Elevator Pitch

Eleven

The four elevators at the Sycamores Residences, a thirty-story York Avenue apartment tower just below Sixty-Third, were in constant use. Kids heading off to school. Men and women leaving for work. Nannies arriving to look after toddlers. Building maintenance staff heading to the top floor to vacuum hallways, working their way back down to ground level.

New Yorkers headed out from this residence to every corner of the city. Some worked at nearby Rockefeller University. Several units in the building were set aside for visiting professors and scientists who came to Rockefeller from all around the globe.

Although an exact count was not known because residents came and went, some people had guests, and others had sublet their apartments without informing building management, it was generally believed that any given time about nine hundred people lived in the Sycamores Residences. The building, like so many others in the city, was a small town unto itself.

Only three of those roughly nine hundred people were in Elevator Number Two when it happened.

Fanya Petrov, forty-nine, a visiting scientist from Russia, was staying on the twenty-eighth floor; she had been waiting the better part of five minutes and the elevator still had not arrived. She followed, with increasing frustration, the digital display above the doors, telling her where the elevators were. She’d hear them traveling through the shaft, whizzing past her floor on the way to the top of the building. Often, inexplicably, the elevator car would sail right past on its descent, not stopping to let her on. Was someone from building maintenance overriding the functions?

Since coming to New York three weeks earlier, she had learned that the magnificent view of the East River and the Queensboro Bridge that had at first so impressed her was not worth the aggravation of the slow elevators in the building. She’d have been happy with a room on the first or second floor. Who needed a view? She had learned that if she was to be on time for her appointments at Rockefeller, she had to allow herself an extra ten minutes because of the elevators. She’d take the stairs, but really, was she going to go down twenty-seven floors? It wasn’t particularly exhausting — she had done it a few times — but it was time-consuming. And she just knew that the moment she entered that stairwell, the elevator doors would be parting.

She blamed the children. And their parents.

There were so many youngsters in the building, and they always forgot something. Only yesterday, after thinking she’d caught a break when the elevator showed up almost immediately, the doors opened at the twentieth floor to allow a young man and his ten-year-old son to board. As the doors were closing, the boy shouted, “I forgot my lunch!”

“For Christ’s sake,” his father said, sticking out his arm to stop the doors. “Go!”

The boy bolted from the elevator, ran down the hall to their apartment, fumbled about in his pocket, looked back, and said, “I don’t have my key!”

Fanya had closed her eyes and said to herself, You have got to be kidding me. Well, not exactly that, but the Russian equivalent. Fanya spoke English fluently, but she was not up to speed on American phrases of frustration.

The father dug into his pocket and said, “Here!” He tossed the keys so the son could retrieve them halfway down the hall and, of course, he failed to catch them.

Future scientist, Fanya thought.

“Sorry,” the father mumbled in the woman’s direction.

The polite thing to do, she felt, would have been for him to step off the elevator and let her continue on her way. But no.

The kid got the apartment door open, ran inside, took a good two minutes to find his lunch, then came charging back down the hall to get onto the elevator.

Today, as she stood waiting, Fanya Petrov tried to think about the prepared remarks she would be delivering within the hour. Her area of expertise was “missing heritability,” traits that are passed down through the generations that cannot be found in the genome. The world had come to believe that a person’s DNA revealed everything, but it could not predict certain diseases or behaviors or countless other things, even when evidence existed that these characteristics could be passed on.

And while that was the subject of her talk for today, Fanya was an expert in other things, as well. Like bacterial pathogens, and how they could be spread among a population. Used, in effect, as weapons. Fanya knew a thing or two about what many in the world most feared: bioterrorism.

It was something she had studied a great deal back in Russia.

It was her expertise in missing heritability that had earned her an invitation to continue her studies in New York, but it was her vast knowledge about pathogens that might end up keeping her here.

Fanya Petrov did not want to return to Russia.

Fanya Petrov wanted to stay in America.

This was not something she had mentioned to her superiors back home. But she had mentioned it, discreetly, to another professor at Rockefeller who had connections with the State Department. A few days later, a message was relayed to her that her situation was being looked at favorably. If she were to seek asylum in the United States, she would be accepted — provided, of course, she shared everything she knew about Russian research into pathogens.

That was fine with her.

But Fanya Petrov was now very, very anxious. What if her superiors were to learn of her treachery? Would they summon her home before her application for asylum had been approved? Would she be thrown into a car and put on a plane before anyone knew she was missing? And what would happen to her when she got back?

Very, very bad things.

She had become so consumed with worry that when the elevator’s arrival was announced with a resounding ding, it startled her. Fanya sighed with relief and stepped into the empty cab as the doors opened.

She pressed G and watched as the doors closed.

The descent began.

“Please, no stops,” she said under her breath, in Russian. “No stops, no stops, no stops.”

There was a stop.

At the twentieth floor.

No.

Every time the elevator stopped, or there was a knock at the door, or someone dropped by to see her at her office at Rockefeller, Fanya feared it would be someone from the FSB, Putin’s modern version of the KGB.

So when the door parted and there was no one standing there who looked like a Russian thug, Fanya felt momentarily relieved. But relief was soon supplanted by irritation when she saw that it was the same father and son who had delayed her on her last trip down this elevator. Her heart sank. Please let them have remembered everything, she thought.

The father glanced to see that G had already been pressed. As the doors started to close, he looked down at his son and asked, “You got your homework?”

The kid, suddenly panicked, said, “Shit.”

American children, Fanya thought. So foul-mouthed.

The doors only had four more inches to go to close. But the father’s arm went up with the speed of a lightning bolt, his hand angled vertically, sliding into the rapidly narrowing space. The rubber extenders bounced off both sides of his wrist and the door retracted.

“Please,” Fanya said. “I am in a hurry.”

He caught her eye and nodded. Fanya took that to mean that both father and son would get off, retrieve the forgotten homework, and catch another elevator.

But that was not the father’s plan.

He said to the boy, “You hold the elevator. I’ll go. It’s on the kitchen table, right?”

The boy nodded and put his finger on the Hold button.

Fanya sighed audibly, but the father didn’t hear it because he was already running down the hall, keys in hand.

The boy looked sheepishly at the scientist. “Sorry.”

Fanya said nothing. She crossed her arms and leaned up against the back wall of the car. Down the hall, she saw the man slip into the apartment.

Five seconds, ten seconds, fifteen seconds.

Fanya felt her anxiety growing. She did not like to be in any one place for a long period of time. She felt exposed, vulnerable.

The apartments in this building were not huge. How long could it take for the man to run in, grab something off the kitchen table, and come back out?

“Remembering homework is your responsibility,” Fanya said sternly. “If you forget, you forget. The teacher gives you a zero. Next time, you remember.”

The boy just looked at her. But suddenly his eyes went wide. He said to Fanya, “Can you hold the button?”

“What?”

“Just hold it!”

She stepped forward and replaced his finger with hers on the button. The boy slipped off his backpack, dropped it to the floor, and knelt down to undo the zipper. He rifled through some papers inside and said, “Here it is.”

Yet another sigh from Fanya.

The boy got up and stood in the open doorway. “Dad!” he shouted down the hall. “I found it!”

No response.

This time, he screamed, “Daaad!”

The father’s head poked out the doorway. “What?”

“I found it!”

The dad stepped out into the hall.

Fanya, somehow thinking they were finally all on their way, let her finger slide off the button.

The doors began to close.

“Hey!” the kid said.

But he was less courageous than his father and did not insert his arm into the opening to stop the doors’ progress. And Fanya wasn’t about to do it.

She’d had enough.

The father shouted, “Hey! Hang on! Hold the—”

The doors closed. The elevator began to move. The boy looked accusingly at Fanya and said, “You were supposed to hold it.”

She shrugged. “My finger slipped. It is okay. You wait for your dad in the lobby.”

The kid slipped his backpack onto his shoulder and retreated to the corner, which was as far away as he could get from the woman in the tight space.

They traveled three or four floors when the elevator stopped.

This was just not Fanya’s day.

But the doors did not open. The elevator sat there. The readout said they were at the seventeenth floor.

“What is happening?” Fanya asked. She looked accusingly at the boy. “Did your dad stop the elevator?”

The kid shrugged. “How would he do that?”

After fifteen seconds of not moving, Fanya began to pace in the confined area.

It’s them. They know. I’m trapped.

“I have to get to work,” she said. “I have to get out of here. I am giving a lecture. I cannot be late.”

The boy dropped his backpack to the floor again, reached in and pulled out a cell phone and began to tap away.

“What are you doing?” Fanya asked, stopping her pacing.

“Texting my dad.”

“Ask him if he stopped the ele—”

“I’m telling him we’re stuck.” He looked at the phone for several more seconds, then said, “He’s going for help.”

“Oh,” Fanya said. She wanted to ask the boy to ask his father if there were any strange men around. Men who looked out of place. Men with Russian accents. But she decided against it. “Why do you think we are stuck?” she asked the boy.

The kid shrugged.

“Why won’t the doors open?”

“We’re probably between floors,” the boy said.

Fanya looked at him and, for the first time, felt some kinship. They were, after all, in this together. “What is your name?”

“Colin,” he said.

“Hello, Colin. My name is Fanya.”

“Hi.”

Keep talking to the boy, she told herself. It would help control her paranoia.

“What was your homework on?”

“Fractions,” he said.

“Ah,” she said. “I liked taking fractions when I was a little girl.”

“I hate them.”

Fanya managed an anxious smile. “I think we need to do something to get out of here. We cannot stay in here. It is not good.”

“My dad’ll get somebody.”

“That could take a long time. We need to do something now. Don’t you have to get to school so you can see how well you did on your fractions homework?”

Colin nodded.

“And I have to get to work. So let’s figure this out.” Fanya studied where the doors met, worked a finger into the rubber lining. “I bet we could get these apart.”

“Uh, I don’t think you’re supposed to do that.”

“Maybe we are not between floors,” she said. “Maybe the hallway is right there and all we have to do is step off.”

“Maybe,” Colin said uncertainly.

She dug her fingers in and started to pull the door on the right side into the open position. The doors did not move.

Fanya said, “You look like a strong boy, even though you are little. You pull from the other side.”

Colin said nothing, but did as he was asked. He got his fingers into the now-larger gap and pulled hard on the left door. Even with both of them pulling, the doors parted only about half an inch.

“Okay, okay, stop,” Fanya said. They both released their grips on the doors and took a step back. “I do not think this is going to work.”

And then, as if by magic, the doors parted. Fanya and the boy stepped back, startled.

“Well,” Fanya said.

The woman and the boy were faced with a concrete block wall, and an opening.

From the floor of the car, and going nearly three feet up, was the gray cement wall of the elevator shaft. Above that, open space. Fanya and Colin were able to stare straight down the seventeenth-floor corridor.

“Success!” she shouted.

Fanya felt relieved not only that the doors had opened, but that there were not any men in black suits standing there in the hallway, waiting for her.

“I’m not going through there,” Colin said nervously, backing away farther.

Fanya smiled. “We just have to be quick.”

“No way,” he said.

She smiled sympathetically. “Think of it as a fraction. The doors are how far open?”

The boy looked at her. “Half?”

“Very good. So it is half-open, and half-closed. Half-open is good enough for us to get out. But I will try it first.” She grinned. “I just have to be fast.”

She set her purse on the elevator floor. “I used to be a gymnast in Russia,” she said. “When I was a girl.” She grimaced. “It was a long time ago. But some things you don’t forget. Climbing up three feet should not be so hard.”

Fanya put both hands on the grooved metal strip on the hallway level, hoisted herself up enough to get her knee onto it, then moved her entire body through the opening. She was on her knees in the hallway, her feet hanging over the edge inside the car before she stood triumphantly.

“What are you going to do now?” Colin asked, looking up at her. “Are you going to leave me here?”

Shit. She really couldn’t do that. She’d freed herself, could head to the university, but how would it look? “Visiting Professor Abandons Child in Stuck Elevator.” Would a callous act like that prompt the State Department to reject her request for asylum?

“No,” she said. “I will not do that. I will not leave you here.” She glanced down at the elevator floor. How stupid of her. She’d dropped her purse there. It would have made more sense to have tossed it out onto the hallway floor before making her escape.

“Colin,” she said, pointing. “Toss me my purse. Then we’ll see about getting you out, too.”

As Colin reached down to get it, Fanya dropped back down to her hands and knees to reach in to take it from him.

She leaned forward into the car. Colin picked up the purse and held it out for her. Fanya shifted slightly forward on her knees.

The elevator suddenly moved.

Down.

The roof of the car dropped toward Fanya’s neck. She didn’t have to glance upward to see what was coming. She saw the elevator floor dropping away from her. While physics had never been her area of expertise, she could figure this much out. If the car’s floor was heading down, the car’s ceiling would surely follow.

Without having to think about it, she began to withdraw her head from the elevator. She needed to get her entire body back into the hallway.

She was not quick enough.

The elevator continued on its way to ground level at a normal rate of speed. When the doors opened several seconds later, those who had been waiting — and not very patiently, at that — were greeted by the sight of a near catatonic, wide-eyed Colin, huddling in the corner as far away as possible from Fanya Petrov’s arm and hand, still gripping her purse, and the scientist’s decapitated head.

Twelve

Barbara got to the Morning Star Café on Second Avenue, just above Fiftieth, before her daughter, Arla, got there. She took a booth near the window, facing the street, and said yes to a cup of coffee when the waiter stopped by. Barbara scanned the menu to pass the time, but knew she’d be getting a Virginia ham and cheddar omelette. Arla, she was betting, would have only coffee.

Barbara glanced at the photos on the wall. A lot of famous people had dropped by the Morning Star over the years. There were a couple of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., who Barbara was pretty sure had lived in the neighborhood before his death in 2007. She’d seen him once, a couple of blocks north of here, but didn’t say anything, even though she was a fan. You were always seeing somebody famous in New York and were expected to be cool about it.

She’d checked the menu, scanned the walls. Fidgety. Getting out her phone seemed the next logical step. Barbara had mixed feelings about meeting with her daughter this morning. She had reason to believe Arla’d been seeing a therapist lately, although Arla had not come right out and admitted it when Barbara asked. But Barbara knew Arla had a multitude of issues she was struggling to come to terms with. There’d been an eating disorder for a while there, but that seemed to be under control. When Arla was in her midteens, she’d gone through a cutting period, marking her arms with a razor. That one really had Barbara worried, but that, too, had passed.

Barbara was aware that whatever the issue, Arla was inclined to trace it back to her mother. She was, after all, the root of all of Arla’s problems.

Well, fuck, Barbara thought. I was never exactly June Cleaver.

When Barbara found herself pregnant at eighteen, she was already working on a career in journalism. As a kid, inspired by watching reruns of The Mary Tyler Moore Show (she wasn’t old enough to have seen it when it first came on), Barbara wanted to be Mary Richards. She wanted to work in news. And Mary showed how an independent woman could make it, after all.

When she was barely seventeen, she had landed a reporting gig at the Staten Island Advance, winning over the editors by showing up day after day with unsolicited stories about interesting people in the borough. They were good. They saw that the kid could produce. They took her on despite her young age and lack of a journalism degree.

Who needed a piece of paper to frame and hang on the wall? You went out, you asked people questions, you observed, you wrote it down. When someone wouldn’t tell you what you wanted to know, you found someone else who would. You kept asking until you got an answer. How tricky was that? You needed to go to school for four years to figure that out?

Barbara threw herself into her work from the very beginning. The proverbial printer’s ink ran through her veins. She was covering murders and gang wars and plane crashes and political scandals when she was no older than first-year journalism students.

She was having the time of her life.

Until she found out she was pregnant.

Getting knocked up was definitely not part of the plan. At first, she was in denial. She couldn’t believe that it had happened. The home pregnancy test had to be wrong. So she did nothing, told no one.

But there comes a point when what you refuse to believe becomes painfully obvious.

So when her tummy began to ever so slightly bulge, she found the courage to find the man who’d gotten her pregnant. He deserved to know, right? Barbara figured there was a chance he’d even want to know. Okay, maybe that was being too hopeful. The guy was going to be shocked, no doubt about it. Especially considering that they hadn’t even known each other until they’d had sex, and hadn’t exactly been a couple since.

They hadn’t even seen each other since.

It had been, Barbara was willing to concede, a night of very bad decisions.

Starting with going to a party at NYU given by a former high school friend who, unlike Barbara, had pursued higher education. More bad decisions followed. She smoked a little too much weed, drank a little too much gin. And then, going over to chat up that older guy in the corner. That was the big one.

He was no longer a student, having gotten his MBA a few years earlier. He’d tagged along with some girl who knew the host of the party.

So why was he all alone in the corner?

A shrug. Some guy was going on about having to leave because he played in a band and they had a late-night gig in SoHo. She left with him.

“The bitch,” Barbara said.

Later, she wasn’t entirely clear how events had progressed. They’d had more to drink. It was possible there’d been a walk. And then they’d ended up in someone’s dorm. On a bed. Barbara remembered some fumbling with a condom, but hadn’t paid all that much attention when the guy said, “Uh-oh.”

In a few weeks, she’d have an idea what had alarmed him.

While some of the events from that night were foggy, Barbara knew there was no one else up for the role of father of her child. Sure, she’d gone to bed with other guys. But the last time she’d had sex before that evening had been a good (or bad, depending on how you looked at it) six months.

Other things she was sure of? What he looked like, and a first name. She asked the friend who’d thrown the party if she knew the guy’s surname. No special reason, she said. Just, you know, wondering.

She found him.

Broke the news.

He said, “I have no idea who you are.”

The way he said it, it almost sounded like he was telling the truth. Barbara refreshed his memory with every detail she could remember.

“Sorry,” the guy said. “Honest to God, I don’t ever remember meeting you. How long ago was this? I don’t even remember being at that party.”

“Yeah, well, we were both kind of flying.”

“Maybe you were,” he said. “Not me.”

Barbara couldn’t decide what to do. Go after him? Demand a blood test?

And of course, there was one other option.

But again, Barbara was paralyzed with indecision, and did nothing. By the time she found the strength to tell her parents, it was too late to end the pregnancy. Barbara’s mother and father — fucking saints, that’s what they were — didn’t judge. Oh sure, they wanted to know about this man, and Barbara told them she’d talked to him, that he refused to accept responsibility, and had moved to Colorado or Wyoming and gone into real estate. It wasn’t worth the time to pursue him, she said.

Okay, they said. These things happen, they said. No sense ranting and raving. What’s done is done. Let’s figure out what to do.

Give the baby up for adoption, Barbara decided. I’m not cut out to be a parent.

Well, okay, sure, that’s a possibility, her mother said. But that is my future grandchild you’re talking about. If you’re absolutely determined that you do not want to raise this child, well, your father and I have still got a few good years left, and we’ve been talking about this, and we’ve agreed that if you’re okay with it, we’ll do it.

At first Barbara thought, no way. But as that child grew inside her, she started to come around to her mother’s way of thinking. This could work. The world was changing. Alternative parenting options were in vogue. Sure, some people might look down their collective noses at Barbara, but when had she ever cared what anybody else thought?

She knew her mother was betting that when the baby arrived, Barbara would have a change of heart. She’d see that infant and decide to raise the child herself, even if there was no father’s name to put on the birth certificate.

That whole mother-child bond would kick in.

Arla arrived.

The bond did not kick in.

Barbara was tormented that it did not. She was consumed with guilt that she did not want to raise this little girl. Did she love her? Of course, without question. But if there was a mothering gene, Barbara feared she did not have it.

So Barbara’s parents honored their pledge and took Arla into their home. Barbara remained conflicted about how things had turned out. She felt less guilty that she had not given Arla up to strangers, that she was with family. But every time Barbara went home and saw her mother and father so fully engaged with Arla, the guilt bubbled back to the surface. It was an ache that never went away.

Every time she saw Arla, she was reminded of her abdication of responsibility. In those moments, she wondered whether adoption would have been the better choice. Out of sight, out of mind.

She hated herself for even thinking it.

Every week, Barbara sent a good chunk of her paycheck to her parents. She visited most weeks. She did love Arla. She loved her more than anyone or anything else in the world. No one pretended Barbara was not her mother. Arla was not raised to believe Barbara was the aunt who dropped by. No, Barbara was Mom. Barbara’s parents were Grampa and Gramma.

No lies. No attempts to deceive. At least not on that score.

It all seemed to work out.

And when Arla was twelve, Grampa died. Liver cancer. Barbara’s mother carried on alone. Barbara still came by, but as Arla moved into her teens and became the kind of hellion so many teenage girls turned into for a period of time, Barbara had to admit, deep down, that she was relieved to be spared the daily turmoil.

Thirteen months ago, Barbara’s mother passed on. Heart attack.

“This is how I see it,” Arla had told Barbara the last time they’d sat down together. “You leaving me with them is what drove them to an early grave. I was a bitch and a half, no doubt about it, but I should have been your bitch and a half, not theirs.”

“I can’t rewrite history,” Barbara had said.

“Yeah, but you don’t have a problem writing about others who’ve made a mess of theirs,” she’d countered. “Bad things people have done, mistakes they’ve made, that’s your whole shtick. But looking in the mirror, that’s not so easy.”

Barbara hadn’t known what to say. The truth was always difficult to argue.

They’d had a serious argument six months earlier. Arla wanted to go out west, try to find her father. Barbara did everything to discourage her, and offered no clues that would help her track him down. “The man’s not worth finding,” she said. Arla was furious.

Barbara said something she wished she hadn’t. “Maybe you’d have been happier if I’d given you up for adoption and you’d been raised by strangers.”

“You’re the stranger,” Arla shot back. “Always have been.”

And then Arla had gone in for the kill. “I have this friend who’s getting married, and she says her mother’s driving her crazy, wanting to be involved in every single detail about the wedding, and my friend’s like, God, I can’t take it anymore, and I said to her, hey, at least she’s interested.”

So there was every reason to feel unsettled about meeting with Arla this morning. What was Barbara to blame for now? What repressed maternal memory — or lack thereof — had Arla gone over with her therapist this week?

She’d said she had news.

Jesus, maybe it’s about her father.

So far as Barbara knew, Arla had abandoned her idea of heading out west to look for him. Maybe she’d changed her mind.

Arla still was not here — being habitually late to meetings with her was, Barbara figured, a minor act of vengeance — so Barbara scrolled through her Twitter feed. Barbara was almost never without the phone in her hand. The advent of technology had made it nearly impossible for Barbara to be alone with her own thoughts. If she wasn’t writing, or reading, or having a conversation with someone, she was on the phone.

She followed political leaders and countless pundits and various media outlets and even bulletins from the NYPD. And no one had to know that she also followed someone who tweeted, every single day, cute puppy pics.

So shoot me.

She continued to scroll, caught a glimpse of something, then thumbed her way back up the feed. It was a post from the NYPD.

There’d been an elevator accident in an apartment building up on York Avenue. The story was just breaking and details were few.

“Fuck,” she whispered.

“I take it you’re not talking to me.”

Barbara looked up to find Arla standing there.

“Oh, hey, hi,” she said, slipping out of the booth to give her daughter a hug. No matter how angry Arla might be with her, she’d still allow her mother to do that. And Arla would slip her arms around Barbara in return, even if she didn’t pull her in for the big squeeze.

“You look good,” Barbara said as they slipped into the booth, sitting across from each other.

And it was true. The thing was, Arla always looked good. She was tall and slender, with straight black hair that hung below her shoulders. She wore a black, clingy dress with a broad, black, patent leather belt. A lank of hair hung over one eye and she brushed it back, tucking it behind her ear.

“Thanks,” Arla said. “Have you ordered?”

“Only coffee. I was going to get an omelette. What do you want?”

“Coffee’s good.”

“Go on, have something. I’m buying.”

Arla shook her head. “That’s okay.”

