The woman reached out, taking Valentina’s hands in her own, and the feeling was something overpowering, like an electrical spark passing between them that the girl did not understand; all at once, she wanted to embrace this strange woman tightly but also to push her away, the two emotions fighting a battle inside her that made her stomach turn. The woman looked deeply into Valentina’s eyes and spoke some words in a language she could not understand. Whatever the woman had said, Mrs. Ivanova agreed.
“Da.”
The old woman nodded.
“Ochee chornya.”
Dark eyes.
The other children were waiting in the hallway when Valentina emerged, each of the American strangers holding one of her hands as they led her along. The children broke into song and Valentina knew the tune; she had sung it herself a few months earlier when little Ruslan, just a year and a half old himself, had been taken away:
Puskai prïdet pora prosit’sia
Drug druga dolgo ne vidat?
No serditse s serdtsem, slovno ptitsy
Konechno, vstretiatsia opiat
How swift the hour comes for our parting
No more to meet, or who knows when?
But heart with heart must come together
And someday surely meet again.
When Valentina reached the door at end of the hallway, she began to struggle against the hold of her new guardians. In five years she had rarely left the confines of the orphanage, and at this threshold the reality of her situation became clear: once she passed through the doors this time, she would never return. She fought to pull her hands away from the strangers and succeeded in slipping the grip of the man, but the woman held strong, pulling Valentina close and wrapping her in her surprisingly powerful arms.
Valentina could see that Mrs. Ivanova had stopped at the end of the hallway, remaining in the shadow of the threshold.
“Babushka…” the girl wailed, but the old woman just turned her head away, her features knotted in anguish.
In the end, there was nothing to be done. Valentina’s effort to resist proved only that she could not win, that the forces arrayed against her were too great to overcome. Within seconds she had been carried into the backseat of a waiting car, hulking and black, and whisked away into the bright new day. Twisting free of the American woman’s grip with one final effort, Valentina turned and looked back through the rear window of the car, aching inside as she watched the only home she had ever known recede into the distance and finally disappear.
ONE
Eleven years later …
She called the Columbia boys
on her cell phone and within minutes they ambled out of the dorm together, slightly drunk already, the four of them primped and preened for a night of adventure in the clubs downtown. They looked her over, briefly entertaining the idea that she might be available to them for more than just dope, but her eyes met theirs with a look of cold denial and the thought was abandoned.
“For one-fifty I can give you eight hits,” she said, marking the price up since they obviously had money and were buzzed. “E or K.”
“Both,” said the tall one with curly hair. “Four and four.” The exchange was made and the boys headed south toward the Red Line stop at 116th. She had intended to take the subway herself, but didn’t like the idea of covering the distance alongside the drunken college kids. Paying for a cab would be the smart thing, but she wasn’t used to the idea of spending money on herself.
Riverside Park then, on foot. She passed through the Barnard campus and across Riverside Drive, heading all the way down to the path below the Hudson Parkway, within view of the water. She followed the route out of habit, accustomed to traveling in a group that could protect itself through unity and numbers, but this time she was alone. Barely a minute passed before she heard the footsteps behind her: two men, both heavyset, quickly closing the distance to her but then slowing down, holding thirty or forty feet back. She could feel their eyes on her. She picked up her pace but they stayed with her, maintaining the same distance, plotting the timing of their move.
Shit
. She scanned the area near the path, searching furtively for a route of escape, and only then did she truly appreciate—too late—the inherent dangers of the remote route she had chosen. The light fixtures above were in bad repair, with only one meager lamp still working on the quarter-mile stretch. A high barrier of blackened stone—the original foundation of the parkway—bordered the path like the forbidding wall of a medieval castle, preventing escape. Elm trees loomed overhead, their branches obscuring the view of the path from above. Traffic noise from the parkway filled the air with an ambient hum, muting sounds that might otherwise alert the residents of nearby apartment buildings.
Don’t run
, she commanded herself.
