Elevator Pitch

Prologue

Stuart Bland figured if he posted himself close to the elevators, there was no way he could miss Sherry D’Agostino.

He knew she arrived at the offices of Cromwell Entertainment, which were on the thirty-third floor of the Lansing Tower, on Third between Fifty-Ninth and Sixtieth, every morning between 8:30 and 8:45. A car was sent to her Brooklyn Heights address each day to bring her here. No taxi or subway for Sherry D’Agostino, Cromwell’s vice president of creative.

Stuart glanced about nervously. A FedEx ID tag he’d swiped a couple of years ago when he worked at a dry cleaner got him past security. That, and the FedEx cardboard envelope he was clutching, and the FedEx shirt and ball cap he had bought online. He kept the visor low on his forehead. There was every reason to believe the security desk had been handed his mug shot and been advised to keep an eye out for him. D’Agostino — no relation to the New York grocery chain — knew his name, and it’d be easy enough to grab a picture of him off his Facebook page.

But in all truth, he was on a delivery. Tucked into the envelope was his script, Clock Man.

He wouldn’t have had to take these extra steps if he hadn’t overplayed his hand, going to Sherry D’Agostino’s home, knocking on the door, ringing the bell repeatedly until some little girl, no more than five years old, answered and he stepped right past her into the house. Then Sherry showed up and screamed at him to get away from her daughter and out of the house or she’d call the police.

A stalker, she called him. That stung.

Okay, maybe he could have handled that better. Stepping into the house, okay, that was a mistake. But she had no one to blame but herself. If she’d accepted even one of his phone calls, just one, so that he could pitch his idea to her, tell her about his script, he wouldn’t have had to go to her house, would he? She had no idea how hard he’d been working on this. No idea that ten months earlier he’d quit his job making pizzas — unlike the dry-cleaning gig, leaving the pizza place was his own decision — to work full-time on getting his script just perfect. The way he figured it, time was running out. He was thirty-eight years old. If he was to make it as a screenwriter, he had to commit now.

But the whole system was so terribly unfair. Why shouldn’t someone like him be able to get a five-minute audience with her, make his pitch? Why should it only be established writers, those assholes in Hollywood with their fancy cars and big swimming pools and agents with Beverly Hills zip codes. Who said their ideas were any better than his?

So he watched her for a couple of days to learn her routine. That was how he knew she’d be getting into one of these four elevators in the next few minutes. In fact, it would be one of two elevators. The two on the left stopped at floors one through twenty, the two on the right served floors twenty-one through forty.

He leaned up against the marble wall opposite the elevators, head down, trying to look inconspicuous, but always watching. There was a steady flow of people, and it’d be easy for Sherry to get lost in the crowd. But the good thing was, she liked bright colors. Yellows, pinks, turquoise. Never black or dark blue. She stood out. And she was blond, her hair puffed up the way some women do it, like she went at it with a bicycle pump in the morning. She could be standing in a hurricane, have every stitch of clothing blown off her, but there wouldn’t be one hair out of place. As long as Stuart kept a sharp lookout, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t miss her. Soon as she got on the elevator, he’d step on with her.

Shit, there she was.

Striding across the lobby, those heels adding about three inches to her height. Stuart figured she was no more than five-two in her stocking feet, but even as small as she was, she had a presence. Chin up, eyes forward. Stuart had checked her out on IMDb, so he knew she was nearly forty. Looked good. Just a year or two older than he was. Imagine walking into Gramercy Tavern with her on his arm.

Yeah, like that was gonna happen.

According to what he’d read online, she’d started in television as a script supervisor in her early twenties and quickly worked her way up. Did a stint at HBO, then Showtime, then got lured away by Cromwell to develop new projects. The way Stuart saw it, she was his ticket to industry-wide acclaim as a hot new screenwriter.

Sherry D’Agostino stood between the two right-hand elevators. There were two other people waiting. A man, sixtyish, in a dark gray suit, your typical Business Guy, and a woman, early twenties, wearing sneakers she’d no doubt change out of once she got to her desk. Secretary, Stuart figured. There was something anonymous and worker bee about Sneaker Girl. He came up behind the three of them, waiting to step into whichever elevator came first. He glanced up at the numbers. A tiny digital readout above each elevator indicated its position. The one on the right was at forty-eight, the one on the left at thirty-one, then thirty.

Going down.

Sherry and the other two shifted slightly to the left set of doors, leaving room for those who would be getting off.

The doors parted and five people disembarked. Once they were out of the way, Sherry, Business Guy, Sneaker Girl, and Stuart got on. Stuart managed to spin around behind Sherry as everyone turned to face front.

The elevator doors closed.

Sherry pressed “33,” Sneaker Girl “34,” and the Business Guy “37.”

When Stuart did not reach over to press one of the many buttons, the man, who was standing closest to the panel, glanced his way, silently offering to press a button for him.

“I’m good,” he said.

The elevator silently began its ascent. Sherry and the other woman looked up to catch the latest news. The elevator was fitted with a small video screen that ran a kind of chyron, a line of headlines moving from right to left.

New York forecast high 64 low 51 mostly sunny.

Stuart moved forward half a step so he was almost rubbing shoulders with Sherry. “How are you today, Ms. D’Agostino?”

She turned her head from reading the screen and said, “Fine, thank—”

And then she saw who he was. Her eyes flickered with fear. Her body leaned away from him, but her feet were rooted to the same spot in the elevator floor.

Stuart held out the FedEx package. “I wanted to give you this. That’s all. I just want you to have it.”

“I told you to stay away from me,” she said, not accepting it.

The man and woman turned their heads.

“It’s cool,” Stuart said, smiling at them. “Everything’s fine.” He kept holding out the package to Sherry. “Take it. You’ll love it.”

“I’m sorry, you have to—”

“Okay, okay, wait. Let me just tell you about it, then. Once you hear what it’s about, I guarantee you’ll want to read it.”

The elevator made a soft whirring noise as it sped past the first twenty floors.

Sherry glanced at the numbers flashing by on the display above the door, then up to the news line. Latest unemployment figures show rate fell 0.2 percent last month. She sighed, her resistance fading.

“You’ve got fifteen seconds,” she said. “If you follow me off, I’ll call security.”

Stuart beamed. “Okay! Right. So you’ve got this guy, he’s like, thirty, and he works—”

“Ten seconds,” she said. “Sum it up in one sentence.”

Stuart suddenly looked panicked. He blinked a couple of times, his mind racing to encapsulate his brilliant script into a phrase, to distill it to its essence.

“Um,” he said.

“Five seconds,” Sherry said, the elevator almost to the thirty-third floor.

“Guy works at a factory that makes clocks but one of them is actually a time machine!” he blurted. He let out a long breath, then took one in.

“That’s it?” she said.

“No!” he said. “There’s more! But to try to explain it in—”

“What the hell?” Sherry said, but not to him.

The elevator had not stopped at her floor. It shot right past thirty-three, and then glided right on by thirty-four.

“Crap,” said Sneaker Girl. “That’s me.”

The two women both reached out to the panel at the same time to press the button for their floors again, their fingers engaged in a brief bit of fencing.

“Sorry,” said Sherry, who’d managed to hit the button for her floor first. She edged out of the way.

US militant group Flyovers prime suspect in Seattle coffee shop bombing that killed two.

As the elevator continued its ascent, Business Guy grimaced and said, “Guess I’ll join the club.” He put his index finger to the “37” button.

“Someone at the top must have pushed for it,” Sneaker Girl said. “It’s going all the way up first.”

She turned out to be right. The elevator did not stop until it reached the fortieth floor.

But the doors did not open.

“God, I fucking hate elevators,” she said.

Stuart did not share her distress. He grinned. The elevator malfunction had bought him a few extra seconds to make his pitch to Sherry. “I know time travel has been done a lot, but this scenario is different. My hero, he doesn’t go way into the past or way into the future. He can only go five minutes one way or the other, so—”

Business Guy said, “I’ll walk back down.” He pressed the button to open the doors, but there was no response.

“Jesus,” he muttered.

Sherry said, “We should call someone.” She pointed to the button marked with the symbol of a phone.

“It’s only been a few seconds,” Stuart said. “It’ll probably sort itself out after a minute or so and—”

With a slight jolt, the elevator started moving again.

“Finally,” Sneaker Girl said.

Storm hitting UK approaching hurricane status.

“The interesting angle is,” Stuart said, persisting, “if he can only go five minutes into the past or five minutes into the future, how does he use that? Is it a kind of superpower? What kind of advantages could that give someone?”

Sherry glanced at him dismissively. “I’d have gotten on this elevator five minutes before you showed up.”

Stuart bristled at that. “You don’t have to insult me.”

“Son of a bitch,” the man said.

The descending elevator had gone past his floor. He jabbed at “37” again, more angrily this time.

The elevator sailed past the floors for the two women as well, but stopped at twenty-nine.

“Aw, come on,” Business Guy said. “This is ridiculous.” He pressed the phone button. He waited a moment, expecting a response. “Hello?” he said. “Anyone there? Hello?”

“This is freaking me out,” Sneaker Girl said, taking a cell phone from her purse. She tapped the screen, put the phone to her ear. “Yeah, hey, Steve? It’s Paula. I’m gonna be late. I’m stuck in the fucking eleva—”

There was a loud noise from above, as though the world’s largest rubber band had snapped. The elevator trembled for a second. Everyone looked up, stunned. Even Stuart, who had stopped trying to sell his idea to Sherry D’Agostino.

“Fuck!” said Sneaker Girl.

“What the hell was that?” Sherry asked.

Almost instinctively, everyone started backing up toward the walls of the elevator, leaving the center floor area open. They gripped the waist-high brass handrails.

“It’s probably nothing,” Stuart said. “A glitch, that’s all.”

“Hello?” Business Guy said again. “Is anybody there, for Christ’s sake? This elevator’s gone nuts!”

Sherry spotted the alarm button and pressed it. There was only silence.

“Shouldn’t we be hearing that?” she asked.

The man said, “Maybe it rings someplace else, you know, so someone will come. Down at the security desk, probably.”

For several seconds, no one said anything. It was dead silent in the elevator. Everyone took a few calming breaths.

Average US life expectancy now nearly 80.

Stuart spoke first. “Someone’ll be along.” He nodded with false confidence and gave Sherry a nervous smile. “Maybe this is what I should be writing a—”

The elevator began to plunge.

Within seconds it was going much faster than it was designed to go.

Stuart and Sherry and the two others felt their feet lifting off the floor.

The elevator was in free fall.

Until it hit bottom.

One

Barbara Matheson was impressed by the size of the crowd. The usual suspects, more or less, but the fact that they’d turned out meant her story had made an impression.

This was a TV event, really. Get the mayor walking out of City Hall, lob a few questions his way, get video of him denying everything. The Times, the Daily News, the Post could all write their stories without being here. But NY1 and the local ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates had crews waiting for Richard Wilson Headley to show. He might try sneaking out a back way, or leaving in a limo with windows so deeply tinted you wouldn’t know whether he was inside or not. But then the evening newscasts would say he made a point of avoiding the media, imply that he was a coward, and Headley never wanted to come across as a coward.

Even if he could be one at times.

