Now You See Her

Chapter 50

I SIT IN WHITENESS, getting ready for my wedding. I’m wearing a fluffy white robe and white curlers in my hair. Even the separators between my freshly polished toenails are a chaste virginal white.

I smile as I suddenly notice the white roses that cover the bathroom’s entire countertop. They glow almost painfully in the undiluted Florida light that fills the room.

As I put the finishing touches on my mascara in the makeup mirror, there’s a pounding on the door.

“Come out with your hands up!” Peter says through a bullhorn. “And those little panties of yours held high!”

I begin to laugh but stop as I hear the coughing sound of a gas engine being started with a rip cord. Is it a lawn mower? I think, turning toward the door.

Immediately bits of wood explode inward, spraying my face, and I see the tip of the chain saw as it cuts a slot in the door. As I watch, the spinning blade disappears, and through the hole a face appears, like Jack Nicholson’s in The Shining. I think it’s Peter, but it’s not. It’s the almost Asian face of the Jump Killer.

“How’s my fair Nina?” he says, flashing me his white capped teeth.

As I turn to run, I trip on the lip of the tub. I grasp the edge of the shower curtain, but the rings pop off the rail one by one, and I fall backward into warm water. As I scramble up, I see it’s not water at all but blood, and in the tub beside me, spooning like a honeymooning couple, are the dead bodies of Elena Cardenas and Ramón Peña.

Covered in blood, I scream, flailing as I see that half of Ramón Peña’s face is missing, the white of his skull stark against the sea of red.

I woke up. Struggling to catch my breath, I looked up into darkness while my heart clubbed the inside of my chest. And I really thought I was going to have a heart attack when I saw a dark figure was hovering above me.

“Angel of Death,” I spat out.

“Mom?” Emma said, clicking on my bedside lamp.

My eyes burned as she started shaking my shoulder.

“Wake up, Mom,” she said. “We both overslept. I can’t find my new AE shirt. You know, the nice blue one? Jeez, you’re covered in sweat. Are you sick? Don’t tell me you’ve got the swine flu?”

I wish, I felt like telling my daughter as I pulled the sheet over my head. You could get over the swine flu. I mopped my clammy brow on the other side of my pillow.

My recurring nightmares, on the other hand, were the gift that kept right on giving.

Even after almost twenty years.

“Oh, I know,” Emma said. “Too much champagne at my party last night. That’s it. You’re hungover.”

Emma was teasing, of course.

“Ha, ha, wise girl,” I said, lifting the cover and suddenly smiling. “Your blue shirt’s crisply ironed on a hanger in my closet, Little Miss Sweet Sixteen. And you’re welcome for last night’s party. It wasn’t like it was expensive or anything. I think it was worth having to eat cat food when I’m old, don’t you?”

Emma stuck out her tongue. I stuck out mine right back. Emma and I were close, like sisters and best friends put together, only better. We even shared clothes. Which pissed her off. I guess it would piss me off a little, too, to have a mother who could fit into my jeans.

“As if you’ll ever be old,” Emma said, climbing into the bed and wrapping me in a headlock. “You know how many of my stupid friends’ mothers asked if you were my older sister? Even some of Mark’s Collegiate buddies were checking you out. It’s really not fair. Isn’t Snow White supposed to be the fairest one of all? Come on, Evil Queen. Step aside already.”

“Never,” I said with a cackle.

Again, Emma was teasing. Due to a death-march regimen of treadmilling and starvation, at forty I was just still in the ballpark of merely pretty. Emma, who had inherited Peter’s dark, beguiling looks on the other hand, was already nearly six feet tall and a heart-melting beauty.

I wasn’t the only one who thought so, either. Every once in a while, she’d get legit offers for modeling from friends of friends. Which I told her that I’d let her do over my dead body, of course.

As much as we were friends, I was very protective of her. Probably overly so. I didn’t care. I knew what the world was like, how precarious, how quickly and completely destruction could follow from just one false move.

Emma was going to have a good life, a normal life, a safe life. It was all that mattered.

“The last thing I’d worry about is your looks, kiddo,” I said, knocking on her head with a knuckle. “Now, that brain of yours, well, that’s another story.”

I ducked as she swung my pillow.

“Shit!” I screamed as I finally glanced at my iPhone charging on the night table and saw the time. “Why didn’t you tell me we were so late!?”

