Free Strong 03 - Twice by Lisa Unger

in there a minute ago. It headed downtown after theyellow cab. Those FBI guys were everywhere. Yet they saw nothing. He laughed a little too loudly and the elderly woman sitting next to him glanced at him warily. He gave her a bright smile.
    “ I t just doesn’t work for me,” said Lydia, flipping through the photos Ford had given them. The cabdriver wove between and around cars, racing up the West Side Highway as if the cops were chasing him.
    “Can you slow down, please?” Jeffrey said to the bulletproof glass that separated them from the driver. But the driver seemed not to hear … or maybe more likely not to give a shit.
    “I admit the logistics are a bit hard to put together,” he said, finally giving up on trying to get through to the maniac cabdriver. “But right now it doesn’t look like there was anyone else there.”
    “More evidence is going to turn up,” she said. She had a way of sounding so sure of herself and her intuition that Jeffrey was always inclined to nod in response to what she said, even if he didn’t necessarily agree with her.
    “You know, there have been cases where a person is so pumped full of adrenaline that he takes on superhuman strength.”
    “Usually brought on by fear,” said Lydia, thinking of the painting again.
    “Or narcotics.”
    “Ford’s notes say that her blood alcohol level was only slightly elevated and that there were no narcotics present at all.”
    “Or rage,” suggested Jeffrey, bracing himself as the cab made a sharp fast exit from the highway at Ninety-sixth Street and headed across town. It was the street that divided the city. Ninety-sixth separated the richest people in Manhattan from the poorest, the safest neighborhoods from the most dangerous. The city was segregated like that all over, but nowhere more starkly than here. If you followed Madison Avenue or Park Avenue from midtown up to the Bronx River Expressway, you saw the city change before your eyes. Luxury high-rises, trendy cafés, exclusive shops morphed into starkprojects and dark doorways, abandoned buildings with boarded-up windows and marred by graffiti, empty lots filled with garbage.
    “I guess the most pressing question at this point,” said Jeffrey, “is whether there was another way into the building.”
    “There are a
lot
of questions,” said Lydia, feeling the buzz tingling in her fingertips. “Like who does Julian believe has come for her? Is it someone real? Or is she delusional?”
    “Well, she’s definitely delusional.”
    “Something’s not right,” she said, looking out the window.
    “If I had a nickel for every time you’ve said that …”
    “You
do
,” she said with a smile.
    “True enough.”
    Jeffrey and his partners Jacob Hanley and Christian Striker had started their private investigation firm nearly seven years ago, now. All former FBI men, they’d grown tired of the politics of the bureau, tired of the paranoia about public perception of the organization, and they’d decided they’d be more effective investigators on their own.
    They’d started out with small cases—insurance fraud, husbands checking up on wives, some employee screening. Then they’d started working with the FBI and NYPD on cold cases, or cases where the police felt their hands were tied … in those cases, the firm’s involvement was strictly confidential. But it was Lydia and Jeffrey’s first case together, the infamous Cheerleader Murders, that put them on the map. Now the firm that started out of Jeffrey’s one-bedroom East Village apartment employed over a hundred people and filled a suite of offices in the West Fifty-seventh Street high-rise. They’d been hugely successful, in large part due to Lydia, her contributions as a consultant, and the publicity that surrounded the books she wrote on some of the cases they’d worked. When Jacob died last year, Jeffrey and Christian Striker had asked Lydia to come on as partner.
    “True enough,” he repeated, taking her