Barbara was here on the off chance that something might actually happen. And yes, she was enjoying the shit she’d stirred up. This show of media force was her doing. She’d broken the story. Maybe Headley would take a swing at somebody who put a camera in his face, although that seemed unlikely. He was too smart for that. The TV stations were here for a comment, but she’d already gotten one and put it in her column.

“That’s a load of fucking horseshit,” Headley had said when Barbara ran the allegations past him. Her editors at Manhattan Today printed the response without asterisks to disguise the profanity, but that was hardly daring these days. The Times still avoided curse words except in the most extreme cases, but even The New Yorker, that staid institution, didn’t blink an eye about f-bombs and hadn’t for years.

“You really put his dick into the blender this time.”

She turned. It was Matt Timmins, instantly recognizable by his multidirectional black hair and glasses thick enough to see life on Mars. He worked for an online site that covered city issues, but she knew him back when he worked for NBC, before he got laid off. He had a phone in hand, waiting to take video, which would be good enough for the political blog he wrote.

“Hey, Matt,” Barbara said.

“Wearin’ Kevlar?”

Barbara shrugged. She liked Matt, vaguely remembered sleeping with him nearly ten years ago when they were both in their early thirties. The local press had been camped out in front of the house of a congressman in the midst of a bribery scandal. Barbara and Matt had shared a car to keep warm while waiting for the feds to arrive and walk the politician out the front door. After, they went to a bar, had too much to drink, and went back to his place. It was all a bit foggy. Barbara was pretty sure Matt was married now, with a kid, maybe two.

“Headley won’t shoot me,” she said. “He might hire someone to shoot me, but he wouldn’t do it himself.”

A woman with a mike in one hand looked up from the phone in her other. She’d been reading a text. “Dickhead’s on the move,” she said to the cameraman standing beside her, loud enough that it created a low-level buzz among the collected media. The mayor was on his way.

Of course, Mayor Richard Wilson Headley always went by “Richard,” sometimes “Rich,” but never “Dick.” But that didn’t stop his detractors from referring to him that way. One of the tabs, which had it in for him nearly as much as Manhattan Today did, liked to stack DICK over HEADLEY on the front as often as it could, usually with as unflattering picture as they could find of the man. They also took delight in headlines that coupled GOOD with HEADLEY.

Headley knew it was a losing battle, so sometimes he’d embrace the word so often used against him, particularly when it came to the city’s various unions. “Am I going to be a total dick with them on this new contract?” he asked the other day. “You bet your ass I am.”

“Here we go,” someone said.

The mayor, accompanied by Glover Headley, his twenty-five-year-old son and adviser, communications strategist Valerie Langdon, and a tall, bald man Barbara did not think she’d seen before, was coming out the front door of City Hall and heading down the broad steps toward a waiting limo. The media throng moved toward him, and everyone stopped halfway, allowing Headley a makeshift pulpit, standing two steps above everyone else.

But it was Glover who spoke. “Hey, guys, we’re on our way to the mansion, no time for questions at this—”

Headley shot his son a disapproving look and raised a hand. “No, no. I’m more than happy to take a few.”

Barbara, hanging at the back of the pack, smiled inwardly. Standard operating procedure for Headley. Overrule your aides; don’t hide behind them. Act like you want to talk to the press. The whole thing would have been rehearsed earlier. Valerie touched the mayor’s arm, as though asking him to think twice about this. He shook it off.

Nice touch, Barbara thought.

Even though the bald guy was standing back of the mayor and trying to be invisible, Barbara was sizing him up. Trim, over six feet, skin the color of caramel. Of the three men standing before the assembled media, this guy had the most style. Long dress coat over his suit, leather gloves even though it wasn’t that cold out. Looked like he’d stepped off the cover of GQ.

A looker.

She thought of the people she knew in City Hall, the ones who regularly fed her information. Maybe one of them could tell her who this guy was, what the mayor had hired him to do.

Then again, she could just go up and introduce herself, ask him who he was. But that would have to wait. NY1’s correspondent, a man Barbara knew to be in his fifties but could pass for midthirties, led things off.

“How do you respond to allegations that you strong-armed the works department to hire an independent construction firm owned by one of your largest political donors for major subway upgrades?”

Headley shook his head sadly and smirked, like he’d heard this a hundred times before.

“There is absolutely nothing to that allegation,” he said. “It’s pure fiction. Contracts are awarded based on a long list of factors. Track record — no pun intended — and ability to get the work done, cost considerations, and—”

The NY1 guy wasn’t done. “But yesterday Manhattan Today printed an email in which you told the department to hire Steelways, which is owned by Arnett Steel, who organized large fund-raisers for your—”

Headley raised a shushing hand. “Now hold on, right there. First of all, the veracity of that email has not been determined.”

Barbara closed her eyes briefly so no one would have to see them roll.

“I would not put it past Manhattan Today to manufacture something like that. But even if it turns out to be legitimate, the content of that message hardly qualifies as a directive. It’s more along the lines of a suggestion.”

In her head, Barbara composed her next piece.

“Headley alleges the email uncovered by Manhattan Today could be phony, but just to cover all his bases, says that if it turns out to be the real deal, it’s not that much of one.”

In other words, suck and blow at the same time.

“Everyone knows that Manhattan Today has an obsession with me,” Headley said, waving an accusing finger in Barbara’s general direction.

He’s spotted me, she thought. Or one of his aides alerted him that she was there.

Headley’s voice ramped up. “It’s been involved in a relentless smear campaign from day one. And that campaign has been led by one person, but I won’t give her the satisfaction of repeating her name before the cameras.”

“You mean Barbara Matheson?” shouted the reporter from the CBS affiliate.

Headley grimaced. He’d walked into that one, Barbara thought.

“You know who I’m talking about,” he said evenly. “But even though this vendetta is being led by a single individual, I have to assume this kind of character assassination is approved from the top. Maybe the opinions of this journalist, and I use the term loosely, are slanted the way they are because of direction from upstairs.”

Barbara yawned.

“That’s why I’m announcing today that I will be filing a defamation suit against Manhattan Today.”

Oh, goodie.

Textbook Headley. Threaten a lawsuit but never actually file. Act outraged, grab a headline. Headley had threatened to sue every news outlet in the city at some point. He’d used the same tactics back when he was in business, before he embarked on a political career.

“Furthermore,” he said, “I—”

Headley noticed Valerie waving her phone in front of Glover, who winced when he read what was on her screen. The mayor leaned her way as she turned the phone so he could see it. While he was reading the message, there was a stirring in the crowd as some received messages of their own. The NY1 guy and his cameraman were already on the move.

“Sorry,” Headley said. “We’re going to have to cut this short. You’re probably getting the same news I am.”

With that he continued on down the steps, Valerie, Glover, and the bald man trailing him. They all got into the back of the waiting limo, which was only steps away from Barbara. But she had her eyes on her phone, attempting to learn what it was everyone else already seemed to know. She was vaguely aware of the whirring sound of a car window powering down.

“Barbara.”

She looked up from her phone, saw Glover at the limo window.

“The mayor would like to give you a ride uptown,” he said.

Her mouth suddenly went very dry. She glanced quickly to both sides, wondering if anyone else was witnessing the offer. Matt, to her left, was smiling.

“I’ll always remember you,” he said.

Barbara, having made her decision, sighed. “How kind,” she said to Glover.

She made as though she was turning off her phone, but set it to record before dropping it into her purse.

Glover pushed open the door, stepped out, let Barbara in, then got back in beside her. The limo was already pulling away as he pulled the door shut.

Two

The stairwell on West Twenty-Ninth Street that led up to the High Line, just west of Tenth Avenue, was blocked off with police tape, a uniformed NYPD patrolman standing guard.

Detective Jerry Bourque parked his unmarked cruiser directly under the elevated, linear park that at one time had been a spur of the New York Central Railroad. He got out of his car and looked up. The viaduct was only about one and a half miles long, but it attracted millions of people — locals and tourists — annually. Lined with gardens and benches and interesting architectural features, it had quickly become one of Bourque’s favorite spots in the city. It cut through the heart of lower Manhattan’s West Side, yet was a ribbonlike oasis away from the noise and chaos. When it first opened, Bourque jogged it.

Not so much these days.

There were half a dozen marked NYPD cars, some with lights flashing, cluttering the street. As Bourque approached the stairwell entrance he recognized the patrolman standing there.

“Hey,” Bourque said.

“They’re expecting you,” the officer said, and lifted the tape.

Bourque still had to duck, and the tape brushed across his short, bristly, prematurely gray hair. He was a round-shouldered six foot three. When circumstances demanded he stand up straight, he pushed six-five. He started up the stairs. Halfway, he paused for several seconds, a slight wave of anxiety washing over him. It was still hanging in there, this sense of unease before he reached the scene of a homicide. It hadn’t always been this way. He reached into his pocket, feeling for something familiar, something reassuring, and upon finding it, he carried on the rest of the way to the top.

When he reached the High Line walkway, he looked left, to the north. The path veered slightly to the west, where the High Line crossed West Twenty-Ninth Street. A gently curved bench hugged the walkway on the left side, with a narrow band of greenery between the back and the edge.

This was where everyone — police, the coroner, High Line officials — were clustered.

Bourque walked on with a steady pace, his head extending slightly ahead of his body, as though tracking a scent. There was no need to run. The subject would still be dead when he got there. Bourque had turned forty only three months earlier, but his creased and weathered face would have allowed him to pass as someone five or ten years older. A woman had once told him he reminded her of those trees that grow out of the rocks up in Newfoundland. The relentless winds from the ocean caused them to lean permanently to one side, the branches all going in one direction. Bourque, the woman said, looked like someone who’d been worn down by the wind.

As he got closer, another detective, Lois Delgado, saw him and approached. Seeing her, his anxiety receded some. They were more than partners. They were friends, and if there was anyone Bourque trusted more than Delgado, he couldn’t think who it might be.

And yet, he didn’t tell her everything.

She had an oval face, the way she let a curl of her short dark hair fall across her upper left cheek where she had a port-wine stain about the size of a quarter. Bourque understood why she tried to disguise it, but he found it one of her most beautiful features. She pulled her hair back on the right side, usually tucking it behind her ear, giving her face a kind of lopsided quality. She was a year older than Bourque, but unlike him she could have passed for someone younger.

“Well?” he said.

“Dead male,” she said. “No ID on the body. If I had to guess, late forties, early fifties. Early-morning jogger noticed something behind the corner of the bench that turned out to be a foot.”

Bourque looked around. The High Line wound among countless apartment buildings. “Somebody must have seen something,” he said.

“Yeah, well, that part of the bench is up against a nearly windowless wall on the left, and an open area on the right, and then there’s the rink just up there, so...”

Delgado shrugged, then continued. “Had to have happened in the middle of the night when there was no one going by. Tons of pedestrian traffic up here through the day. Thousands of people walk along here.”

“High Line closes at what, ten or eleven?”

“Yeah,” Delgado said. “They roll down the gates at all the access points then. Opens up again at seven in the morning. Wasn’t long after that that the body was discovered. You couldn’t do this to someone during the open hours.”

Bourque gave her a look. “Do what?”

