He thought of the Park Slope doctor’s widow again, of watching her face as she saw her whole future disappear. Bridge out.
He couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable. Michelle would never do something like this. She wasn’t that type of person. And he loved her with all his heart, even—remarkably—now. It was a mistake, a fluke, and she’d be back, pleading for forgiveness. And he
would
forgive her, because he loved her, still.
The apartment was quiet as a tomb.
W
HAT ARE YOU DOING
here? I thought this was your day off.”
Nancy Amerulo, one of the Seven-six detectives assigned to the Governors Island task force, glanced up as he strode into that precinct’s squad room armed with an extra-large coffee the next morning. Amerulo was a handsome blonde, big-boned, well-liked. She looked tired, though—this high-pressure, no-results investigation was wearing everybody down.
Jack shrugged. “Justice never rests.”
The detective stared at him, then shrugged back. She didn’t know him well enough to pry.
He moved away, and took a big slug of coffee. Time to buckle down. For the past few weeks he had been working at less than his true capacity, because—whether Michelle believed it or not—he had made an effort to get home for her. She had walked anyway. He made a sour face. It happened every day, to cops all over the world. The divorce rate for members of service was insane.
So what?
To hell with her. People were getting killed here. What was he supposed to do, not give a damn?
Over in a far corner, he dropped into a chair next to Anita Tam, a very tall, very skinny young black detective attached to the Medical Examiner’s office. Tam was a computer whiz; she brought her own high-tech laptop to the task force office, scorning the dinosaur desktops of the precinct house.
“Don’t those get in the way?” Jack asked, nodding down at her long fingernails poised over the keyboard.
“I like the clacking sound,” she replied.
“Really?”
She just grinned. Long stints of overtime research had given them a relaxed familiarity.
“Anything new?” Jack asked. While the rest of the task force was focused on the present whereabouts of Robert Dietrich Sperry, he was still determined to discover the identity of the boy in the box. He had a hunch that this was how the killer would be found.
Detective Tam nodded toward the computer screen: yet another list of missing persons. “You wouldn’t believe what a mess it is out there.”
Jack frowned—he would believe it all too well.
“What’s the plan for today?”
Jack shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m wondering if maybe we should look at Canadian missing persons. After all, that’s not so far from New Hampshire…”
Tam sighed and hunkered down.
After a couple of hours of staring at the computer screen, Jack grew bleary-eyed; he found himself imagining some strange alternate universe peopled by all the might-be-alives and the insufficiently remembereds, a twilight world of putty faces and eerie smiles.
Just before lunch, the other detective’s phone rang.
Tam picked up; her eyes widened. “DNA results,” she whispered to Jack.
At the Governors Island crime scene, the M.E.’s crew had taken hair samples from the bedding of Robert Sperry and the deceased boy. On TV, Crime Scene wizards would plug such samples into some high-tech gizmo and get instant results; in real life, it sometimes took weeks or months.
“Mm-hm,” the detective said. Her face fell. “That’s okay, we expected that.” Then her face brightened. “Really? Are you sure? It’s a definite match? All right, thanks a lot.”
Jack was sitting up now, leaning forward. “What? What did they say?”
Tarn frowned. “First of all, the boy’s DNA didn’t match anything from the missing person databases. No surprise there, but check this out: His DNA and Sperry’s are a definite match. They were related.”
Jack sat back, clasped his hands behind his head, and thought for a minute. “All right, let’s try to put this together…I doubt that Sperry was the kid’s father, because we would have seen that name pop among the New Hampshire school rolls. If the man was his grandfather, the kid might have had a different last name. But if that’s the case, why didn’t his parents report him missing?”
The two detectives sat in silence for a minute, thinking and thinking and not getting anywhere.
AT HOME THAT AFTERNOON,
Jack made a beeline for the answering machine, but the goddamn red light didn’t blink once.
“Bitch,” he muttered, then felt guilty because he was talking about the woman he still loved. At least, he still loved her in the part of his heart that wasn’t hating her right now.
