I told her about spotting Merchant at the library. Eliza said she hadn’t seen anyone at all suspicious where she’d been. Then I pointed to the subway entrance. ‘Let’s go,’ I said.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Uptown.’ There wouldn’t be any going back to the construction site now; there would be workers all over the place who would see us. We needed to find a safe haven. At the very least, we needed to find a place to have lunch.

  ‘I don’t think we can go to libraries to get online anymore,’ I told Eliza once the 6 train was loud enough to cover our voices, which was immediately. ‘They’ve found us both times we tried it. Someone is tracking us better than I would have expected.’

  Eliza looked thoughtful, stared at her Skechers for a moment, and then directed her gaze at my face. ‘They haven’t found us,’ she said. ‘They’ve found you.’

  That was entirely true but it wasn’t what I wanted to hear at this moment. ‘What did you find out in your library?’ I asked. That wasn’t exactly changing the subject, but it was close. I’d think about the implications of the cops looking for me and not Eliza later.

  Eliza gave me a quick look that indicated she saw what I was doing but didn’t comment. ‘I heard from Laura,’ she said.

  Finally, something that resembled a development we might be able to use! ‘What did she say?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you anything that will get anybody in trouble,’ she said in a hurry.

  ‘You were already staying in someone else’s apartment and if I’m not mistaken you’re still carrying Rainbow’s gun,’ I pointed out. ‘Everyone you know is already in trouble. This is about getting us all out.’

  We stopped talking when the train stopped at 51st Street, then waited until the doors closed and we started moving again.

  ‘Does Laura know anything about Damien’s murder?’ I asked. ‘Truth, now. This is no time to protect someone if it puts us in more danger.’

  ‘Laura definitely wasn’t there when Damien got killed,’ Eliza answered. ‘But she knew about staking out the basement and probably found Damien’s body before you did. She got scared and ran and that’s why I hadn’t heard from her for a couple of days.’

  ‘That and us not turning on our phones,’ I said.

  Eliza looked displeased.

  We went through the same routine at 59th Street and I gave a glance to the subway map in our car even though I knew the 6 train by heart. ‘Let’s get off at Sixty-eighth,’ I said.

  Eliza’s eyes widened a bit. ‘That’s New Amsterdam,’ she said.

  I knew it was the stop nearest her college. I nodded. ‘We have people to see.’

  ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea.’ Her shoes became objects of great interest again. I almost never look at my shoes but then they’re very basic designs. It’s hard to be creative in my size.

  ‘It’s the only good plan to have. We don’t have access to physical evidence and the cops have clearly already decided you did it, although that becomes less likely with every passing minute. I don’t even really know how Damien died.’

  Eliza’s eyes shot up to look at mine. ‘He got strangled, didn’t he?’

  I told her about my analysis of Damien’s body and how asphyxiation seemed to be almost impossible. ‘I think maybe he was poisoned to make it look that way, something that would cause him to lose the capacity to breathe.’

  ‘That’s crazy,’ Eliza said. The train was slowing down and she looked more panicky.

  ‘Show me something about this whole business that isn’t,’ I answered.

  We stopped at 68th Street and without a coherent plan in my head I sort of insisted that Eliza get off the subway and come with me to the center of the New Amsterdam University campus, which is the common area of separate buildings. It was where I had last spoken to Laura Rapinoe.

  While we were walking toward the campus, I asked Eliza if there was anyone besides Laura who would have known about Damien’s comings and goings, who he was dealing with and what he was doing. Even though the most obvious explanation of his murder was that it was related to his pill business, it’s always a mistake to go with the most obvious explanation and not investigate anything else. ‘Laura was probably in love with him, from what you’ve told me, but she said it was you who were interested in Damien,’ I said. ‘It sounds like he didn’t reciprocate. Is there someone else he might have been involved with?’

  ‘It wasn’t me.’ Eliza didn’t want to go where we were going and she was retreating into her less communicative self.

  ‘I get that. If it wasn’t Laura either, who could it have been?’