“Easier if you just come and see for yourself,” she said.

Bourque took a breath.

I’m fine.

As they approached the bench, he saw the dirty white rubber sole of the shoe the jogger had spotted.

“We think he got dragged into the tall grasses and that was where it happened,” Delgado said, pointing to all the vegetation at the edges of the walkway that made it such a popular place for people to stroll. “I guess, just before they close the High Line and security does its walkthrough, someone could hide in the grass and not be seen.”

A couple of other officers made some room for the two detectives, who stepped off the main part of the path and into the greenery at the left edge. Bourque knelt down close to the body.

“Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah,” said Delgado.

“Did a real number on the face.”

“Hamburger,” Delgado said.

“Yeah,” Bourque said, feeling a tightening in his chest.

“Check the fingers. At least, what’s left of them.”

Bourque looked. “Fuck me.”

The fingertips on both hands were missing.

“All cut off,” Bourque said. “What would you need for that? Small pruning shears? The kind you use in the garden? Who walks around with one of those, unless it’s one of the people who maintains this area.”

“Don’t think he used pruners,” Delgado said. She parted some grass to reveal a rusted ribbon of steel, one of the original tracks when the High Line was used to bring rail cars into the heart of the city. “See the blood?”

Bourque slowly nodded. “He holds the guy’s fingers over the rail, using it like a cutting board. Could have done it with a regular pocket knife, although he’d have had to press hard to get through bone.”

“Our guy would have to have been dead by then, Jer,” Delgado said.

“Would make it a tad easier,” Bourque said. He paused to take a breath. “You cut the ends off ten fingers, you’re going to get some objections if your guy is alive.”

They looked back from the bloody rail to the body.

“Why?” Delgado asked.

“Hmm?”

“I’ve seen a finger get cut off as a way of getting someone’s attention, of making them talk, of punishing them, but why cut ’em all off after he’s dead?”

“Identi—”

“Of course,” Delgado said. “So we can’t take fingerprints. And the smashed-in face keeps us from knowing who he is.”

“Maybe the killer’s never heard of DNA,” Bourque said, pausing to take another breath.

“You okay?” Lois asked. “You comin’ down with something?”

He shook his head.

Delgado said, “DNA takes time. Maybe whoever did this wants to slow us down. Or maybe our guy here isn’t in the database.”

“Could be.”

“Why not just cut off the hands? Why all the fingers? Why ten cuts instead of two?”

Bourque thought about that. “If he just had a simple knife, cutting through fingers was easier than sawing through wrists.”

Delgado nodded. “Yeah.”

Bourque raised his head over the top of the bench and looked down the walkway. “You walk off with ten fingertips, maybe you leave a blood trail.”

“It rained around five this morning,” Delgado said.

He sighed, looked at the body again. He took out his phone and started taking pictures. His gaze wandered farther down the body. The man’s tan khakis had inched up one leg far enough to reveal his socks.

“Check it out,” Bourque said, his voice barely above a whisper.

They were novelty socks, imprinted with several images of the shark from Jaws.

“Daaa-duh, daaa-duh,” Delgado said.

Bourque took some close-up shots.

“I’ve seen those for sale somewhere,” he said.

“Lotta places sell novelty socks these days,” Delgado said.

They both stood. Bourque gazed along the High Line, first to the north, then the south. “So if this happened after hours, and this is all locked up, how’d our killer get away?”

Delgado said, “Before you got here, I walked a block in each direction. One or two places, if you were really brave, you could jump onto a nearby roof. There’s some rooftop parking up that way. Get onto a roof, or a fire escape, work your way down.”

“Like Bruce Willis in Die Hard,” Bourque said. The words came out in a whisper.

“What?”

Bourque repeated himself, louder this time.

“Yeah, could be done,” Delgado said. “If you’re in good shape.”

Bourque coughed, cleared his throat. “I don’t ever remember a murder on the High Line. Nothing bad happens up here.”

Delgado said, “It’s lost its cherry.”

Bourque put a hand to his chest, indicating he had a call or a text coming in. “Give me a sec,” he said.

He took the phone from his pocket, glanced at it, put it to his ear as he came out from behind the bench and walked a few yards up the High Line, still within the area that was taped off, but free of police or any other city officials.

Bourque nodded a couple of times as he walked, as though responding to whatever his caller was saying. But there’d been no call, and no text.

And Bourque was not talking. He was wheezing. His windpipe had started constricting at the sight of those fingers with the missing tips.

When he felt confident he was far enough away from the murder scene to not be seen, he reached back into his pocket for that familiar object.

He brought out the inhaler, inserted it into his mouth, and inhaled deeply as he depressed the top of the tiny canister. A barely de-tectible puff of medicine entered his lungs. He held his breath nearly fifteen seconds, exhaled, and repeated the process.

Bourque tucked the inhaler back into his pocket. He took a few breaths through his nose, waiting for his air passages to open up again.

He turned around and walked back to have another look at the man with no fingertips.

Three

Barbara sank into a leather seat opposite the mayor and Valerie. Glover and the good-looking bald guy made space for her in the middle, so her feet had to straddle the driveshaft hump. Even though the car was roomier than most, she found her shoulders squeezed by the two men. She was picking up a cheap aftershave scent from Glover. But the bald guy was giving off something subtler, an almost coffee-like scent. Barbara wondered whether it was an actual cologne, or if he’d been in the Starbucks line for too long. Either way, she kind of liked it.

She turned her head to face the bald man. “You’re new.”

He smiled.

“I’m Barbara Matheson, but I’m guessing you know that.” When he didn’t say anything, she looked at Headley. “Does he talk? Stomp his foot once for yes, two for no?”

“That’s Chris Vallins,” Valerie said. “Say hello, Chris.”

“Hello,” said Chris. Deep voice. If brown velvet could make a sound, Barbara thought, this would be it. “Nice to meet you.” He snaked a gloved hand around in the tight quarters and offered it.

“A pleasure,” Barbara said, shaking it. “And what do you do for His Holiness?”

“Part of the team,” he said. “Whatever the mayor needs.”

Barbara didn’t see her new friend Chris as much of a chatterer, so she turned her attention back to those sitting across from her. She wondered whether to make anything of the fact that Valerie was sitting next to the mayor. There was a foot of space between them, but Barbara tried to read the body language. If Valerie found her boss as unappealing as Barbara believed she should, she’d be pressing herself up against the door. But there was a slight shoulder lean toward Headley.

Maybe she was reading too much into it. And what did it matter, anyway? If Headley wanted to screw the help, and the help was okay with it, then what business was it of Barbara’s? Valerie was a grown woman capable of making an informed choice. Surely she had to know the mayor’s background, what a shit he reportedly had been to his late wife, Felicia. Everyone knew that, ten years earlier, the night Felicia died in their uptown brownstone after a long fight with cancer, Headley was fucking the brains out of one of her caretakers in a room at the Plaza. It was a young Glover who called 911 to report that his mother had stopped breathing.

Headley was already one of the most famous, if not most notorious, businessmen in the city, so when the media picked up an emergency call at his address, a couple of TV vans were dispatched to the scene. What ended up on the news was a shot of a weeping Glover, his father nowhere to be seen and not reachable by phone. Headley claimed later he had muted his cell because he’d been meeting with a possible investor whose name he was not at liberty to reveal. No one believed it for a second.

Barbara had wondered if that was when Headley’s relationship with his son had soured. The boy had humiliated him. Unwittingly, of course, but that was what he’d done. Headley had been on the cusp of a mayoral bid way back then but delayed it, hoping that as time passed his reputation would be rehabilitated. When he finally did announce his candidacy, he had created a myth about himself as the sad widower who had raised his teenage son on his own.

Felicia had been a looker in her day, a onetime model who worked her way up to a senior editor position at Condé Nast. Valerie had some of Felicia’s attributes, at least those the mayor valued. In her late thirties, she was younger than him by more than a decade. Long legs, busty enough without being too obvious about it, dark, shoulderlength hair. Probably bought all her clothes at Saks, went to some trendy salon like Fringe or Pickthorn to get her hair done. Unlike Barbara, whose salon was the bathroom sink, did quite well pulling together a wardrobe at Target, and whose makeup budget was a pittance compared to what she spent on pinot grigio.

More than once, at political events, when Valerie was looking the other way, Barbara had observed the mayor checking out his communication director’s ass as if it harbored some mystical secret. Not that hers was the only one.

But now, in the back of this limo, Headley had a very different expression on his face as he sized up Barbara. He was scowling at her, like she was a teenage daughter who’d ignored curfew for the fifth night in a row.

“So what’s happened uptown?” Barbara asked, looking out the window. The driver had found his way from City Hall to the FDR and was making good time heading north.

Beside her, Glover said, “Some kind of elevator accident.”

Barbara was underwhelmed. Elevator accident, crane collapse, subway fire. Whatever. It was always something in a city this big. It’d be news if something didn’t happen. If Headley felt a need to attend, it had to be more serious than usual, but still. Headley liked being seen at catastrophes. Say a few things for the evening news, give the impression he knew what he was talking about, show his concern.

Barbara was willing to cut him some slack on this. It was something all mayors did, if they were smart. A mayor who couldn’t be bothered to show up when New Yorkers endured something particularly tragic would be pilloried. Rudy Giuliani had set the standard, way back on September 11, 2001, as he walked through the rubble, holding a handkerchief to his mouth. Say what you wanted about the guy’s shenanigans since, you had to give him credit for his service back in the day.

Barbara doubted Headley had it in him to be that kind of mayor. She just hoped he — and the city — would never be tested like that again.

“They’re saying four dead,” Valerie said.

Barbara nodded again. It wasn’t that she didn’t care. But industrial accidents, car crashes, drive-by shootings, apartment fires, these just weren’t her thing. She covered city politics. Let the youngsters chase ambulances. She’d cut her teeth on that kind of stuff, and it was valuable experience, but she’d moved on.

“Nice of you to give me a ride, but this isn’t the way to my place,” Barbara said to Headley, who was still looking at her through narrowed eyes. “So, what? Am I grounded? Being sent to bed without my dinner?”

“Barbara, Barbara, Barbara,” Headley said, looking weary and disappointed at the same time. “When’s it going to stop?”

“What?” Barbara asked. “Your love of quid pro quos or my love of writing about them?”

“You think you can keep poking the bear and never get a scratch,” he said. “You’re not untouchable.”

Untouchable. Interesting choice of word.

“Well, you told everyone you’re suing me and Manhattan Today. So I guess I’m not untouchable. But while we’re on that issue, how’s the suit against the Times for saying you were registered to vote federally in three different districts? And how long’s it been since you threatened to sue that actress who said you had performance anxiety?”

Valerie shot a glance at Barbara but said nothing.

Headley forced a smile. “Well, I think we know which of those accusations was the more ridiculous.” The smile faded. “Anyway, these things take a while to work their way through the courts.”

Barbara settled into the leather seat, taking advantage of the headrest. Don’t let them rattle you, she thought. Sure, there were four of them, not counting the driver, who was getting off at Forty-Second Street and heading crosstown. The one Barbara really wanted to know more about was this Chris dude beside her, who looked like he could get a job playing a Bond villain’s bodyguard if he lost his City Hall gig. Not that that was necessarily a knock against him. He was a handsome piece of work. Was being surrounded supposed to put her on edge? Did they know how much she was actually loving this? If Headley and his gang ignored her, gave no hint of how annoyed they were with her, well, that would be unbearable.