The waiter came. Just because Arla didn’t want to eat wasn’t going to stop Barbara. She ordered two coffees and an omelette for herself.

“So how’s it going?” Arla asked.

“Fine,” Barbara said, then frowned. She told her daughter, briefly, about the incident the day before involving the young woman who’d interned at Manhattan Today. Even as she told Arla the story, she wondered why. Was she hoping to garner some advance sympathy, maybe ward off the latest grievance Arla wanted to air?

“That’s awful,” Arla said with what seemed genuine concern. “Are her parents down here yet?”

“Probably,” Barbara said. “And now,” she said, raising her phone, “there’s another one.”

“Another elevator thing?”

Barbara nodded.

“I get totally creeped out in them,” Arla said. “It’s not that I think they’re going to crash or anything. It’s just, when that door closes, there’s no place you can go, and if you’re trapped in there with someone weird, you can’t wait to get to your floor.” She shook her head. “Two in two days. They say things come in threes.”

Barbara smiled. “I think that’s celebrity deaths. So,” she said slowly, “what’s your news?”

Arla inhaled deeply through her nose. The arrival of her coffee gave her a moment to exhale and prepare for what looked to Barbara like a major announcement. She took a packet of Splenda, ripped it open, and sprinkled half of it into the cup.

Pregnant, Barbara was thinking. History repeating itself.

“So...” Arla said. “I got a job.”

Barbara blinked. “You have a job. So this is a new job?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, that’s good. Congrats. You didn’t like what you were doing?”

“No, it was okay. And I learned a lot of stuff there that I can do at the new place.”

“So where are you moving to?”

“Okay, so, you know at the job I had, I was doing all this survey stuff. Analytics, interpreting data, all that kind of thing.”

“Right. What marketing is all about.”

“No one makes a decision these days without looking at all the data. No one in business goes with just their gut.”

“Gut feelings are all I’ve ever had,” Barbara said. “I don’t understand any of this stuff you’re talking about.”

“It’s the way the world’s going,” Arla said. “I mean, even if you’re sure your own instincts are right, no one wants to make a move without data to support it.”

“And let me guess,” Barbara said. “Sometimes the data tells you what the people want, so that’s what you give them, even if, in your heart, that’s not what you want to do.”

Arla shrugged. “Pretty much. You find out what the people are hankering for and deliver it.” She shook her head. “God, who uses a word like ‘hankering’ anymore?”

Barbara chuckled.

Arla continued. “Anyway, you want to know if your message is getting out there, and if it is, if it’s reaching the target audience. All that stuff. It’s pretty fascinating. The company I just left, we were doing a lot of work for the entertainment industry. What movies people like and why, data from advance screenings. Funny thing is, even when you have a movie you think will be a hit, it can go out there and sink like a stone.”

“Sure,” Barbara said.

“But I was thinking, what if I could take those kinds of skills and apply them in a way that would have some more meaning? You know, instead of finding a way to make some airhead pop star even more popular, what if you could expose people to issues that matter, and make them care?”

“That actually sounds like a good thing,” Barbara said. “So who are you going to work for? Planned Parenthood? The ACLU? Save the Whales?”

“Not one of them,” Arla said. “But still, a place where I can do some good.”

“So, tell me,” her mother said.

“You promise you won’t get mad.”

Barbara sat back on the bench. Oh, no, she thought. She’s gone to the dark side. She’s working for Facebook.

The waiter delivered the ham and cheddar omelette, but Barbara didn’t even look at it. “Just tell me.”

“I got a job with the mayor’s office,” Arla said.

Barbara was too stunned to speak.

“Pretty cool, huh?”

Barbara found her voice and said, “This mayor? The mayor of New York?”

Arla nodded and smiled. “I haven’t actually met him yet. I mean, maybe I never will. You can work for someone like that and never come face-to-face. You’re just one of the minions, right? But you never know.” She leaned across the table and whispered conspiratorially, “I hear rumors he’s thinking of going for a Senate seat, or maybe even something bigger than that. Imagine being on the ground floor if that happens.”

Clearly, Arla had not read Barbara’s latest column that put out that rumor. Barbara pushed her plate to one side and leaned in, their foreheads almost touching.

“I get it,” she said.

“Get what?” Arla said.

“It’s creative, I’ll grant you that.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Arla said, leaning back into her seat.

“Don’t be cute, Arla.”

“Honestly, I don’t know what you mean, Mother.”

“Did you actually plan it? Did you think, wouldn’t it be great if I could work for the man my mother’s been trying to get the goods on since he took office? The man is totally corrupt, you know. Always doing favors for his friends. Or did the mayor’s office seek you out?” Barbara suddenly smiled. “I could see it happening that way.”

“Not everything is about you.”

“Headley figures out who you are and offers you a job just to stick it to me. Were you headhunted? Maybe he figures if I know you’re working for him, I’ll back off. Or I’ll take him up on his offer.”

“What offer?”

“Never mind.”

“I saw the position advertised online,” Arla said. “And I applied. I went for an interview, and I got it. If you’re suggesting I was hired just to even some score with you, then thanks for the insult. I’m good at what I do. I got hired because I bring something to the table.”

“You went after it to spite me.”

“You’re not even hearing me anymore.”

“You wanted to rub my nose in it,” Barbara said.

Arla eyed her mother pitiably. “I’d have thought, being a writer and all, you could do better than a cliché like that.”

“Once they find out you’re my daughter, they’ll probably fire you.”

“Well, unless you’re planning to tell them, I should be fine.”

Arla’s last name was Silbert, as was Barbara’s. Matheson was actually Barbara’s middle name, which honored her mother’s side of the family. She’d chosen to write under it years earlier, so Arla wasn’t likely to be found out on name recognition alone.

“You know, it’d be nice, if just once, you could acknowledge that I can accomplish something on my own. Maybe even congratulate me.”

Barbara said nothing.

Arla sighed resignedly and looked at her watch. “Shit, I have to run. Don’t want to be late on my first day.” She flashed a smile as she slid out of the booth. “Thanks for the coffee. Always nice to catch up.”

She turned and walked out. Barbara watched as she reached the sidewalk, turned right, and walked past the window, heading south.

Barbara looked at the omelette. She was sorry she’d quit smoking years ago. She wished she had a butt to grind into it.

Thirteen

Jerry Bourque was at his desk. Lois Delgado sat across from him, drinking coffee from a paper cup.

“How’s it going?” he asked.

“Kid’s sick,” she said. “Barfed her guts up first thing.”

Delgado had been married ten years to a firefighter named Albert. They had a seven-year-old daughter, Abigail. Abby for short.

“Al’s shift starts late, so with any luck I’ll be home before he leaves, and if not, we’ll get his mother to come over.”

“That’ll be nice,” he said.

She shot him a look across the two desks. “Don’t get me started.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“Bullshit.” Delgado rolled her eyes. “She’s a snoop. She went into the medicine cabinet last time, looking around.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“All the prescriptions, I had them all turned exactly halfway, so only the right side of the labels were exposed. Like, all you’d see of my name on the prescription is ‘gado.’ You know what I mean?”

“I get it.”

“So after she’s been there, I check, they’re all facing every which way. Pretty much in the same spot — she covered her tracks that much — but not sitting the way I left them. I got one of those mini-safes, like they have in the hotels? Put it in our bedroom closet. One day she says, she just happened to see it when she found Abby in there, wanting to try on my shoes. Oh, she says, I see you have a safe? What’s that for? It’s driving her crazy. Thing is, it’s the only place I can keep something where I know she won’t see it. Financial papers, stuff like that. I tell her it’s where I keep my gun.”

“She buying that?”

“She knows I already have a lockbox for it. Maybe I can get her thinking I’m building an arsenal. But she probably suspects.”

“Albert ever decides to have an affair, he hasn’t got a chance of getting away with it.”

“No kidding,” Delgado said. “I’ve told him, you mess around, I’ll kill you and I know how to cover my tracks.”

Bourque believed she had the skills, if not the actual inclination. “And if you decide to have an affair,” he said, “you’ll know how to get away with it.”

Delgado smiled. “No way Albert’s finding out about Ryan.”

Bourque grinned. Delgado had a thing for actor Ryan Gosling. She’d seen all his movies multiple times. Once, on a trip to Canada, she even drove by the Burlington high school he’d attended. A photo of him from a magazine was taped to the edge of her computer monitor.

“I think, maybe having his picture there would be a clue,” Bourque said.

Delgado shook her head. “It’s the opposite. If he and I were seeing each other, putting that picture there would be the last thing I’d do. It actually keeps anyone from being suspicious.”

“Brilliant,” Bourque said.

“Anything back on the DNA?”

“Don’t make me laugh. How about the tip of the finger? Were they able to pull a print off it?”

Delgado said, “Waiting. Looks like a pinkie. They found it about twenty yards north of the bench the body’d been dumped behind, just to the edge of the path, in the flower bed. Once we get a print, and they do the DNA, we’ll find out if our guy’s in the system. The hands were callused, suggesting the vic did physical work.”

“And the socks are a dead end. So far.”

Delgado said the review of surveillance video along the High Line was also going nowhere, at the moment. “But at least there’s this.” Delgado pointed to her computer monitor. “I’m sending it to you.”

Bourque signed in and called up the file his partner had shared. It was a picture from the coroner’s report of the dead man’s cobra tattoo.

“That tat might be the best thing we’ve got at the moment,” he said.

Delgado nodded. “It’s something. We can start hitting tattoo parlors. Wondering if it’s time to put out a release. White male, best guess is between forty and fifty years old, photo of the tattoo, those socks.”

“I’m gonna make another call to Missing Persons,” Bourque said. “Maybe somebody’s worried Daddy didn’t come home.”

“Knock yourself out,” Delgado said.

Bourque first went onto the NYPD’s Missing Persons Twitter feed, then its website. Most of the missing were categorized as “silver alerts,” which applied primarily to senior citizens with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. These were folks who’d wandered away from home or a facility, and in most cases turned up okay. Many of the others were kids who’d failed to come home. But the likelihood that any of these were child abductions was low. These were youngsters who’d had a fight with their parents, or stayed over at a friend’s house without thinking that a call home might be a good idea. If a child had been taken, odds were it was a parental abduction, a custody fight that spiraled out of control. That didn’t mean it was any less serious an event. Some parental abductions ended up very badly. Murder-suicide, for example. Teach the other spouse a lesson.

What didn’t come up on the Missing Persons list very often were middle-aged men or women without any history of mental disabilities.

Bourque didn’t see any recent postings that sounded like the High Line victim. There were a couple of men who had been missing for several months who were, as the saying went, “known to police,” and could very likely be residing at the bottom of the East River, but the man Bourque was hoping to identify was very recently deceased.

He put in a call to the Missing Persons bureau to ask if they’d had any reports about a middle-aged white male they’d not yet put on the website.

“Funny you should ask,” they said.

The house was on Thirty-Second Street, between Broadway, to the south, and Thirty-First Avenue to the north, in the Astoria part of Queens. It was a two-story semidetached, gates across the driveway that were intended to keep anyone from ripping off the ten-year-old Ford Explorer parked there. It sat on a slab of concrete that sloped downward toward a single garage door.

Lois Delgado parked their unmarked Ford Crown Vic out front, although anybody who knew anything would immediately be able to spot it as a police car with its plain minihubcaps, lights inside the front grille and atop the rear window shelf, and antenna on the trunk lid.

Bourque got out the passenger side and waited until Delgado had rounded the car so they could approach the front door together. She rang the bell and stood ahead of him.

Seconds later, the curtain was pulled back an inch. A woman peeked out. They heard a deadbolt turn and a chain come off before the door opened.

“Mrs. Petrenko?” Delgado said. “Eileen Petrenko?”

The woman was in her forties, about five-four, plump, her brown hair pulled back tightly into a bun. She eyed the two of them with apprehension.

“Mrs. Petrenko, I’m Detective Delgado and this is Detective Bourque.”

“Oh my,” she said. “Have you found him? Please tell me you’ve found him.”

“Could we come in?” Delgado asked.

“Yes, yes, of course,” she said, holding open the door.

They entered a cramped living room that was a mess of newspapers, magazines, and small office boxes up against one wall.

“I’ve been going out of my mind,” Eileen said, wringing her hands nervously. “Have you found him? Where is he? Has he gone back to Cleveland? He hates it here, I know that, but I can’t believe he’d just go back there without saying a word. I called his sister, and she hasn’t seen him, and if he was going back he’d have got in touch with her, I know he would.”

“Can we sit down?” Bourque asked.

Eileen cleared the couch of newspapers so the two detectives could sit. She took a seat across from them. There was a framed photo of her and a round-faced man with grayish, brush-cut hair on the small table next to her.

“This is Mr. Petrenko?” Delgado asked.

The woman picked up the picture and looked despairingly at it. “I’ve barely slept for two days,” she said.

Bourque had his notebook out. “I know you’ve been over this with the officers who spoke with you yesterday morning, but I wonder if you’d mind going over it with us.”

The woman kept the framed photo in her lap and nodded.

“Your husband’s full name?”

“Otto Mikhail Petrenko.”

“Can you spell that?”

She did.

“Date of birth?”

“Um, February third, 1975.”

“Where was Mr. Petrenko born?” Delgado asked. “What kind of name is that?”

“Russian,” his wife said. “Except for Otto. That is German. He was named after an uncle in Germany. Mikhail was his father’s name. He was born in Voronezh, but his parents slipped out of the country and into Finland shortly after he was born, and then, eventually, to America, when Otto was around four years old. They settled in Ohio, which is where Otto grew up, and where we met in Cleveland.”

“And how long have you been married, Mrs. Petrenko?” Delgado asked, her voice soft and full of concern.

“Seventeen years,” she said.

“The two of you have children? Or do you live here alone?”

“It’s just us,” she said, looking uncomfortable. “Otto had siblings, but...” Her voice trailed off.

“And you own this house?”

She shook her head. “We’re renting. Otto didn’t want to buy. He didn’t know whether he wanted to stay here.”

“In Queens?” Bourque asked.

“In New York. Anywhere here.”

“You moved here from Cleveland?”

“Three years ago,” she said. She glanced at the boxes along one wall. “We’ve still got things in boxes, if you can believe it. It’s not important stuff. We’d move it to the basement, but it’s awfully musty down there.”

“What about the garage?”

“We’ve got furniture in there,” she said. “Our place in Cleveland was bigger, so we had stuff we couldn’t place, so we just leave it in there. We haven’t been able to get the car in the garage since we got here. Is this important?”

“I’m sorry,” Delgado said, offering an apologetic smile. “Sometimes we tend to wander. Tell us about when you last saw Otto.”

“Two nights ago,” she said. “Sunday night.”

“What time would this have been?”

She thought a moment. “Around eight? I know it was after 60 Minutes. The show had just ended when Otto said he was going out. He didn’t show up for work yesterday, and he didn’t show up today.”

“Did he say where he was going on Sunday night?”

Eileen Petrenko shook her head. “I just thought, maybe out for a drink.”

“I noticed the Icon when we were driving around,” Bourque said.

Another head shake, but this one was more violent. “He wouldn’t go to that kind of bar.”

Bourque glanced at Delgado. She said, “I think it’s a gay bar.”

“Oh,” he said. “Anywhere else he might have gone?”

“There’s the Break, the billiards place,” she said. “Sometimes he goes there. Mostly he watches the others play because he’s not very good. But when he hadn’t come home by eleven, I went down there looking for him, and he wasn’t there. They hadn’t seen him. Then I wondered if maybe he’d gone to a movie. I don’t like movies, so sometimes he goes alone.”

“He likes movies?” Bourque asked.

Eileen nodded her head toward the boxes along the wall. “Half of them are filled with DVDs. He likes to collect. There’s even some of them on VHS. On cassette, you know? And we don’t even have a VCR anymore. Threw it out years ago.”

“What’s his favorite movie?” Bourque asked.

She had to think. “He likes adventure ones. Like with Indiana Jones or that John Wick person, that kind of movie. Action ones. He likes the fighting ones, where they’re doing the kung fu or whatever it’s called. I don’t watch those.”

“One of my favorites,” Bourque mused, “is that one, with the shark? Where they had to close the beaches?”

She brightened. “Oh, right, Jaws. That’s one of Otto’s favorites.” She looked curious. “I bought him some socks online with a shark on them. For his birthday.”

Bourque exchanged a brief glance with Delgado. “Yeah, great movie.”

Eileen said, “If he had gone to a movie, he’d have been home before midnight.” She took a tissue from a box on the table next to her and dabbed the corner of her right eye.

“Do you think he was meeting with someone?” Delgado asked.

“He didn’t say.”

Delgado leaned forward, elbows on her knees. “This is a difficult question to ask, Mrs. Petrenko, but is it possible your husband is seeing someone?”

“You mean, a woman?” She looked aghast. “An affair?”

Delgado nodded.

“Oh, no, that’s... I don’t think so.” She seemed to close in on herself, squeezing her arms closer to her body. “That wouldn’t be like him, I don’t think.”

The room went quiet for a moment while the detectives let Eileen think about that one a little longer. Finally, Delgado asked, “Why did you say you thought he might have gone to Cleveland?”

She shrugged. “He doesn’t like it here. He doesn’t like New York. He doesn’t like the big cities very much. At least, not the ones on the ocean.” She sniffed, touched the tissue to her nose.

“The ocean?” Bourque said. “He doesn’t like to swim? He hates boats?”

“No, no, it’s not like that. There’s the cities on the coast and then there’s the rest of the country.”

“I don’t follow,” Delgado said.

“Otto says one day there’s going to be another civil war, but it won’t be between the north and the south. It’ll be between all the snooty people, you know, the elites, and all the other people, the real Americans.”

“So people who live in, like, New York and Los Angeles and places like that aren’t real Americans?” Delgado asked.

“They don’t hold true American values,” Eileen Petrenko said. “Otto would say they all want everyone to have abortions, to turn children into homosexuals, that kind of thing. But mostly, they look down their noses at everyone else.” She shrugged, then tried to smile through the tears she was holding back. “But that’s not me. I like people. I try to get along. I like people here. I like my neighbors. They’re nice.”

“Your husband’s views,” Bourque said slowly, “sound similar to those espoused by the Flyovers.”

Eileen nodded. “That sounds like something Otto might have mentioned, but when he started in on this, I didn’t listen to much. What are Flyovers?”

Bourque said, “It’s an alt-right group that says the real Americans are the ones the elites fly over when they go from coast to coast.”

Eileen looked confused. “It can’t be the same group. I was watching the news yesterday, wondering if there might have been a car accident or something that might have involved Otto, and there was something about a bombing in Boston, and they mentioned that group. But Otto wouldn’t want anything to do with people like that.”

“Does Otto spend a lot of time on the net?”

Eileen’s face darkened. “Maybe. But he’s not some pervert if that’s what you’re asking. He’s not on any of those porno sites. And he’s not in some chat room talking to women, either. Not Otto.”

Bourque glanced at Delgado, who was no doubt thinking what he was thinking. If Otto was their guy, and it was looking as though he might be, when they left this house they’d be taking his computer with them.

“Mrs. Petrenko,” Bourque said, “do you know whether your husband was having any disagreements with anyone? Personally or professionally? Maybe there was someone who had a grudge against him?”

“No. Otto is a good man.”

“Has he ever been in any kind of trouble?”

“Trouble?”

“With the police? Has he ever been arrested?”

She bit her lip. “It was a long time ago.”

Delgado asked, “When was this?”

“Ten, eleven years, I think? It was a misunderstanding. Otto and a friend, they were on an out-of-town job, had too much to drink, and broke some furniture in a motel. The police were called. But Otto and the other man, they agreed to pay for the damages, and the charges were dropped.”

Bourque slowly nodded his head. “So if he was arrested, they probably took his fingerprints.”

Eileen shook her head. “It was long ago. He did the right thing. He paid them.”

Delgado smiled. “I’m sure he did. Let’s move on. Can you describe his behavior the last few weeks? Did he seem any different to you? Did he seem worried about something?”

Eileen thought about that. “Maybe a little.” They waited. She put a hand to her forehead, then took it away, as if taking her own temperature. “He’s been in touch with his family.”

“Is that odd?” Bourque asked.

She shrugged. “Usually, at Christmas maybe, he calls his brother, asks how his kids are, or he’ll check in with his sister if it’s her birthday. But these last few weeks, he’d just call to say hi, or he’d send them an email. I mean, he likes them, they’re family, but he’s never shown all that much interest before.”

“Did he say why he was doing that?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. “It was like... it was like he was worried about them. I heard him say to his sister that they should have an alarm system. And I heard him ask his brother if he’d noticed anyone watching the house. I asked Otto about that, when he got off the phone, and he said we live in an age when we need to be careful, that was all.”

“Where do his brother and sister live?” Delgado asked.

“His brother’s back in Cleveland. His house is around the block from where ours used to be. And his sister lives in Vegas. She’s a blackjack dealer.”

“Have you talked to them since your husband went missing?”

Eileen Petrenko shook her head. “I didn’t want to alarm anyone. And... and if Otto’s just done something stupid, I don’t want to have to explain it later.”

“Stupid how?” Bourque asked.

“I don’t know. Sometimes men do stupid things. They have too much to drink, they... have some midlife crisis or something.” She tried to laugh. “Maybe he bought a motorcycle and decided to drive across the country.” But her laughter turned immediately to tears. “He would never do that. It’s not... it’s not like him.”

Bourque took out his pad. “Could you give me your brother-and sister-in-laws’ names and numbers?”

“Anatoly Petrenko, and Misha Jackson. That’s her married name.” She left the room briefly and returned with a cell phone. She sat back down, opened up the contacts on the phone, and recited two phone numbers for Bourque.

The two detectives gave each other a subtle glance. It was time.

“Mrs. Petrenko,” Delgado said, “you provided a picture and a general description of your husband when you first called the police.”

“That’s right.”

“I wonder if you could provide a few more specifics. Perhaps, identifying marks.”

“Identifying marks? Like...”

Bourque said, “You know, birthmarks, perhaps a scar, a tattoo maybe.”

“Oh,” she said. “Otto does have a tattoo.”

“There you go,” Delgado said. “Can you describe it?”

“I can do better than that,” she said, picking up the phone again. She tapped on photos.

“Last summer, we went up to Cape Cod for a couple of days to see my cousin and her husband.” She swiped through the pictures until she found the ones she was looking for. “Here we go.”

She handed the phone to Delgado, who leaned in closer to Bourque so they could look at the picture together.

The photo showed Otto standing on the beach, ocean behind him, hands on his hips. He was shirtless, wearing only a pair of black swimming trunks, his belly hanging over the waist.

The photo offered a clear shot of his shoulder, and the coiled cobra tattooed on it.

“Ah,” said Delgado. “That is distinctive. What’s the story behind that?”

“He got it when he was in his early twenties and didn’t know better,” she said. “He and some of his stupid friends, they were at some bar where they had a cobra in a big cage, and if you could stay in the cage with it for five minutes, you got free drinks.”

“Jesus,” Bourque said.

“Otto was the only one who lasted that long, so he got the tattoo as a reminder.” Her voice dropped, as though someone were listening. “I bet it was defanged, or whatever they call it. The bar couldn’t risk having their customers poisoned.”

“You’re probably right,” Bourque said.

He looked into the woman’s face. He hated this part, always had. Telling someone a loved one was dead. It was the worst part of the job. He felt a slight constriction in his windpipe.

He had a couple more questions before he’d break the news.

“So why did you move here from Cleveland if your husband hates New York so much?” he asked.

“The company he worked for went out of business,” she said. “He sent out résumés all over the place, and the only firm that responded was here in New York. So even though he didn’t want to move, there really wasn’t much choice.” She smiled sadly. “Have to put food on the table, you know. I’ve been working, too. I got a job waiting tables, but I haven’t gone in since Otto’s been gone.”