  ‘I dunno.’ I thought I’d made progress with Eliza. Clearly coming here had been a mistake on that front, but we might still get some useful information and that was worth a few hours of Eliza hating me again. Maybe I’d send a note to Ken so he could meet us for lunch. She liked Ken.

  ‘Do you know where to find Laura? Would you two have a class together today?’ Maybe Laura was the key. There didn’t seem to be anyone else except the elusive Rainbow, about whom I still knew next to nothing.

  ‘No. Let’s go.’ Did she think it was going to be that easy?

  ‘Not just yet. Let’s find Laura.’ Skimpy though it was, my plan consisted of confronting Laura Rapinoe with the fact that she’d been lying to me whenever we’d spoken, that she’d been at least in lust with Damien Van Dorn, and that she needed to come clean about what had been going on around him before his murder. Hey, I told you it was skimpy. But right now it was all I had.

  ‘I don’t want to find Laura.’ Eliza was reverting to a pouty ten-year-old. That wasn’t going to work on me, either.

  ‘Well, if you have a better idea, I’m listening.’ I kept walking in the direction of what could be called a quad, except it was all concrete and had its own subway stop. There’s quads and there’s quads. Eliza was following, but not really keeping up.

  ‘Julio knows who did it. We should find him.’ The voice was coming from behind me.

  ‘Jules doesn’t know who did it or he wouldn’t have come looking for us. Laura’s our best source at this point. She might have been in the room with him waiting for Jules and his buddy for a while. I doubt she was there when he was killed.’

  Eliza didn’t answer me, probably because I made sense and she couldn’t argue with it. I made a point of not giving her a smug I-told-you-so look. I’m classy.

  ‘Besides,’ I said, ‘this is where Damien was doing his business. Maybe you’ll recognize other people around here who were buying from Damien. Now, I know you’re not a narc and neither am I. I’m not interested in knowing who was buying Damien’s pills. I am interested in finding out who killed him, and every thread you pull on can lead to something. Does that sound right to you?’

  Again there was no response and this time I didn’t think it was because I was being so brilliant. That was never a good position from which to begin for me.

  I spun around and my worst fears were realized. There were any number of people of undergraduate age milling around, some in a hurry, heading to or from class or with some other business at the college.

  But not Eliza. Even after I scanned the area, she was nowhere to be seen.

  TWENTY-SIX

  After all was said and done and I had kicked myself around the block mentally, there was nothing to do but to go home.

  I trudged up the steps to my building and then up two flights to my apartment and by then was so emotionally ragged that the only way to cheer myself up was to remember that I’d be able to take a shower soon. And what kind of comment on a person’s life is that?

  It was a decent bet that Merchant would show up at the apartment soon because Eliza was right about one thing: he did always seem to know where I, and not she, was. I was fully charged and could handle him easily enough if it came to that, but the shower was definitely at the top of my priority list, and if he tried to arrest me while I was doing that, the NYPD would have a really serious lawsuit on its hands.

  But when I got inside I found my brother and Aunt Margie, who normally weren’t here this time of day. Still, I’m willing to bet I didn’t look as surprised to see them as they did to see me.

  It was one of those TV sitcom moments when everyone said, ‘What are you doing here?’ at the same time. But then Ken added, ‘And where’s Eliza?’ So that took some explaining, during which I felt like an idiot who needed a shower.

  Once my demoralizing tale had been told, Aunt Margie told me to sit down next to her, which I did, and she patted my hand and told me it wasn’t my fault, except that we all knew it was. I should have been keeping a closer eye on Eliza. I’d fooled myself into thinking we trusted each other.

  ‘Why’d you come home?’ Ken asked. ‘The cops can be at our door any minute.’

  ‘I didn’t come straight home. I went to Rainbow’s place in Queens because I thought Eliza might go there, but nobody was home. The door’s been fixed, though.’ I put my head back and closed my eyes. I wasn’t tired but I was weary. Closing my eyes was the next best thing to a shower. ‘Then once I couldn’t find her and had no idea where to look, I figured I’d come here. The cops don’t think I killed anybody.’