“I honestly don’t know why you seem to have it in for me,” Headley asked. “Why so angry?”

“I’m not angry,” Barbara said. “I just have this thing about hypocrisy.”

“Oh, please,” the mayor said. “Hypocrisy is the fuel that keeps the world running. Let me ask you this. Be honest. Have you ever had a source who did something bad, something worth writing about, worth exposing, but you looked the other way because they had good intel that gave you an even better story? Something that would give you an exclusive? Are you going to sit there and tell me you’ve never done that?”

Barbara said, “There are a lot of considerations when you’re working on a story.”

Headley grinned. “That sounds as evasive as something I would say. We’re really not that different, you and I. It’s all a game, isn’t it? Politics and the media? And it can be great fun, I’m not denying it. But sometimes” — and at this point his face grew stern — “it all starts to get a little annoying.”

“Am I annoying you?” Barbara asked, almost hopefully.

He held his thumb and forefinger apart a fraction of an inch. “Just a titch. But,” he said slowly, “we’d like to give you an opportunity to redeem yourself.”

Barbara eyed him suspiciously. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Headley glanced at Glover and gave him a subtle nod.

Glover said, “The mayor certainly has his differences with you, but he also recognizes your skills as a journalist, that you are an accomplished writer. And he respects you for that.”

Headley looked out the window, watched the city go by as they traveled north on Third.

“Needless to say,” Glover continued, “the mayor, and the rest of the team here, wish you’d at least occasionally focus on the things that are getting done. This subway story you’ve latched on to, that’s a really positive story. But instead, you’re portraying it in a negative light. The current signal system is based on technology from the 1930s and desperately needs to be overhauled. And then there’s the switchover to electric cars. The mayor wants every city vehicle to be converted to electric power within his first term. Soon you’ll be seeing those little green stickers on the back of every car and truck that’s—”

“Glover, move it along,” Headley said to his son, still looking out the window, an edge of irritation creeping into his voice.

“We’re not announcing anything at the moment,” Glover said, “but in due time it may be in the mayor’s interest to tell his story to a broader audience, so voters have a better sense of who he is. That there’s more to him than two-bit scandals and salacious headlines. That he’s a man who wants to make a difference, but on a broader canvas.”

“Ah,” said Barbara, looking at Headley. “You want to move up the political food chain. After mayor of New York, there’s only governor, or president. Or going on TV endlessly to defend a corrupt president. How do you know someone wants to be the leader of the free world? They suddenly come out with a book, like the world’s been dying to hear their life story. Comes out, sells a few copies, then the primaries come, someone else gets the nomination, and the book ends up on the seventy-five-percent-off table at Barnes & Noble, and even then they can’t unload the copies. In the end, their life story gets pulped.”

Glover waited to see if she was done. When Barbara said nothing more, he continued. “As I was saying, we’re looking for someone who can assist the mayor in telling his story.”

Barbara nodded. “A ghost writer.”

Glover smiled. “My sources tell me you’re no stranger to that kind of work.”

It was true. Over the years, Barbara had ghostwritten three memoirs. One for a Broadway actress, one for a sports hero who’d lost both legs in a car accident, and one for a pop star who was once at the top of the charts but now would be lucky to get a gig singing in a SoHo night club. None of those assignments would have given her a shot at a Pulitzer, but they’d certainly helped pay the bills.

When Barbara failed to confirm or deny what Glover had said, he carried on. “We’ve started speaking to publishers. We’re meeting later with Simon & Schuster. They’re looking for possible writers to work with Da — with the mayor, but we have final approval on that and can make suggestions of our own. We think you’d be a leading candidate.”

“Seriously.”

Headley cleared his throat, turned away from the passing scenery, and looked directly at her. “There’s a feeling that choosing someone who’s had an antagonistic history with me would lend the project considerable credibility. That it wouldn’t be a whitewash.”

“It would be particularly credible if I were working for you at the same time you were suing me.”

Headley grimaced. “I suppose we could let that slide. There’s still enough of a history of animosity, I should think.”

Barbara nodded slowly. “Of course, you’d still have final approval on the manuscript.”

“Well,” said Valerie, weighing in for the first time, “of course, but we’re looking for a fair and balanced portrait. Warts and all. The mayor wants to lay everything out on the table. America’s becoming accustomed to candidates who are less than perfect. If you’re running for office these days, it helps if you’re relatable.”

“Warts and all,” Barbara said slowly. “Are you sure you want to go there?”

“And I haven’t mentioned perhaps the most important thing of all,” Glover said. “You’d be looking at a mid-six-figure fee. With the potential for bonuses should the book stay on the bestseller list for an extended period of time.” He grinned. “Or if anyone ever wanted to turn it into a movie. You know. A biopic. Despite your little speech, it could happen.”

Headley had the decency to blush. Barbara figured even he had to know that was over the top. She poked the inside of her cheek with her tongue. “Golly. That’s something.”

Headley leaned forward, lowered his voice, as if they were the only two in the car. He locked eyes with her and said, “I believe, despite our differences, we could work together.”

Barbara appeared to consider the offer as the mayor leaned back in his seat. “I could probably carve out some time from my Manhattan Today duties.” An eyebrow went up as she looked at the mayor. “Maybe weekends?”

“Oh,” said Glover, who had glanced down for two seconds to read a text on his phone. “Working on this book would be a full-time proposition. At least for the duration of the project, which I think would take the better part of a year. Wouldn’t you agree, Valerie?”

“I would,” she said.

“Jesus.” It was the driver. They all looked forward up Third, through the windshield — Barbara and Glover and Chris had to turn around in their seats — to see the traffic stopped dead at Fifty-Eighth. Police cars blocked any further passage northward. The limo driver snaked the car between some taxis, heading straight for the makeshift barricade of emergency vehicles. He powered down the window as a police officer approached.

“You can’t—”

The driver said, “I got the mayor here.”

The cop leaned forward to peer into the back to be sure, then nodded and waved them through. But it wasn’t possible to go much farther. Emergency vehicles clogged the street.

Glover, waving his phone, said, “Latest is three dead, not four. Elevator dropped at least twenty floors. No word yet on the survivor’s condition.”

Headley nodded solemnly.

“We’ll walk from here, David,” Valerie told the man behind the wheel.

The limo came to a dead stop. The driver jumped out and opened the door on the mayor’s side.

Chris Vallins opened his door and, once out, extended a hand to Barbara to help her out. Her first inclination would have been to refuse. I can get out myself, thank you very much. But some other, perhaps more primal, instinct overruled that inclination, and she accepted the offer. His grip was strong, his arm rigid enough.

“Thank you,” she said.

Vallins nodded.

Glover had gotten out the other side and ran around to Barbara. Quietly, he said, “It was my idea.”

“I’m sorry?”

“About the book. To see if you’d be interested. My father took some convincing. I think you’d be perfect.”

“Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” Barbara said.

“No, it’s not like that. You’d do a good job.” His voice went even softer. “I’d never admit this to Dad, but I’ve admired your work for a long time.”

She hardly knew what to make of that.

They caught up to the rest of the group as they walked toward the office tower where, it appeared, the accident had occurred.

“Son of a bitch,” Headley said, more to himself than anyone else.

“What?” Valerie asked.

“Morris Lansing’s building,” he said. Valerie looked at her boss blankly, clearly not immediately recognizing the name. “Seriously?” he said.

A CBS camera crew spotted the mayor and zeroed in on him.

“Mr. Mayor!” someone shouted. “Do you know when this elevator was last inspected?”

A camera was in his face. Headley looked appropriately grim.

“Look, I’ve only just arrived, and haven’t been briefed, but I can assure you I’ll be speaking to all the involved parties and bringing all the powers of my office to bear on...”

Barbara slipped through the media throng and headed for the main doors in time to see the paramedics wheel out a gurney with a bloodied woman strapped to it.

“Make way!” one of them shouted, and the crowd scattered so that they could reach the open doors of the waiting ambulance.

The gurney passed within a few feet of Barbara, who got a look first at the woman’s sneakers, and then, as she was hustled past, her face.

Barbara only caught a glimpse of her. Two seconds, tops.

But it was long enough.

“Paula,” Barbara whispered.

Four

Detectives Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado decided to split up duties.

Delgado was going to look for overnight surveillance video. There were cameras on the High Line and undoubtedly on nearby buildings. She was also going to be tracking down the city workers responsible for locking up access to the High Line at the end of the day to ask whether they had seen anything that, in retrospect, might seem important.

Bourque would check reports of any missing person whose description might match their victim. He also had an idea where to get a lead on those shark socks.

After the chief medical examiner had arrived, the body would be moved to the Manhattan forensic pathology center, where a DNA sample would be retrieved. If the deceased’s genetic ID was on file, they’d know with certainty who he was. The only problem, of course, was that it could take weeks or months to get those results. Fingerprints would have been a faster route, but that was obviously not an option this time.

An autopsy would tell them more about how those fingertips were removed, and how, exactly, the man had died. Those blows to the head, most likely, Bourque figured. When the lab was done scouring the man’s body for clues, his clothes would be searched and analyzed.

A four-block-long stretch of the High Line was to remain closed for the day as forensic experts examined every inch of it. Maybe they’d be able to pull up a shoe print with a hint of blood on it. The rain might not have washed away everything. Maybe the killer had dropped something. Handrails on the stairs at access points north and south of the scene were to be searched for blood traces, and dusted for fingerprints, although that was not expected to produce much in the way of results, considering thousands of people touched those handrails every single day.

Officers were dispatched to knock on the doors of every single apartment along the High Line with a view of that curved bench. Any apartment where no one was home through the day was to be revisited that evening. Bourque also wanted someone there after midnight to make note of apartments that remained lit right through till morning. One of those night owls might have been looking out the window at just the right time.

I’m doing okay, he thought. I got through all that just fine. As long as I don’t think about it, I’ll—

Which, of course, made him think about it.

About those drops. Blood drops. Falling like red rain onto the lips of that—

“Jerry?” Delgado said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“You off?”

“Yeah, I’ll catch up with you later,” Bourque said, feeling his throat start to constrict.

Bourque headed for his car. Once he was behind the wheel, he took another hit off the inhaler. He held his breath for ten seconds as he slipped the device back into his pocket, then glanced at his watch.

He had a midmorning appointment he’d failed to mention to his partner, but there was still enough time to check out one lead ahead of that. He started the engine, turned the car around, and headed east. He’d seen those socks at the Strand Bookstore. That didn’t mean their homicide victim had bought them there, but he might find out who distributed them, and how widely.

The truth was, he just wanted an excuse to go to the bookstore.

He headed for Broadway and Twelfth and left the unmarked cruiser half on the sidewalk, half on the street. One of the few benefits of being a cop. You never had to hunt for a parking spot. He entered the store, went past the front counter and tables stacked with new releases, then took a left into the clothing section. It wasn’t as though one could pull an entire wardrobe together here, but the store carried novelty T-shirts and hats and plenty of pairs of offbeat socks.

