Gabriela dropped the new backpack, which contained her gym bag, on a battered coffee table in the living room. Daniel set his belongings beside it and sat heavily in a solid chair at the dining room table. He went online via his iPad and she walked to the window, looked out over the courtyard and cul-de-sac.
Gabriela found the smell of the rooms troubling. The aroma reminded her of a funeral parlor. Old, stale chemicals, though here they would just be cleansers, not preservatives for dead flesh. She recalled just such a smell from six years and two months ago. Her stomach twisted, hurt grew, anger grew. An image of the Professor arose.
Then she thought of her mantra.
Sarah.
Your goal. Focus on your goal.
Sarah.
It’s just a random smell, she told herself, that’s triggering hard memories. Still, she couldn’t quite flick it away. She stepped into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, which was mostly bare – a container of coffee, butter, a shriveled lemon, hard as horn. And in the crisper an onion. It too was past prime but not rotten. Green shoots were growing from the end, eerie. She thought of Joseph’s unruly hair, slick, greasy. She found a knife, dull but sharp enough to slice the vegetable if she sawed with pressure. When she’d produced a small pile of rings, she found oil in the cupboard, which she poured into a dusty frying pan, without bothering to wipe it clean. She turned up the heat and cooked the rings and shoots, stirring them absently in a figure-eight motion with a wooden spoon.
The sweet scents rose and soon they’d mitigated the smells that had bothered her. The thoughts of past death faded.
Daniel Reardon walked to the doorway of the kitchen. She sensed him watching her closely. She glanced at his handsome face, felt that ping of attraction. Thought of Friday night, two days ago. A year, forever.
‘Hungry?’
‘Probably. But I don’t want anything to eat. I’m just air freshening.’
‘With onions?’ A laugh. He had a wonderful laugh – just like the actor he so closely resembled.
Her voice shivered as she said, ‘Every night when she’s with me, Sarah and I cook. Well, not every night. But most. She likes to stir things. She’s a great stirrer. We sometimes joke, we …’ And she abruptly fell silent, inhaled deeply, looking away from him.
She touched her chest, wincing, and Daniel stepped close, taking a tissue and slowly wiping the blood from the corner of her mouth. Then he embraced her. His hand trailed down her spine, bumping over the strap of her bra beneath the thick sweatshirt and settling into her lower back. He pulled her close. She tensed and groaned slightly. He tilted her head back and, despite the residue of blood, kissed her hard on the lips. She groaned, frowning, and he released her.
‘Sorry,’ he whispered.
‘Don’t be.’
He pressed his face against hers once more, pulling her body into him. And then stepped back, as if forcing himself to. She shut off the stovetop gas and they returned to the living room.
She looked around the apartment. It was sterile, worn in the way of faded elegance, like rich folks downsizing, retiring. The bland furniture had been top quality ten, fifteen years ago but was dinged and scuffed. The cushions had suffered from too many asses, the carpet from too many leather heels.
Ugly, yes.
But it was quiet. And secluded.
Safe …
The decorations were largely nautical. Prints of ships in turbulent waves, as well as seafaring memorabilia and lanterns and fishing gear.
Gabriela regarded the wooden display rack of knots on the wall. ‘Yours?’
‘That’s right. I tied them. A hobby.’ He looked over the short pieces of rope bound into nautical knots, two dozen of them. ‘They have names, each one.’
Another wall was devoted to photography. He spotted the direction of her eyes. ‘Not as good as yours.’
‘You’ve got an Edward Weston and an Imogen Cunningham, Stieglitz.’
‘They’re just reproductions, not originals.’
‘Well-done, though. Quality work. And picking those pieces in particular. Weston was a groundbreaker. Cunningham too, though I think she needed more of an edge.’
‘And there – something your daughter would appreciate.’ On one wall was an antique riding crop and a pair of spurs.
An indelible image of Sarah came to mind.
Sarah …
She sensed Daniel was about to bring up a serious topic. She was right.
‘Mac, I’m going to have some people help us.’ He nodded toward his iPad, on which he’d presumably been sending and receiving emails.
‘Help us?’
‘They’re good folks. And we need them.’
‘I can’t ask that.’
‘You didn’t ask.’ Daniel smiled. ‘Besides, I owe you big time. You’re the one who came up with the Princeton Solution. I don’t know what would’ve happened if you hadn’t been there. It would’ve been a nightmare.’
‘I’ll bet you could’ve handled it.’
‘No. You saved my life,’ he told her.
Gabriela offered a modest smile. ‘Who are they, these people?’