“Right,” Delgado said. “You said earlier he didn’t show up for work yesterday or today?”

She nodded worriedly.

“We’d like the name of that boss,” Bourque said.

“Sure, of course,” Eileen said.

“What sort of work does your husband do, anyway?” Delgado asked.

“Elevator repair,” she said. “Otto services elevators.”

Fourteen

Mayor Richard Headley had arrived at his City Hall desk early and had made it clear to Valerie and the rest of his staff that unless the Statue of Liberty hiked up her skirt and waded over to Jersey City, he did not want to be disturbed. He muted his phone and brought up onto his screen a speech he was to deliver to the New York Conservation Authority the following week. Headley had speechwriters, but he hadn’t been happy with their attempts at this one, and he wanted to take a run at it himself. The speech was one of a series the mayor had been giving to various groups about the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the city. That included everything from establishing more charging stations for electric cars throughout the five boroughs to making all the cars in the city’s fleet 100 percent electric. It was easier said than done, but Headley had made a greener city one of his campaign planks and he wasn’t going to back down on it.

Converting larger vehicles, such as garbage trucks and fire engines, to electric power was a more formidable task, but scrapping conventional gas-powered cars, those that ran on fossil fuels, to battery power was an achievable goal. The city had already converted nearly 25 percent of its cars — basic four-door sedans — to electric power. They could be spotted by the small, green “NYG” logo on the back bumper. Glover had tried to talk his father into a big sticker that would cover most of the driver’s door, really give people the message, but Headley had thought that too over the top.

While he had the speech on his computer screen, the mayor made a few changes. Just a line here and there so it didn’t sound like he was giving the same speech he’d given the week before to a different group. He liked to work something fresh into each one so that the media would have something new to lead with. That assumed, of course, that the media was paying any attention at all. You tried to do what you thought was right, to make the city a better place, but did the media give you any credit for it? Not often. Certainly not when people like Barbara Matheson were making a big deal out of nothing. Sure, he gave a contract to Steelways, and yes, Arnett Steel had been a major contributor to his campaign, but Steelways had the best proposal for upgrading the subway’s switching system. What was he supposed to do? Recommend a less competent company that came in with a lower bid?

Journalists didn’t understand how the real world worked. They never had and never would.

Barbara Matheson was a perfect example of that. Never worked in business. Never hired or fired people. Never had to make distasteful, backroom payoffs with union leaders to make sure a job site wasn’t sabotaged.

Headley didn’t always like the way the world worked, but he wasn’t naïve enough to think he could change it. Journalists were. They expected more of those in charge than they did of themselves.

Hypocrites, the lot of them.

And yet, when you were in a job like Headley’s, you had to find a way to work with them. The media was one more obstacle to getting things done, like those unions, and government regulation.

Which was why Headley had been open to considering his son’s idea to bring Matheson into the tent with that lucrative offer to write his bio.

An idea that had blown up in their faces. For the time being, the project was on hold. Meetings with prospective publishers had been canceled.

The mayor had brought Glover into his office earlier that morning to tell him how badly he’d screwed up.

“She made us all look like fools,” Headley had said angrily while his son sat on the couch, knees together, head slightly bowed. “You should have known she’d say no, and that she’d go off and write about our proposal. What the fuck were you thinking?”

His son had raised his head long enough to say, “But you said to give it a—”

“So it’s my fault,” Headley had said. “You come up with a strategy that doesn’t work, and it’s my fault.” He paused. “Maybe it is. Who I pick to advise me, that’s on me.”

Before Glover could say anything else, his father had pointed to the door and said, “That’s all.”

There’d been no point trying to completely refute Matheson’s piece about what had transpired in the limo. As Chris had said, she’d probably recorded it. Valerie had issued a short statement to say that Matheson’s experience made her a leading candidate for a possible project, and had nothing to do with undermining her work at Manhattan Today. Valerie also had to clarify what the mayor’s political ambitions were. And that, she said, was to be the best mayor of New York that he could be.

As he reworked the speech, Headley found it difficult to concentrate. He hated personnel matters, especially when they involved Glover. He was still staring at the screen, struggling to find a way to give the speech some new life, when Valerie Langdon strode into the room. She pointed to the flashing light on his phone.

Valerie said, “It’s Alexander Vesolov.”

“Should I know who that is?” Headley said, slowly turning his head to look at her.

“The Russian ambassador.”

“What does he want? A reception or something? Just take down the details.”

“He wants to speak with you. Personally. He’s quite insistent. He sounds pretty agitated.”

Headley took his fingers off the keyboard and sighed. “Christ, somebody not notice his diplomatic plates and give him a parking ticket?”

Valerie said nothing. Headley sighed and reached for the phone. A smile came to his lips as instantly as if a switch had been thrown.

“Mr. Ambassador, always a pleasure.”

“Mr. Mayor,” said the heavily accented Vesolov on the other end.

“What can I do for you today?”

“We are very concerned, of course, about what has happened to Fanya Petrov.”

The mayor didn’t speak for several seconds, trying to place the name, wondering whether it was one he should know.

“I’m sorry, could you repeat that, Mr. Ambassador?”

As the ambassador did so, Headley scribbled the name on a scratch pad and held it up for Valerie to see. She made a Huh? face, but immediately got out her phone to do a search.

“This is a terrible, terrible thing,” Vesolov said. “This is a terrible blow to my country. It’s a terrible blow to the scientific community. Not just for Russia, but for the entire world.”

Valerie set her phone on the desk, screen up, under Headley’s nose. She’d found a Wikipedia page about the woman. Headley scanned it while he carried on the conversation.

“I can understand that,” the mayor said, speaking slowly and deliberately while he struggled to get up to speed. “Dr. Petrov’s work is certainly... groundbreaking. One of the leaders in her field.”

“Not anymore,” the ambassador said.

Headley decided he could not bluff any longer.

“I’m going to have to be frank here, Mr. Ambassador. You have me at a disadvantage. I’ve been in something of a bubble this morning. I do not know what has happened to Dr. Petrov. Has she been asked to leave the country? Is this a diplomatic issue? Because if it is, I’m not sure that I am the best one to talk to. I’d be more than happy to connect you with the State Department or any other appropriate agency.”

“Fanya Petrov is dead, Mr. Mayor.”

“I’m sorry. I did not know. My condolences. Perhaps you could bring me up to speed about what happened.”

“You know about the elevator accident?”

Ah, Headley thought. Something he did know a little about.

“Yes, of course. Very tragic. A horrible thing. I did not know Dr. Petrov was among the casualties. I somehow missed her name in the accounts of the incident. I knew one of the victims. Sherry D’Agostino. I visited the scene personally yesterday, and have directed my staff to—”

“Yesterday?” said Vesolov. “No, not that elevator accident. This happened this morning.”

Headley sat up in his chair, tossed the TV remote toward Valerie and pointed to the screen mounted on the wall. “This morning?” Headley said as Valerie started pushing buttons to bring the screen to life.

“You do not know this?”

One of the news channels popped up, but instead of local news there was a weather update. The mayor mouthed, Fuck!

Valerie came around the desk, forcing the mayor out of her way so she could start typing on his keyboard. She opened a browser and within seconds found an online news video, hit play with the volume off, and stepped back so Headley could watch it.

“I’m just getting more details now...” Headley said.

A woman was doing a remote outside the York Avenue apartment building, but the report was little more than her talking head. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read One Dead in Grisly Elevator Mishap.

“Of course,” Headley said, “the incident on York. Horrible, just horrible.”

“Fanya Petrov,” the ambassador said, “could very well have been on the cusp of some startling scientific discoveries. We have been in touch with her family in Moscow, and they are devastated.”

“I’ve no doubt. Please pass on our deepest sympathies.”

“How could something like this happen?” Vesolov asked. “Her head cut right off! A decapitation.”

Jesus, Headley thought. “It’s a terrible tragedy. These types of accidents are very, very rare.”

“Doesn’t seem that way,” the ambassador said. “One yesterday and one today?”

Headley struggled for an explanation. “I guess it’s like airplane crashes,” he said weakly. “We don’t have any for months, then two or three in quick succession. Mr. Ambassador, I’m going to personally check on the progress of this investigation and will report back to you myself.”

“Thank you, Mr. Mayor,” Vesolov said. “I look forward to hearing from you.” He ended the call.

Headley glared at Valerie. “Why didn’t I know about this?”

“I’d only just found out about it seconds before the ambassador called.”

“What’s the actual address where this happened?”

Valerie looked to her phone for details, and told him.

“I’ve been in that building,” he said. Headley put a finger to his chin, trying to remember. “A fund-raiser, I think. Last year.”

“How would you like to proceed?”

Headley sighed. “Get the car,” he said.

Alexander Vesolov took his hand from the receiver and leaned back in an oversized leather chair. He clasped his hands together over his considerable stomach and glanced at the large portrait of Vladimir Putin hanging on the wall to his right.

The door opened and a young, dark-haired woman with the most perfect posture in the world walked in.

“You were able to speak to the mayor directly?” she asked.

“I was,” Vesolov said.

“And how did it go?”

Vesolov wore a satisfied smile. “I was suitably outraged.”

The woman returned the smile and glanced, for half a second, at the portrait. “Would you like me to inform him?”

Vesolov shook his head. “No, I would like to do that myself.”

“Of course,” the woman said. “I will set up the call.”

Vesolov took his hands from their resting place atop his belly and leaned forward over the desk.

“How do the Americans say it?” he asked.

The woman was not sure what the ambassador was referring to, and waited.

He smiled, remembering. “We caught a break.”

Fifteen

What we’re trying to do,” Glover Headley explained to Arla Silbert as they entered a windowless City Hall office stocked with a dozen cubicles, “is not tell the public what it wants to hear, but gauge whether they’re getting the message we’re hoping to send. Are our policy proposals resonating? Is the message being heard?”

“Sure,” said Arla. “And is it?”

Glover offered half a shrug as they walked into the room, which was eerily quiet. There was no one working at any of the desks. “It’s mixed. That’s why we’re investing so much in the analytics. And we’re also studying New Yorkers’ feelings about Mayor Headley himself. This is one of my primary roles here in the mayor’s administration, this assessing of public opinion.”

“I looked you up,” Arla said, smiling. “I went to some of the same marketing courses as you did, I think.”

He nodded. “Yeah, I noticed that on your résumé, which was one of the reasons you were a leading candidate from the start. There are a lot of very good people in this department. You’ll learn a lot. Although,” and he grimaced, “you’re not going to learn much today. I’m really sorry there’s no one here right now. I forgot everyone’s off to a seminar this morning.”

“That’s okay.”

“Anyway, the mayor thinks very highly of the team down here. The work you’ll be doing for him is critical for future strategizing.”

Arla smiled. “You ever just call him Dad?”

Glover tucked his index finger between his neck and collar, as though his tie was too tight. “When it’s business, I try to be as professional as possible. But yeah, some days, he’s Dad.”

“He’s not Dad every day?”

Glover gave his dry lips a lick. “Well, of course he is.”

Arla sensed she was making Glover uncomfortable, so she shifted gears. “I read that before you got into all this marketing analysis, you were in high-tech.”

“I actually spent some time in Seattle, at Microsoft,” he said. “I even worked for Netflix for a while. When I was twelve, I could take apart just about any device and put it back together with my eyes closed.” He grinned. “If you’re having trouble with your modem, I’m the man to call.”

“Noted,” Arla said. “So, all the work you’ve done so far, what does it say about how New Yorkers feel about the mayor?”

“Depends what side of the fence you’re on, I guess. My father didn’t run on a Republican or Democratic ticket, but historically he has more ties to the Democrats. His father served back in the sixties in Congress as one. But Mayor Headley is not an ideological guy. He’s a pragmatist. He goes into a situation looking at both sides. He hasn’t got his mind made up beforehand. And there’s a lot he wants to do for the city. Improve transit. Keep taxes low. Boost tourism. And he has an ambitious environmental agenda. Electric cars, that kind of thing.”

“It seems that he has — can I really speak my mind here?”

“Yeah, sure. That’s what we’re going to be paying you for.”

“He has a lot of positives, like you say. The pragmatism, speaking his mind. But he’s seen as brusque and dismissive at times.”

Glover couldn’t stop himself from slightly rolling his eyes.

“That’s... certainly true.”

“And he’s been taking heat for favoring friends when it comes to awarding contracts.”

“You can’t believe everything you hear,” Glover Headley said. “There’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes that people never know about. So many things factor into the decision making. It may not make sense to the general public, but there are reasons things are done the way they’re done.”

“I’m sure that’s true,” Arla said.

“That’s why what we’re doing here is so important. One of our jobs is to counter the negativity, the false impressions that are created in the media. It doesn’t matter what the mayor says or does, there are some media outlets that will always find the negative angle.”

He stopped and waved his arm theatrically. “Anyway, this is your home away from home, right here.”

It was little more than a cubicle with cloth-covered dividers on three sides that offered a token amount of privacy from coworkers.

“Awesome,” Arla said.

Glover scanned the workerless room again. “I really wanted to introduce you to some people, but there’s not much sense interrupting their seminar. They should all be here after lunch and then—”

The sound of a text came from inside his suit jacket. “Excuse me,” he said, taking out the phone and reading the message. His forehead creased.

“What is it?” Arla asked.

“I’m going to have to cut your orientation session short,” he said apologetically. “There’s been an incident and the mayor wants to attend. I have to go.”

“What kind of incident?”

“I can’t believe it. Another elevator accident.” He looked at his phone again as another text came in. “And this one may have diplomatic overtones. Look, I really have to go. Let me grab a few reports you can sift through before everyone comes back later.”

Arla glanced about the empty room. “Let me toss out an idea.”

Glover waited.

“What if I came along? Watch the mayor do his thing?”

Glover’s expression bordered on fearful. “I’m not exactly in his good books today. I couldn’t, I mean, no offense, but I couldn’t, you know, take you in the mayor’s limo, someone who’s just been—”

Arla lightly touched his arm. “Relax. Tell me where you’re headed and I’ll get there on my own. I’ll just observe. I won’t get in the way. What better way to get a sense of the boss than to see him in action?”

Glover thought about it for two more seconds, then nodded. “It’s up near Rockefeller University. I’ll text you the exact address when I know it.”

Arla nodded. “See you there.”

Glover gave her a smile before spinning on his heels and running out the door.

Wow, Arla thought. Talk about being in the right place at the right time.

Sixteen

Bourque put Otto Petrenko’s laptop, sealed in an evidence bag, on the floor in front of him as he got into the passenger seat. Delgado got behind the wheel. Both were subdued. Eileen Petrenko stood at her front door, watching them through eyes filled with tears.

Moments earlier, they had told her about the body found on the High Line. While a positive identification had yet to be made, evidence suggested it could be her husband. The dead man was the approximate age and weight of Otto Petrenko. There was the cobra tattoo. The shark socks.

They’d attempted to ask her a few more questions. Did her husband often walk the High Line? Could he have gone there to meet someone? But the woman was too distraught to handle any more of their inquiries.

Delgado turned the key and headed south.

“So Otto’s killer,” Bourque said, “somehow knows Otto’s prints are on file somewhere.”

“So he makes sure we can’t take any,” Delgado said. “But we should be able to get those prints, see if we can get a match on the tip our guy left behind.”

“Confirmation’ll be nice,” Bourque said. “But it’s him.”

They were on their way to Petrenko’s employer, Simpson Elevator Maintenance. Bourque looked on his phone to see how many firms in New York did that kind of work. “There’s a shitload of them,” he said to Delgado. “I guess if you were Otto Petrenko, an out-of-work elevator fix-it man from Cleveland, New York would be the place to go to.”

“Yeah,” Delgado said.

“Went to Cleveland once. The downtown’s got a few tall buildings, but there’s this one huge skyscraper, looks like a mini — Empire State Building. Key Tower. Fifty-seven stories. Tallest building in Ohio.”

Delgado glanced at him. “Only you would know that.”

Their drive took them into the Hunters Point area of Queens. Vernon Boulevard was a north-south industrial street that followed the East River, just south of the Queensboro Bridge. When they found Simpson Elevator, Delgado drove through the open chain-link gate and parked between two pickup trucks. They’d learned from Eileen that the name of Otto’s boss was Gunther Willem.

They opened the door to the office. A chest-high counter topped with peeling linoleum greeted them. Bourque rested his elbows on it and called out “Excuse me” to a heavyset, gray-haired woman sitting at a desk.

When she turned, Bourque could see she was on the phone. She put her hand over the mouthpiece and said, “Help you?”

“Looking for Gunther Willem,” Lois said.

“Not a good time,” she said. Before she could go back to her call, Bourque waved his badge. “Oh,” she said.

She rested the receiver on her desk and shouted, “Gunth!”

From an adjoining office, a gruff voice replied, “What?”

“Visitors.”

There was a grumbled yet still audible, “Fuck,” and seconds later, Gunther Willem appeared. He had a crew cut, a round face, stood about five-five, and was nearly as broad as he was tall. His meaty arms hung out from his body and seemed to bounce as he walked. He spotted Delgado and Bourque and squinted.

“Yeah?”

Bourque still had his badge out. “Detective Bourque, and this is Detective Delgado.”

“I’m up to my eyeballs in shit,” he said. “Whatever this is, can it wait?”

“No,” Delgado said.

Willem took a second, accepted defeat, and waved for them to follow him back to his office. He dropped himself into an office chair that creaked under his weight, and the detectives sat in two plain wood chairs opposite his cluttered desk.

“I’m shorthanded and I got the city breathing down my neck, so make it quick,” he said. “This about some of the robberies along the street here? Guys stealing tools? Because we’re okay. I got two Dobermans in the yard at night, got no trouble on that score.”

“No,” said Delgado. “We’re here about Otto Petrenko.”

“Oh, him. He was a no-show yesterday and today. His wife’s goin’ bananas. He finally come home? Was he out on a bender or something?”

“We’re investigating,” Delgado said.

“Investigating what?”

“What happened to him.”

“What has happened to him? Because, like I said, I’m shorthanded.”

“What can you tell us about Mr. Petrenko?” Bourque asked.

Willem looked from one detective to the other. He quickly figured out the drill. They would ask the questions and he would answer them.

“I don’t know,” Gunther Willem said. “Reliable. Understands how things work, you know? Some people are born with it. They look at a machine and it’s like they’ve got X-ray vision. They can see the parts inside it. He’s pretty smart that way.”

“He came to you from Cleveland?” Delgado asked.

“Yeah. The company he worked for, they were mismanaged, went bankrupt. We were hiring. So he moved here. Guy’s good. Got two people out of a stuck elevator in the new Trade Center Tower one time.”

“Any problems?” Bourque asked.

“Like?”

“You tell us.”

“No, no problems. He does his job.”

“How about when he was off the clock?” Delgado asked. “Any issues you’re aware of? Drugs? Women? Trouble on the home front?”

“Like I said, nuthin’.”

“He socialize with the other guys who work here?”

Willem shrugged. “Some. They go out for a drink sometimes. Give each other the gears. Maybe they get together with the wives once in a while, do some barbecue.”

“You part of that?” Delgado asked.

Willem shrugged. “Not so much.”

“You got along with him?”

“Yeah.” His eyes narrowed when Delgado used the past tense. “What’s this about, anyway?”

“You know anything about who he might have hung out with who’s not with the company?”

Willem shook his head. “No. Not really.” He paused, as if remembering. “Well, there was that one guy.”

“What guy?” Delgado asked.

“Dropped by to see him once in a while.”

Bourque felt as though he’d gotten a carpet shock. “Who was he?”

“Just some guy, is all. I’d see the car pull up on the street there and Otto would go out and talk to him.”

“Did Mr. Petrenko say who he was?”

“I didn’t ask. You want to go talk to somebody, it’s none of my business.”

“Can you describe him?” Delgado asked.

Willem sighed with exasperation. “It was a guy. Whaddya want from me?”

“White? Black?” she asked, persisting.

“White. Uh, grayish hair.”

“Old guy?”

Willem looked up at the ceiling, as though the answer were written there. “No idea. He was too far away to tell.”

“Car?” Bourque asked.

“Jesus,” Willem said. “I don’t know. Something blue. Basic sedan, I think.”

“How many times did you see Petrenko meet with this man?”

“Two, maybe three times? Definitely more than once. I think I might have asked Otto once what the guy wanted.”

“What’d he say?” Delgado asked.

“I don’t remember exactly. I got the idea maybe Otto was helping him, like he was giving the guy some kind of advice.”

“About elevators?” Delgado asked. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to talk to you? Being the boss?”

Gunther shrugged. “Otto knows as much about elevators as I do. Probably more. And maybe it wasn’t advice about this kind of work. Maybe it was about something else. Maybe it was his long-lost cousin. I don’t know.” He paused, thinking. “There was one thing, though.”

They waited.

“Whenever he’s come back in from talking to that guy, Otto’s kind of quiet.”

“What do you mean, quiet?” Delgado asked.

“Just... like he’s got something on his mind.” He shrugged. “I don’t know. Worried, like. Maybe he owes this guy money or something and is having trouble meeting his payments. Although I don’t know why he’d have money problems. He’s pulling down seventy grand a year from me.”

“You got cameras?” Bourque asked.

“What?”

“On the property. Surveillance. That would pick up someone on the street.”

“Yeah, sure, of course. But the last time he was here was weeks ago. They don’t go back more than forty-eight hours.”

Delgado asked, “Did he ever talk about the Flyovers?”

“What’s that? A singing group?”

“Did Otto have strong political views?”

“We don’t talk a lot of politics here,” Willem said. “Well, other than shittin’ all over our useless president and useless governor and useless senators and useless mayor. But that’s about it. Listen, if you’re looking for Otto, I hope you find him. He’s one of the best guys I got. But the way you guys are talking about him, sounds like something’s happened.”

The detectives exchanged looks. Delgado said, “Mr. Petrenko is dead.”

Willem’s face fell. “Shit. What the hell happened?”

“That’s what we’re looking into,” she said.

He shook his head sadly. “Man oh man. There’s so many ways to get killed on the job here, and he buys it on his day off? Was it a car accident? Something like that?”

“Like I said, we’re looking into the circumstances.”

“Son of a bitch. I should give his wife a call. Soon as I get out from under all this other shit that’s going on.”

“What other shit would that be?” she asked.

“Like I said, the city’s on my ass. When two elevators go down in two days, and your company was one of the ones that ever did service calls in both those buildings over the past decade, that’s a fucking problem. They’ll be looking for someone to blame it on, you can be sure of that. But we do good work. And it might have been another company, or maybe we serviced an elevator there but not that one. No one is going to hang this on us, believe me.”

“Two elevators in two days?” Bourque asked.

“I heard about one yesterday,” Delgado said. “Was there one before that?”

“One since,” Willem said. “Few hours ago.”

“Would Otto Petrenko have worked on them?” Delgado asked.

“I hope no one here worked on them. But if anyone did, I hope it was Otto.”

“Why would you say that?”

Willem shrugged. “First rule at engineering school. Whenever something bad happens, you blame it on the dead guy.”

Seventeen

You almost ready?”

Eugene Clement was standing outside the bathroom of the InterMajestic Hotel room he and his wife, Estelle, had rented for their New York stay. The door was open an inch, giving her privacy, but still allowing her to carry on a conversation with her husband.

“Three minutes,” she called out.

Clement knew that meant at least ten, so he stopped hovering by the door and walked over to the small desk, where his phone was recharging. He detached it from the charging cord, took a seat on the end of the bed, and opened one of his news apps.

“I’m starving,” Estelle said. Her words were immediately followed by the sound of a hair dryer.

“Me too. If you’d hurry up, we could eat,” he said, thumbing through the latest news stories.

“What?” she shouted over the roar.