He’d dragged a date in here one night a couple of months ago. Wendy was her name. A waitress from a diner up on Lex in the Seventies. She’d bought a pair of socks imprinted with a library card design, nicely ruled with a “Date Due” stamp and everything. They’d been displayed right next to the ones with the shark images. Bourque hadn’t paid a lot of attention to the socks, having wandered off to the section with books on architecture. At the cash register, Bourque offered to pay for the socks, which came to ten bucks, and she let him. “Just for that,” she whispered to him as they headed back out onto Broadway, “I’ll model them for you.” A sly smile. “Just the socks.”

And so she had.

Bourque had not spent the night. He had to be up early, and so did she. The following morning, he went to a different diner. He hadn’t seen her since.

On this morning’s visit to the bookstore, he checked out the sock display and quickly found the Jaws-inspired design. He took one pair off the rack and compared it to the picture he’d taken of the dead man’s foot. The socks were a match. He took them to the counter, where a young man with frizzy hair smiled and said, “Yeah?”

Bourque said, “I got an email that a book I ordered was in.”

“What’s the name?”

“Bourque.”

“And the book?”

“Changing New York, by Berenice Abbott.”

“Give me a sec. And you want those socks?”

“Can you check on the book first?”

The clerk slipped away. Bourque leaned against the counter, killed some time looking at his phone.

The man returned, set the book on the counter for Bourque’s inspection. It was art book sized, nine by twelve inches and an inch thick, with a crisp, black-and-white cover photo of downtown New York. “It’s used but in nice shape. Couple of pages are slightly creased.”

“That’s okay,” Bourque said, thumbing quickly through the book, scanning the hundreds of photos of New York from the 1930s. “It’s great. I’ll take it.”

“Have you seen the book on Top of the Park? Came out last week. Thought you might be interested.” He pointed to one of the new release tables. “Over there.”

Bourque walked over to the table, found what the man had been pointing to. Another large book, an artist’s rendering on the cover of a gleaming skyscraper soaring upward above a park. “I didn’t know they were doing a book on this,” he said, flipping through the pages, looking at more architectural drawings, floor plans, comparisons to other buildings, around the world, of similar height. There weren’t many.

He brought it over to the counter. “Nice book. They’ve documented everything. Early concepts, final plans, bio on the architect.” Bourque slowly nodded his head. “Gorgeous book.” He flipped the book over, looking for a price. “Jesus,” he said.

“Yeah,” said the clerk. “But you’re getting the other one for only fifteen bucks. And we can take five off the forty for the other one.”

While Bourque considered that, the clerk tapped the cover of the more expensive book and said, “I think it officially opens this week. Supposed to be the tallest residential tower in the world, or just the U.S. I’m not sure. Only thing I know is I won’t be going up it. I got a heights thing. I’ve never even been to the top of the Empire State.”

Bourque had reached a decision. “I’ll take both of them.”

“And the socks?”

“Just a question about them. How many places in the city other than you sell these?”

The man shrugged. “I’d guess all kinds. Why? You want us to match a price?”

Bourque shook his head. At this point, he displayed his badge and put it away. “Do you remember a guy coming in here buying a pair like this?”

The clerk blinked. “You kidding? We sell lots of those. And there’s lots of others work the checkout.”

Bourque was not deterred. “Every item in this store has a different UPC number, right?”

The young man shrugged. “Yeah, sure.”

“So then if you enter that UPC number, up will come all the purchases of this particular sock. And if they were paid for with a credit card, you’d know who made the purchase.”

“Maybe, yeah.”

Bourque smiled. “That’s what I’d like you to do for me.”

The clerk grinned. “So let me see if I understand this. You want to find a guy who bought a pair of these socks.”

“Right.”

“If I did sell a pair to your guy, maybe I’d recognize him. You got a picture?”

“No,” the detective said.

“Okay, so, I’d need one of the managers to okay looking through our records, but I’ve already got your email.”

Bourque handed him a card. “That’s got my phone number on it, too.”

“I don’t have a lot of time,” the detective said, dropping into the plastic chair in the small examining room. “I need a new scrip.”

The doctor, a short, round man in his midsixties with a pair of glasses perched atop his forehead, sat at a small desk with a computer in front of him. He lowered the glasses briefly so he could read something on the screen. He tapped at the keyboard, slowly, with two fingers.

“I hate these goddamn computers,” the doctor said. “Whole clinic has changed over to them.”

“So just write me one the old-fashioned way,” Jerry Bourque said. “On a piece of paper, Bert. With your illegible handwriting.”

“That’s not how it works anymore,” Bert said, squinting at the screen. He paused. “Hmm.”

“What, hmm?”

“You’re going through these inhalers pretty fast,” he said.

“Come on, Bert.”

Bert perched the glasses on his forehead again and turned on his stool to face his patient. “Inhalers aren’t the answer.”

“They work,” the detective said.

The doctor nodded wearily. “In the short term. But what you need is to talk—”

“I know what you think I need.”

“There’s no physiological reason for your bouts of shortness of breath. You don’t have, thank God, lung cancer or emphysema. I don’t see any evidence that it’s an allergic reaction to anything. It’s not bronchitis. You’ve identified plainly what brings on the attacks.”

“If there’s nothing physiological, then why do the inhalers work?”

“They open up your air passages regardless of what brings on the symptoms,” Bert said. “Has it been happening more often, or less?”

Bourque paused. “About the same.” Another pause. “I had one this morning. I got called to a scene, and I was okay, but then I had this... flash... I guess you’d call it. And then I started to tighten up.”

“Is it almost always that one memory that brings it on? The drops—”

Bourque raised a hand, signaling he didn’t need his memory refreshed. “That does, for sure. But other moments of stress sometimes trigger it. Or a tense situation brings back the memory, and it happens.” He paused. “There doesn’t always have to be a reason.”

Bert nodded sympathetically. “The department doesn’t have anyone you can talk to?”

“I don’t need to talk to anyone in the department. I have you.”

“I’m not a shrink.”

“I don’t need a shrink.”

“Maybe you do. You either need to talk to someone, or—”

“Or what?”

“I don’t know.” The doctor waved his hands in frustration. “Maybe you’re like Jimmy Stewart in that Hitchcock movie. He gets vertigo after suffering a trauma. It takes another trauma to cure him of it.”

Bourque scanned the walls, looking at the various framed medical degrees.

“What are you looking for?” Bert asked.

“Something from the New York Film Academy. I’m guessing that’s where you got your medical degree.”

Bert ignored the shot. “It’s been eight months. You need to see someone who can bring more to the table than I can.”

“I’m not baring my soul to anyone in the department.”

Bert sighed again. “Maybe the department is the problem.”

Bourque looked at him, waiting for an explanation.

The doctor said, “Maybe you’re in the wrong line of work. Do you actually like what you do?”

Bourque took several seconds to answer. “Sure.”

“That was convincing.”

Bourque looked away. “I’m okay at what I do. It’s not a bad job.”

“I’ve been seeing you since you were in short pants,” Bert said. “I know this was never your first choice.”

“Okay, I couldn’t get accepted into architectural school. I got over it. Dad was a cop. His two brothers were cops. So I went into the family business. It was what they wanted for me, anyway.”

Bert turned back to the computer, fingers poised over the keyboard. But he had a change of thought and swiveled his chair back to face Bourque.

“Have you tried that exercise I gave you, for when things start tightening up, you have trouble bringing in air?”

“Tell me again.”

“When it starts happening, try not to focus on it. Focus on something else. You think, what are five things I see in front of me? What are five sounds I’m hearing? What are the birthdays for people in my family? List the Mets in alphabetical order. The ten most-wanted list. Or here’s a good one for you: New York’s ten most historic buildings. Or most popular with tourists. Tallest, I don’t know. That would seem to be right up your alley.”

Bourque looked at him dubiously. “Seriously?”

“Just try it.”

It was Bourque’s turn to sigh. “If it’s all in my head, it’s not like it can kill me. Right? If I lost my inhaler, it’s not going to get so bad that I can’t breathe at all. It’s not like I’m going to die.”

Bert slowly shook his head, then went back to the keyboard. “I’ll do you one more scrip,” he said.

Five

So far as Barbara knew, Paula Chatsworth had no family in the city. She hailed from Montpelier, had come to NYU to study journalism, and never went back. Barbara got to know Paula three years earlier when she did a summer internship at Manhattan Today. Barbara had seen a lot of herself in the young woman. An eagerness to learn matched by a healthy contempt for authority. And she swore a lot. For some reason, Barbara didn’t expect that from a Vermont girl, but she was pleased. Paula had assured Barbara that Vermont girls could cuss with the best of them.

Manhattan Today didn’t take Paula on permanently, and Barbara lost touch with her. She’d run into her once in the Grand Central Market, getting a taco at Ana Maria. Three minutes of small talk, enough time to learn that Paula had not found a job in her field of study, but was working as a copywriter for a firm that managed a number of websites. “I’m right up by Bloomingdale’s,” she said. “So I don’t have to go far to get rid of my paycheck.”

Paula hadn’t mentioned anything about being in a relationship, but it was only a quick meeting, and there was no reason why she would have. She hadn’t looked conscious as she was wheeled to the ambulance, but the police would probably be looking through her phone for a contact, if it wasn’t password protected, or talking to her coworkers to find next of kin.

Barbara thought she might be able to help.

Once she’d learned which hospital Paula had been taken to, Barbara headed there. While she waited in the ER to find out how she was doing, Barbara tracked down her parents in Montpelier. She hoped someone, maybe from Paula’s work — she had, after all, been injured at her place of employment — had already been in touch, but it turned out Barbara was the first to call.

“I don’t understand,” Paula’s mother, Sandy, said, her voice breaking. “How does an elevator just fall?”

“They’ll be looking into that,” Barbara said. “Some kind of fluke accident, I’m guessing.”

“We were always so worried about her going to New York,” Sandy said. “All the things that could happen. Muggings, shootings... I told her, don’t you dare get a bicycle, don’t be trying to ride around the city on a bike because everyone there drives crazy and you’ll get hit for sure. But an elevator?”

“I know.” Barbara hardly knew what else to say. And offering comfort had never been one of her strengths. Shit happens was her basic philosophy. But still, her heart ached for the woman. Barbara asked if there was anyone in the city she should call. Sandy said if Paula had been seeing anyone, she and her husband didn’t know anything about it.

“We haven’t heard from her for weeks,” Sandy said, and Barbara could hear her crying. “She might... we said some things...”

Barbara waited.

“Paula’s been sorting out who she is,” Sandy said quietly. “If you know what I mean. It’s been hard for me and Ken to... to accept.”

Barbara remembered Paula mentioning once, during her internship, about going to the Cubbyhole, a well-known lesbian bar, one weekend. She’d made no effort to hide her sexual identity, so Barbara had an idea what Sandy might be hinting at. Maybe it was Paula’s parents who’d been sorting out who she was, more than Paula herself.

“Sure,” Barbara said. “I understand.”

Paula’s father, Ken, got on the line.

“I’ve never driven into Manhattan,” he said. “What’s the best route?”

His voice was all seriousness, as if focusing in on travel arrangements could push the image of his injured daughter out of his head.