‘A couple of guys I’ve worked with for years. Smart. We need smart.’ Daniel regarded her ambling eyes. ‘She’ll be okay, Mac. I promise. Sarah will be okay.’
And Gabriela thought: Promise. What an odd verb. A word you can’t trust. Or shouldn’t.
Like the word trust itself.
Don’t be so cynical, she thought.
But that was hard. Gabriela was cynical in the grain. She’d learned to be that way, because of the Professor.
She saw in her mind’s eye his still face, waxy, surrounded by satin. A material she had come to despise.
‘They’ll be here soon.’ He squinted, looking her way. ‘What’re you thinking? Something important. I can tell.’
In a soft voice. ‘No.’
‘No you’re not thinking, or no you’re not telling? It’s got to be door number two because you can’t not be thinking something. That’s impossible.’
She tried to formulate the words so they didn’t come out foolish. This wasn’t easy. ‘Too many people turn away when something bad’s happening. They’re afraid, they’re worried about the inconvenience, worried about being embarrassed. But you’re not willing to let Joseph get away with this and you’re doing it for me, for somebody you’ve known for only a couple of days.’
Daniel Reardon wasn’t able to blush, she assessed. But he was embarrassed by her words. ‘You’re giving me a complex.’ He looked around and noted the bar. ‘I need a drink. You? Wine? Anything stronger?’
‘No. Just … not now.’
He opened a bottle of cabernet and poured the ruby liquid into a glass. A long sip seemed to exorcise her cloying gratitude. He had another. ‘Now. We should think about our next steps. Andrew and Sam should be here soon. First, I guess we ought to call the complication. Make sure he’s home.’
Complication …
She smiled at the word. Then scrolled through her phone until she found Frank Walsh’s name and called. ‘No answer.’ She sent a text. ‘But I’m sure the list is safe. There’s no reason it wouldn’t be.’
Daniel’s face remained calm. Though of course he’d be thinking: Without that list your daughter’s dead. And the man who’d kill her, that prick Joseph, will be after you too before long.
And he didn’t need to add that Joseph would be looking for him too.
But then her phone buzzed and she glanced at the screen. A text had appeared. She smiled briefly. ‘It’s Frank. He’s not going out tonight. Everything’s fine.’
‘That’s one less worry we have. But I don’t know how I feel about Mr Frank “Complication” Walsh on your speed-dial list. I’m thinking I’d rather take his place.’
‘I could move you up to number two.’
‘Only two?’
‘Mom is first.’
‘That’s fair enough.’
Daniel walked to a tall glass-fronted mahogany entertainment enclosure, circa 1975, she guessed, though it contained newer components. He turned the radio on to a local station. After five minutes of bad music and worse commercials it was time for the news. She strode to the device and abruptly shut it off.
Daniel looked at her as she stared at the receiver. She told him, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. About what happened today – any of it! It has to be on the news. I’m all over the news!’ Her voice had grown ragged again.
‘It’s okay, it’s okay …’
She started at the buzz of the intercom. It seemed as loud as an alarm. ‘Daniel?’ came the tinny voice through the speaker. ‘It’s Andrew.’
Pressing the unlock button, Daniel nodded reassuringly to Gabriela, ‘The cavalry’s arrived.’
CHAPTER
31
2:15 p.m., Sunday
1 hour earlier
Detective Brad Kepler watched his boss read the media release once, twice, again.
Captain Paul Barkley looked up at the NYPD press officer, a wobbly young man with persistent acne, who sat before him in this hellhole of an operations room. Then, without saying a word, he looked down and read once more.
Barkley’s stomach made a Harley-Davidson noise that everyone in the room pretended to ignore.
Kepler knew that most Sundays, this time of day Barkley was tucking away his wife’s roast beef, along with – when she wasn’t looking – massive forkfuls of buttered mashed potatoes. The detective was aware of this routine because he’d been invited to supper a few times. He had three repetitive memories of the occasions: Barkley telling the same quasi-blue jokes over and over. The roast beef being very good. And Kepler’s spending the entire time trying to figure out if there was any possible scenario for telling Barkley’s know-it-all college-student daughter to shut the fuck up. Which, of course, there was not.
Kepler himself read the release again.
Fred Stanford Chapman, 29, … wife, Elizabetta, 31, two children, Kyle and Sophie … Surgery to remove a bullet lodged near his heart is planned for later today … Investigations continue … Prognosis is not good …
Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera …
‘How many calls?’ Barkley asked the youngster.
‘From the press? A hundred.’
Barkley snapped, ‘That’s an exaggeration.’
Kepler thought: Probably isn’t. His partner, Naresh Surani, seemed to concur.
