Disturbed Earth Read Free Page B

what's coming down. There's this little girl and there been others around the state, around the country, not to mention the cold cases. I can't even get this on the Amber alert unless I have more evidence. There were other cases I never told you about, I couldn't. We don't know who the hell she is or why someone would do it, but I'm scared. I'm scared about copycats. I'm scared. I'm scared of all of it, the crazies, the terror junkies. I think about it and in my mind I see paper dolls, you know, like I used to make for the kids, a row of paper dolls holding hands and then someone sets fire to them."
    "You think this is terrorists?"
    "Why not? You want to scare people, how about taking their kids?"
    "Come on!"
    "You think it couldn't happen? I don't think anymore. I just try to cover my ass." He hesitated. "I can't get rid of the stink."
    We had pretended we were OK, like everyone else; we pretended the recovery was complete, but the city was still on the edge of a nervous breakdown even after all this time, and Sonny Lippert had been in the World Trade Center that day.
    He had been on his way to a meeting at Two World Trade when it happened, and I knew he was going, I'd talked to him ten minutes earlier. I thought he was dead. I spent half the day thinking Sonny was dead, that a bunch of other people I knew were dead. Later I found him. He was digging at the site, still in his good gray suit, covered in dust, digging and looking for the living and there was no one. For a week we stayed there together. I couldn't leave him. I couldn't leave the hole. Maybe I should have gone home to Lily instead. Maybe if I'd gone home she would have stayed with me. She didn't. She left me and married somebody else.
    Sonny said, "If you really have to go out, keep with your cell phone, at least, and call me back on a landline, OK? I mean stay with it all the time, when you take a piss, when you're sleeping. You get a message, you get a beep, anything. OK? And you don't do anything else. You don't do anything else without telling me. Just the phone. OK?"
    Lippert could be crazy and lucid at the same time and I wasn't going up against him on this one.
    I said, low-key as I could manage, "Maybe she's still alive, Sonny. Maybe this is about something else, the blood, the clothes. She could be alive, you know that?"
    "Listen to me. She's not alive, but we'll pretend we're hopeful, like you say. I don't want any of this leaked. I don't want anything on TV. I know you know people around here, but you'll keep your mouth shut, won't you?"
    "I hear you."
    "I don't want anyone knowing we think this is a repeat of the others, that there's a serial killer involved, OK? We'll take it a step at a time. Because if news about this gets out, we'll have every family on our back, everyone whose kid has been out of the house for half an hour. You hear me? Keep it zipped, man, OK?"
    He was over-reacting, he was blowing it out of all proportion, he was way out of the ballpark on this, I was sure of it. What made me go along finally, what made me believe him, was that Sonny Lippert said something I'd almost never heard him say in more than twenty years.
    "It was my fault," he said. "The other girl. I didn't act fast enough. It was my fault," he said and walked away.
    I kept my mouth shut.

2
     
    The jogger's name was Ivana Galitzine. She was tall and thin with long arms, and she wore gray sweatpants and a thick hooded sweatshirt and pink All Star high tops, same as the blood-drenched sneakers in the black rubber bag; only pink. The laces on the left shoe were untied and trailed on the ground. I couldn't help looking at the shoes; she saw me looking, then put her hands back over her face and leaned against Lippert's dark green Jaguar that he got on a lease cheap. Like a child's, the girl—Galitzine—her fingernails were bitten and the bright pink polish was chipped. I tapped her on the arm and said softly in Russian, "Are you alright? Do you want to see a