“I’m really not the best one to ask. I don’t have a car. I don’t even have a driver’s license.”

“Are there tolls?” he asked. “Will I need lots of change? Is there parking at the hospital?” He said they were going to leave within the hour.

Barbara suggested they consider a train. Or better yet, there was probably a flight they could take from Burlington.

Ken said catching a plane made sense, and that he’d look into that as soon as he got off the phone. Barbara promised to call back if she learned anything, and gave Paula’s parents numbers for the hospital, as well as for her own cell. In turn, Ken gave Barbara their cell number so she could update them, if there was news, as they were en route.

Once the call was over, Barbara felt emotionally wrung out. Paula’s mother was on to something when she’d said the last thing you worried about when your child went to the big city was an elevator accident. A million other perils came to mind before something like that. Hit-and-run, botulism, alien abduction would all be higher up on the list. How many elevator mishaps did New York have in a year? One? Two, maybe?

Barbara went looking for a coffee, although what she needed was something much stronger. She came back to the ER, asked the woman at admitting how Paula was doing and whether she’d been moved to a room.

The woman, eyes focused on a computer screen, said she would check when she had a chance.

“I’ve got a number for her parents,” Barbara offered.

The woman kept staring at the screen and tapping away at the keyboard.

Fuck it, Barbara thought.

She wandered into the curtained warren of the emergency ward, peeking into the various examining areas to see whether she could find Paula.

It didn’t take long.

Paula lay in a bed, connected to various wires and tubes and machines, including a beeping heart monitor. The woman’s face was mottled with blue and purple bruises, and her body had been immobilized. Barbara assumed she’d have suffered multiple fractures. If she’d been standing when that elevator hit bottom, the shock wave would have run straight up her entire body, shattering bones, particularly those in her legs, compressing her insides. It would be like jumping off a building.

God, what must it be like to be in a plunging elevator? Barbara wondered. Knowing what’s coming? Knowing there’s nothing you can do about it?

Barbara hoped a doctor or nurse would appear so she could get an update on her condition. If they asked if she was family, she’d tell them she was Paula’s aunt or a much older sister.

As she took another step closer to the bed, it occurred to Barbara that Paula was pretty close in age to her own daughter, Arla. Paula was in her early twenties, Arla would be twenty-five on her next birthday, Barbara thought.

I should call her.

Paula stirred slightly, her head shifting slightly on the pillow.

“Hey,” Barbara said softly.

Paula’s eyes did not open.

“Don’t know if you can hear me or not, but it’s Barbara. Barbara Matheson, from Manhattan Today. From your internship?”

Nothing.

Paula’s right eye opened a fraction of an inch, then closed.

“I’ve called your folks,” she said. “In Montpelier. Hope that was okay. Figured you’d want them to know. They’re coming.”

Paula’s lips parted, closed, parted again.

“You want to say something?” Barbara asked.

Her lips opened again. Paula’s tongue moved slightly.

“Don’t push yourself. It’s okay. Save your strength.”

But then a word, light and as soft as a feather, drifted from Paula’s mouth.

“What was that?” Barbara said, turning her head sideways, placing her ear an inch from Paula’s lips.

She whispered the word again, just loud enough for Barbara to hear.

“Floating.”

“Floating?” Barbara said.

“Like floating.”

Barbara pulled away, nodding. “I’ll bet,” she said. “You were basically in freefall. You’d have felt weightless, and—”

The heart monitor went from a beep to a sustained, alarming tone.

“What the—”

Barbara looked at the machine, saw the flat line travel across the screen.

“Oh, shit,” she said.

She threw back the curtain and called out: “Hey! Hey! I need help here!”

From the far end of the ward, a nurse came running.

Later, when it was over, and Barbara had made the call to Paula’s parents to tell them that there was no longer a sense of urgency, she found her way to a bar over on Third north of Fiftieth and ordered a scotch, neat.

She was on her fourth when it occurred to her that maybe “floating” was not a reference to plummeting in the elevator. Now Barbara wondered whether Paula was being slightly more metaphorical as she slipped away. In the short time she’d worked at Manhattan Today, Paula had shown a flair for words.

Six

By late afternoon, just about everything anyone could want to know about the elevator accident at the Lansing Tower was available. Everything, that is, except for why it had happened.

Various news sources had posted brief profiles on the dead. They were:

Paula Chatsworth, twenty-two, single. Tribeca resident, originally from Vermont, worked for Webwrite, a firm that produced copy for firms working on their online presence. Paula had initially survived the elevator plunge, but later died at the hospital.

Stuart Bland, thirty-eight. Lived with his mother in Bushwick. He’d held a variety of odd jobs, none for very long, including a stint at a dry-cleaning operation. That, police speculated, might have been where he acquired a FedEx ID. The courier company reported that he was not, and never had been, an employee, which got the police wondering what he was up to. Found on the floor of the elevator was a script with his name attached. Initial speculation was that Bland hoped to meet with someone in the building to discuss the project, although there was no record of him having made an appointment.

Sherry D’Agostino, thirty-nine. Vice president of creative at Cromwell Entertainment. Married to Wall Street stockbroker Elliott Milne. Mother of two children: a daughter, five, and a son, eight. She lived in Brooklyn Heights. “An immense loss,” said Cromwell president Jason Cromwell, “both personally and professionally. Sherry had an unerring eye for talent in all fields and was not only a vital member of our team, but a close, personal friend. We are beyond devastated.”

Barton Fieldgate, sixty-four. Estate lawyer at Templeton Flynn and Fieldgate. Married forty years, father of five. Lived in an $8 million brownstone on West Ninety-Fifth. Said Michael Templeton: “That something like this could happen, in our own building, is unimaginable. Barton was a friend and colleague of the highest order. He will be missed.” There was also a report that the firm was already in the process of suing the owners of the Lansing Tower for failure to maintain the elevators properly.

The cause of the accident was under investigation by multiple agencies, including the fire department and the city body that oversaw the licensing and operation of elevators and escalators. New York, it was pointed out, had thirty-nine inspectors to check on some seventy thousand of them.

Richard Headley was flopped on the office couch in Gracie Mansion, the official New York mayoral residence, jacket off, feet on the coffee table with his shoes still on, tie loosened, and remote in hand. He was looking at the large screen bolted to the wall, flipping back and forth between the various six o’clock news reports. He’d decided to stay awhile on NY1.

They had a few seconds of his arrival at the Lansing Tower, then a clip of him conferring briefly with Morris Lansing, the major New York developer — and long-time friend of the mayor’s — who owned the skyscraper.

The door opened and Valerie Langdon walked in, moving quickly so as not to obstruct the mayor’s view of the news.

“Get me Morris,” Headley said, muting the TV and handing her his cell phone. “I want to see how he’s doing.” He glanced at his aide. “You know who he is now?”

“I know he gave half a million to your campaign,” Valerie said. “It slipped my mind before.” She added, “You have a lot of donors.”

Valerie tapped the screen and put the phone to her ear. She spoke to someone, said she had the mayor on the line for Lansing, then looked at Headley. “They’re getting him.”

While he waited, Headley continued to watch the news. They were on to another story, out of Boston. A reporter stood out front of a building Headley recognized as Faneuil Hall. When he saw the word “bomb” in the crawl he turned the volume back on.

“—four injured when what police are calling an explosive device of some kind went off inside the market. Of the injured, one is reported in serious condition. Police believe the device was left in a backpack inside a trash container in one of the food court areas. The incident brought back memories of the horrific Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, in which three people were killed and hundreds injured. If this most recent event had been during the busier lunch hour period, it’s very likely more people would have been injured and possibly killed. The Marathon bombers, two brothers, were motivated by Islamist extremism, but this event may find its roots far closer to home. It’s similar to other acts linked to the domestic extremist group known as the Flyovers, although authorities have not yet confirmed that the group is involved, despite some vague claims of responsibility on Twitter that—”

“Richard,” Valerie said.

He muted the set again as she handed his phone back to him.

“Morris?” he said.

“Hello, Richard,” Lansing said.

“We didn’t have long to talk today. I wanted to check in, see how you were, see what else they’ve learned.”

“It’s horrible,” Lansing said. “Beyond horrible. Sherry was a friend. We were out to her place on Long Island three weeks ago. And Barton was a good man. The other two, I have no idea who they were. This one guy, posing as a courier, that sounds fishy to me. Someone at security is going to be fired, I can promise you.”

“If anybody can get into the building that easily, yeah, you’re going to want to look into it. But is there anything that connects that guy to the elevator malfunction?”

“Well, no, not at this time,” Morris Lansing said. “They don’t know what the fuck happened there. There’s so many safeguards built into the damn things, but once in a while, they still let you down. Jesus, no pun intended.”

“I just wanted you to know that if there’s anything you need, all you have to do is call,” Headley said. “The office of the mayor is here to help you in any way it can.”

There was a pause from Lansing’s end.

“Morris?”

“Yeah, well, about that,” Lansing said. “There’s gonna be lawsuits comin’ outta my ass on this one. Fieldgate’s firm is already making noises. But we’ve got our own ax to grind. We’re going to be turning our sights on the city.”

“Christ, Morris.”

“It’s nothing personal, but damn it. I don’t intend to take the fall — shit, there I go again — the blame for this. We’re seeing a major liability issue for the city here. Whatever was wrong with that elevator the city inspectors should have caught.”

Now it was Lansing’s turn to go quiet.

“You must believe these things can’t work both ways,” Headley said through gritted teeth. “You don’t think elevator inspectors did due diligence in your building? Maybe what I should do is send every fucking inspector — food, air quality, rodent infestation — your way and do a complete inspection from roof to basement. And not just in that building, but every other one you’ve got across the city. That seems to be what you’re asking for here.”

“Richard, for God’s—”

“That’s Mr. Mayor to you, you fuckin’ ass pimple.”

“No wonder so many people call you Dick,” Morris said.

Headley ended the call and tossed the phone onto the coffee table. Valerie looked at him expectantly, but he did not fill her in.

There was a light rap on the door and Valerie went to answer it. Chris Vallins strode in with a touch screen tablet in his left hand, his right tucked casually into his pocket.

Headley looked up but said nothing.

“Mr. Mayor, something you might want to see,” Chris said, handing him the tablet. “Matheson’s latest column just dropped.”

Headley grabbed a pair of reading glasses that were sitting on the coffee table and slipped them on. The headline on the page, “Headley Takes Me for a Ride,” was enough to make him wince.

“Christ almighty,” he said. He tossed the tablet in the direction of the table, but missed. Chris didn’t wait for the mayor to pick it up. He bent over and got it himself.

“Give me the gist,” Headley said.

Chris said, “She tells about the offer. To write your bio. That she’d get mid — six figures to do it. That she’d have to take a break from Manhattan Today. Implying this was your way of getting her to stop writing critical stories of your administration. That you were buying her off. Bribing her, essentially.”

Headley said, “We deny the whole thing. It’s a total fabrication.”

Chris slowly shook his head. “She quotes everything that was said in the car so perfectly I’m betting she recorded it.”

“Shit,” Valerie said. “I remember her doing something with her phone just before she got into the car. I thought she was just turning it off.”