He didn’t respond. He was scanning the most recent headlines. One, in particular, caught his eye. An elevator accident. The second in two days. There were few details. The story was developing.

“My my,” Clement said softly.

The hair dryer went silent. “What did you say?” Estelle asked, opening the bathroom door wide.

“Nothing,” he said, turning to look at her. She was wearing one of the robes supplied by the hotel.

“You know where I’d like to go?” she said.

“Where?”

“I’d like to see Radio City Music Hall. I think they have tours.”

Clement nodded. “We can look into that. We could walk it from—”

The room phone started ringing.

“Who would that be?” Estelle asked.

Clement got up, walked around the side of the bed, and snatched up the receiver. “Hello?”

“Mr. Clement?” A woman’s voice.

“Yes?”

“Eugene Clement?”

“Who is this?” he asked.

“I’m Sheila Drake. I’m a booker for New York Day. It’s a—”

“I know what it is.”

“Who is it?” Estelle asked.

He covered the mouthpiece and snapped at her, “TV show.”

“Mr. Clement?” Drake said.

“Here.”

“We know you are in New York and would like to have you on the show today. We can send a car.”

“How did you know—”

“The Flyovers group is believed to be responsible for several recent bombings in—”

“That’s ridiculous. We can’t control people saying we had anything to do with those events. They’re horrible tragedies. We’re all about awareness, raising issues.”

“We’d like to talk to you about that. Give you a chance to make that point.”

“We’re here celebrating our anniversary. I don’t have time for—”

“Let me try to lay it out for you, Mr. Clement. We can pursue you down the sidewalk, shouting questions at you, and when we broadcast that you’re going to look like some kind of criminal. I think you’d be doing yourself a favor to come into the studio for a sit-down interview where you could make your case calmly, without creating some negative impressions. What do you say?”

Clement thought for a moment.

“Mr. Clement?”

He cleared his throat and asked, “What time?”

Eighteen

Chris Vallins was leaning up against the window of Blockheads, a small restaurant across from the Morning Star Café. He was tucked under the awning and, he thought, reasonably invisible, especially considering how wide Second Avenue was. The restaurant didn’t open until eleven, so no one was going to come out and tell him to move on.

He had a phone in his hand, set to take photos. He would have liked a camera with a telephoto lens, but even in New York, standing on the sidewalk wielding one of those was likely to attract attention.

He’d followed Barbara Matheson from her apartment to the café. Barbara, clearly, was a walker. She lived in Murray Hill on East Thirty-Seventh, between Lexington and Third. She came striding out of her place, headed for Third and turned left, staying on it for thirteen blocks, then hanging a right on Fiftieth and east one block to Second. The Morning Star was right around the corner. Chris had stayed half a block behind all the way, usually on the same side of the street. Barbara gave no indication of knowing she was being followed. She never looked back. She had met Chris only the one time, in the back of the mayor’s limo, but he figured his bald head was pretty distinctive, so he’d worn a Knicks ball cap. And unlike when he was in the limo, when he was wearing a suit, Chris had dressed this morning in old jeans, a button-down-collar blue shirt, and a brown leather jacket.

It wouldn’t have much mattered if he’d looked exactly as he had the day before. Like a lot of people, Barbara had her eyes glued to her phone even while she was walking. She seemed to possess a requisite skill for the modern world. She knew what was in her path without looking up. Her gift, however, had yet to be perfected. When she failed to notice a dog walker’s leash stretched out across her path, she tripped and nearly hit the sidewalk. If she was at all rattled by the near miss, she didn’t show it.

When she turned into the café, he kept on walking, then crossed the street at the next light and took up his position in front of Blockheads. Barbara had taken a seat in a booth close to the window. Chris couldn’t make out every detail, but at least he knew where she was. A few minutes later, another woman arrived. Younger, early to midtwenties. She slid into the booth opposite Barbara.

While they talked, Vallins mentally reviewed what he had already learned about Barbara Matheson.

The first bit of information was probably the most valuable. This thorn in the mayor’s side was not using her real name, at least not when she wrote her columns. Her real name, and the one she used for all her financial transactions, was Barbara Silbert. Vallins was well aware that novelists often chose to publish their books under pseudonyms, but was that an acceptable practice when it came to journalism? Could you really take potshots at politicians and others while hiding behind a name that was not your own?

Once he had determined Barbara’s true last name, he was able to find out plenty of other things about her. She was living in a sublet, paying $1,100 a month, which was a pretty good deal, considering the average was more than $3,000. Just as well her rent was a deal, considering that Manhattan Today was paying her a few pennies under a hundred thousand a year. That might have sounded like a lot to some, but you needed a lot to live right in Manhattan.

Barbara paid off her cards every month and was rewarded for that with a decent credit score. What was interesting about the statements he’d been able to access was not so much what was on them, but what was not. No Bloomies, no Saks, no Nordstrom. When Barbara bought clothes, she was not extravagant. The Gap, Macy’s, maybe Club Monaco if she really wanted to splurge. Not a shocker. All Vallins had seen her in was jeans and a top and a light jacket. Barbara spent most of her money at bars and restaurants. It didn’t look as though she ate much at home. Lots of diners, like the Morning Star. There were a few charges at liquor stores, so even if she didn’t make many of her own meals, at least she drank at home.

About fifteen minutes after the younger woman joined Barbara, she got up to leave.

Chris took off his right glove so that the camera icon on his phone would work when he touched it with his finger. Barbara exited the restaurant. Chris hit the button and held it, firing off multiple shots as the unknown woman stood briefly, got her bearings, and started walking south. Chris lowered the phone as she crossed Fiftieth and hailed a cab. She got in, and the cab took off down Second.

Barbara stayed. She appeared to be ignoring her breakfast.

Chris wondered who the young woman might be. If Barbara’d had a Facebook page, Chris might have found a picture of her there, if she was a friend. But Barbara was not on Facebook. She had a substantial Twitter following, though. Just under thirty thousand. But Twitter was not typically where one posted photos of friends. It was for mouthing off, something Barbara did plenty of.

Five minutes after the young woman left, Barbara got up, paid the bill, and emerged onto the sidewalk. Would she head back toward home? Walk to the Manhattan Today office? These days, what with half the world working from home, there might not be much reason for Barbara to show up at an actual office.

She headed north. As she walked, she did the same thing she’d done earlier. She took out her phone. It was welded to her palm, Chris thought.

She glanced down at it as she crossed Fifty-First. Chris let out a derisive sigh. All these people, looking at their phones when they should be watching where they’re going. Getting hit by cars, walking head-on into other idiots who were also staring at their phones. There was a video on the news the other day of a woman falling into some open sidewalk cellar doors, the kind you saw all over the city to accommodate deliveries.

Barbara barely took her eyes off the device the whole next block, but somehow she knew there was a red light at Fifty-Second, and she stopped instead of stepping into the path of a panel truck.

Chris was only a few feet behind her. Close enough to hear her phone when it started to ring. A curious ringtone, at that. It sounded like someone tapping away furiously on an old manual typewriter.

Barbara put the phone to her ear. As the light changed, she continued walking north.

Chris couldn’t make out anything she was saying. But whatever the caller was telling her was serious enough to make Barbara stop dead in the middle of the sidewalk and listen.

Chris had to hit the brakes to avoid walking into her. He sidestepped around her and kept on walking. When he reached the next corner, he turned and looked back. Barbara was tucking her phone into her purse and stepping out into the street to hail a cab.

Shit.

He looked north and saw several available ones coming their way. Second Avenue ran only southbound, so the cabs were spread out across its width. One on the far side veered across, aiming for Barbara and cutting off several other vehicles in the process.

Chris waved and caught the attention of another cab driver. The car swerved toward him. By the time he got into the back of his taxi, Barbara was pulling away.

“Where to?” asked the driver, a heavily bearded man with one hand on the wheel and the other holding a half-eaten apple.

“That taxi right ahead? That picked up that woman? I’m going where she’s going.”

“Where’s that?” the driver asked.

“Don’t know. Just follow it.”

“Ah, like in the movies,” the driver said, taking one last huge bite of the apple, powering down his window, and tossing the core.

The miniscreen bolted to the back of the Plexiglas partition was playing some snippets from daytime TV. Chris made several unsuccessful attempts to mute it before giving up. He was thinking if he could get his hands on Barbara’s phone long enough to fiddle with the settings, he’d be able to track her location without having to chase after her.

Barbara’s cab was continuing straight on down Second. Past Forty-Second, past Thirty-Fourth, finally hanging a right on Twenty-Seventh. The cab went halfway down the block toward Third before it pulled over.

“Stop here,” Chris said when his own cab was about ten car lengths back.

He tossed a ten through the partition window and was out of the car before Barbara had exited hers. He pulled out his phone and pretended to look at it while Barbara settled up with her cabbie. She got out, walked a few doors west on the north side, stopped to study the building she was in front of, and went in.

Chris crossed the street so he could check out the address without standing directly in front of it.

Barbara had gone into a funeral home. Clappison’s Funeral Services, to be exact.

Nineteen

Arla grabbed a cab.

When the taxi was half a dozen blocks from her destination, it stopped dead, not going anywhere. Traffic was insane. Arla bailed and ran the rest of the way. She jogged Central Park three mornings a week, so she didn’t get winded, but she sweated through her work clothes. Glover had texted her the York Avenue address, and she got there before the mayor and his entourage.

Along the way, her mind went back to the brief meeting she’d had with her mother. It had gone pretty much as she’d expected. Maybe it would have been better to break the news to her about her new job in an email. Face-to-face, things had a way of getting unpleasant in a hurry.

Arla wondered if that awkwardness was what she’d wanted all along. To see the expression on her mother’s face when she told her whom she was going to be working for. To revel in her shock and disappointment. Of course, if that really was why Arla had told Barbara in person, it meant her mother wasn’t wrong suggesting Arla took the job just to get under her mother’s skin.

In the moments when Arla was honest with herself, she had to admit there was something to that. Arla had, to put it mildly, conflicted feelings about her mother. At some level, yes, she loved her. After all, she was her mother. And there were even times when Arla could understand what it must have been like for Barbara, to have found herself pregnant at such a young age, to not want to have to give up a career.

At least she didn’t abort me, Arla told herself in moments when she was inclined to be generous.

But then there were the other times, when she just didn’t give a shit about her mother’s feelings. She should have been there for me, each and every fucking day.

So yes, maybe she was sticking it to her mother. But the flip side of all this was: Should Arla have turned down a great opportunity just because it would make her mother unhappy? Didn’t she have her own life to live? Wasn’t she entitled to make her own choices? Arla had actually been concerned, when she’d applied, that her potential employer would make the connection. If they found out Barbara was her mother, they’d probably deny her the job. Would that have been fair?

She stopped thinking about all that when she reached the scene.

York Avenue was blocked off. There was no sense of pandemonium, but there were half a dozen FDNY vehicles, as many marked police cars, and two or three unmarked ones. There was one lone TV van, and not an ambulance in sight. Arla was guessing the scene had been busier earlier. A couple of hours must have gone by since the accident.

Flimsy police tape served amazingly well to keep people from entering the building. Without any official City Hall ID — she was hoping she’d have one before long — Arla wasn’t expecting anyone to let her pass. She’d have to wait for Glover, once he had arrived with his father and whoever else was coming, to see if she could get in.

Looking south down York she saw a black town car approaching. It stopped and Glover got out, followed by Mayor Headley. A woman Arla knew to be Valerie Langdon emerged from the other side. One of the news crews spotted their arrival and went charging in their direction. Arla expected the mayor to stop and say something for the cameras, but instead he made a path straight toward the building.

As the three of them got closer, Arla tried to catch Glover’s eye. But he was walking directly alongside his father, glancing down at his phone, presumably looking for updates he could pass along to the mayor. When they reached the tape line, close to where Arla was standing, she worked her way through the crowd, reached out, and tapped Glover on the arm.

He glanced her way, reacting with mild surprise, as though it had slipped his mind that she was going to find her own way here.

“Hey,” he said, blinking. Then, it all came back. He glanced at Headley, who was several steps ahead, having already ducked under the tape line.

“Right,” Glover said, seizing the opportunity and lifting the tape for Arla. “Come on.”

She slipped under it. The closest NYPD officer, having seen she was with the mayor’s party, made no attempt to stop her. Arla stuck close to Glover. He was her hall pass. If she got separated from him, the police might boot her ass out of there.

Arla felt her pulse quickening as she headed for the entrance. Here she was, on her very first day, walking alongside one of the mayor’s key advisers, strolling right past the police barricades, a dozen steps behind the mayor himself (and hoping he would not see her and ask who the hell she was), getting an up-close look at a tragedy that would be all over that evening’s news.

Did it get any better than this?

They went into the building’s large atrium-style lobby. The bank of four elevators was along the back wall, and the doors to one were wide open. Standing outside, peering in, were two men and one woman in firefighter garb, and what Arla guessed were a fire department captain — in dress blues, the FDNY patches on his shoulders — and a woman Arla recognized as the city’s new chief of police. Bringing out the big guns, she thought. Sure, an elevator accident was a tragedy if someone got killed, but it wasn’t exactly John Lennon getting shot out front of the Dakota, was it?

As if he could read her mind, Glover sidled up to her and whispered, “She was a big deal.”

“Who was a big deal?” she asked, leaning her head toward his.

“The woman who got killed. Some scientist from Russia.”

“What happened to her? Where’s—”

Arla stopped herself. She’d spotted what everyone was looking at. On the floor of the elevator was a bloody, pulpy mass, about the size and shape of a cabbage. Next to it, what appeared to be an arm in a blue sleeve. The elevator floor was a blood-covered mess.

When Arla suddenly turned away she found herself up against Glover Headley’s chest.

“Oh, God,” she said.

But she quickly pulled away before he could place a comforting hand on her back. Her sense of horror and revulsion was displaced almost immediately by the feeling that she needed to be professional. She was not going to be that horror movie heroine who clung to the male lead for comfort. So she spun about and looked back in the general direction of the elevator without focusing on the head and the arm and the blood.

I will not throw up.

Mayor Headley joined the bigwigs huddled in conversation.

“What’s happening?” Arla asked Glover.

“Getting up to speed,” he said. “Stay here. I gotta go.”

Arla did as she was told as he went to this father’s side. There was more discussion; at one point, the chief of police whispered something to the mayor while she pointed to the far end of the lobby.

Arla looked that way. A man in his mid- to late thirties was sitting on a lobby couch with his arm around a young boy. A father and son, Arla guessed.

The mayor nodded and broke away from the crowd. He headed for the father and son and said a few words to them. The man’s head went up and down once, at which point the mayor perched his butt on the oversized coffee table in front of the couch, which put him only inches away from the boy.

Arla desperately wanted to know what this was about.

She slipped around the outer perimeter of the lobby, coming at the couch from the other side. There was a large pillar behind it, and she took a position along one side where she was unlikely to be seen. As cover, she took out her phone and pretended to be checking something.

Although the pillar blocked her view, she could make out the conversation reasonably clearly.

“Your name’s Colin?” the mayor asked.

“Yes,” the boy said softly.

“You know who I am?”

“You’re the mayor?”

“That’s right.”

“My dad told me when you walked in. You’re like the mayor of all of New York?”

“I am.”

“I thought you’d be bigger.”

Headley chuckled at that. “It’s like with movie stars. When you see them in person you wonder why they aren’t twenty feet tall. The police were telling me what a brave young man you are.”

“Oh?”

“You went through something pretty horrible. But here you are, with your dad here, and you’re holding up okay, aren’t you?”

“I guess.”

“Missing school.”

“Yeah,” said Colin. “My dad phoned and told them I’d be late.”

“Well, you ask me, I think you should get the whole day off. What do you think, Dad?”

Arla heard the father speak for the first time. “Yeah. I’m thinking we might go to the movies, or maybe the Museum of Natural History.”

“I like the whale,” Colin said.

“Oh, yeah, the whale is something,” Headley said. “You wonder, how can it float up there, right? The police and the fire department folks say that not only were you brave, you were very helpful to them, explaining what happened.”

“Her head came right off,” the boy said, keeping his voice steady. “The rest of her is still upstairs in the hall. They should tell people so they don’t come out of their apartments and see her there.”

“I think that’s been done, Colin, but that’s a good idea, and nice of you to be thinking of other people’s feelings. Anyway, I want to talk about you for a minute. I’m gonna give you my card here, and one for your dad, and what we’re going to do is have you for dinner at Gracie Mansion.”

“At what?”

“That’s where the mayor — that’s where I live. I get to stay there while I’m serving the people. If I get voted out in the next election, then they kick me out.”

“You could live with us,” Colin offered. “Could he live with us, Dad? We have the spare room.”

“I would imagine the mayor has a backup plan,” the father said.

“I do,” Headley said. “But I’ll keep your offer in mind.”

“Why do they call it Gracie Mansion?” Colin asked.

“Good question,” the mayor said. “It was built, way back in 1799, by a man named Archibald Gracie.”

“Oh.”

“I’ll show you all around when you come.”

“I’ve never been in a mansion,” the boy said.

“Anyway, you, and your dad, and your mom will be most welcome.”

“She lives in Omaha,” the boy said. “I see her at Christmas.”

“Okay then. You and your dad will be my dinner guests.”

“What will we be having?” the boy asked.

“Colin,” the father said, gently reproachful, “you don’t—”

“It’s okay,” Headley said. “What would you like?”

“Hot dogs.”

“I think my chef can handle that.”

Arla moved toward the edge of the pillar, hoping to get a peek. Headley extended a hand for Colin to shake, but instead the boy slipped off the couch and threw his arms around the mayor’s neck. Headley wrapped his arms around the boy and held him for several seconds.

When they let go, Headley said, “You call me anytime.”

The mayor stood, shook the father’s hand, and went back to rejoin the other emergency officials.

No cameras, Arla thought. No TV crews. No reporters hanging about. They were all still outside, beyond the police tape. Not even Glover or Valerie Langdon had witnessed Headley’s visit with the boy and his dad.

They’d hired her to analyze data. But that wasn’t going to stop Arla from suggesting that they find a way to highlight some other sides of Headley’s personality.

That was what her gut was telling her.

Twenty

A silver-haired man in a black suit spotted Barbara Matheson entering the lobby of Clappison’s Funeral Services and approached noiselessly, as though floating on air.

“May I be of assistance?” he asked in a soft, unctuous manner.

“I’m looking for the Chatsworths,” she said. “Ken and Sandy. Parents of Paula.”

“Yes, of course,” he said solemnly. “A terrible, terrible thing. This way.”

Barbara realized she was speaking barely above a whisper, and this man’s reply was equally sedate, even though there was no one else around. There was something about entering a funeral parlor that made people act like they were in a library. Someday, she thought, she’d like to throw a party in a place like this. Take her best shot at waking the dead.

Barbara followed the funeral director through a set of doors and down a hallway to a small receiving room. Broadloomed, four big comfy chairs, velvet drapes at the window. Barbara thought that if it weren’t a room for grieving, it would be perfect for choosing which whore you wanted to spend the next hour with.

In one of the chairs was a woman Barbara assumed had to be Paula Chatsworth’s mother, and the man pacing the room with a phone to his ear must be her husband, Ken. Sandy Chatsworth had no phone in her hand, and seemed to be staring off into space. Dazed, numb with shock, Barbara guessed.

But she did look up when Barbara came into the room. Her eyes were pink and puffy.

“Ms. Chatsworth?” she said.

“Barbara?” Sandy said, suddenly focusing, extending her hands, which Barbara took in hers. Ken was still pacing the room. “Ken, it’s—”

He held up a finger. The introduction would have to wait.

“Hello?” he said into the phone. “Listen, I’ve been on hold for fifteen goddamn minutes. I want someone to tell me — hello? All I want is some answers about—”

He took the phone away from his ear, his mouth wide with astonishment. He looked ready to spout a series of obscenities, but then, mindful of where he was, changed his mind.

“I got cut off,” he said, looking at his wife. “After waiting that long, they hung up on me! The sons of — Jesus!”

“Keep your voice down,” Sandy said.

He shook his head, still not believing it. Finally, he looked blankly at Barbara, as if wondering who the hell she was.

Barbara reached out a hand. “Mr. Chatsworth. I’m Barbara.”

“Oh, right, sorry,” he said, hitting his forehead with the butt of his hand. “God, you got here fast.”

“You caught me at a good time,” she said. “How are you doing? A dumb question, I know, but—”

“They’re getting Paula ready to send home,” Sandy said. “We’re going to have a service in Montpelier on Friday. So many people back home want to pay their respects to Paula. Everyone is devastated.”

“Of course,” Barbara said.

“All her friends from school, at least those who haven’t moved away like Paula did, are coming. Flowers have been coming to the house. Thank goodness our neighbor’s been watching, taking them in. And one of her friends set up some kind of Facebook page, but I don’t know much about that.” Sandy’s voice trailed off, as though she realized that flowers and Facebook pages weren’t very important.

“How’d you get here?” Barbara asked Ken, since he’d been so worried about the logistics of coming to New York.

“Flew,” he said. “I don’t think... I don’t think I could have driven in this traffic.” He turned his head, as if looking through the walls to the street outside.

Barbara nodded. “Even those of us who live here can’t get used to it.” She paused. “Who were you trying to get on the phone?”

“Someone with the city.”

“Who? What department?”

“I’ve been getting bounced all around. I want to talk to whoever’s in charge of making sure the goddamn elevators in this city are safe. I want to know how this happened. I want to know who screwed up and got our daughter killed.”

“Sure,” Barbara said. “You want answers. I understand that.”

“No one’s telling us anything,” Sandy said.

“Sometimes,” Barbara said slowly, “and I certainly don’t want to be making apologies on behalf of the city, but things can get overlooked. I don’t mean with the elevators, but maybe that’s true. I mean the personal touch. People doing their jobs forget about how this is all actually affecting you. They forget there are folks like you who are really hurting and deserve to be updated on what’s going on. And every one thinks it’s someone else’s job to talk to family. But an accident like what happened with Paula, that’s the sort of thing that’s going to be fully investigated. At some point, someone will talk to you.”

“Oh, someone already came to talk to us,” Sandy said. “That’s why we called you.”

“Yeah,” Ken said.

“Who?” Barbara asked.

“Didn’t give us a name,” Ken said. “Sandy asked if he had a card or anything he could leave with us but he didn’t give us one. He just said he’d find a way to get in touch with us if and when he needed to.”

“He was,” Sandy said slowly, “kind of nice. I mean, he said all the right things, about expressing his condolences and all.”

“But he didn’t say who he was or who he represented?” Barbara asked. “Was he someone who works here, at the funeral home?”

Sandy shook her head. “He made it sound like he was with the city, you know, the city government. Whoever looks into these types of things.”

“So what did he say? What did he want? Did he find you here?”

Ken nodded. “He said he’d called around, found out where Paula had been taken after she... after she left the hospital.”

Sandy said, “He said he wanted us—”

“—to keep our mouths shut,” Ken said, cutting her off.

“What?”

“He didn’t say it like that,” Sandy said. “But that was the implication.”

“Tell me what he said,” Barbara said, feeling a tingling at the back of her neck. “Exactly. Or as best as you can remember.”

Sandy thought a moment. “He said he was very sorry for our loss. He said it was a very terrible thing that happened. He said all aspects of the incident were being looked at and—”

“Is that the word he used? ‘Incident’? As opposed to ‘accident’?”

She looked to her husband, who nodded. “Yes. He called it an incident. Anyway, he said they were looking into it, and asked for our patience, and said we weren’t to talk to anyone about it.”

Barbara blinked. “Why?”

“He didn’t mean, like, friends and family,” Ken said. “He meant, well, people like you.”

“He didn’t want you talking to the press? To the media?”

Ken nodded. “He said we needed to keep a lid on this while the cause was being determined. So, anyway, this was early this morning, and after he left, I started thinking, what the hell, this is America, last time I checked, right?”