‘I wanted to keep it quiet,’ the captain said.
‘A shooting?’ From the PA youngster.
Public affairs. Crap.
‘Yes, a shooting. In goddamn Manhattan. I wanted to keep it goddamn quiet. But I guess that didn’t work out, did it? This was a leak the size of the Titanic.’
Kepler corrected, The Titanic wasn’t a leak. The Titanic was a ship that got fucked because of a leak.
But, of course, the edit was tacit.
Barkley snatched up a pen and began to revise.
Which gave Kepler the chance to look around their new digs. This was the second room the Charles Prescott Operation – the CP Op – had been assigned to in the past two days. Sure, this happened to be a busy time for bad guys and little operations like the CP Op didn’t mean very much, in terms of chalking up cred, so they had to take whatever room was free at the moment. But this one was the pits. The twenty-by-thirty-foot space did have a few high-def monitors, but they were off, and they didn’t even seem hooked up. The walls were scuffed – nothing new there – and the government-issue furniture was cheap. Nearly a third of the floor space was devoted to storage. Something smelled off too, as if a take-out turkey sandwich had fallen behind one of the filing cabinets a long, long time ago.
At least it couldn’t get any worse.
Barkley slid the press release back like an air hockey puck. ‘Fix it. And by the way, no comment from me, other than the investigations continue. Stop at that. Nothing more.’
The press officer tried again. ‘But a hundred calls, sir.’
‘Why’re you still here?’ Barkley made a sound like a disagreeable transmission. This one came from his throat, not his belly.
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’ The Public Affairs officer scooted out.
Why the hell does that kid wear a sidearm? Kepler thought.
Barkley turned to the two detectives, sitting at a battered fiberboard table, and barked, ‘Jesus.’ He nodded toward Kepler’s copy of the release.
Fred Stanford Chapman, 29, … gunshot wound …
Then the boss changed direction. ‘Now, her.’
He didn’t need to say Gabriela. There were no other women causing them so much anxiety at the moment.
‘I told you yesterday I wanted her under surveillance. Twenty-four seven. What the hell happened? You were at her place, right? Cameras, microphones.’
Her.
Brad Kepler shrugged. ‘She tipped to us. I don’t know. And then started using evasive tactics.’
‘The hell does that mean? Sounds like something from a bad cop movie.’
‘But,’ Kepler said, ‘we’re still on her.’ A glance at his partner. ‘Right?’
Surani called Surveillance, had a discussion, then clapped his hand over the mouthpiece and said to Barkley and Kepler, ‘We’ve got officers close. It’s righteous.’
Which sounded like something out of an even worse cop movie.
Righteous?
The captain asked, ‘How’d you manage the tail, if she slipped you at her place?’
Surani explained, ‘Brad got a GPS on her.’
‘How the hell you do that?’ The captain gave one of his broad frowns that he used for emphasis, a gesture several of his detectives had developed pretty good imitations of, Brad Kepler included.
‘She was distracted. It was chaos, weapons, screaming, diving for cover. I got the thing into her jacket pocket.’
Barkley was pleased, Kepler could tell, but his nature required him to ask, ‘You think that was a safe idea?’ The captain could never just say, Good job.
‘Safe idea?’ Kepler asked. He didn’t know what that meant. ‘I frankly didn’t think about it. It was just something I had to do: Get the tracker onto her then back off.’
Surani, his gray complexion even grayer under the inhumane lights in the dismal operations room, said, ‘It was pretty good, pretty smooth. She doesn’t have a clue.’
‘Microphone?’ The captain brushed his trim, white hair – senior congressman’s hair – twice, then a third time. He seemed to look Kepler up and down, as if approving of his impressive tan. Or disapproving.
‘No, just a tracker. We lost her for a bit in the subway.’
The New York city metro system was huge and fast and efficient, and that meant it could transport Gabriela anywhere within a several-hundred-square-mile area. And GPS trackers wouldn’t work there.
‘But then she surfaced. CCTV got a facial recognition exiting a station in Midtown. The signal’s been solid since then.’
‘Unless she decides to hop on the A train again.’
‘She can’t live in the MTA,’ Surani said. ‘The food sucks down there. And the showers? Forget about it.’ This drew a hard glance from Kepler because the joke was beyond stupid. It wasn’t even a joke.
‘And she was with the guy?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Stay on her. But I want everybody tailing to be invisible. You follow me? If Surveillance gets made, then people could get killed. That’s not happening on my watch.’
And why not? Kepler wondered, of the dramatic pronouncement. You can protect all the innocents in New York City, can you now, boss? A lot of people have died on your watch over the years, when you think about it.