The thought of spending any more time in the apartment was oppressive, and he considered putting on his sweats and going for another run, but gravity and fatigue won out and he sank down into the couch in the front room. Michelle’s departure still had an air of unreality to it, as if she might still come home and point to a hidden camera and tell him that the whole thing had been a gag.
It wasn’t even five, but the room was already growing dark. He lay back and closed his eyes. After a few minutes, he rolled over, to make himself more comfortable for a nap, and felt something press into his side. He dug into his jacket pocket and winced.
The little ring box.
That made him too agitated to sleep. He went into the kitchen and fixed himself a bowl of cereal and then he returned to the couch and half-watched several hours of TV He didn’t care what was on, as long as the noise covered up the apartment’s silence, and helped drive bad thoughts from his head.
He had finally dozed off when—over the racket of a commercial—he barely heard his cell phone ring. Scrambling, heart pumping, he found the remote and killed the TV.
When he flipped his phone open, a woman’s voice came on the line and he was flooded with relief.
“Michelle?” he said. “Are you okay?”
But it wasn’t Michelle.
It was Maureen Duffy.
“I
’M ON THE CORNER
,” he said into his cell phone half an hour later. “Are you standing by?”
When the girl replied in the affirmative, he set off jogging down the block, still holding the phone up to his ear. He wanted to scan the street, but forced himself to keep his head down, tucked inside the hood of his sweatshirt. He pushed a pair of nonprescription eyeglasses higher on his nose and hoped that the getup would serve to fool the two meatballs he had met in front of Duffy’s apartment, if they were waiting outside her friend’s place now. (When he bought his exercise outfit, he had been concerned with Linda Vargas’s comments about the embarrassing nature of Spandex; he had never considered its suitability as a disguise. Thankfully, the baggy clothes concealed his shoulder holster as well as his private parts.)
The street was lined with three- or four-story brick apartment buildings. Out of the corner of his eye, he noted an address, then counted down to Duffy’s hideout. Without pausing, he jogged briskly up the stoop, took out his keys, and pretended to insert them into the front door. “Buzz me in,” he said into the cell phone. With a little luck, he would look like some resident returning from an exercise break.
Duffy was on the third floor.
“Why all this secrecy?” she asked as soon as she opened the door, but he ignored her; the doorway opened into a front room, and the lights were on, and he headed straight for the switch. He turned it off, then made for the windows, cursing as his shin barked a coffee table. Carefully he opened a space between two blinds. The street was dark, save for pools of light under the well-spaced streetlamps, and it was impossible to see into all of the parked cars. No one was out in front of the building, though.
Jack turned back to the girl. “I could’ve shown up with a lot of noise and flashing lights, and that would have just scared off your friends, and then where would we be? I want a chance to find out what’s going on.” He didn’t mention that he was handling this case strictly off duty, and that bringing in the troops would have given him a lot of explaining to do. “Let’s talk in the back,” he said. They made their way down a narrow hallway, and she turned on a light in the kitchen, a space barely big enough for a little table and a couple of potted plants. Jack noted a bunch of bright children’s drawings plastered on the fridge.
Hapy Birdy!
, one of them said.
Duffy sat down. She was wearing a tight Hunter College T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts, white satin with blue trim. Hardly January attire, but the apartment was hot and stuffy. The girl’s outfit left little to the imagination; Tommy Balfa had risked his marriage for this. Was this all it had taken with Michelle, some moment of opportunity like this, some momentary excitement that could justify ruining months of a deep relationship?
“Who owns this place?” Jack said.
Maureen pushed a lock of red hair out of her eyes. “It’s a friend’s. She’s out of town.”
He leaned back against the sink. “Did you actually see someone coming after you?”
Maureen frowned. “Yes. There were two of them. I didn’t get a good look so I don’t know if it was the same ones, but they were definitely following.”
“What did you do?”
“I know the man at the deli around the corner from my place, this nice Egyptian guy, and he let me go out the back way. I didn’t want to go home again, but luckily I had these keys with me.”