“Pretty sure,” Barbara said.

“And if we want to talk about what happened to our daughter, and we ask for answers, that should be our right. But first I wanted to call around and see what they’d found out. Maybe find out which department that guy was from. And no one wants to talk to me. I keep getting passed from department to department.”

“I don’t understand why they’d want to keep you from talking to the press,” Barbara said. “I wonder if they’ve approached the families of others who were in that elevator.”

Sandy said, “At one point, he said they needed time to find out who did this, and then he corrected himself right away, and said, how it happened.”

Barbara blinked. “Who?”

Sandy nodded. “But he took it right back.”

“What’d this guy look like?”

Sandy said, “About six feet tall. Black hair, very short and trim. Nice suit and tie. Clean shaven. And his shoes,” she said slowly. “I remember his shoes.”

“What about his shoes?”

“They were really nicely shined. Remember that, Ken?”

“I didn’t pay any attention to his goddamn shoes,” he said.

“And his car was parked right out front in a no-parking zone,” she said. “I watched when he left. He got in the passenger side, but whoever was driving wasn’t worried about parking it illegally.”

“Can you describe the car?” Barbara asked. “Any city markings on it? Did it say NYPD on the side?”

Sandy shook her head no. “It was a big SUV. All black, with dark windows.”

Ken asked, “Who drives around in a car like that?”

A couple of people came to mind for Barbara. Well, not people, exactly, but agencies. Why would those agencies be interested in an elevator mishap, tragic as it was?

Twenty-One

Richard, oh, Richard!”

The mayor turned when he heard his name and saw a woman heading his way. Early eighties, her slender frame draped in black silk. Her billowy pants were half covered by a blouse that came down nearly to her knees. Her silver hair was pulled into a tight bun at the back of her head, and she viewed the world through oversized, round glasses with thick rims. Heavy on the makeup, huge black eyebrows.

She had her arms outstretched as she closed the distance between them.

“Margaret,” Headley said, placing his hands on her shoulders and delivering air kisses to both cheeks. “The Queen of the Sycamores. I knew I’d been in this building before.”

When he’d first heard the address of this second elevator catastrophe, he was sure there’d been a campaign fund-raiser here. Margaret Cambridge had invited all her wealthy friends to a party so extravagant they’d all felt obliged to give the maximum contribution allowed under the law to Headley’s campaign. It was a shame about the rules that prohibited massive infusions of cash from individuals. Margaret’s late husband, whose name adorned half a dozen buildings in the city, had left her a billion or two, not that anyone was counting, and she’d have given Headley a million bucks if she could get away with it.

“I heard you were here,” said Margaret. “I walked down the whole way.”

“Good God,” he said. “From the penthouse?”

“Well, I didn’t have much choice,” she said. “They shut all the elevators down when that one went haywire. I hope they open the others before long because there’s no way my ticker’s going to survive the walk back up.”

He rested a comforting hand on the woman’s shoulder. “I’m sure they will.”

“If not, a couple of those handsome firemen can carry me back up,” she said, and cackled. She then quickly put her hand over her mouth and glanced around. “I better not laugh. Considering what’s happened.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “It was Dr. Petrov, wasn’t it?”

He nodded solemnly. “A terrible loss to the scientific community, I’m told.”

“Maybe, but she was a total b-i-t-c-h,” Margaret said. “I don’t move as fast as I used to, and she’d see me coming for the elevator but do you think she’d hold it? Not a chance. The Commie slut.”

“Well,” said Headley.

Margaret leaned in closer and whispered conspiratorially, “She was Russian, you see.”

“Yes, I know. I heard from the ambassador a short while ago.”

“I don’t like it when we’ve got any of those in the building. They’re all spies, you know. Rockefeller’s full of them.”

Headley smiled. “Always good to be on your guard.”

She smiled. “Will you be at the party Thursday?”

Headley had to think a moment. “Top of the Park?” he said.

Margaret nodded. “It’s going to be the event of the year. A party in the sky.”

“I’ll be there. Wouldn’t miss it. Are you on the list?”

Margaret looked incensed at the suggestion she might not have been invited. “Please,” she said. “It’s Rodney Coughlin’s project. He and I go way back.” She winked.

Headley grinned. “He’s been a close friend to me for a long time, as well. Perhaps not as close.”

Margaret sniffed. “He only gave you a bigger party to show me up, you know.”

Headley gave her bony arm a friendly squeeze. “You could always throw another one.”

She laughed.

“Mr. Mayor?”

Headley turned. Annette Washington, the city’s chief of police, the first black woman to ever hold the position, wanted his attention. “Chief,” he said.

“Sorry to interrupt.” She tipped her head to draw him away.

“See you Thursday, Margaret,” Headley said. “Bring your dancing shoes.”

He pulled himself away and followed Washington into the building’s management office off the lobby. Already there were the fire chief and a small, balding man in his forties, and a formidable-looking man in a dark suit. Early sixties, just over six feet, strong jaw. The kind of guy who, if he wasn’t already in charge, looked like he was about to assume that role.

Headley looked at him and thought: Federal.

The man extended a hand. “Mr. Mayor. Brian Cartland, Homeland Security.”

Yup, Headley thought.

What was a guy from Homeland doing at an accident like this? It didn’t make any sense to Headley, unless it had something to do with the fact that the person killed in this accident was some noted Russian scientist who was an expert in who the fuck knew what? What a crazy world, where a malfunctioning elevator could lead to a diplomatic incident. Headley was betting the ambassador had been on the line to the White House before he’d called him at City Hall. That would explain Homeland’s attendance.

“Good to meet you,” Headley said warily. “What’s going on?” He looked at the fire and police chiefs and then turned his attention to the small, balding man.

He said, “Mayor Headley, Martin Fleck. I work for you.” He flashed a smile. “Department of Buildings, elevator inspection division.”

“So again I ask, what’s going on?” Headley asked.

“That’s very much what we want to determine,” Cartland said. “Elevator accidents don’t happen every day. You’ve had two this week, and it’s only Tuesday. As a matter of routine, after yesterday’s incident, we got in touch with Mr. Fleck here. As it turns out, Homeland has a suboffice in that building, so our interest was piqued. Needless to say, how an elevator goes up and down is not Homeland’s area of expertise, so Mr. Fleck was able to enlighten me.”

“It’s true,” Fleck said. “Elevator accidents don’t happen every day. Although about thirty people, on average, are killed in elevator mishaps every year, and some seventeen thousand Americans are injured on an annual basis, although those numbers also include escalators.”

“Okay,” said Headley slowly.

“And of those thirty who are killed, probably about half of them are going to be folks who work on them. An elevator technician slips and falls down the shaft, or he’s at the base of the shaft and an elevator comes down and crushes him, or he gets caught between the moving parts. All totally avoidable, but someone gets careless. Horrible when it happens, but not totally shocking, given the dangerous conditions in which an elevator technician works.”

Headley was getting impatient, but decided to let Fleck continue with Elevator 101.

“Stats show that one in every twelve million elevator trips results in a mishap, and often that may be as simple as a door failing to close or open properly,” Fleck continued. “When passengers in an elevator are injured, it’s not usually a fault of the elevator itself. For example, a woman goes into an elevator with some big flowing scarf and it gets caught in the doors, and the elevator stars to rise and that scarf is stuck at the floor below and the other end is still wrapped tightly around the woman’s neck and—”

“I get the picture,” the mayor said.

“Sometimes you get an idiot who wants to elevator-surf and—”

“I’m sorry, what?” asked Headley.

“Elevator-surf. Gaining access to the shaft and riding on top of the car for the thrill of it. Kids do it. The problem is, there are cables galore and parts that stick out, and the cables are greasy, and you’re either going to fall and get caught between the car and the shaft, or—”

“Just tell me what happened here,” the mayor said.

“Well,” Fleck said, “Petrov, this Russian science lady, she’s partly to blame.”

Headley gave the Homeland agent a weary glance. “If it was her fault, why are we all standing here?”

“It wasn’t her fault that the elevator stopped,” Fleck said. “It was her mistake to climb out. Actually, if she’d stopped there, she’d have been okay, but according to the boy, she reached back into the opening for her purse and that was when the elevator suddenly continued its descent, and she got caught and, well, lost her head. But the fact that the elevator stopped in the first place is the thing we’re looking at.”

“We think it may have been sabotaged,” Cartland said.

“Sabotaged how?”

“We’re not sure,” the Homeland Security agent said.

“Not sure?”

“It might have been hacked.”

The mayor’s eyes widened. “Hacked? Is that possible?”

“Yes,” Cartland said. “It’s not an easy thing to do, but it can be done. The elevator system here was recently upgraded. Loads of high-tech stuff. The more high-tech things get, the greater chance there is of messing about with them. Those old-fashioned ones, with the big metal gates you had to close, that needed a guy to run them, those didn’t get hacked.”

“But you don’t have any actual proof that that’s what happened,” the mayor said.

“No,” said Cartland.

This time, Fleck weighed in. “In yesterday’s incident, as far as we can tell, given that there are no survivors, the car started acting like it had a mind of its own. Passing floors riders had pressed buttons for. That part sounds a bit like a hack, like someone was messing with the system. They’ve got an upgraded system over there, too. So up and down they went, and then, when they were around the twentieth floor, the car plummeted. That suggests a total override of the system.”

“How could that happen?”

“If someone had control of it. Someone outside the elevator itself.”

Headley looked at Cartland. “What the fuck are we looking at here?”

The Homeland Security agent looked grim. “We’re still assessing. But we have to consider the possibility that one or both of these elevator accidents were not accidents at all.”

Headley studied the man. “So if they weren’t accidents, who’s doing it? If you’re here, does that mean terrorism? Does ISIS know how to hack elevators? They’ve decided to stop running cars and trucks into crowds? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? I mean, as far as terrorism is concerned, it’s about the most inefficient method I can imagine. And not only that, the level of expertise required would be off the scale. You want to kill a bunch of people, there are lots of easier ways to go about it.”

“I don’t disagree,” Cartland said. “But it doesn’t change the facts that have been presented to us.”

“Let me see if I get what you’re saying. Someone might have tampered with one or two elevators. Someone might have hacked in, or sabotaged the mechanism, but you really don’t know yet. Has anyone claimed responsibility?”

Cartland shook his head. “Not for this, specifically.”

“Is there anyone you think might claim responsibility?”

“We have been dealing, lately, with an uptick in domestic terrorist acts. In Seattle, in Portland. Just yesterday in Boston. The group responsible for those incidents might be looking for a higher profile. They’re very much on our watch list. But there’s no shortage, in this country, of crazy individuals with an ax to grind.”

“But so far, no one’s taking credit.”

Cartland shook his head again.

“Could it be you guys are blowing something out of proportion, looking for something that’s not there, to justify your existence?”

Cartland clearly did not think that deserved a response, and said nothing.

“What would you have me do?” Headley asked. “Tell New Yorkers to stop using the elevators until further notice? You have any idea what kind of chaos that would create in a vertical city like this? The entire fucking town would come to a halt.”

“We should show him,” Fleck said to Cartland.

“Show me what?” the mayor said.

Cartland said, “Let’s take a walk upstairs. There’s something you need to see.”

Twenty-Two

Welcome back to New York Day,” said the woman, looking into the camera. “I’m Anjelica Briscoe.”

Briscoe adopted a stern expression. “A bombing in a Seattle coffee shop. More bombings in Portland and Boston. People dead, and wounded. Disgusting, cowardly acts. What do they have in common, and what do these cities have in common? Many things, of course, but one is that they’re coastal cities, and that makes them, symbolically, targets for those who identify themselves as members of the Flyovers, a domestic extremist group whose somewhat self-deprecating name is actually a shot at the so-called coastal elites, the people who fly from New York or Boston to Los Angeles and San Francisco and back again. They feel these elites literally look down on the rest of the country and hold the people who live there in contempt. Our guest here today is the head of the Flyovers, Eugene Clement. Mr. Clement, thank you for coming in to speak with us here today.”

The camera panned to the other end of the desk, where Clement sat, grim-faced.

“I think your characterization of what the Flyovers stand for is grossly unfair and inaccurate,” Clement said.

Briscoe looked him straight in the eye and said, “The Flyovers has been branded by some as a terrorist group. Is it?”

“Absolutely not. That’s a reckless assertion,” he said. “The Flyovers is made up of good, decent American citizens who want nothing more than to be recognized for their contributions to this great country.”

“You heard what I said off the top. Law enforcement officials say these bombings in various coastal cities are very possibly the work of Flyovers adherents.”

The blood vessel in Clement’s right temple could be seen pulsing as he leaned forward in his chair and said, “These bombings are despicable, horrible acts. To even suggest they have anything to do with us breaks my heart, outrages me.”

“So the Flyovers eschew violence as a means to highlight their issues?”

“Without question,” he said.

“And yet, you were among the armed militants involved in the occupation of a national wildlife refuge in Colorado last year. Are you going to tell me that wasn’t a violent act?”

Eugene Clement appeared slighty taken aback by the question. He took a moment to respond. “A couple of things, Anjelica. First, that was not an event connected in any way to the Flyovers. Second, no one was injured in that, well, what you call an occupation. I would call it a demonstration against abusive federal authority. Washington controls millions of acres of land in the state that it has no business being involved in. That was a protest aimed directly at the federal government. Which, thank God, did not come in with guns blazing and kill a peaceful protester, as they did at a similar demonstration a few years ago.”

“But there’s a lot of crossover in beliefs between those groups and the Flyovers.”

“Some, perhaps,” he acknowledged. “But that’s very true on the left, as well. We haven’t held all liberals to account for the actions of the Black Panthers or the Symbionese Liberation Army or, more recently, groups like Antifa.”

“Yes, but—”

“What the Flyovers is seeking to address is the current cultural divide, not government interference in our lives. Our goal is an attitude change. We want to... educate the Americans living along the coasts, the folks who seem to be unaware that there is another America. We’re more than a caricature, more than a bunch of NASCAR-loving, ribeating, beer-swilling rubes. Not that being a NASCAR-loving, ribeating beer drinker is anything to be ashamed of.” He managed a rueful smile. “That sounds like a great afternoon to me. Anyway, the coast is something of a metaphor. There are people throughout the country who hold the views we seek to challenge. You can find them right here in New York, I would imagine.”

“But isn’t that exactly what you have reduced the so-called coasters to? A cliché? Sushi-eating, latte-drinking, gluten-avoiding, Prius-driving elites?”

Clement shook his head. “Not at all. As I said, we’re just trying to educate.”

“By blowing things up.”

Clement’s cheeks flushed. “No. That Greatest Generation you’ve heard so much about? You’ll find it in the heart of the country. And you’ll find their sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters there, too. But some of this country’s most prominent politicians seem to have forgotten that. Only a couple of years ago, that woman who nearly became president, who even won the popular vote, said, and I quote, ‘I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward.’” He sneered. “You know, coastal places. What an insult to the rest of the country.”

“You have to admit that many of the people who swear allegiance to the Flyovers organization—”

“That’s laying it on a bit heavy. We hardly have a pledge of allegiance.”

“Many of your followers, your adherents, those that speak their mind on your comments page, have advocated the kinds of terrorist acts we’ve seen lately.”

“You know, Anjelica, many urbanites believe the only amendment we care about is the second one. Well, nothing could be further from the truth. We believe, as all good Americans do, in the First Amendment. Freedom of speech. I may not like what some of these people have to say, but I would defend their right to say it. Just as I defend your right to speak to me in condescending and belittling terms.”

The host was unfazed. “Some of the things your followers say constitute hate speech.”

Clement frowned. “What is hate speech, exactly? It’s hate speech when you don’t like something I’ve said. But when you attack me for what I said, can’t your words also be defined as hateful?” He leaned in again. “What we need to do is find common ground. You speak your mind and I’ll speak mine, and that way we’ll find a way to meet in the middle. Think of all the things that we have in common. We want good jobs, we want the best for our families, we want a secure future.”

“You make yourself sound like a peacemaker when the FBI and Homeland Security have suggested the exact opposite. Many of your members also belong to white supremacist, white nationalist organizations. Some are members of the KKK.”

Clement shrugged. “And I can find you plenty of people of color who share their sentiments when it comes to coastal folks looking down their noses at us. That’s what I mean about meeting in the middle, which is an apt metaphor when you’re talking about the middle of the country. We’ve got people talking to each other who otherwise might never do so. We want to bring people together, to start a dialogue. We won’t get anywhere throwing insults at each other.”

The interviewer grinned slyly. “If you can take a mild criticism here, Mr. Clement, wouldn’t it be more accurate to call your group the Flown Overs, since that’s who you are. It’s the coastal folks who are flying over you.”

Clement gave her a withering look. “And there you have it in a single question. The contempt. The ‘we’re so much smarter than you’ comeback.”

Briscoe suddenly looked regretful, aware she had gone too far. She touched her ear, an indication she was getting a message from the control room. “Mr. Clement, we’ve run a bit over here, but I wanted to thank you for agreeing to come in and speak to us.”

He said nothing.

“I do have one last question.”

“Of course.”

“Given the way your organization feels about coastal cities and the people who live there, what are you doing in New York?”

“My wife and I are celebrating our anniversary. Or we were, until you dragged me in here.” He offered up a self-deprecating laugh and a smile. “The fact is,” he said, “I love New York.”

“How dare she say those things to you,” Estelle Clement said when her husband returned to the TV studio’s green room, where guests waited for their turn to go on air. There was a monitor in the room, and she had watched the segment. She lowered her voice and said, “What a bitch.”

Clement scowled. “The way she talked to me,” he said, his voice trailing off as he grabbed her by the arm and steered her into the hallway.

“You’re hurting me,” she said.

He eased his grip but did not let go of her as they headed for the lobby.

“You should sue,” Estelle said. “You could sue her for what she said.”

The studio was on the fourth floor of a building on Columbus Circle. There were several people waiting at the bank of elevators by the reception desk. Clement said, “Let’s take the stairs.”

“Do we have—”

“I just want to get out of here as fast as I can,” he said, already leading her toward a door with an Exit sign over it. Estelle, sensing his anger, did not object.

When they came out onto the street, Clement stopped for a moment to compose himself.

“Did you hear what I said up there?” Estelle asked. “You should sue her and the network for—”

“No,” he said firmly. “It’s more than just one arrogant TV host or one network. It’s a bigger battle than that.”

Estelle placed a hand on his arm. “What do you want to do? Do you want to go home? We can, you know. If this has ruined everything, we don’t have to stay. I can see if I can get our money back on the tickets.”

“Tickets?” he said.

“You remember we have tickets for that show tonight. But it’s okay, we can—”

“No, we’re going.” He lifted his head and gave it a small shake, as though trying to rid himself of the anger he felt. Then he forced his mouth into a smile. “We’re not going let them stop us from having a good time.”

Estelle smiled. “You’re sure?”

Clement nodded. “I’d forgotten about the show. What are we seeing?”

“It’s that one with all the dancing,” Estelle said. “I know that doesn’t exactly narrow it down. You’re probably going to hate it, anyway.”

“All those nancy boys prancing about the stage? I wouldn’t miss it for the world. In the meantime, I’m going to take you out for a fabulous lunch. How does the Capital Grille sound?”

“Sure,” his wife said.

“I’ll get us a cab,” he said. “You stay here.”

He stepped off the sidewalk and walked out between two parked cars. He came up around the side of one of them as he waved his hand in the air.

Behind him, he heard a window power down.

“Hey,” someone said.

Eugene Clement did not turn around when he heard Bucky’s voice. Looking up the street, Clement said, “Still on track?”

“Yes.”

“Keep your eyes open. The world knows I’m here. There’s probably a heightened alert already.”

“Got it.”

“We’re good to go.”

Clement heard the window power up as a yellow cab swerved across the street and came to a stop in front of him. Clement opened the back door and called out to his wife.

“Madam,” he said, “your chariot has arrived.”

Twenty-Three

Barbara had been in the funeral home for the better part of half an hour.

Chris Vallins was getting tired of waiting across the street for her to come out. It wasn’t hard to figure out why she might be here, given that in her column she’d written about losing a friend in the Monday elevator accident. The dead woman’s name had been Paula Chatsworth.

To confirm, he had looked up this funeral home on his phone and called to ask if the Chatsworth service would be held there. And if so, when? Asking for a friend, he said. The woman who answered said that while the home had been involved, the service for the Chatsworth woman was going to be held up in Montpelier.

Ah, well, thank you very much, he said.

Chris believed he was going to have to do more than just follow Barbara Matheson around and make a few online inquiries. If you really wanted to find the dirt on someone, you broke into their place. You got on their computer and read their emails. You looked into the bottom bedroom dresser drawer and checked out the sex toys.

But one thing had come out of today’s efforts that had piqued his curiosity. Who was the woman Barbara had met with at the Morning Star? They hadn’t talked long. The other woman hadn’t even ordered breakfast. Was she a source? Was she someone passing along information to Barbara? Vallins could not recall seeing the woman in the time he had been working for the mayor’s office, but the city employed a lot of people who could be privy to the kind of information Barbara would like to have. Even though Chris had seen her from across the street, he was confident he’d recognize the woman if he saw her again. And he had her picture.

Vallins started hearing music and glanced to the north. A shabbily dressed man was coming his way, pushing a rickety shopping cart with nothing in it but an ’80s-style boom box that was playing at full volume.

“You can’t always get what you want...”

Wasn’t that the truth, Vallins thought, giving the man a nod as he wheeled his cart past him. The man was bobbing his head to the music and took one hand off the cart’s handle long enough to give Vallins a thumbs-up.

Vallins couldn’t help but smile.

Finally, Barbara emerged from the funeral home and started walking back toward Second Avenue.

Vallins was on the move again.

When the Manhattan Today writer got to the corner, she crossed Twenty-Seventh, looking down at the phone in her hand the entire time. A cab shot past, the driver giving her the horn. Without even looking up, Barbara sent her free hand skyward and gave the cabbie the finger.

She went into the Duane Reade on the corner.

Chris followed her in, still keeping his distance, and found that Barbara had gone down the feminine hygiene products aisle. He knew he was going to look especially conspicuous hanging around that part of the store, so he decided to go back outside and wait for her to emerge. He found a spot a few yards down the sidewalk where he could watch the door of the drug store.

While he waited, his own phone rang. He dug it out of his jacket, saw Valerie on the screen.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Where the hell are you?” Valerie asked.

“I’m running an errand for the mayor.”

“What kind of errand?”

“If he wanted you to know I’m guessing he would have told you.”

A sigh at the other end. Then, “There’s been another elevator plunge.”

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“No.”

“Where?”

“On York, just south of Rockefeller University. Some big-deal Russian scientist got killed.”

“Jesus,” Chris said. “Are you there?”

“Yeah. Homeland Security’s here, too.”

“What?”

“Yeah. Maybe because of who it was who got killed. You ever heard of Fanya Petrov?”

“No. Should I?”

“Beats me.”

Barbara, a small Duane Reade bag in hand, came out of the store. She glanced into the bag, as if checking that she remembered everything.

“I gotta go,” Chris told Valerie. Without waiting for a response, he ended the call and slipped the phone back into his jacket.

Barbara was heading north, holding the bag in her left hand, her phone in her right. As she crossed Twenty-Eighth Street, she put the phone to her ear, spoke to someone. The call lasted little more than thirty seconds, which led Chris to think maybe she’d only left a voice mail.

As she continued on, she appeared to be searching for something on her phone. Maybe another number, someone else she wanted to get in touch with. Or maybe she was on some site, thumbing through headlines.