Headley slumped further into the couch. “Glover,” he said under his breath.

Neither Chris nor Valerie said a word.

Headley, feigning a cheerful tone, said, “Bring her into the loop, Glover says. Get her on our side. Throw enough money at her that she’ll jump at the chance.” Headley shook his head, then managed a wry smile. “I guess this means she’s not taking the job.”

“Nothing against Glover,” Valerie said, “but you know I advised against this from the beginning.”

“I know,” Headley said, grimacing.

“Matheson’s piece also raises the question of why you want to do a book. It encourages speculation that you’re giving serious consideration to running for something besides reelection for mayor, before you’re ready to tip your hand. That was the other reason why I didn’t want to pursue this matter with Matheson.”

“I shouldn’t have listened to him,” Headley said. “I should have known better.”

“At the risk of stepping over the line, sir,” Valerie said tentatively, “I’m not sure Glover has enough experience to be advising you on these sorts of matters. He understands you better than any of us, of course, but where he’s most valuable is in the data mining end of things. Analyzing trends, surveying.” She shrugged. “There’s nobody in the whole building who can help me with a computer problem the way he can. But when it comes to advising you on matters like—”

Headley raised a silencing hand and Valerie went quiet.

Chris said, “There’s a bit at the end of the column.”

Headley gave him a pained look, expecting even more bad news.

“No, it’s not about you,” he said. “Someone Matheson knew was killed in that elevator accident.”

The mayor was about to look relieved, but quickly adopted a look of moderate concern. “Sherry D’Agostino, I bet. Everybody knew Sherry.” He managed a wry grin. “I even went out with her a few times, back in the day.”

Valerie looked slightly pained, as though only Headley could boast about dating someone who’d recently died.

“No,” Chris said. “Paula somebody. She’d interned at Manhattan Today.”

“Oh,” Headley said. There didn’t seem to be much else to say. He looked at Valerie, then Chris, then back to Valerie. “Can you give us the room?” he asked her.

She looked momentarily taken aback, but said nothing as she headed for the door and closed it behind her.

“Chris,” he said, “have a seat.”

The man sat.

“Chris, in the time you’ve been with us, you’ve shown yourself to be very valuable. One part bodyguard, one part detective, one part political strategist.” He chuckled. “And whenever Glover isn’t here to fix my printer, you know just what to do.”

Chris smiled. “Thank you, sir.”

“You’re good at finding things out. Turns out not all the great hackers are teenagers living in their parents’ basements. You’ve been very helpful for someone in my position.”

“Of course,” he said.

“I might not be in this office today if it weren’t for you.”

“I’m not so sure about that, Mr. Mayor.”

“Don’t be modest. You found that woman, talked her into coming forward, telling her story to the Daily News. Wouldn’t be sitting here now if she hadn’t told the world how my opponent forced him self on her when she was fourteen and he was forty. Even dug up the emails he wrote to his lawyer where he as much as admitted it.”

Chris only smiled.

Headley grinned. “Thank Christ you weren’t digging into my own history.”

Chris shook his head dismissively. “I guess if someone’s looking hard enough, they’ll find a few skeletons in anyone’s closet.”

“Yeah, well, I might need a walk-in closet for all of mine. But I believe you understand where I’m coming from, that I want to make a difference. I’ve been an asshole for much of my life, Chris, but I hope I’m doing what I can to make up for that now.”

Chris nodded, waiting.

Headley’s face went dark. “I’m worried about a couple of things.”

“Yes, sir?”

“The first is... Glover.”

“He’s eager to please you. He means well. He wants your approval, sir.”

“Yeah, well, that may be. But his instincts... just let me know if you see him doing something particularly stupid, would you?”

“Of course. And the other thing?”

“Barbara.”

Chris nodded slowly.

“Let’s face it. She’s good at what she does. People feed her stuff. She has good sources. Some working right here at City Hall, people who’ve not been loyal to me. She’s a pit bull. If she bites down on your leg you’ve as good as lost it.”

“I understand your frustration,” Chris said.

“If there were some way to get her off my back, some way to neutralize her...”

Chris was silent for a moment. Finally, he said, “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about here, sir.”

Headley looked at him, puzzled at first, then horrified. “Christ, you didn’t think I meant...”

Chris gave him a blank stare. “Of course not.”

“Jesus, no.” He shook his head. “No, I’m thinking more... about those skeletons in the closet. If there were a way to discredit her somehow.” The mayor put a hand to the back of his neck and tried to squeeze out the tension, like he was wringing a sponge dry.

“Let me nose around,” Chris said.

“Good, that’s good,” the mayor said. “You had me worried there for a minute.”

Chris Vallins tilted his head to one side, as if to say, Yes?

“That you might have thought, even for a second, that I was suggesting we push the woman out a window or something.”

“Forgive me,” Chris said. “I know you’d never hurt a soul.”

Seven

Jerry Bourque’s first stop on the way home had been an art supplies place down on Canal Street. Then he’d gone into a grocery store with hot table service and filled a container with a few steamed vegetables, lasagna, a dollop of mashed potatoes, two chicken fingers, and some shrimp chow mein. The fact that some of these items did not typically go together did not bother Bourque. They charged by the weight of the container, so you could throw in a bit of whatever you liked.

As he came through the door of his fifth-floor, two-bedroom apartment in the Lower East Side, he tossed his keys in a bowl on a table in the hall, then went into the kitchen. He took his phone from his jacket pocket and set it, and his food, on the counter. He placed the bag from the art store on the already cluttered kitchen table. He slid out ten sheets of white illustration board, each twenty by thirty inches. He stacked them neatly at one end of the table by several small, screw-top bottles of art paint, a selection of box cutter — type knives, a metal ruler, some brushes and pencils, several three-foot-long strips of balsa wood, a glue gun, and a large, eighteen-inch-square paper cutter with an arm strong enough to slice through the art board. Or his fingers, if he wasn’t careful.

Fingers.

He tossed his sport jacket and the book filled with photos of old New York onto his bed in the bedroom. The other book, about the nearly completed Manhattan skyscraper, he set on the kitchen counter. He took his dinner out of a bag, opened the lid of the rigid cardboard container, and took a fork out of the cutlery drawer. He picked up a remote to turn on a small television that hung from the underside of the cabinetry.

He went through the stations until he landed on a local newscast, took a bottle of beer from the fridge, then leaned up against the counter and ate his dinner while standing. There’d been a truck rollover on the Van Wyck, spilling a load of bananas across two lanes. Four were dead in an elevator accident. The mayor was fighting allegations of giving a big city contract to a friend.

“So what else is new,” Bourque said, his mouth full of chow mein.

Some nut set off a bomb in Boston. England was still being battered by high winds.

Bourque finished his meal, put the food-stained container into a garbage bin under the sink and his fork into the dishwasher, next to three other forks, the only other items in the appliance. He took five minutes and looked at the pictures in the skyscraper book.

“Wow,” he said to himself several times.

Then he went into his bedroom to take off his tie and dress shirt and suit pants. He tossed the shirt into a bag that would be dropped off at the dry cleaner at week’s end. The pants he lay carefully on the bed, then took a gripper hanger from the closet, clamped it to the cuffs, and hung them up. He stripped off his socks and tossed them in a laundry basket. Come Sunday morning, he’d fill his pocket with quarters, head to the basement laundry room, and do a wash.

Now, dressed only in boxers and a T-shirt, he went back into the kitchen and sat at the table. Next to the paints was a twelve-inch metal ruler, which Bourque used to draw several long, straight lines on the cardboard sheets, then several small boxes in a grid formation.

Standing, he sliced off some of the cardboard sheets with the oversized paper cutter, then with the box cutter lightly scored the art board along some of the pencil lines, allowing him to bend the cardboard to a right angle without separating the pieces. Sitting back down, he cut some strips of the balsa wood to match the length of the scored lines, applied some hot, drippy adhesive from the glue gun, and used them to brace the corners. The tip of his index finger touched some of the hot glue.

“Shit!” he said. He peeled the set glue off and sucked briefly on the finger.

He spent the next hour making three rectangular boxes of different sizes, painting them various shades of gray, then detailing the perfectly arranged boxes on the sides, making them look like windows. At the bottom edge, he drew detailed entrances and oversized windows. He did all of this without drawings or plans or blueprints of any kind. What he saw in his head he turned into three dimensions.

One of the purposes of this exercise, beyond the fact that he just liked doing it, was to push out of his head the events of the day. Some evenings it worked, some evenings it did not.

This was one of those nights when it did not.

Bourque’s mind kept coming back to the body with the smashed-in face on the High Line. After his appointment with Bert, he and Delgado had paid a visit to the coroner’s office. The naked body, minus fingertips, yielded at least one clue that might lead to an identification. On the dead man’s right shoulder was a two-inch-long tattoo of a coiled cobra.

A DNA sample had been taken. A search of his clothes yielded nothing helpful. No credit card or time-stamped gas bar receipts had been found in the dead man’s pockets. His jeans and top were cheap off-the-rack items from Old Navy.

Bourque had taken another look at the socks. They looked relatively new; the area around the big toes did not show signs of an imminent hole. And the corpse’s toenails had been due for a trim. Bourque had heard back from the bookstore and been told the shark socks were made somewhere overseas, sold online and in countless stores across the city, but if he still cared, they had sold twelve pairs in the last month. Six were put on credit, six were paid for with cash. Bourque took down the credit card information.

His one pleasant memory of the visit to the coroner’s office had been standing close enough to Delgado to smell her hair. Whatever shampoo she used had a scent — mango? — that was strong enough to overrule the lab’s stench of bleach and antiseptic.

Bourque forced the investigation from the front of his mind as he held out at arm’s length the first completed building of the evening. He turned it around and admired it. If he noticed a spot where the paint was thin, he gave it a touch-up.

“Okay,” he said to himself. “Installation time.”

He got up from the kitchen table and opened the door to the second bedroom. But there was no bed, or dresser, or even a chair. There were four metal card tables, arranged into a large square roughly six by six feet, and almost entirely covered in boxes similar to the ones Bourque had just made. They were arranged in a grid, with space between to replicate streets.

Bourque placed that evening’s effort onto one of the tables. He moved some of the existing ones to make way for the new one. He viewed his work from various angles. Some of the boxes soared as tall as four feet, others only a foot or so. Many were recognizable. There were crude interpretations of the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Flatiron Building, 30 Rockefeller Plaza, the Waldorf Astoria Hotel.

The model city was in no way exact. The landmark structures he was re-creating were, in his version, within steps of each other, rather than scattered across the city. This was more an appreciation of the city, not a replica.

Bourque leaned up against one wall and crossed his arms, admiring his handiwork. At first, his gaze took in the project as a whole, but then his focus narrowed on one spot near the edge.

He stepped away from the wall, knelt down so that his eye was at the model’s street level. He studied the street in front of his recreation of the Waldorf Astoria.

His airway began to constrict.

If only I hadn’t moved. If only I hadn’t dived out of the way.

The drops.

He breathed in, then out, heard the wheeze.

He wasn’t expecting it to happen now. Here, at home, working on his project. Away from people with bashed-in faces and missing fingertips. But then he had to look at the sidewalk in front of the Waldorf Astoria.