“Did you see anybody after that?”
She shook her head. “No, but I had
a feeling
, when I was on my way over here.”
“Why didn’t you just call the cops?”
She stared. “That’s what I did.
You’re
a cop, right?”
He ignored the question. “Are you sure there isn’t something you want to tell me? Like why these guys might be after you?”
She shook her head again. “I swear. I don’t know why anybody would be interested.”
Jack didn’t say anything for a minute, hoping the awkward silence might prompt her to open up, but she stayed mum. “Well,” he finally said, “it looks like there’s a good lock downstairs, and a decent one on the front door here, so you should be all right.”
The girl grabbed the bottom of her T-shirt and twisted it nervously. “There aren’t any bars on the windows, and there’s a fire escape in the back.”
Jack sighed.
He thought of the empty apartment waiting for him at home.
THE SOFA BED IN
the front room had a bar in the middle that jabbed into his back, and the radiator was so hot that the place was stuffy even with the front windows cracked, but Jack barely noticed.
Every few minutes he pushed the rumpled sheets off his body, got up, and padded to the front window. Nothing to see, for now…His thoughts inevitably returned to Michelle, and they were so painful that he started to actually welcome the idea of an attack on the apartment, as a diversion.
He lay back down, settling onto the creaky bed and trying to avoid the middle bar. After a while, he drifted into a weird fantasy. There’d be sirens. Another terrorist attack, something big, and he would call Michelle, and go and fight through traffic and find her, on foot if he had to, and even though the event would be terrible, catastrophic, he would hold her and they’d be close again…
In the middle of the night, sleep finally put him out of his misery.
A HAND ON HIS
shoulder jolted him awake.
“Detective.”
He rolled over, groggy. At first he thought it was Michelle, and he almost reached out for her, but then he remembered that he wasn’t at home, and it was only the girl, her form indistinct in the dark.
“I think they’re out there.”
He rubbed his face. “Who? Where?” He swung his legs over the side of the bed.
“Out front.”
He got up and moved to the window, skirting the coffee table this time. He stood in the dark corner, then pulled apart two of the metal blinds. There was a car across the street, parked, but with taillights bright. (Engine on for heat?) He sat watching for a minute. The tail-lights went off, but nobody got out. There was no way a person would sit out in that cold without a damned good reason.
“Shit,” Jack grumbled. He returned to the bedside. At least he didn’t have to get dressed; the sweats served as pajamas and street gear, rolled into one. He slipped his feet into his running shoes and picked up his shoulder holster.
“I’M GETTING TOO OLD
for this crap,” he muttered to himself as he knelt on the back fire escape and lowered its heavy iron ladder. One small security light shone over the back door below, and there were a couple of lights over some of the garages along the alley, but things were still good and dark. He clambered over the side and down the ladder, the rungs freezing his bare hands. The late night had a chill, cathedral hush.
He came out of the alley, turned the corner, walked fifteen yards, and peered around the next corner: Nobody around. The streetlights were ringed by rainbow halos. He took a deep breath, then darted across the street and slipped along behind the parked cars.
Ten yards away, he pulled his new service piece out of its holster. He was sweating now, despite the cold, and once again he couldn’t help envisioning a cold, dank basement in Red Hook. After his shooting he had promised himself that he would stay out of trouble. It wasn’t just that he had a son to think of—there was Michelle, and his oath that he would never put her through something like that again. What did that oath mean now?
He wiped his gun hand against his leg and took a few deep breaths—and noticed that his exhalations were puffing out white into the air. Easy to spot in a rearview mirror? While he waited for his breathing to calm down, he suddenly wondered if he had turned his cell phone off. He slapped at his thigh, then realized that he had left the phone in the apartment. What if Michelle tried to call him right now? But she wouldn’t…The thought of her refusal to talk sent another bolt of rage through him, and he wanted to take it out on whoever was in the dark car ahead. As he came closer, its engine suddenly revved up. Jack flinched, but he stayed back in the shadows for a few seconds and the car didn’t go anywhere.
The heater.