  Aunt Margie had spent decades as a radio crime reporter, so when she looked pensive it got my attention. (I’d reopened my eyes by now.) ‘No, but they’ll call you an accessory after the fact, they’ll say you harbored a fugitive from justice and they’ll squeeze you for information on where Eliza could be.’

  Closing my eyes again seemed like the way to go. ‘If I knew where Eliza could be, I’d go there and keep harboring the fugitive,’ I said. ‘Let them come and try to squeeze me. I’ve come up with a few defensive moves over the years.’

  ‘We’ve got to find her.’ Ken was focused on the task at hand. ‘She’s out there, she’s going to feel the temptation to use her phone and she’ll get picked up in a nanosecond.’ He turned to me. ‘What can we do?’ Ken talks a nice game but he knows I’m the more experienced investigator in the firm. He got his license because I’d grilled him for days on the questions that would be on the exam.

  ‘First thing is to report to her dad,’ I said. ‘Actually, the first thing is for me to take a shower. It’s been days.’

  ‘You took one yesterday morning,’ Ken pointed out. ‘You used up all the hot water.’

  Was that only one day ago? It seemed like weeks. ‘Trust me. I need another. I’m going to do that right now.’ And, fool that I am, I stood up to go to my room and find a robe.

  Before I could make it out of the room, Ken said, ‘I still want to know how we can find Eliza. She’s out there alone.’

  ‘That kid is good at taking care of herself,’ I told him. ‘We’ll look for her, of course, but at the moment I’m more worried the cops will find her than her being on her own.’

  I walked into my bedroom and took off all the clothes I’d been wearing, as it turned out, not for a week but only since the day before. Then I got an especially fluffy terrycloth robe from my closet, lamented that it wasn’t really my size and therefore fell well above my knees, and opened the door to finally have that promised shower.

  And when I was two steps from the bathroom door, just in the line of sight of the living room, Aunt Margie and Ken were sitting in a chair and on the sofa, respectively, just as they’d been when I’d walked out.

  Except that in the other side chair now was seated Detective Sergeant Richard Mankiewicz of the New York Police Department.

  At least he wasn’t still holding that damned fork.

  There was a brief (I’ll say) moment of panic and then I turned to run back into my bedroom and at least put on underwear, but it was too late. ‘Fran,’ I heard Mank say. ‘Come on in. We should talk.’ Like it was his apartment or something.

  ‘I need to get dressed,’ I said.

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ That, dear reader, was my brother, who at the very least was finding some aspects of my current situation amusing. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘No, it’s not,’ I said, and fled to my bedroom.

  I locked the door. It wasn’t that I thought anyone was going to try to force their way in, but it gave me that sense of safety that at the moment was more an illusion than a reality. Hey, they’re my emotions.

  What were my options? I could climb down the fire escape and try to, you know, escape, but the window squeaked loudly when you opened it and Mank would know before I made it out. Besides, the whole idea of coming home was that I had nothing to run from without Eliza by my side. And overpowering a New York City detective to run out into what might very well have been a small army of other cops didn’t seem like such a good idea, either.

  My best choice – and it wasn’t great – was to let Mank book me and go through whatever process it would take to get back to where I was now, only without cops chasing me. It wasn’t much but it was something. Don’t ask me what.

  I put on a pair of jeans and a very bland khaki t-shirt that was, amazingly, a little too large for me (I bought it at a men’s big and tall shop) to keep from being too revealing. Because I’d just walked out into the hallway wearing a bathrobe that covered at least fifty percent of me. No sense sending false signals.

  There was a series of deep breaths, which my martial arts sensei had taught me as a means of finding my center (which I always thought was right around the bellybutton) and then I opened the bedroom door and walked out again, fully dressed and prepared to meet my fate.