Bourque immediately thought of grabbing the inhaler from his sport jacket in the other room, but then remembered what his doctor had suggested.

“Okay, Bert, we’ll give it a try.” He closed his eyes and concentrated.

Find a category.

Got it. The city’s tallest structures, starting with the highest.

Aloud, he said, “One World Trade Center. Top of the Park. 432 Park Avenue. 30 Hudson Yards. Empire State Building.” He stopped himself.

Could he include Top of the Park? The luxury apartment building on Central Park North, the subject of his new book, didn’t officially open until later this week. Erected between Malcolm X Boulevard, otherwise known as Lenox Avenue, and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, or Seventh Avenue, the building came in at ninety-eight stories, making it two floors taller than the astonishing, and relatively recent, 432 Park Avenue, which towered over Central Park looking like some monolithic, vertical heat grate.

Did it really matter for the purposes of this exercise? He was still wheezing. He continued with his list.

“Uh, Bank of America Tower. 3 World Trade Center, uh, 53 West Fifty-Third. New York Times. No, wait. Chrysler Building, then the New York Times Building.”

The tightening in his chest was not easing off.

“Fuck it,” he said.

He went into the other bedroom, picked up his jacket, and reached into the left inside pocket.

The inhaler was not there.

“What the...”

He always tucked it into the left pocket. But maybe, just once...

The inhaler was not in the right pocket, either. Nor was it in either of the outside pockets.

Bourque felt his lungs struggling harder for air. The wheezing became more pronounced.

“Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered.

Had he taken the inhaler out of his jacket when he first got home? He went back to the kitchen to check. It wasn’t on the kitchen table or on the counter by the sink. Bourque returned to the bedroom, wondering if the inhaler had slipped out of his coat when he had thrown it onto the bed.

He got down on his hands and knees, patting beneath the bed where he could not see.

“Come on,” he wheezed.

He found nothing.

In his head, he had an image of a snake coiling itself around his windpipe. Like that cobra tattoo on the deceased.

It was becoming increasingly difficult to breathe. If he didn’t find his inhaler soon, he was going to have to use his last breaths talking to a 911 operator.

And that would be if he could find his phone. Where the hell had he left his phone? He hadn’t noticed it in his jacket pockets as he searched for the inhaler. Had he left it in the kitchen?

He started to stand, and as his eyes were level with the top of the bed, he spotted something. Something small and dark, just under the edge of the pillow.

He grabbed the inhaler, uncapped it. He exhaled, weakly, then put the device into his mouth and, at the moment he squeezed it, drew in a breath. Held it for ten seconds. He breathed out, then prepared for a second hit.

He wrapped his mouth around the inhaler again. Squeezed. Started counting.

His cell phone rang. Out in the kitchen. He got to his feet, had the phone in his hand by the time he’d counted to four.

The name DELGADO came up on the screen. Lois Delgado.

Five, six, seven...

Delgado had not given up on him yet. Bourque had his finger ready to take the call.

Eight, nine, ten.

Bourque exhaled, tapped the screen. “Yeah, hey,” he said, holding the phone with one hand and gripping the inhaler with the other.

“It’s me,” Delgado said. “You okay? Can barely hear you.”

He got some more air into his lungs. “I’m fine.”

“Okay. Anyway, sorry to call so late.”

“It’s okay. What’s up?”

“I’ve got a tip for you.”

He sighed mentally. “Go ahead. I’m all about self-improvement.”

“Not that kind. A fingertip. Our guy dropped one.”

Eight

Bucky had heard about the Boston bombing even before he saw the item on TV that night from his cheap hotel room. Mr. Clement had filled him in, and he sounded less than impressed when they had spoken late that afternoon about how that event had gone down.

Four injured, one seriously.

“It’s a wonder it even made the news,” Mr. Clement said when they had their brief meeting, standing almost shoulder to shoulder, feigning interest at the Central Park Zoo’s penguin exhibit. They spoke softly, careful not to turn and face each other during their chat, as the penguins swam and splashed and waddled.

Mr. Clement made it clear he was not blaming Bucky for how unspectacular the Boston event turned out to be. Bucky had not been assigned to that one. Bucky didn’t know who Clement had trusted to do Boston, but he was betting whoever it was, he wouldn’t be doing any Flyovers missions in the future.

Bucky, however, was in the old man’s good books. Bucky’d engineered the Seattle coffee shop bombing the week before, which left two dead. That made headlines, to be sure.

“New York’s special,” Mr. Clement had said. “That’s why we have to be more ambitious here, Bucky. Not some simple coffee shop bombing.”

“I hear ya,” Bucky said.

His real name was Garnet — last name Wooler — but he’d gotten the nickname Bucky when he was a kid, before his parents managed to scrape up enough money to have him fitted with braces. But the name stuck, and just as well, because as names went, Garnet was no great shakes, either. These days, if anybody asked, he told them he was named after Captain America’s sidekick, Bucky Barnes. There were those who thought the name made him sound stupid, like some country hick. But if he were some dumb rube, Mr. Clement wouldn’t have been putting so much faith in him. That was for sure.

Bucky liked the man, and even though Bucky was now in his late thirties, he looked up to Mr. Clement, who was pushing seventy, as a father figure. Bucky had lost his own dad when he was seventeen, and he missed having someone older and wiser — and male — to mentor him, guide him. Mr. Clement, to a degree, had filled that role.

“We’ll talk again tomorrow,” Mr. Clement said. “A progress report.”

“Sure thing,” Bucky said. “Are you having a nice time?”

Without nodding, Mr. Clement said, “We are. Estelle has never been to New York before. Long way to come, all the way from Denver. So we’re taking in the sights. Might see a show.”

Bucky chuckled. “Oh, there’ll be a show, all right.”

Mr. Clement managed a smile. “Nice to have a front row seat. I didn’t go to Seattle, or Portland, or Boston, and just as well. Would have been hard to explain how I just happened to be in those places at those times. But New York? This trip’s been in the works for months. We’re here celebrating our anniversary.”

“I didn’t know. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, Bucky. You have a restful evening.”

“You, too, Mr. Clement.”

“I’d suggest you hang in here another five minutes after I leave.”

“Sure.”

With that, the older man departed.

Bucky didn’t stay an extra five minutes. He stayed an extra twenty. The truth was, Bucky found watching the penguins very entertaining. Darned if they weren’t the cutest damn things he’d ever seen.

Nine

Barbara had poured herself another finger of scotch, brought it into the bedroom with her, and decided, before turning off the light, to look one last time at online responses to her column. An argument could be made that the comments section on all websites should be disabled. It was just possible that giving an outlet to every anonymous wingnut on the planet to spew hate and spread lunatic conspiracy theories was not in society’s best interests. Barbara sometimes thought wistfully back to the old days when if you wrote a letter to the editor of your local newspaper, you had to include an address and a phone number. Before they printed your letter, they had to confirm that you were really you.

Fucking quaint was what it was. The days before the trolls and the bots and the people with tinfoil hats.

Not every online comment was written by a crazy person, but enough were that it made sense to think twice before dipping in. After you’d read a few, you might feel the need for a shower.

And yet, Barbara could not help herself.

Sitting up in bed, she opened the laptop resting atop her thighs and went to the Manhattan Today website.

Readers who despised Mayor Richard Headley might give passing praise to the column, but mostly they wanted to hurl insults at the man himself. “Rat fucker,” wrote BoroughBob. Well, Barbara thought, that certainly seemed, for New York, more appropriate than “goat fucker,” and was, by current standards, relatively tame. SuzieQ saw the mayor as “a cum stain on the city’s reputashun.” Barbara wondered where SuzieQ had gone to school.

Then there were the Headley supporters who took out their anger against Barbara. “When’s the last time you actually did anything for the city, you cunt Jew?” asked PatriotPaul. Was it worth replying to tell PatriotPaul that, while raised Presbyterian, she no longer belonged to any organized religion whatsoever? Perhaps not. The numerically named C67363 asked, “How’s anything ever going to get done in this city when people like you are always complaining?” It was downright charming when someone could express an opinion without being vulgar.

Barbara scrolled through a few more. On very rare occasions, someone might actually have something useful to say, maybe even point Barbara in the direction of a future article, although she wasn’t seeing anything like that tonight.

But then there was this:

“Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

Barbara blinked, read it again. It was a reference, of course, to the column’s postscript about Paula Chatsworth. How she’d worked briefly at Manhattan Today, how she’d shown so much promise, how her life had been cut short by tragedy when she clearly had so much still to offer.

It was, for Barbara, an emotionally honest bit of writing, and her sadness at the young woman’s death was genuine. People came to the big city to pursue a dream, not get killed in some freakish accident.

Barbara read the comment again.

“Sorry about your friend. It’s often the case that innocents are lost in the pursuit of a greater good.”

What the hell was that supposed to mean?

What “greater good” could the author possibly be referring to?

The author went by the handle GoingDown.

“Very fucking funny,” Barbara said aloud, shaking her head. But then she thought, maybe it wasn’t intended as an elevator joke. The writer could be an oral sex aficionado.

She was about to close the laptop when it dinged. An incoming email.

From Arla.

Barbara could not remember the last time she’d heard from her daughter. A few weeks, at least. Could it have been as long as a month?

Barbara clicked on the email.

“Hey,” Arla wrote. No “Dear Mom.” That would be too much to expect, Barbara knew.

It went on: “I have news. Want to meet for a coffee or something tomorrow?”

News? What kind of news could Arla have? So far as Barbara knew, she wasn’t seeing anyone. Then again, Arla had never been big on sharing the details of her private life with her mother. It would have to be something big for Arla to actually propose getting together.

Maybe Arla had been seeing someone. Maybe Arla was engaged.

Would she be expecting her mother to foot the bill for a wedding? Christ, how much was Headley offering to ghost-write his bio again? Mid — six figures?

No. No way. Arla would have to need life-saving surgery before Barbara would sink that low.

Maybe Arla was pregnant.

Wouldn’t that just be history repeating itself.

Anything was possible.

Barbara clicked on Reply and began tapping away.

“Sure,” she wrote. “When and where?”

Ten

The boy gently pats the woman’s arm as she sits in the chair. He believed she was simply asleep, but he has to be sure. She does not look well. Her forehead is glistening with sweat.

“Mom? Mom, are you okay?”

She opens her eyes slowly, focuses on the boy. “I guess... I nodded off there.”

“You’re sweating like crazy. For a second it looked like you weren’t even breathing.”

Her gaze moves beyond the boy. “Oh, Lord, I didn’t even put the groceries away. The ice cream’ll be melted.”

The boy gives her arm a squeeze. “I already put it away. You should have sent me to the store instead.”

“Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly capable. A little extra exercise never hurt anybody.” She finds enough energy to smile. “Why don’t you get us both a little ice cream? It’s chocolate. I’ll sit right here. My legs are killing me.”

The boy gets out a couple of bowls, takes the ice cream from the freezer, and spoons out two small servings. He hands one bowl to his mother, then perches himself on the arm of her chair while he eats his. She eats hers very slowly, as if this simple task takes effort.

Chocolate is his favorite. But he finds himself too worried to enjoy it. He doesn’t know how much longer things can go on this way.