Chapter 51

IT WAS POURING RAIN four hours later when, umbrella-less, I decided to race from my triple-parked taxi toward the crowded Aretsky’s Patroon on East 46th Street. Not good. It was only a hundred feet or so, but I got completely and utterly hosed in the monsoon.

Of course, I thought, as I finally squished my way inside. It always rained when you were running late for your very first power lunch with your boss and forgot to check the weather.

To make matters oh so much better, there was a lithe and perfect Nordic hostess behind the podium inside. She acknowledged my sopping presence with a slight lift of her eyebrow. But then she smiled nicely.

“Welcome to Patroon. Name?” she asked.

I stood there as tall and regally as I could, doing my damnedest to pretend that being as wet as a drowned rat was the new black.

“Nina,” I said, flicking my ruined hair out of my eyes with a hopefully gracious and professionally competent smile. “My name is Nina Bloom.”

I’d lucked out. My boss hadn’t arrived yet, so I was able to do some rehab work on my makeup and hair in the ladies’ room before I returned to the discreet banquette where I’d been seated.

As I waited, I kicked back for the first time and drank in the vista. Carefully seated inside the modern power-lunch mecca, big-hitter media elites in bespoke tailoring were cutting deals beside Botoxed A-list fashionistas. Among the bottles of San Pellegrino, I spotted Ivanka Trump and Anderson Cooper chatting it up.

Well, it was more like I studiously ignored Ivanka and Anderson, like we were currently not speaking. I had picked up on one or two things living in Manhattan for the last couple of decades.

After a moment, I smiled and raised my own glass of sparkling water toward the room of power players and took a sip. Given my arrival in New York in 1994 with nothing but the clothes on my back and Emma in my belly, I had good reason to toast myself.

Most of all just for surviving.

I thought about all the craziness of those first few years. The skeevy dive bar around the corner from Madison Square Garden where I worked until I started to show. The place in Chinatown where I got my first fake ID. The shoebox of an apartment in Spanish Harlem that I brought Emma home to after giving birth at Lenox Hill Hospital.

My “big-shot career,” as Emma called it, came later. After some extremely creative résumé writing and a New York Career Institute class and a whole lot of luck, I’d scored my first non-waitressing job as a paralegal at Scott, Maxwell and Bond, one of the most powerful corporate law firms in the city.

I thought working at a law firm would be just a way to make a little more money, but from the get-go I found myself enthusiastically drawn to the work. There was something so exciting about being even a small part of the cases and issues and war room strategizing. After the chaos that had been my life up until that point, I found comfort in the law, its authority, its rationality, its calm and inherent nobleness.

The luckiest thing of all was that after I proved my usefulness in a class action suit, my boss, Tom Sidirov, a legendary litigator and even better person, practically demanded that I go to City College and then Fordham Law School on the firm’s dime.

It had taken almost ten years of work and night school, and thousands of logged hours on the New York City subway, but I eventually pulled it off. I became a lawyer. I’d even passed the New York bar exam on my first try.

Over the last three and a half years, my career had steadily started to pick up speed. I wasn’t in line to make partner anytime soon, but I had my own cases now, my own clients, even my own personal assistant.

All my hard work at the office and as a mom was starting to reap some pretty plush dividends, I thought, as I sat in the tastefully done restaurant. There weren’t supposed to be second acts in American lives, but I was giving it a pretty good go. I was finally starting to come across things I’d never dreamed I ever would again.

Stability. Fun. Dare I even say its name?

Hope.

It seemed that after two decades and a thousand miles, maybe I’d finally run far enough. For a moment there among the high-rent chatter and clacking crockery, I think I actually felt safe.

That’s what made what happened next so wrong, so utterly unfair.

Because as I sat there toasting myself, it wasn’t just my boss who was on his way.

As I sat cozy and dry and warm and stupidly proud of myself, my rude awakening and reckoning was already hurtling toward me, bigger and badder than ever before.

Chapter 52

“IS THIS SEAT TAKEN?” my boss, Tom Sidirov, said five minutes later.

Bald and short, even in his signature Brioni navy chalk stripe, my slight, sixty-plus mentor looked more like a retired bus driver than one of the country’s most successful litigators. Which couldn’t have tickled the cunning summa cum laude Columbia Law School grad and tenacious former Golden Gloves boxer more.