  My fate, at that moment, was sipping from a glass of iced tea Aunt Margie had certainly provided (Ken can cook but it would never occur to him to offer someone a drink other than a cold beer) and looking as causal as if he had dropped by to discuss an upcoming police fundraiser. Why the police need fundraisers with an annual budget of $11 billion is something of a stumper, in my opinion, but perhaps that’s beside the point.

  ‘What can I do for you?’ I said when I got to the living room. I sat on the sofa next to Aunt Margie, who is the safest person I’ve ever met.

  ‘I’d like to know where you’ve been for the past twenty-four hours,’ Mank said in a tone so conversational he might have been telling me about a movie he’d seen on Netflix the night before.

  ‘Any number of places,’ I told him, which was undeniably true.

  ‘Can you tell me what some of them were?’ he asked.

  Ken looked amused, which pissed me off beyond the usual scale. Aunt Margie looked at Mank as if she thought he was a nice young man, which served to infuriate me even more. Didn’t my family understand that this man was the enemy?

  ‘Are there any rights I need to be made aware of?’ I asked Mankiewicz.

  He had the temerity to look surprised. His eyebrows practically left his forehead and circled over him like one of those banner planes that carry advertisements over the Jersey shore. ‘You think I’m arresting you?’ he said. ‘What for?’

  The one advantage of Mank being here was that I no longer had to worry about the cops being able to trace me; they clearly knew where I was. So I could break out my poor neglected iPhone and fire it up. It had eighteen percent power left and needed a charge. I could empathize, but I didn’t need a boost right now. ‘You’ve been texting me pretty much on a quarter-hour basis,’ I told him. ‘One of those messages read, Come in and let me help you. Isn’t that what cops say when they want to arrest you?’

  ‘It’s also what friends say when they want to help,’ Mank said softly. ‘Fran, I get where you’re coming from. You were trying to keep Eliza safe and there were officers everywhere you turned up. So my being here must seem awfully suspicious.’

  ‘Ya think?’

  Mank stood up and approached my end of the couch. ‘Let me explain. The Van Dorn case is not in my precinct. I have no connection to it. I’m not here to arrest anybody because I haven’t been assigned a case. I’m here as a friend and I’m trying to figure out how to help get you clear of all this stuff that’s been going on. I’m not here as a cop.’

  ‘You caught Damien’s case,’ I reminded him.

  ‘As a missing person. The murder took place in the Bronx. I can consult but I’m not the lead on that one.’

  It was municipal red tape but it might mean I could trust Mank a little. But oops. I immediately powered down my phone. ‘I probably shouldn’t have turned that on,’ I said. ‘Detective Merchant will show up at our door in about three minutes.’

  This is how my family works: Ken immediately curled his hands into fists and stole a look at the apartment door. He stood up to check if it was locked, and it was because we live in New York.

  Aunt Margie’s face took on a stony look. Anyone who might possibly be a threat to Ken or me has to get through Aunt Margie first, and they’re not going to be happy they did.

  ‘It’s not that easy to trace a cell phone that’s just showing someone’s text messages,’ Mank told me. ‘Nobody’s coming to your door just yet. Now tell me, where is Eliza Hennessey and what does she know about the murder in the Bronx?’

  I didn’t want it to happen or consciously try for it, but my eyes narrowed. All of a sudden Mankiewicz was asking me questions about the fugitive I’d been keeping from the NYPD for more than a day. ‘I thought you weren’t here as a cop,’ I said, and there was a definite edge in my voice.

  ‘I’m not. I’m here as a friend.’ Mank squatted down just a touch to look me in the eye. The fact was, he probably could have done it standing up, but the man has some pride. ‘You have a problem and it’s tied to Eliza. You don’t have to tell me where she is, but it’ll help if you tell me what she knows and what her plan is at the moment. Because you’re right, Merchant and Brooker definitely want to talk to her, and they think she’s violent. There are some reports she’s carrying an unlicensed gun.’

  Ken glanced at me. He knew about Eliza’s gun but neither of us was aware the police had known about it. ‘I don’t know about that,’ I said. It was true; I had no idea if the gun Eliza was carrying was licensed or not.

 

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