Not yet
. Her instincts for self-preservation had been earned painfully, all through the years of her childhood, and now those instincts were telling her that when the moment arrived, she would be running for her life.
The stone wall came to an abrupt end, and a fork in the path offered a route uphill toward Riverside Drive, a stretch of less than a hundred yards. If she could cover the distance before the men reached her, there would surely be traffic on the road—witnesses—whose presence would force her pursuers to call off their hunt. One hundred yards. The men behind her now recognized her opportunity for escape as well and picked up their pace, closing the distance.
Run, now
.
The men were surprised by her initial burst of speed. Tired, scrawny, poorly fed, wasted away by chemicals and the ruthless attrition of life on the street, she gave every appearance of the runt, the weak member of the herd prime for culling. The pursuers’ eyes could not measure her heart, however, her will to survive. Without that, she would have been dead years ago. And so she raced ahead, the roadway growing closer, offering the possibility of rescue.
The men were breathing hard now, spitting curses at the unexpected effort required. Thirty yards to go, then twenty—she could almost feel their hot breath as they came up behind her but … she
would
make it. She knew it now. The road was just ahead and she veered suddenly to her left, shooting up through a gap in the brush off the side of the path, and the abrupt change of direction surprised her pursuers. They cursed her loudly again.
She burst out from the path, across the sidewalk and out into the middle of the road, bright in the glow of streetlights. As she sped across the road, a dark blue sedan screeched to a stop, just inches short of running her down. The girl stood frozen, paralyzed by the shock of the close call and the fact that she recognized the car. The car door opened and the driver stepped out—a familiar face, a friend. She felt the rush of relief that came with that welcome surprise, but then she read his expression. Her spirit sank.
No smile. No sanctuary.
Atley Greer
grabbed a unit from the motor pool and reached the 79th Street traffic circle a few minutes later. He veered down a service road that led south along the Hudson River, toward the Little League baseball diamonds. The area was still in shadow, the November sun having not yet risen above the buildings to the east. Greer pulled up to the edge of the second baseball diamond, where a circle of ground was marked by yellow crime scene tape. He parked his unit beside two horses—Park Police mounts—their breath fogging heavily in the cold morning air, the early stages of their winter coats just coming in.
“Morning, Detective.”
“Officer Carlin.” Atley gave the young uniform a nod.
“Crime Scene is on the way,” Carlin added. “They’re gonna send more badges once the shift turns over.”
Carlin led Atley toward the crime scene, lifting the yellow tape for the detective to pass underneath. Five other park cops lingered outside the tape line, smoking, looking cold and restless, eager to get back into their warm units or back onto their waiting mounts.
The girl’s body lay at the foot of a cypress tree, on her back, still fully clothed in several dark, torn layers, a worn black leather jacket on the outside. The girl had short, spiky blond hair with a streak of blue on the left side and a handful of facial piercings. Street tats peered out from under her collar shirtsleeves and she wore heavy makeup, now badly smeared. Her face was battered and swollen, a trail of dried blood running down from her nose. The girl’s knuckles were scraped and bleeding, probably from fighting off her attacker. Her eyes were open, pupils of deep gray just now beginning to lose their color.
“Run it down,” Atley said.
“Wallis Stoneman,” answered Carlin, holding up a clear plastic evidence bag, a driver’s license visible within. “Her DL was stashed between her sock and the tights underneath. It says she’s twenty-three, but that didn’t seem right, so I called it in. It’s a good fake, maybe two or three hundred bucks on the street. According to the DMV, the information on it is legit, except for the age—she’s actually sixteen. I called her name in to Real Time. The kid had a long juvie record, but no felonies, no adult court. She’s listed as a runaway, with a PINS warrant out on her.”
A Person In Need of Supervision warrant meant that the girl had an active file with Social Services.
A dirty red messenger bag lay several feet away from the body, open, its contents strewn about the ground; there were a few pairs of underwear that looked like dirty laundry, a striped woolen hat, cigarettes, and some scattered pieces of individually wrapped candy.