She did write a column, after all, Chris thought, making an allowance for how she never put the phone away. She probably read through several dozen news sites every day. And then she’d be calling people and interviewing them and turning the shit they said into a piece for Manhattan Today. But right now, in the wake of what she had written lately about the mayor, it would be nice to know exactly what she was reading and who she might be getting in touch with. And why had she gone to the funeral home, anyway? Was it simply to offer condolences, or was there more to it than that?

Chris found himself closing the distance between himself and Barbara, fooling himself into thinking that if he got near enough, he’d be able to see what was on her phone before she put it away, or to her ear. Chris had an astounding number of talents, skills that no one even knew about, but there were limits to what he could do.

Between Thirtieth and Thirty-First, Barbara nearly walked into an elderly woman coming in the other direction. Her bat-like radar had her dodging out of the way just in time.

As they neared Thirty-Second Street, Chris started to worry.

If Barbara had been looking up as she approached the intersection on the west side of Second, she might have noticed the Don’t Walk warning blazing from the traffic signal on the other side. But Barbara, oblivious, kept on walking.

Coming from the left, a once-white van nearly eaten away by rust was approaching at high speed. It careened around a taxi that had pulled over to pick up a fare. The driver was flooring it, hoping to make it across Second before the light turned red. The engine roared hoarsely, as if suffering from automotive emphysema.

Barbara stepped off the sidewalk and into the intersection.

Everything happened in milliseconds. Chris expected Barbara’s seemingly innate sense of where she was and what was going on around her to kick in.

As the truck bore down on her, Chris realized with startling clarity that was not going to happen.

Fuck, he thought.

Twenty-Four

When Jerry Bourque and Lois Delgado finished talking to Gunther Willem, manager of Simpson Elevator, they went into the back shop to talk to the other employees. The company, counting Willem and the woman in the office, had nine. Eight, now that Petrenko was going to be removed from the payroll. Four more were on the premises, two were out on a call together.

Bourque and Delgado split them up, each interviewing two men. All four were asked further questions about the dead man, whether they had noticed anything out of the ordinary with him in recent weeks, whether he seemed on edge, worried about anything. Did Petrenko have any vices he kept secret from his wife? Did he gamble? Did he use drugs? Was he seeing anyone on the side? Did he frequent prostitutes?

And, finally, who was the man who’d come to visit him? The one he went out onto the street to talk to?

None of the four claimed to have seen Petrenko talking to the mystery man.

The two employees not on-site were on a call at a twelve-story apartment building on Clermont Avenue in Brooklyn, just south of the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Delgado drove. They parked on the street and buzzed the superintendent when they entered the lobby. The building’s two elevators were out of commission during the servicing, and the two technicians from Simpson Elevator were on the twelfth floor.

“Can they get one going?” Bourque asked.

The super said, “I told them, can you do one at a time? But no, they shut them both down at once. Everyone in the building is complaining.”

“No problem,” Delgado said. “We’ll take the stairs.”

A wave of anxiety washed over Bourque.

His lungs felt absolutely fine. He hadn’t taken a hit off his inhaler yet today. Climbing eleven flights of stairs shouldn’t have been a problem for him. A few months ago, he might have taken half those flights two steps at a time.

But that was before.

Could he make it to the twelfth floor? What if his airways started to constrict along the way? And Bourque had been dealing with this issue long enough to know that just worrying about an attack was enough to bring one on.

I’ll be fine, he told himself. I can do this. Just don’t think—

It was like, Bourque realized, when someone told you not to think about an elephant, Dumbo popped into your head.

So when Bourque told himself Don’t think about the drops, he thought about the drops.

“You coming?” Delgado said to her partner.

“Right behind you,” he said.

It hit him by the fourth floor. His windpipe started to shrink down to the size of a straw.

When they were nearly to the fifth, Bourque called up to Delgado, who was half a dozen steps ahead, “I just got a text.”

Delgado glanced back, stopped.

“Just go on, I’ll catch up,” he said, taking the phone from his jacket, looking at the screen and nodding as if to confirm he was right about receiving a message.

“What is it?” Delgado asked.

“I got it,” Bourque said dismissively.

Delgado climbed on.

Once she’d made a turn in the stairwell and was out of sight, Bourque put the phone back into his jacket. He gripped the railing with one hand to steady himself, then dug into his pocket with the other and came out with his inhaler.

But before wrapping his mouth around it, he decided to give his doctor’s advice one more try.

Focus.

What had he suggested? Focus on five things you see. Five things you hear.

I’m in a fucking concrete stairwell. There aren’t five things to see or five things to hear.

That was okay. He could wing it. Like, think of five Paul Newman movies.

There was The Sting. Cool Hand Luke. Harper. That was three. Oh, and The Verdict and that one where he was the pool hustler, what the hell was that one called. Weren’t there actually two? There was the original, that was — fuck, The Hustler. A movie about a pool hustler might just be called The Hustler. But then, twenty-five years later, he reprised the character in a movie with Tom Cruise. Had Color in the title. What the hell was that one—

He was still wheezing.

From a couple of floors above, Delgado’s voice echoed, “You okay down there?”

“Yeah!” he managed to shout. “Coming!”

The hell with it.

He exhaled, put the puffer between his lips, squeezed it, and drew the medicated mist deep into his lungs. Keeping his lips sealed, he did a mental count to ten, then exhaled. He repeated the process, then slipped the inhaler back into his pocket.

Christ, it was all he could do to hold his breath for ten seconds. You watched these movies, where James Bond is rescuing someone underwater for minutes at a time without coming up for air. How the hell was that even possible?

Plenty of takes, that was how.

Bourque felt his windpipe enlarging, his lungs filling with the stale air of the stairwell. Time to move on.

He caught up with his partner at the tenth floor. Even she had stopped to catch her breath, and Bourque took pleasure in overtaking her. “Haven’t got all day,” he said.

“Bite me,” Delgado said.

They came out onto the twelfth floor and at the hallway’s end, directly in front of an open elevator door, were two men on their knees, huddled over a large toolbox. One was white, thin, probably midforties; the other was black, heavyset, late twenties. Even from the end of the hallway, the detectives could tell that there was no elevator car beyond the opening. What they could see was the cinder block back wall of the shaft and various vertical cables.

“Hey,” Bourque said.

The black one turned, then said to his partner, “Cops are here.”

The two men stood. Bourque and Delgado showed their badges and offered hands to shake but the repairmen begged off, displaying oily, greasy palms.

“I’m Walter,” the older man said. “This is Terrence.”

Terrence nodded. “They told us you were coming.”

“So you know what this is about,” Delgado said.

“Can’t believe Otto’s dead,” Walter said. “Jesus. You do what we do for a living, you figure if you’re gonna go, it’ll probably be because you went through an open door by mistake,” at which point he nodded toward the elevator shaft.

“Yeah,” said Terrence, and then, gesturing toward his coworker, “or some moron knocks you in.”

“What happened to him?” Walter asked.

Bourque did the usual dance of not answering and asked the two men the same questions he and Delgado had asked the others. Had they noticed anything odd about Otto in recent weeks?

They had not.

Had they seen the man who’d dropped by to see him at Simpson Elevator?

Again, they both shook their heads.

“Why?” asked Walter. “You think this guy did something to Otto?”

“We’d like to talk to him,” Delgado said.

Terrence said, “Hang on.”

“What?” Delgado asked.

He dug a rag out of his pocket and started to wipe off his hands. “So I’ve been wanting to buy a car. Like, I always liked Mustangs, so I’ve been going through the online ads, you know, seeing if someone has a decent used one, because no way I can afford a new one, and I’m not totally nuts about the latest design, anyway. I kind of like the ones from around 2005, 2006, you know?”

“Okay,” said Bourque.

“So I find one in Queens and I call the guy. It’s a 2005, and he’s asking about thirty-five hundred for it, and I tell him I want to have a look at it, but I’m kinda busy, and he says, where d’ya work, I could run it by, you could check it out. Which makes the guy sound a bit desperate, so I’m thinking he might take a lowball offer, so I say okay. So he comes over, this is like, two weeks ago. Parks it at the curb and I come out to have a look at it.”

Walter said, “Terrence here takes a long time to get to the point.”

“That’s okay,” Bourque said.

His hands cleared of the worst of the grease, he pulled a phone from his pocket and tapped on the photos icon.

“I wanted to take a few pictures of it, from all angles. Told the guy I wasn’t ready to make up my mind but having some shots to refresh my memory later would be a good idea. So, like, here’s the shots.”

He held the camera in front of the detectives and swiped through the pictures. Many of them were close-ups of parts of the blue car, including one of the rear wheel well.

“A lot of rust there. I could probably fix it myself, but if I made a big deal about it he’d probably come down a bit more. Okay, here’s the one I was thinking of.”

The photo he’d landed on was a full shot of the car, parked on the street.

“So, if you look back here, that’s Otto,” he said. “On the sidewalk.”

“May I?” Bourque asked, holding out his hand.

Terrence gave him the phone. With his index finger and thumb, Bourque enlarged the photo, zeroing in on the background. There was another car beyond the Mustang. A plain, dark sedan. One man was leaning against it, arms folded, talking to Otto, perched on the curb. The man was white, maybe six feet, gray hair. He looked to be wearing a suit. But the bigger Bourque made the picture, the less distinct it became.

“What about the car?” Delgado asked.

Bourque shifted the focus to the car. The Mustang in the foreground cut off the left half of the orangey-yellow plate, and the part that could be seen was blurry.

“New York plate,” Bourque said.

“That narrows it down,” Delgado said.

“Last two numbers 1 and 3.”

“Maybe.”

Bourque tapped the screen a couple of times. “Just want to know when... this was taken.” He squinted. “Here we go. This looks like middle of last month? The fifteenth?”

“That sounds right,” Terrence said.

Bourque said, “I’m going to email this to myself.”

“Sure, yeah, okay.”

Bourque did a few more taps, then hit Send. Seconds later, there was a familiar ding from his jacket pocket.

Terrence had never gotten a closer look at Otto’s friend, and had never learned anything about him. Same with Walter.

“Did you buy the Mustang?” Bourque asked.

Terrence grinned. “I did. Got it for two grand.”

Delgado asked, pointing toward the open door, “What’s wrong with the elevator?”

Walter shrugged. “Just routine maintenance.”

Delgado took a step closer, stuck her head beyond the door’s edge, and peered down the shaft. Twelve floors down to the bottom.

The car was twelve floors down, at the bottom.

“Yikes,” she said.

Walter chuckled. “That’s nothing. Come into Manhattan sometime. You look down, you think you can see all the way to hell.”

When they returned to their car, Delgado got behind the wheel of their unmarked cruiser, waited until Bourque was settled in beside her, then got out her phone. She began tapping at the screen.

“What?” Bourque said.

“Hang on,” she said. Her phone made a brief woop sound. She’d sent a text.

Before Bourque could quiz her again, he heard the ding of an incoming text on his own phone. He reached into his jacket, saw the one-word message from Delgado:

He looked from his phone to her.

“I heard that one,” she said. “Funny I didn’t hear the other two. In the stairwell, or on the High Line.”

She put the car in drive and hit the gas.

Twenty-Five

Save her? Or not save her?

It was incredible how many thoughts could go through one’s head so quickly. But even in the fraction of a second that Chris Vallins had to make a decision, he realized what he had here was an opportunity. As that truck bore down on Barbara, whose eyes were still focused on her damn phone, Chris saw that a solution to the mayor’s problem had presented itself. In a millisecond, this walking-talking-writing thorn in the mayor’s paw could be dead.

A gift has been handed to us.

Some gifts, it turned out, were more difficult to accept than others.

He darted into the street like an Olympic runner who’d just heard the shot from the starter’s pistol. His left arm went into the air, palm facing the truck, as if he were Superman and could stop its progress. Even if he could have, the truck swerved.

Barbara looked up from her phone.

Her head turned a couple of degrees in the direction of the truck, but there wasn’t time for her to get a full view of it. Chris had thrown his right arm around her waist. He was moving so quickly that she was literally swept off her feet.

And then, basically thrown.

It was, pretty much, a football tackle. Barbara went down, hitting the pavement just shy of the opposite corner. Chris went down with her, the knuckles of his right hand scraping the pavement, tearing his glove. Barbara let out a scream as her right elbow hit asphalt, but it was drowned out by the brake squeal, and the subsequent gunning of the engine, from the truck. It sped through the intersection. The driver, knowing that at least he hadn’t killed anyone, evidently saw no reason to hang around.

Barbara’s phone slipped from her hand and skittered across the pavement, bouncing off the curb. Her Duane Reade bag was airborne. When it landed, some twenty feet away, its contents — a box of Tampax, a stick of Halls lemon cough candies, and a bottle of shampoo — scattered across the pavement.

“Shit!” she cried. Instead of trying to get up, she rolled over onto her back. She winced as she gripped her elbow. “Fuck!”

Chris had hit the ground hard, too, but at least he knew what was coming, and had thrown himself into a roll as he struck pavement. As he slowly got to his feet, half a dozen people gathered. An elderly woman who’d gone to fetch Barbara’s phone glanced at Chris and said, “Well done!”

As she stood over Barbara, ready to hand her the phone, she asked Barbara, “Do you need an ambulance?”

“I think... I think I’m okay,” Barbara said. “It just hurts like a motherfucker, is all.”

Chris watched Barbara working her arm, try to determine whether her elbow was broken. She could move it without screaming, so that was a good sign. He was pretty sure, despite the close contact he’d had with Barbara, she’d not actually seen him. She didn’t know who had pulled her from the van’s path. The identity of her Good Samaritan could remain a mystery.

Perfect.

All he had to do was walk away, blend in with others on the sidewalk. He started heading north.

“Hey!”

Chris was pretty sure who was doing the yelling, and who was being yelled at.

“You! With the hat!”

Chris pulled the ball cap lower onto his forehead and slowly turned. Barbara had gotten to a standing position. The old woman had moved on, but a young man in a U.S. Postal Service uniform and a short, round-shouldered woman with a wheeled, wire cart full of groceries were on either side of her, offering support. Someone had gathered her Duane Reade purchases and put them back in the bag. Barbara, now standing on her own, was staring at him.

Chris slowly pointed a finger to his own chest, pretending to be puzzled.

“Yeah, you!” she said, pointing. “Jesus, you play for the Jets?”

She’s going to recognize me. Get ahead of this. Don’t let her be the one...

He took a step toward her, let his jaw drop with feigned astonishment.

“Christ, it’s you,” he said.

Barbara blinked a couple of times, as though trying to focus. “What?”

He took off the hat. “I was in the limo. Yesterday. I work for the mayor.”

Barbara’s astonishment appeared 100 percent genuine. “I don’t believe it. It is you. Uh... Chris something.”

“Vallins,” he said, moving in closer. He looked at the man and woman flanking her. “It’s okay,” he said. “I got this.”

They nodded with relief that they didn’t have to hang around.

“What the hell were you doing, walking off? You fucking saved my life.”

He shrugged. “You looked okay, so I didn’t think I was needed. Are you okay?”

“I think so, but my elbow hurts like a son of a bitch.”

“You should get it checked out. You should go to the hospital.”

“I’ve had enough of hospitals,” she said. “I just need to put some ice on it.”

Chris appeared to be considering something. “Look,” he said, “my place is only a couple of blocks from here, and if I don’t have ice, I’ve probably got some frozen dinners that’d do the trick.”

She eyed him warily.

“How’d you do it?” she asked.

“It was a simple tackle. Nothing to it.”

“No, not that. Was the guy driving the van in on it? He waited until I got there, and you were in position?”

He met her skeptical eyes with his. “You figured it out. I come from a long line of conspirators. My dad helped fake the moon landing. You want some fucking ice for your elbow or not?”

Twenty-Six

Mayor Headley followed Brian Cartland, of Homeland Security, NYPD chief Annette Washington, and Martin Fleck, from the city department that oversaw elevator operations, to a stairwell. The fire chief, who’d evidently been up here earlier with Fleck, had stayed in the lobby.

Headley had been worried they were heading all the way up to the hallway where they’d find the rest of Fanya Petrov. But it turned out that, for now, they were going only as far as the second floor.

They came out onto a hallway and approached the four elevators. Only one had the doors in the open position. A police officer was standing guard, keeping people away, because there was no elevator car beyond the opening. At least, not one that anyone could step into.

But someone could step onto it.

Given that the car was one floor below, at lobby level, what the mayor and others were looking at was the roof of the elevator car. Two large steel beams ran crossways, left to right, across the top of the middle of the car. Attached to it were various cables and metal boxes with large buttons on them. More cables, electrical ones, were snaked neatly across the top of the car. In the far left corner was what appeared to be a hatch.

Headley pointed. “That’s where people can get out?”

“They can be rescued from there,” Fleck said. “But it’s not like in the movies where you see passengers pushing it aside and getting out themselves. It’s locked. It can only be opened by rescue workers.”

Headley pointed tentatively into the shaft. “Can I poke my head in there?”

Fleck nodded.

The mayor stood at the edge, braced himself with one hand where the door slid into the wall, and leaned in. He craned his neck around to look up. The shaft’s four corners appeared to disappear into infinity.

“Christ,” he said, and pulled himself back into the hallway. “So what did you want to show me?”

Cartland pointed to something close to the hatch. “You see that?”

Headley squinted. “What?”

Cartland looked at Fleck. “Can you help us here?”

Fleck stepped from the hallway, directly onto the roof of the elevator. Headley was the only one to give a short gasp. But the elevator was as solid under Fleck’s feet as if he were standing in the lobby. He lifted his leg over the beam to get closer to the far side of the car’s roof.

He knelt down and indicated, without touching it, a small black box, not much bigger than a cell phone but thicker, that had a short black wand attached.

“This is an antenna,” Fleck said. “And this,” he said, pointing to the box, “is a remote pinhole camera.”

Headley watched. “Go on.”

“Someone’s drilled a small hole here that provides a view of what’s happening inside the car.”

Fleck stood, used one of the beams to lean against. He looked as relaxed as if he were sitting on a park bench.

“Cameras in an elevator don’t seem all that unusual,” Headley said.

Fleck said, “People think cameras are everywhere, but that’s not necessarily so with elevators. There may be cameras in the hallways and the lobbies so you see who’s going in and out of the elevators. But while they’re inside? Not so much. Freight elevators, that’s a different story sometimes. Security likes to keep tabs on those.”

“But some buildings must have cameras in the regular elevators,” the mayor said.

“You’re right,” Fleck said. “But we’ve talked to building management. They don’t have them here. The other elevators? No cameras in those.”

Headley looked at the man from Homeland Security and the police chief. Their faces were grim.

“Only this one,” Cartland said, for emphasis. “Well, and one other.”

Headley waited.

“We had a look at the elevator from yesterday. There was a camera attached to the roof of that car, too. Like this one. It was the only elevator in the building outfitted that way.”

“Jesus Christ,” Headley said.

“We have a definite link between both events,” Annette Washington said. “Same kind of camera, identical placement.”

“What you’re telling me,” Headley said, “is that somebody could have been watching everything that happened. Somebody could have watched those people die yesterday. Somebody could have watched that scientist’s head come off.”

No one said anything.

“Fucking hell,” Headley said. He pointed first to the camera, then to the beams and other equipment that sat atop the elevator car. “Fingerprints?”

“Working on it,” Washington said.

“And what about surveillance cameras? In the halls, and the lobby?”

Cartland said, “We don’t know when this camera might have been placed here. It could have been a week ago, a month ago, or a year. Fleck here is going to have to go back and see when this elevator was last inspected. It’s doubtful this would have been overlooked during an inspection. That’d mean it was outfitted with the camera since then.” He sighed. “We don’t know how far ahead this was planned.”

Fleck said, “My experience, someone walks in wearing maintenance coveralls and a hard hat, he can pretty much get into any part of a building he wants.”

“This is unbelievable,” Headley said. He turned on Fleck. “It’s your fucking department! Aren’t your people looking for this kind of thing?”

Fleck didn’t flinch. “No. We’re looking for mechanical and safety problems, although like Mr. Cartland said, I’d like to think that our people would have noticed this.”

Headley tried to stare him down. “‘Like to think’?”

Cartland cleared his throat. “If you’ve got the strength to walk up a few more floors, Fleck’s got something else to show you.”

Headley trembled at the thought of having to look at the headless corpse. Surely they didn’t need him to see that.

“If you’re asking me to see what’s left of Dr. Petrov up there, you can spare me the trouble,” Headley asked. “Is her body still up there?”

Cartland nodded gravely.

“Seeing her head was enough,” the mayor said.

Fleck threw his leg back over the beam, got himself off the roof and back into the hallway. He dusted himself off and then looked at the mayor.

“That’s not what we want you to have a look at,” he said.

“What then?”

“As bad as what you’ve seen so far,” he said, “it gets worse.”

Twenty-Seven

Driving back into Manhattan, looking straight ahead as she drove over the Queensboro Bridge, Lois Delgado said, “So talk to me.”

Jerry Bourque said, “Talk to you about what?”

She glanced his way. “What’s with the texts that aren’t texts? I’ve got ears, you know. If someone had sent you a text, I’d have heard it.”

Bourque ignored her, watched the traffic.

“You can’t breathe,” she said. “You’re sneaking puffs on that thing.”

Now Bourque shot her a look.

“What?” she said. “What kind of detective would I be if I hadn’t noticed?”

Bourque, looking away, said, “I use it, the odd time.”

She sighed. “It’s not allergies or bronchitis or anything like that, is it? If it was, you wouldn’t be hiding it. It’s in your head, right?” Before he could reply, she said, “Shit. It’s not like cancer, is it? Emphysema? I’ve never seen you smoke.”

“I don’t have cancer and I don’t have emphysema.”

“So it’s the other thing.”

Bourque said nothing.

“Maybe you came back too soon.”

“I took two weeks. I was fine. I could have taken two years. It wouldn’t have made any difference.”

Delgado said, “You don’t know that. What happened to you, that kind of shit can mess you up. There’s no shame in not coming back until you’re ready.”

She decided not to push, and drove a few more blocks without saying anything, except for one “Fuckin’ asshole” when a cab cut her off.

“The doctor says there’s nothing physiological,” Bourque finally said.

“Okay.”

“It’s... like you say. It’s a reaction to stress.”

She nodded. “So... at those times, your windpipe starts shrinking on you?”

He nodded. “More or less. Couple hits off the inhaler usually takes care of it. Until the next time.”

“And this has been going on since it happened?”

Bourque shook his head. “No. Maybe three, four months after. I’d been having a lot of trouble sleeping. And when I did finally nod off, there were nightmares. And then, through the day... there’d be times when I found myself struggling to catch my breath. The memory gets triggered, and it starts.”

“You can’t blame yourself,” Delgado said. “It wasn’t your fault. Is that what this is about? Guilt? Because you didn’t do anything different than I would have done.”

“Tell that to the kid,” Bourque said.

“You know and I know the only person who gets the blame is Blair Evans. What were you supposed to do? Stand there and let him shoot you? There was a review. You did nothing wrong.”

“I should have taken the bullet. He might have missed anything vital.”

“Listen to you. More likely he would have put it right between your eyes.”

Bourque’s voice went low. “I should have been ready. I was going for my weapon but I wasn’t fast enough.”

“Well, the son of a bitch got what was coming to him anyway. Running into traffic right in front of a double-decker tour bus. Wham. Look, you’re going by the Waldorf when you hear a shot. This Evans asshole comes running out the front, armed, before you’ve even got a chance to react. You yell, ‘Freeze.’ He’s aiming right for you, he pulls the trigger, and you dive out of the way. Exactly what I would have done.”

“I didn’t know she was behind me,” he said so quietly that she almost didn’t hear him.

“How could you, Jerry? You got eyes in the back of your head? If it hadn’t been her, that bullet would have kept heading up Park Avenue until it found someone.”

“Her name was Sasha.”

Delgado nodded. “I know.”

“And her baby’s name is Amanda.”

“I know that, too.”

