House on Fire

56

Maggie Benson’s apartment was on 126th Street in Harlem. This wasn’t the Harlem I knew from when I was a kid. Now there were yoga studios and hip restaurants and a Whole Foods. Her building was kind of ugly, and run-down inside, with an elevator that didn’t seem to be working. I walked up the six flights. The local NYPD guy was already there. He opened the door when I knocked. The crime scene tape around the door had been broken.

“You’re from Westchester?” he said. He looked like he was twenty-two, though he had to be older.

I didn’t correct him. Let him think I had something to do with the cops. I didn’t need to talk to him. I said, “Is Crime Scene done with their work?”

“I think so, yes. They’re done with the prints and the computers and all that. But you can wear these if you want.” He handed me a pair of nitrile gloves as I entered.

I immediately smelled Maggie’s delicate patchouli scent. Not the brash perfume she’d been wearing at Kimball’s, when she was playing a role.

The apartment was immaculate, looked like it had just been cleaned and straightened out, but I knew that was just the way Maggie lived. She was an army girl through and through. On the left was a fairly big room that was clearly outfitted as her office. Framed things on the wall. Her state license. Diplomas. Certificates of attendance at training seminars — forensic analysis, debt investigations, public records searches. A small, spare home office. She didn’t meet people here, I was pretty sure. On a simple metal desk was an open laptop next to a coffee mug. The laptop was a MacBook. It was plugged in, but it was dark. The police must have finished examining it.

I touched the trackpad with a gloved finger, and the screen came to life. A log-in screen with a blank for a password. The Bash Bunny wouldn’t work here. It didn’t work on Mac computers.

I looked at the screen and thought. Maggie was a pro. The password wasn’t going to be “1234.” Though I tried it, just to be sure, and I was right. It wasn’t “1234.” I had no idea what to try. It wasn’t going to be the date that we met, that much I knew. Or “I ♥ Nick.”

This was, I realized, a fool’s errand. Going into Maggie’s apartment and hoping to find some trace evidence she might have left behind — that was ridiculous. She was a pro and as careful as I am.

The laptop sat on a yellow legal pad. Maggie always had a legal pad. She always took notes on legal pads while she talked on the phone.

This one was blank. Which probably meant that she’d taken her notes with her, folded up into a small square — also something she used to do.

I switched on the desk lamp and looked at the yellow pad, then held it up to the light at an angle.

Yes. You could see the faint indentations of what she’d written on the top sheet, which she’d removed.

The cop who’d let me in had followed me into Maggie’s office, but I could see he was losing interest. His radio blasted an indecipherable message; he picked up his handheld from his belt and spoke into it. As he did so, he walked out of the room and into the hall, and I took advantage of his absence. I grabbed a pencil from a jar of pens and pencils and did something that would make another professional groan. I shaded the surface of the paper lightly with the lead of a pencil, bringing out all the indentations in white.

The proper way to do this is to use an ESDA machine, an electrostatic detection apparatus, to lift indented writing off paper. It’s nondestructive. But I didn’t have that with me and I didn’t have the time. And for my purposes, I didn’t need it. The old-fashioned way worked just fine.

It brought up a constellation of notes in Maggie’s bold handwriting:

That last — commingling of funds — was underlined three times. Then there was a name, CONRAD BLACK, with a circle around it.

MEGAN KIMBALL — that was who had called her first, to hire her. And it was clear the call was all about Conrad, Megan’s father. Megan was asking about her father’s will, had it been revised? And something about HK and money. HK being Hong Kong?... Or Hayden Kimball?

Conrad Black: now, there was an interesting name. I didn’t know the man, but my father did. A bright, scholarly guy. He’s a Canadian financier, used to be called a “press baron,” who was convicted on four counts of fraud. He used to own the Jerusalem Post and the Daily Telegraph but got in trouble and went to prison for embezzlement and such. What that really meant was putting his personal expenses — household staff, private chefs, private jets, chauffeurs — on the company tab. Even though it was a publicly traded company. Was another Conrad — Conrad Kimball — doing the same thing? And why was Maggie taking notes about it?

I grabbed the marked-up piece of paper and tore it off the pad. Folded it three times, like Maggie used to do.

I felt like I had something useful now. I looked around the rest of the apartment, her bedroom, and I felt a pang. More than a pang: it was outright painful to look around and see the neatly arranged detritus of her life. A poster of Santorini — she must have traveled to Greece after she left the service. A collection of snow globes from all the places she’d lived, which was a lot. Her drawer of panties.

But I knew Maggie was too careful to leave any unencrypted disks or hard drives lying around. There was nothing more here to find. I also, to be honest, wanted to leave. I couldn’t bear to be there any longer.