“The bag,” said Greer, “it was open that way when the body was first discovered? Everything spilled out like that?”
“Yes, sir. Money and valuables, if she had any, are gone.”
Greer squatted down and examined the girl’s filthy fingernails, her cracked boots, her torn leggings. There was dirt behind her ears, at least a week old. The clothes hadn’t been washed in at least a month. Atley could see several old scars on her forehead and across the bridge of her nose. He pushed the girl’s sleeves up and found more scars and hardened contusions on the outside of her forearms—old defensive wounds. Plenty of rich kids in New York dressed like punked-out street urchins, studied in their griminess and disrepair, but this girl’s body and clothes told a story of authentic hardship and, somewhere in her history, physical abuse.
“This girl is street,” said Greer, looking up at Carlin. “You ever see her around?”
“Maybe,” answered Carlin dubiously, “but it’s hard to say for sure. A lot of them hang along Riverside Park—they all kind of look the same in their tweaker uniforms.”
Greer put on a rubber glove and reached for the girl’s mouth, pulling her upper lip back to see her teeth; they had begun to decay from smoking meth.
“Tweaker,” Carlin repeated his diagnosis.
With his gloved hand, Greer closed the girl’s eyes, then rose to his feet. He scanned the immediate area, hoping to discover any detail out of the ordinary. There was random garbage scattered throughout the baseball diamond and the surrounding woods, plus the tracks of countless runners and bicycles and Park Police horses passing over every inch of the grounds.
“We’ll do the canvass when the rest from Homicide show up,” Greer said.
“You going to notify in person, Detective?”
“She’s local?” Greer asked, surprised. He took the ID’s evidence bag from Carlin and confirmed it: the given address was on West 84th, half a block from Amsterdam Avenue. Was he wrong about the girl being street? If the address was legit, she had died not half a mile from home. Greer took out his cell phone, selected the camera function, and held the phone close to the girl’s devastated face. The flash ignited brightly as the camera recorded the image.
Atley Greer badged his way
past the doorman at the fashionable 84th Street address and headed toward an empty elevator car that stood open in the lobby. He pressed the button for the 27th floor, assuming that the apartment number on the dead girl’s ID was correct. As the elevator doors slowly closed him in, he saw the doorman picking up the house phone at the front desk, calling ahead to alert the Stonemans that a cop was on the way.
At the 27th floor, Atley trekked a long hallway of plush, cream-colored carpet to reach the apartment at the northeast corner of the building. The apartment door was already open. An attractive, well-tended woman a few years younger than Atley—thirty-eight, maybe?—waited there in anticipation of the detective’s arrival, her hands clutched tightly in front of her. Her facial expression was a familiar one to any cop; over the years, this woman had met many police officers at her door, and of course they had always been bearers of bad news. There was a sense of resignation to Mrs. Stoneman, a determination to steel herself against the next, latest wave of heartbreak.
“Mrs. Stoneman?”
“Yes,” the woman answered. “What did she do now?”
“I’m Detective Greer, ma’am. 20th Precinct. Could I have a moment of your time?”
“Come in.”
The woman’s apartment was tastefully furnished with a mix of modern and antique furniture, fine carpets, and original artwork placed throughout. On the living room wall was a large, professionally done black-and-white portrait of Mrs. Stoneman—several years younger—with her arms wrapped around a beautiful young girl: preteen, blond, smiling happily.
Atley heard sounds from the direction of the kitchen. Someone was moving around in there.
“Is your husband at home, Mrs. Stoneman?”
“Not for nearly six years, Detective. I’m divorced. My ex-husband, Jason, lives in Virginia.”
Atley was sorry to hear that—death notifications to a single parent were particularly rough, and it fell to the notifying officer to be a source of comfort. He also wondered now who the person in the kitchen was.
“And your daughter Wallis …”
“We call her Wally.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
Claire Stoneman hesitated, looking ashamed.