Bourque’s voice went even quieter. “There were drops of blood on Amanda’s face. She’s in a baby carriage, on her back, she’s looking up. Imagine being fourteen months old... and seeing your mother... take a bullet through the head. Tasting her blood as the drops land on your lips.”

Delgado could find no words.

“It’s the drops I see,” Bourque said. “Whenever I close my eyes, I see the drops.”

“You should talk to someone.”

Bourque looked at his partner. “I’m talking to you.” And when he breathed in, they both heard a whistle.

“Oh, shit,” he said.

He took his inhaler from his pocket and uncapped it. Before he could put it to his mouth, it slipped from his fingers and landed in the footwell in front of him.

“Damn thing slips out of my hand half the time,” he said. The inhaler was beyond his reach. He briefly unbuckled his seat belt so he could shift forward to scoop it up.

He took a couple of hits from it before tucking it back into his jacket.

“If you didn’t have that thing, what would happen?” Delgado asked.

“Asked my doctor the same question,” Bourque said. “He never really gave me an answer.”

Twenty-Eight

Chris Vallins said to Barbara Matheson, “Here.”

He’d stopped in front of the doors to a plain, white brick apartment building on the south side of East Twenty-Ninth Street between Second and Third.

“My place,” he said.

Sitting on the sidewalk, his back supported by the apartment building, was an unshaven man in his forties or fifties, a paper coffee cup on the ground in front of him with a few coins in it. His clothes were worn and dirty, but he was wearing a blue pullover sweater that looked relatively new.

“Hey,” Chris said to the man, who gave every indication of being homeless.

He looked at Chris and smiled. “My man!” he said. “How’s it going?”

“Not bad,” Chris said. “You?”

“It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood,” he sang. “A beautiful day for a neighbor. Will you be mine?”

Chris grinned. “How’s the sweater working out?”

The man gripped the front of the sweater, gave it a tug, then let go. “Mighty fine. Nice to have when there’s no room at the inn overnight. Got any more?”

“I’ll look through my closet again. In the meantime,” Chris said, taking off his gloves, “you might as well have these.” The leather on the fingers of the right glove was torn in several places from when Chris had hit the pavement.

“No, I couldn’t,” the man said, but reached up anyway to take them.

“The right one’s a bit ripped up, I’m afraid.” Vallins glanced at his bruised knuckles. “Me, too, apparently.”

Barbara looked at Vallins’s hand. “I’m sorry. That’s because of me.”

Vallins shrugged, his attention still focused on the homeless man, who was already trying the gloves on for size. “They fit?”

The homeless man grinned and said, “Not bad. Got a receipt in case I need to return them?”

“Think I lost it,” Vallins said.

The man finally looked at Barbara and said, “He’s a keeper.”

She said, “Oh no, we’re not—”

“This is a friend of mine, Jack. Barbara.”

“Hi, Barbara.”

“Hello, Jack,” Barbara said.

“Jack served his country with honor and distinction in Afghanistan,” Chris said.

Barbara gave the man a solemn nod as Chris opened the door and said, “See ya later, Jack.”

The homeless man gave them a thumbs-up.

As they entered the lobby, Barbara said, “I should have given him something.”

Chris shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. Drop a buck in his cup on the way out if you feel like it.”

They took the elevator to the fifteenth floor, walked to the end of a hall, and entered his apartment. Chris went straight to the kitchen. “Take the tour while I find some ice.”

He shuffled things around in the freezer compartment of his refrigerator while Barbara admired the view from his apartment window.

“If you look between those two buildings over on the left,” he called out from the kitchen, “you can see a small sliver of the East River.”

“I bet when they advertised this place, they touted the river view,” she said, one arm crossing her midsection so she could hold her elbow.

“You guessed it. Allowed them to add another two hundred a month to the rent,” he said.

“When a boat goes by, it’s like looking at it through a keyhole.”

While the view was not spectacular, it was a decent apartment. Spacious enough living room, a sliding glass door that led to a balcony big enough for two chairs. A peek down the hallway showed three doors, so a bathroom and two bedrooms. Not bad. Barbara would have killed for an extra bedroom that she could have turned into an office, instead of always using her kitchen table to do her work. The furnishings were modern, and there was the obligatory wall with the flat-screen TV, audio equipment, and shelves for speakers, CDs, DVDs, books, and a few framed snapshots.

Barbara ran her finger across the spines of the books. She never went into a house without seeing what the residents read, or at least displayed. Vallins’s taste ran to mostly nonfiction. History, politics. He even had a copy of that sports star’s memoir, the one Barbara had ghostwritten.

Maybe I should autograph it, she thought.

She stopped and looked at one of the photos. A young, grinning Chris, maybe seven years old, standing between what she presumed were his mother and father, the three of them leaning up against a rusted minivan. It looked like a vacation shot, and whoever’d snapped it was one of those amateur photographers who thought you must show the entire person, from shoes right up to their heads. All three were in cutoffs, short sleeves, and sneakers, and there was what looked like camping gear strapped to the roof racks. Everyone looked happy. You didn’t need to vacation at the Ritz to have a good time.

Barbara glanced into the kitchen. Sleek cupboards, small granite-topped island, Wolf stove with the red knobs, Sub-Zero fridge. If Vallins had come from humble beginnings, he appeared to be doing okay now.

Vallins pointed to the small, round table tucked into the corner of the kitchen by the window. There were two open laptops with darkened screens sitting there. “Let me make some space,” he said, closing them, setting one atop the other, and moving them to the kitchen counter. “Sit,” he ordered.

Barbara sat.

He brought over a bag of frozen vegetables from the freezer, set it on the table, and gently lifted Barbara’s arm and rested her right elbow on it.

“Oriental stir fry,” she said, glancing at the bag. “So this is like Chinese medicine?” She winced. “Fuck, that’s cold.” She’d rolled her sleeve up, but the bag was too cold on bare skin. She rolled her sleeve down and put her elbow back on it.

“I still think you should go to the hospital.”

“I’m not dying.” She almost managed a grin. “I’m not that bad. You tackle like a girl. What about your hand? Doesn’t it need some frozen veggies, too?”

He waggled his fingers in the air. “They work fine.” He went back to the freezer. “Hey, this might be better.” He held up a pliable, blue-gel ice pack.

“The veggies are doing the job,” she said.

He closed the freezer. “You want a coffee? I got a one-cup maker.”

“You never have company?” she asked.

Vallins ignored the question. “Yes or no on the coffee?”

“Actually, just some water, and some Tylenols, if you’ve got them.”

He opened one cupboard to get a glass, and another to get a small bottle of pills. He filled the glass from the tap and shook out two pills onto the kitchen table. She popped the pills into her mouth and washed them down with her free hand.

“I’ve yet to encounter a problem that can’t be solved with drugs and/or alcohol,” she said.

“So you want a beer with that, then?”

She shook her head. “Water’s fine.” She paused. “Tell me about your friend.”

“Nothing to tell, really. Served his country. Came back. PTSD. Couldn’t hold a job. Lost his family. No support. End of story. There’s a million of them.”

“But you help him,” Barbara said.

He shrugged. “Not really. Not as much as I could, or should.”

Barbara narrowed her eyes as she looked at him, as if intensifying her focus would provide some greater insight.

“So,” she said slowly.

“Yeah?” Chris looked at her with raised eyebrows.

“You were following me,” she said.

“Nope.”

“You had to be.”

He shook his head very slowly. “You think you’re that important?”

“Why are you dressed like this?”

“Like what?”

“Baseball cap. Leather jacket. Jeans. Give me a break. You didn’t want to look like you did in the limo yesterday.”

“On my day off,” Chris said, “I lose the suit and tie.”

“It’s Tuesday.”

“The mayor has weekend events. Sometimes I work Saturday or Sunday. So I get a day off midweek instead.”

“Not buyin’ it,” Barbara said.

“Okay, so let’s say I was following you, which I was not. This kind of blows my cover, doesn’t it?”

Barbara considered that. “Maybe the whole thing was a setup, a way to gain my confidence. So you rescued me.”

“Yeah. I cleverly arranged for that truck to come along at just the right moment as you were crossing the street, and you helped immeasurably by staring at your phone the whole time like a complete and total idiot.”

Barbara bit her lower lip. “Okay, so, where were you going if you weren’t following me?”

“There’s a bar up the street where I have lunch sometimes.” He cast a suspicious glance her way. “What are you doing in my neighborhood? How do I know you weren’t nosing around up here looking for me?”

“Please,” she said.

“Let me ask you this,” Chris said. “Is this your routine when someone saves your life? Interrogate them? A simple thank-you would do.”

Barbara was quiet for several seconds, as though working up her nerve to say something nice. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Thanks. And I’m sorry you scraped your hand.”

“Stop gushing,” he said. “You’re embarrassing me.”

“You could still have been following me, but had to do the right thing when I nearly bought it. Felt you had no choice. That’s why you tried to take off without my seeing you.”

“The veggies working?” he asked.

She lifted up her elbow momentarily. “I think a piece of frozen cauliflower is digging into a bone.”

He got up, went to the freezer, and brought back the proper icepack. As she set her elbow on it, he tossed the bag of frozen vegetables back in.

“You got any real food here?” she asked.

He opened the fridge compartment wide enough for her to see. It was nearly empty.

“This could be my place,” Barbara said. “You don’t get to the store much?”

Vallins shrugged.

“Let me ask you something,” Barbara said.

“More questions about how I staged your near-death experience?”

She shook her head. “Sit down.” He did. “So, Headley. What exactly do you do for him? What’s your title?”

“I was recently knighted, so you might want to call me Sir Vallins.”

“Funny, I would have pegged you for the court jester.”

“I’m an assistant to the mayor. I assist.”

Barbara smiled. “In what ways do you assist?”

Chris leaned in closer. “Any way I can. Security, policy implementation, research, whatever.”

“Security?”

He nodded.

“You got a conceal and carry license?”

“I’m sorry?”

Barbara rolled her eyes. She knew he knew what she was talking about. “Are you packing?”

“Did you seriously say ‘are you packing?’ Are we in a Scorsese movie?”

“Show me your gun,” Barbara said.

“First of all,” Chris said, “I am not going to answer that question, and if I were packing, which I am not saying I am, I wouldn’t be doing it on my day off.”

Barbara sighed. “Fine. So you assist the mayor. So following me around, that would fall into the category of assisting.”

“You’re a one-trick pony.”

“Okay,” she said, switching gears. “Tell me about him.”

“Off the record?”

“Off the record. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Vallins shrugged. “He’s an asshole.”

“I wouldn’t call that a keen insight. A lot of us have figured that out.”

“But even if he is, you don’t get how things work in the real world.”

“I think I’ve heard this speech before,” Barbara said.

Chris said, “Nothing gets done in this town without cutting corners.”

“Cutting corners shouldn’t mean rewarding people who donated to your campaign.”

“Did you ever get a job because you knew somebody? A friend who put in a word for you? Do you know anyone who hasn’t, somewhere along the line, gotten a job that way? One hand washing the other?”

“It shouldn’t work that way at City Hall.”

“Suppose, right now, you became mayor. Or... I don’t know, managing editor of the Times. Who would you bring in to help you run things? People you’d worked with in the past, people whose abilities and reputations you knew? People who’d supported you along the way that you wanted to help out in return? Or total strangers, so as not to look like you were practicing favoritism? And then those total strangers turn out to be total fuckups?”

She decided to go in another direction. “What’s the deal between the mayor and Glover? Who hates who more?”

Vallins spoke slowly, as though choosing his words carefully. “The father-son dynamic can be a complicated thing.”

“Diplomatic.”

“Glover... never stops trying to impress his father. It’s not easy.”

“Because Headley’s hard to please, or the boy’s just not up to it?”

“Bit of both.”

Barbara nodded. “Why are the feds involved in the elevator crashes?”

Vallins blinked. “I think I just got whiplash there. We’re done with Glover?”

“Is it Homeland?”

“What are you talking about?”

“At least one set of relatives who lost someone in yesterday’s crash was told not to talk about it or ask questions. By a guy in a dark suit with a dark SUV who sounded like he was right out of central casting. Everything but the Ray-Bans.”

“I’ve got no idea,” Chris said. “So ask Homeland. What do you want to talk about next? It’s like you’ve got this list in your head, you’re checking things off.”

Barbara looked into his brown eyes for several seconds. “What’s your story? Who are you? Where do you come from?”

“Grew up in Queens. Moved into Manhattan in my twenties.”

“What’d your folks do?”

“Dad worked construction, died when a beam landed on him. My mom was a traditional wife until he passed and she went out to work for a couple of years.”

Her face softened. “Sorry.”

He shrugged. “I was ten when my dad died.”

“College?

Chris shook his head. “No money for that. Whenever I need to know how to do something, I find someone who already knows and learn from them. Did all kinds of jobs from the age of, like, thirteen. Even before then, I had an aunt who helped me as much as she could with money, but she wasn’t rich or anything. Worked in a butcher shop, computer repair store, did some security work in my twenties. Sometimes I’d be doing them all at once, finishing up one shift at one gig and heading off to the other.” He smiled. “I’m a quick study. Show me how to do something once, I’ll know it forever.”

“So, you never played college football, then. Where’d you learn to tackle?” She smiled.

“Tackling girls just comes natural.”

“How’d you connect with Headley?”

“Worked low-level on a campaign, got discovered. Like a movie star.” He shrugged. “What about you?”

“What about me?”

Chris moved in closer. “Why are you so angry?”

She scowled. “I’m not angry.”

“Please. I’ve been reading you for years,” he said. “You are one pissed-off bitch, and I mean that as a compliment. The best writing comes from outrage, right? You use words like a weapon.”

Barbara shifted her elbow on the icepack. “It’s not anger,” she said defensively. “I just don’t like injustice and hypocrisy.”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “It goes deeper. Something happened to you. Something changed you. What was it?”

“Don’t psychoanalyze me,” she said.

He studied her for several seconds. “You think who you are doesn’t come through in everything you write? I may not know your shoe size, but I know who you are.”

“And who’s that?”

“Someone looking to settle a score,” he said. “Let’s have a look at that arm.”

He gently took hold of her wrist with one hand, as though she might try to escape, while he lightly touched her elbow with the other. Barbara made no effort to stop him.

“So this bald thing you got goin’ on,” she said, looking at his scalp. “You after the Dwayne Johnson look? You shave it, or did you lose your hair before your first prom?”

“I don’t have money for combs and conditioner,” he said, still holding her arm.

They didn’t say anything for several seconds.

“I don’t sleep with the enemy,” Barbara said.

“Did I ask?”

“No,” Barbara conceded. “Not yet.”

“I’m heading into kind of a busy week and don’t think I could handle anything more than heavy petting.”

She appeared to be considering it, then glanced at her elbow. “And I do my best work with this arm, and until it mends...”

She pushed back her chair and stood. She handed Chris the icepack. “Gotta go.”

“Let me walk you out.”

“I can find my way.”

He followed her as far as the door. She turned, went up slightly on her toes, and kissed him on the cheek. “Thanks for the Oriental veggies.”

“My pleasure.”

“I know you were following me,” she said.

He smiled. “Then you won’t be surprised the next time it happens.”

On her way out, she gave Jack a ten.

Twenty-Nine

They had to walk up twenty-seven floors.

They couldn’t be sure that the other elevators in the York Avenue building had been sabotaged in any way, even though there was no evidence that they’d been fitted with pinhole cameras.

Martin Fleck offered to save the mayor the hike, saying he could take video and email it to him. But Fleck had also set the hook, promising to show something significant to the mayor, and Headley wanted to see it for himself.

“I still hit the StairMaster four times a week,” the mayor said. “So lead the way.”

Brian Cartland, of Homeland, was okay with making the climb, as well, but police chief Annette Washington begged off, but not because she wasn’t up to it. She had a meeting at One Police Plaza.

In the lobby, Arla had found Glover and was going to tell him about the exchange she had just witnessed between the mayor and the boy, but she didn’t have a chance. The sound of a text notification came from inside Glover’s jacket. He looked at the phone to find a message from his father.

“Gotta go,” he said. “You might as well head back to the office. The others should be back by now and you can get started.”

Arla was dismissed.

Glover found the entrance to the stairwell and was just about to exit onto the second floor hallway when the fire door opened and his father, Fleck, and Cartland entered.

“We’re going up,” Headley said.

“How far?” Glover asked.

“You’ll see,” his father said.

Fleck led the way, followed by the mayor, then Cartland, and finally, Glover. Everyone except Glover was careful to pace himself, taking the stairs at a steady rate. Glover, however, in struggling to keep up, occasionally took the steps two at a time, which only tired him out even more, causing him to stop several times to catch his breath.

Once they’d reached the twenty-ninth floor, Cartland said of the yet-to-be seen Glover, “Shall we wait for your son, Mr. Mayor?”

Headley had a hand on his chest, feeling the pounding inside. “That... really was a workout,” he said. “You think you’re in shape, but... No, let’s get started. Glover will get here when he gets here.”

Fleck led them down a corridor around the corner from the elevators until they reached a locked, green door marked Equipment Room Keep Out. Fleck produced a key to open the door, and once he had, they heard the soft humming of machinery and cooling fans.

Cartland and Headley followed him in. As the door was about to shut, a hand shot in to keep it open. A breathless Glover stepped into the room behind the others.

“Good of you to join us, Glover,” Headley said.

The room, about thirty feet square, was filled with several tall, locker-like units in the center that were constructed of green metal. Along one wall were the tops of the machines — massive pulleys that housed the belts and cables responsible for raising and lowering the elevators through the shafts. They were, at this time, idle, given that all the elevators were shut down.

Attached to one of the locker units, at eye level, was a black box about the size of a thick, paperback novel, or an oversized TV remote.

“Whoa,” said Glover, scanning the machinery like a wide-eyed kid. “Never been in a room like this.”

Fleck walked over to one of the green metal units and, with another key, opened one. Inside, from top to bottom, were countless wires and circuit panels. Lights flickered on and off while small digital readouts provided information.

Headley glanced at it all, clearly flummoxed by what any of it meant.

“This is the brains and the guts of the elevator system,” Fleck told the other men. He reached for the black box attached to the next unit and dislodged it. It had evidently been attached magnetically. It had a small screen at the top and several rows of small buttons below. A cable with a jack at the end dangled from the bottom. Fleck plugged it into one of the circuit boards, and the screen came to life with a series of numbers and symbols.

“Okay,” Fleck said. “I’m now, with this box, in control of the elevator system to this building. I can move them from floor to floor, open the doors and close them, send them straight to the bottom or the top. I can do any damn thing I want.”

He continued. “Before I can do any of this, of course, I have to punch in a slew of codes to establish an interface between this device and the elevator system. But if you know the codes, you’re in business. And here’s the thing.” At this point, he unplugged the unit, and started tapping the various buttons with his index finger.

“If I’m outside the building, at home, or at my office, and if I want to do all these same functions, I can, as long as I have this box or one just like it with me. Admittedly, that’s a little trickier, because first I have to get through the entire building’s security system to access the elevator system. But if I know those codes — and it would be easier to get them if I’ve already been in here to set things up — I’m in business. I can make this elevator do whatever I want, and I don’t even have to be here. So if you’re thinking of reviewing the surveillance tapes from the time of the event, well, that’s not necessarily going to be of any help.”

“Jesus,” said Headley. “But the codes and everything, those can’t be easy to crack.”

“They aren’t,” Fleck agreed. “But it can be done.”

“So,” Cartland said, “you’d either have to work in the elevator business and understand all this shit, or—”

“—know someone who did,” said Glover, who had been watching intently.

Headley gave his son a dismissive look. “Thanks, Glover. I think we’d all pretty much figured that part out.” To Fleck, he said, “Or anyone who works for the city’s elevator inspections division.”

“Yes,” said Fleck.

Headley looked at Cartland. “What do you suggest?”

“Off the top,” he said, “we need to get people checking every single elevator in the city, looking to see if a camera’s been surreptitiously installed. So far, the two elevators where people have been killed have had that camera.”

“Christ. How long could that take?” Headley asked Fleck.

“Seventy thousand elevators, and roughly a hundred and forty inspectors,” Fleck said. “Do the math. That’s about eighteen hundred elevators per person, you figure maybe they can do half a dozen a day, and—”

“That’s insane,” Headley said.

“But,” Fleck said, “if we make this public, get every building maintenance team involved and they do the inspections themselves, at least a simple visual, well, that would speed up the process.”

Headley looked back to Cartland. “Go public?”

Cartland’s face was granite.

“We go public with this,” Headley said, “and let everyone in New York know that somebody may be fucking with the elevators, and they know that every time they get into one of these things they’re gambling with their lives...”

“Pandemonium,” said Glover.

“Yeah,” said Cartland. “This is a vertical city. You got eight and a half million people afraid to go to work. Terrified to ride the elevators in their own building.”

“The city’ll come to a fucking standstill,” Headley said. “Unless we can find the son of a bitch who’s got one of those boxes there.”

“Yeah,” said Cartland. “And if this is, as we suspect, sabotage, we have to start asking why anyone would want to do this.”

“Do terrorists need a reason?” Headley asked.

“This is a very sophisticated way to go about killing people. It would take a lot of thought and planning and expertise. To go to all this trouble, you can bet your ass there’s a reason. Even if it’s one that might not make sense to us.”

Headley had turned his attention back to the box Fleck was holding. “How many of those can there be? Not that many, right? You go to every elevator maintenance company, find out if one of these has been stolen.”

Fleck looked grim.

“Mr. Mayor, you remember, before we came up here, I said what I had to tell you was worse than what you already knew?”

Headley made a face that suggested he’d had a bad burrito. “I think we know what that is now. A paralyzed city.”

“Well, yeah, that’s pretty bad. But what I wanted to tell you was about this box.”

Fleck held it up in his hand, next to his face, like a Price Is Right girl, but without the fake smile.

“Anybody can get one of these off eBay for five hundred bucks.”

Thirty

Jerry Bourque was slipping on his jacket and getting ready to leave the station at the end of his shift when his desk phone rang.

Lois Delgado had left early to look after her sick kid, so he couldn’t hand it off to her. Before departing, she’d gotten back to Gunther Willem to find out if he’d learned whether Otto Petrenko might have worked on one, or both, of the elevators that had killed people in the last two days. Bourque, checking his phone on the way back into Manhattan, got up to speed about the York Avenue elevator mishap that had claimed the life of some Russian scientist.

“I hate coincidences,” he’d said. “Two elevators drop and we’ve got an elevator technician beaten to death.”

Once they were back at the station, she’d called Willem. He promised to get back to her as soon as he could. Shortly before Delgado left, he phoned in and reported that according to company records, Petrenko had never done work in those two buildings, but the company had in years past.

Even so, Delgado had made a point of telling their captain that while there might be no connection whatsoever, she and Bourque were investigating the death of an elevator technician. The captain said that if those two elevator incidents were anything more than straightforward accidents, the information hadn’t been made its way to their precinct yet.

Now, on his own, Bourque was standing by his desk, thinking about what he would pick up from the hot table on his way home, when the phone rang. He snatched up the receiver and put it to his ear.

“Detective Bourque,” he said.

“Is this Detective Bourque?” a woman asked.

It never mattered that you gave your name when you answered. People had to make sure.

“That’s right.”

“This is Misha Jackson? You were trying to reach me?”

“Yes,” he said, slipping back into his chair, reaching for a notepad and taking a pen in hand. “Thanks for returning my call.”

“I work in the casino and don’t get off work till about four in the morning, and I turn off all the phones so I can get a decent sleep. When I woke up” — and at this point she started to cry — “I had calls from my brother and Eileen. I can’t believe this. Who would do something like this to Otto?”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” Bourque said.

“I can’t get my head around it! Otto was... he was an okay guy. I don’t know why anyone would do this.”

