When Ronny Lee Jessup had been arrested three years later and his hideous labyrinthine cellar had topped the news, David waited in dread for the coroner to report that one of the nine cadavers the killer had crudely mummified was hers. But she remained missing.
Perhaps he should have found hope in the fact that she wasn’t among the living and dead women in those subterranean rooms, but after three years, his capacity for hope had been exhausted. She wasn’t out there alive, waiting to be found, not in this strangely altered and steadily darkening world. Like a grotesque insect in human disguise, Jessup stowed her poor body in some secret niche as if it were a chrysalis from which she would in time emerge, her beauty reborn, to submit to his brutality once more.
Friends advised David to move on, and he tried, but he could not. He was haunted by what had been, what might have been, and what could never be. When writing, especially since the loss of Emily, he often became obsessed with the work to the exclusion of all else, so it seemed that if the atmosphere of Earth should suddenly evaporate, he would be sustained by the air of the fictional world he created. He had also become obsessed with one path by which he might find peace of mind: discover the truth of her fate, locate her remains, and bury her in the cemetery nearest to the cottage in Corona del Mar, where they had been so happy, where he would always be able to look after her, as he had failed to do in life. For this reason, for six years, he had been visiting Ronny Lee Jessup in Folsom.
At 2:10 p.m., the turboprop commuter flight began its descent into Orange County. The clouds of the north had withered away south of Santa Barbara. Sun sequined the sea. Vehicles glittered like miniature racers on freeways as undulant as slot-car tracks, and office towers rose to reflect distorted versions of one another in walls of dark glass. In less than four hours, David would have dinner with the impossible woman who could not be Emily Carlino but could not be anyone else.
| 10 |
In the Corona del Mar cottage, David switched on his computer and discovered that he already had a response from Isaac Eisenstein in New York. The message was simple: Call me on my personal cell.
Attachments included Maddison Sutton’s California driver’s license. She was twenty-five, as she claimed, which happened to be the age at which Emily disappeared. Her address was a post office box in Goleta, in Santa Barbara County, which was not far from where Emily’s broken-down Buick had been found abandoned on that long-ago night of hard rain.
Also attached, the DMV registration for the ivory-white vintage Mercedes 450 SL identified the owner as Patrick Michael Lynam Corley at the same post office box in Goleta.
The third and last attachment was a death certificate for the same Patrick Michael Lynam Corley, who had passed away on June 22, seven years earlier, at the age of fifty-nine.
David called Isaac’s private cell phone, was forwarded to voice mail, and left a message.
The two study windows were fitted with interior shutters. The half-open slats interleaved shadows with bands of sunlight that laddered up one wall.
When Isaac returned the call six minutes later, he said, “Pazia and I are going to dinner at Le Coucou. She’s been looking forward to this for a month, so if we’re not out the door in twelve minutes, I’ll have to eat dinner with an ice pack on my balls.”
“Then let’s get to it. How can a car be registered to a guy who’s been dead seven years?”
“Someone’s been renewing it in his name every time it comes due. I don’t know who yet, but I’ll have more for you tomorrow.”
“What do you know about this Corley?”
“He was a contractor and property developer. Built houses in and around Goleta. His wife died five years before him. No children. More tomorrow. Now these photos you sent of Maddison Sutton—my God, she’s a looker. Breathtaking. Are you head over heels?”
Isaac knew nothing about Emily Carlino. David spoke of her to no one in his current life. Sorrow, the mystery of her fate, and shame kept him silent.
“It’s not about romance, Isaac. And only three of the shots were her. The other three are a different woman.”
“So you said, but you’re wrong about that. Forty-four-detail comparisons of facial-recognition scans say they’re one and the same person, and every photo of the same period.”
“No. Those shots were taken ten years apart.”
“Somebody’s pulling your leg, pal. Faces don’t stay the same for a decade. The most highly reliable recognition programs require base images of the subjects on file to be upgraded every seven or eight years. According to her driver’s license, she’s twenty-five, and the function of our scan that estimates age puts all these photos in her midtwenties.”