“That’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Anatoly — my brother — said you’d already talked to him.”

“Yes. I’m wondering if your story is similar to his.”

Misha Jackson made sniffing noises at the other end of the line. “Yeah, I guess. It was weird. I mean, we didn’t hear much from Otto. He was always the odd one out of the three of us, you know?”

“Explain.”

“Well, he was always more of a loner, more to himself. Me and Anatoly had lots of friends, but Otto was the one who kept to himself. He was kind of a mechanical geek from the get-go. He’d have never gone outside the house if our mother hadn’t forced him.”

“Mechanical geek?”

“Even as a kid, he always took apart everything to see how it worked. Toaster, TV, you name it. Computers, too. He could just see the inside of a machine in his head, you know what I mean?”

“Sure. His boss said as much.”

“I’d get a Christmas card from him and Eileen every year. But even that, she wrote it and put the stamp on it and walked it down to the corner mailbox. Otto didn’t give us much mind. But we were still family, you know? Just because he didn’t pay much attention to us didn’t mean he didn’t give a shit. If something happened to either one of us, he’d be there. Four years ago, my husband had a heart attack, and it was looking bad there for a while, and when Otto heard about it, he was on the first plane out to see how I was doing.”

“Sounds like, on balance, a good brother.”

Another sniff. “Yeah.”

“Tell me about his recent calls.”

Bourque heard the woman take a breath. “It was strange, him calling for no obvious reason. Wasn’t my birthday or Christmas. He just calls and asks how we’re doing. But here’s the part that’s strange. He wanted to know what hours I work, and I told him, and next thing you know he’s calling me at the casino, and not from his home phone. A different phone.”

“Hmm,” said Bourque.

“And on this call, he’s all, hey Misha, you need to watch yourself. Make sure you lock your doors, make sure you put on the alarm at night. He even wanted to know if I carried a gun. Why the hell would I want to do that? He tells me it’s legal to carry a concealed gun in Nevada, that I should think about doing that, and I’m thinking, where is this coming from? And I ask him, and he says it’s nothing, but the world’s changing, you can’t be too careful.”

“That sounds like what he told your brother. He wanted him to carry a gun, too.”

“I asked him if he was in trouble and he said no. But I could tell he was lying. It was in his voice. He was definitely on edge about something.”

“Did he say whether he was being threatened in any way?”

“No.”

“Did he talk about the Flyovers?”

“The who?”

“An activist group.”

“I don’t remember any talk about that.”

“It sounds as though your brother was trying to put you on guard, that he believed there was some threat to you that he wasn’t willing to share.”

“Well, no one’s threatened me, except for a guy who lost a hundred grand the other night on blackjack. He wasn’t too happy, and security had to remove him. But that’s work stuff. Happens now and again. But outside the casino, going about my business, I haven’t noticed anything out of the ordinary. No one waiting by my car when I finish work. No one watching the house, at least that I’ve been able to see.”

“Is that what Otto was suggesting? That there could be someone watching you?”

Misha Jackson paused. “That reminds me of something he said. I only just thought of it now.”

“What did he say?”

“I kind of forgot about it, because it seemed so crazy, I thought he had to be joking. He said, just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Kind of a variation of the line about being paranoid. It doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you. That’s why I thought it was a joke, that he was referring to that. But now that I think about it, maybe he meant it. Why would anyone be watching me and my brother? That makes no sense.”

“And yet, someone did kill Otto. Can you think of anyone who might have a grudge against your entire family?”

“Christ, you think we’re next?”

“I don’t know anything like that, Ms. Jackson. But Otto was murdered, and clearly he was trying to warn you.”

There was a long silence at the other end of the line.

“Ms. Jackson?”

“I’m gonna get it.”

“Get what?”

“That gun.”

Thirty-One

So how’d your first day go?”

Glover Headley raised an eyebrow as he asked Arla the question. He was nursing a Stella while Arla was waiting to take her first sip of a Kir Royale. They were seated at a table at Gran Morsi, an Italian place a short walk from City Hall.

“Yeah, right, wow,” she said. “It’s not every job where the first thing you see is some dead scientist in an elevator.”

“That’s why I wanted to check in on you. I hope this wasn’t too forward, asking you here for a drink. I wanted to get away from the building, see how you are. That was a pretty traumatic thing to have to deal with.”

“Yeah, sure, I get that. Look, aside from the decapitation, it was a pretty good start. You know, like, ‘Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, did you enjoy the play?’”

Glover couldn’t help but chuckle. “God, that’s awful. But the way you put it, that made me laugh. When you got back, the rest of the department was there?”

Arla nodded. “Everyone was great. I think, tomorrow morning, I can really hit the ground running.”

“That’s terrific.”

“But listen, I’m glad we’ve got a second to talk, because I saw something kind of interesting today.”

Glover took a swig of his beer. “Oh, yeah? In the office?”

“No, at the building where it happened.” She described how his father had dealt with the boy who’d been in the elevator when the woman was killed. “He was great with that kid. That’s a side of the mayor we don’t see often enough.”

“Yeah, that’s for sure,” Glover said, an edge to his voice.

Arla caught the tone. “What?”

Glover put his elbows on the table and leaned in. “My dad is a guy with... many sides. There was a time, from all accounts, when he was a complete jerk. Back when he worked for his own father, looking after the buildings he owned. There are stories, and they’re not pretty. But once he got out from under his dad’s thumb and started out on his own, I think he started to change, become more empathetic. To actually care about people, you know? At least to some degree, and with some people. But there’s always been this part of him, a side he tries to keep buried, where he’s still that young man who’s stuck doing Daddy’s dirty work. A cold son of a bitch. It comes out every once in a while.”

Arla smiled. “Like with you, sometimes.”

“Like with me most of the time,” he said. “It’s kind of an open secret.” He sighed. “There’s even a ‘poor Glover’ hashtag on Twitter where people post times when my father humiliates me.”

“That’s awful.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it balances out, considering there’s like half a dozen other Twitter accounts devoted to making fun of him.”

Arla gave him a sly look. “Which one of them is yours?”

That made him laugh again. “I’ll never tell. The thing is, I get what he’s trying to do. His dad was tough with him, and that turned him into someone with drive and ambition. He figures, if he’s tough with me, he’ll get the same result. He’ll turn me into the kind of man he is.” He paused. “I don’t know that I want to become the kind of man he is.”

“Sure,” Arla said. “I get that. We all have to be, you know, our authentic selves.” She rolled her eyes self-deprecatingly. “Or some new age bullshit like that.”

Glover nodded. “God, I can’t believe I’m telling you all this.” He ran his hand over his head. “Well, look, I don’t want to keep you from anything. I wanted to buy you a drink and make sure that you survived.”

Arla paused a moment before asking, “You wanna get something to eat? I mean, we’re just sitting here and it’s dinnertime and all. But you totally don’t have to. You probably have to go help the mayor do something.”

“I don’t.”

“Great,” Arla said, smiling. “And listen, I’ll get this because you’ve been so—”

“No, that’s nuts.” He grinned. “I can bill the city for this one. I’ll write if off as employee training.”

“Well, you strike me as a very good trainer,” Arla said.

As soon as she said it, she thought, what the hell was that? You strike me as a very good trainer. Why did she say something like that? As soon as the words left her lips she realized it sounded like some Fifty Shades come-on, which it was not.

Unless it was.

No, it was not. She had to come back with something else.

“The whole department,” she said, “seems very equipped to bring new people up to speed, to train them in the latest data analysis.”

Okay, she thought. Not a bad recovery. She couldn’t tell, from Glover’s expression, whether he’d interpreted her previous comment as sexual. That was probably a good sign.

But then Glover leaned in even closer.

“You know, we have to be very careful these days. I don’t want my sitting here with you, having a drink, having dinner, to be seen in any way as inappropriate. You’re not under any pressure to stay. We’re living in a post-Weinstein world now.”

“Dinner was my idea, remember?” she said.

Glover smiled. “It’s nice talking to you.”

“Yeah,” Arla said slowly.

Glover sat back in his chair and raised his palms. “You know, about work. It’s good, talking about all the things that need to get done.”

“Of course, right,” she said.

He turned his head, scanned the room. “If you see a waiter, let me know and I can score us some menus.”

“So,” Arla said, signaling a change in the conversation’s direction, “what did your dad want?”

“Hmm?”

“When we were at the accident, and he texted you to come upstairs?”

“Oh, yeah, we had to walk all the way to the top.” He stopped looking for someone to bring him a menu and leaned in conspiratorially. “I don’t even know if I should tell you about it.”

“Why? What?”

Glover rubbed his chin, trying to decide how much to share with Arla. “You have to promise not to tell anyone.”

Arla felt her pulse quicken. “Yeah, sure, of course.”

“There was this guy from the building department, and this other guy from Homeland Security or something.”

“You’re kidding. Why would someone from Homeland be there?”

His voice went even quieter. “They think the elevator was sabotaged.”

Her mouth dropped open and her voice rose. “Seriously?”

Heads turned at a nearby table.

Through gritted teeth, he said, “Shh. I can’t tell you this if you’re going to look like I just told you I’m gay or something.” A pause. “Which I’m not.”

“Okay,” she whispered.

“Anyway, it looks like the ‘accident’ was deliberate. Yesterday’s, too.” His face grew grim, yet he also looked excited to be able to share privileged information. “Looks like, by the same person.”

“Oh my God. So, it’s terrorism?”

“Could be,” he said. “It would have to be someone very smart to be able to pull it off. Lots of technical know-how required.” Glover smiled, as if in admiration of whoever had done it. “And this is kind of curious, although I haven’t mentioned it to my dad because he’s been such a prick lately — pardon my French — but people who supported my father lived in both of those buildings.”

“You think that means anything?”

Glover shrugged. “Probably not. I mean, there’s probably people in every skyscraper in Manhattan who supported him.” A pause. “Hard as that is to believe at times.”

“So what are they doing about it?” she asked.

“Last I heard, they’re quietly putting out the word to every landlord in the city to check the elevators. Not giving the real reason why. They’re making up some excuse. Maybe to do with the cameras that were installed.”

“Cameras?”

He filled her in about what had been found on top of the elevator cars. “If that’s all that it was, it might just be a Peeping Tom thing. But it’s way worse than that.”

“But if it’s happened twice, it could happen again. Don’t people need to be warned?”

Glover shook his head. “They don’t want to start a panic. Listen, I’m gonna go find us some menus.”

He got up from the table in search of a waiter.

Arla watched him walk away, thinking, Oh my God, my mom so needs to know this.

Thirty-Two

My feet are dead,” Estelle Clement said to her husband, Eugene, as she sat on the edge of the bed in their hotel room. She had kicked off her shoes and was massaging her right foot with both hands. “What an idiot I was, wearing heels to the show tonight.”

“I told you,” Eugene said.

“I thought we’d be able to get a cab after. I never dreamed we’d have to walk all the way back. We should have gotten one of those Ubers.”

“I never take those,” he said. “There’s a record. Where you were, where you went, when you took the trip.”

“You don’t want the world to know we went to a show and came back to the hotel?” she asked.

“I just... don’t like being tracked,” he said.

“You’ve been on edge ever since that TV thing,” she said.

The mention of TV prompted Clement to pick up the remote. He pointed it at the television and turned it on. He flipped through channels until he found news.

“Did we come all the way from Denver so you could watch TV?” she asked.

He ignored her.

Estelle said, “Fine.” Having massaged her feet enough that she felt she could walk, she strolled over to the window. “There’s not much of a view. You should have booked us on a higher floor.”

“This was all they had,” Clement snapped. On the screen was a reporter, standing out front of a high-rise building. The chyron across the bottom read: Second Elevator Disaster in Two Days. He had the volume set too low to make out what she was saying.

His wife reached across the bed for her purse and dug out her cell phone. “I’m gonna text the kids.”

“Do that.”

“We’ve got two more days,” she said, with what sounded like a hint of resignation in her voice. “What about tomorrow?”

“Why don’t we talk about it at breakfast?” he said. “I’m trying to watch this.”

She hadn’t started texting yet. She was glaring at her husband.

“Eugene,” she said.

“Hmm?”

“Look at me.”

He sighed, turned and said, “What?”

She asked, “Who was that man?”

“What man?”

“The man sitting in the car, after the interview, when you were getting the cab. The one you talked to with your back to him.”

Clement’s face grew concerned. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“He put down his window and he said something to you. You had a conversation.”

“He was probably telling me to stop leaning on his car,” Clement said.

“Do you know him?” she asked.

“Of course not,” he said.

“Because I think I’ve seen him before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I only had a quick look at him. But at home, I thought I saw you talking to him once. On the street. And I even thought I saw him in the lobby.”

“I’d never seen him before in my life.”

“So you did see him? Today you had your back to him when you talked to him.”

Clement was briefly flustered. “I didn’t see him. I didn’t see anybody. I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Estelle was quiet for a moment before she asked, “Why did we do this trip?”

“What? It’s our anniversary, for Christ’s sake.”

“I was surprised when you proposed it.”

He tossed the remote onto the bed and rolled his eyes. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because it’s the first really nice thing you’ve done in a long time.”

“This is what I get. I plan a trip, I fly us to New York, and now I’ve done something wrong. What do you want from me, Estelle?”

She considered the question. “Well, for starters, to love me again, if that’s not asking too much.”

He looked at her, said nothing.

She sat back down on the bed. “You don’t even... I know I’m not twenty-one anymore, that the years take their toll, but... I’d like to think you still found me even a little... attractive.”

“Of course I do,” he said without conviction, glancing for half a second back at the television.

“The prescription... worked, but you still don’t seem to want—”

“I really don’t want to have this conversation again, Estelle.”

“You never want to have this conversation.”

“Maybe because we don’t need to have this conversation.”

“If you would just talk to—”

“I don’t need to talk to anyone.”

Estelle said nothing for several seconds. Then, “It’s a myth that it’s always women who lose interest.”

Clement briefly closed his eyes and sighed. “This has been a very stressful year for me. Getting the organization up and running. Getting the word out. Dealing with all these baseless accusations. It’s taking a toll. Surely to God you can see that. Maybe you need to stop thinking about yourself all the time and try to imagine what I’m going through.”

That cut deep. She eyed him scornfully. Her voice was cold and even when she said, “Everything I do is for you.”

He waved his hands in the air, let them fall to his sides. “Fine, okay, you do.”

“I think the reason we came here has nothing to do with our anniversary.”

“That’s ridiculous,” he said.

She got up from the bed, went to the bathroom, and closed the door. When Clement heard her turn the lock, he grabbed the remote.

Maybe, he thought, he could catch the rest of that elevator report on a different newscast.

Thirty-Three

Barbara, as was her routine at night before turning off the lights, was sitting cross-legged on her bed, MacBook in her lap. She was jumping from website to website, reading the latest from the New York Times, Politico, the Hill, The Huffington Post, CNN, BuzzFeed.

She’d taken some more painkillers for her elbow, which still hurt like hell. Despite Chris Vallins’s plea, she had not sought medical attention. She fell. No big deal. People fell all the time. And her elbow still worked. She knew this for a fact because she had used her right arm to empty a bottle of chardonnay into a wineglass when she’d come home.

She’d had a hard time getting Chris Vallins out of her head the rest of the day. She was feeling things for him she did not want to feel.

Get over it, she told herself.

Barbara had made some calls when she returned home. She wanted to reach family members of the others who had died in Monday’s elevator crash and ask if any spooky officials in black SUVs had come to see them, too, to tell them to keep their questions to themselves, to not speak to the media. She figured that was a better place to start, since she was going to run into more problems — especially considering she did not speak Russian — trying to find relatives of the woman who’d died in today’s elevator incident.

She had no luck getting any of Sherry D’Agostino’s relatives to call back. Ditto for the family of Barton Fieldgate.

But she did get through to Stuart Bland’s mother.

Stuart, as it turned out, had still lived at home.

“I told him to leave that lady alone,” she said tearfully once Barbara had identified herself. “He went to her house and nearly got in trouble. He wouldn’t have been in that elevator if he’d listened to me.”

It took several more questions for Barbara to get the full picture, that Stuart was trying to get a producer to look at a script he had written. That was what had taken him to the Lansing Tower.

“At first, they thought he had something to do with it,” Bland’s mother said. “Because he was using a phony ID. For FedEx. So that made them suspicious. But he couldn’t have had anything to do with it. That’s just crazy. He could barely get his bicycle chain back on. I think I convinced them. But I shouldn’t even be telling you this.”

“Why?”

“The man said.”

“What man?”

“The man who came to see me. From the government.”

“Did he say which department?”

“He didn’t say. But I could tell.”

“What was his name?”

“I’m not sure he told me. He didn’t leave a card. I have to go.”

And she hung up.

Barbara wrote a piece for Manhattan Today, but it didn’t take long and she wasn’t very happy with it. Recounting her conversations with Bland’s mother and Paula’s parents, she asked her readers, “Who is this mystery man?” Why would someone want the families of the victims to keep a low profile while the elevator accident was being investigated? Why would they be pressured not to ask questions? Barbara did not speculate in her piece. She did not mention the FBI or CIA or Homeland Security. She didn’t have anything solid enough to do that.

And Vallins hadn’t been any help when she’d asked him about it. If he knew anything, he wasn’t saying.

And he never did answer the bald question, the bastard. Okay, so maybe that was too personal. Just as well she’d resisted the urge to run her hand over his head.

Looking again at the story she posted, she fretted at how light it was on facts. But maybe someone who did know something would read it and get in touch. That was often how it worked. A story that was incomplete could produce more leads than a story that didn’t run at all.

It had produced a few responses already, not that they were in any way useful. Just comments from, as Barbara’s father once referred to those who call in to radio talk shows, a “cavalcade of nincompoops.” There was spicydragon, who said, “Anybody that old who still lives with his mommy deserves to die.” And there were these words of wisdom from DeepStateHarry: “We r all being watched. There r black vans everyware.”

Barbara was about to move on from the Manhattan Today website when one other comment caught her eye.

“Hope you are feeling better.”

It was from GoingDown.

Barbara felt, along with the persistent, dull pain in her elbow, a chill run down her spine.

“Hope you are feeling better.”

Barbara thought back to when Chris Vallins had tackled her in the middle of the street. All this time, she’d thought he was the only one keeping an eye on her. Was it possible someone else was, too? Whoever this GoingDown person was, had he — or she — seen that van nearly hit her? When she screamed in pain about her elbow, had this person heard her?

Barbara tried to think back to the scene. There was the old lady who got her phone. That postal worker. The woman with the shopping cart. Was it one of them?

GoingDown had been the one, in a response to her last article, to express condolences about Paula Chatsworth.

Okay, that’s what GoingDown is referring to. Not my fall today.

Barbara touched her hand to her chest. Her heart had, briefly, raced at the thought that she was being watched. She was getting paranoid. Thinking about mysterious men in black SUVs had prompted her mind to go places it shouldn’t.

“Chill out, girl,” she said under her breath.

That was when she moved off the Manhattan Today site and started surfing all the other news outlets.

The so-called experts said screens should be avoided an hour before bedtime. Artificial light from phones and tablets and laptops messed up sleeping patterns, they argued. Bullshit, Barbara thought. This was what she did every night. Even if she had someone over. If some man wanted to roll over and go to sleep after a fuck, that was fine with her. But don’t expect her to ignore what was going on in the world. Frankly, this was one of the reasons why she didn’t like having men spend the night. Not only did they want you to put the laptop away, they expected you to make them breakfast.

Fuck that.

Barbara closed the laptop, killed the lights, and put her head on the pillow. She was about to close her eyes when she noticed her phone, sitting screen-side up on the covers next to her, light up with a text. Barbara glanced over.

It was Arla.

There really hadn’t been a moment all day when Arla wasn’t in her thoughts. Even when Barbara had been with the Chatsworths, or talking to Stuart Bland’s mother, Arla was on her mind. Barbara had been unable to stop thinking about Arla’s new job and what had motivated her to go after it. Had she done it to drive her mother nuts, or was it really a position she wanted, that she believed would challenge her?

Barbara, in one moment, would think her reaction to Arla’s news at breakfast had been perfectly justified. And in the next, she would feel she’d totally blown it. She replayed the conversation in her head countless times.

I should have said... and I shouldn’t have said...

Barbara picked up the phone and read the message.

Barbara typed YES in return.

Barbara quickly tapped NO.

She only had to wait ten seconds for the phone to ring with its distinctive typing chime.

“Hey,” Barbara said.

“Hey,” Arla said. “I know it’s late and all but—”

“No, it’s okay. I’m still up. Everything all right?”

“Yeah, sure, things are good.”

Barbara hesitated before asking, “How was the first day?”

“It was... interesting.”

“That doesn’t sound good.”

“No, I mean, it really was interesting. I hadn’t even started and I ended up going to that second elevator accident.”

Arla filled her in.

“God,” Barbara said. “You saw what happened?”

“Yeah.”

“You okay?”

“I guess. Although I’m sure I’ll have nightmares or something. When I saw it, I thought, don’t be a wuss. Don’t freak out. Believe me, it wasn’t easy.”

Barbara hesitated before asking, “Did you meet him?”

“You mean the mayor?”

“Yes.”

“No. And Glover didn’t introduce me, either. I’m too low level.”

“Glover? You met his son?”

“Yeah. He oversees the department that hired me. So he showed me around because everyone else was off at a seminar.”

“Glover’s your boss?”

“I’ll have several. There’s my immediate supervisor, then Glover, and then, I guess, well, ultimately we’re all working for the mayor, right?” Arla paused. “Look, Mom, about this morning—”

“Yeah, it’s okay. I—”

“No, I said some things and I’m sorry. I’ve been working through a lot of stuff. I’m trying to sort them out. I didn’t take this job to be all in your face. I mean, maybe a little, but this is something I could—”

“It’s okay,” Barbara said again, her voice soft, reflective. “It’s your life.”

“The mayor’s hard to get a handle on. I saw him do something really nice today, when no one was watching, with this kid who’d been in the elevator where this woman got killed. But with Glover, for example, he’s a shit.”

“Well.”

“He was telling me tonight — we grabbed a bite — about how complicated his relationship with his father is. But listen, that’s not why I called. It’s kind of tricky to talk about and I probably shouldn’t say anything, but Glover said—”

“Getting this close to the mayor’s son, you need to be careful about that.”

“What?”

Barbara thought a moment before offering a reason. “If they find out who your mother is, they’ll question your motives.”

“I told you. This job has nothing to do with you.”

“I’m just saying, watch your step with him.”

“I don’t need your advice,” Arla said, an edge in her voice.

“I don’t — I’m just trying to—”

“You know what?” Arla said. “You’re right. I was going to tell you something, but now I realize that’s not a good idea.”

“Tell me what?”

Arla didn’t answer.

“Arla?”

It took Barbara a moment to realize her daughter had ended the call.

“Shit,” she said and tossed the phone onto the floor.

She flopped back on the bed, her head crushing the pillow. A minute later, she turned out her light, and stared at the ceiling until dawn.

Thirty-Four

I’m going to say something to him,” the boy says. “I am. I don’t care if he gets mad.”

His mother shakes her head angrily. “No, you’re not. I’ve known him longer than you have. There’s no talking to him.”

“He’s so mean. You should—”

But the boy stops himself. What he wants to tell his mother is that she should stand up for herself. That she shouldn’t take any more shit from this man. But he can’t bring himself to do that because he knows that everything she does, she does for him. She does not deserve his scorn or criticism.

And yet.

“If something isn’t done,” he says, and it is at this point that his voice starts to break, “you could, you know...”

“Don’t be silly,” she says. “Nothing is going to happen to me.” She smiles. “I’m made of tough stuff. Don’t you worry about me.”

“But last night,” the boy says, “you said your heart felt like—”

“Enough,” she says sternly. “Go do your homework.”