“When you say lunch, you don’t mess around, do you, boss?” I said.

“Well, when it comes to bribing my protégée,” Tom said, twisting an imaginary villain’s mustache, “I pull out all the stops.”

“Protégée?” I said. “Wow, here it comes. I’m almost afraid to ask. What’s this urgent new project you wanted to discuss?”

“A multifirm pro bono initiative is starting up,” Tom said as he spun his BlackBerry on the tabletop. “I don’t know too much about it except that it’s called Mission Exonerate, and I’m the partner who was supposed to find the volunteer for it, yesterday. Which I’m praying to Saint Anthony might be you. It starts Monday.”

“What about ProGen?” I said.

For the last month, I’d been on a team putting together the contracts and prospectus for a biotech merger. To fall asleep at night recently, instead of counting sheep, I’d go over the alphabet soup of reagents, genomics, proteomics, and cell therapies.

“We’ll find someone else to take over your role,” Tom said, lifting his gadget and making the sign of the cross at me with it. “I know it’s last minute. Hence, the free lunch and my undying gratitude. What do you say?”

As if it were a question. Tom had been like a father to me. Try like a fairy godfather.

“I say yes,” I said with a smile.

“Marone! How many times I gotta tell you?” he said, reverting to his native Bensonhurst accent as he took an envelope out of his pocket and handed it over. “When you’re being bribed, neva eva agree straight offa de bat.”

I opened the flap and slid out the two tickets.

And had trouble breathing.

They were double-digit field box seats for tonight’s Yankees game. Tonight’s Yankees–Red Sox game. The first one of the season. The only bigger Yankee fan than me was Emma.

“Oh, Tom,” I said woozily. “Oh, wow. I’m…”

“Hungry?” my fairy god counselor said, winking as he lifted his menu. “Then try the steak frites. Best in the city. Fuggedaboudit.”

Chapter 53

YOU HAD YOUR GOOD DAYS, Peter Fournier thought from his loge-level seat in the unbelievably opulent and immense new Yankee Stadium.

And then you had your perfect days.

“Here we go, Boston! Here we go!” he yelled as loud as he could as Beckett retook the mound.

From the famous façade, to the flat-screen TVs at every turn, to the low bowl-like design that made it seem like you were watching the game from the batting circle, even a die-hard Sawx fan like him couldn’t deny the billion-dollar ballpark was baseball’s version of paradise on earth. Even after they’d dug up Ortiz’s jersey.

But to be here in the eighth inning, the Sox up by three and Beckett still on the mound in a perfect game, was nothing short of miraculous.

Actually, the true topper was having his family there, his gorgeous wife, Vicki, and his two sons, nine-year-old twins, Michael and Scott, with him. As on all their trips to Disney and last year’s incredible European jaunt, Team Fournier was having an unforgettable blast.

The Fournier family had been invited to the game by Tom Reilly and Ed O’Connor, two New York FBI agents Peter had met at the FBI’s National Academy course years before. He’d actually had them and their families down for a Boston–New York spring training game in Fort Myers, and now it was payback.

The two big, bearlike Feds sat on either side of the Fourniers with their Yankee-fan families. There was a lot of razzing back and forth, but it was all in good clean fun.

Funny the places life took you, Peter thought, smiling as he shook his head at his twin sons. The second oldest in a destitute family of ten in a South Boston project, Peter had abhorred the idea of ever having a kid.

To be clear, he liked being married just fine. After all, there was nothing more satisfying or fun or clean than having a faithful, monogamous woman in his life. But by age fifty, and now on his third wife, Peter had had the epiphany that he’d actually acquired enough money to completely buffer himself from all the smelly, human unpleasantness of child rearing with a huge house, nannies, and prep schools.

It had worked out even better than planned. He’d never smelled a diaper, let alone changed one. And it was up to him which meaningless ball games or Christmas plays he would attend.

All he needed to concentrate on now was creating as many unforgettable, fun, heartwarming moments as were convenient so his family would give him his space. Like tonight’s doozy. Being Daddy was easy.

Beckett started off the eighth with a four-seamer on the black that Jeter just gaped at. Peter squeezed Vicki’s hand as their usually sedate son, Michael, jumped out of his seat with excitement, delivering high-fives.

Beckett went up 0 and 2 as Jeter swung and missed a breaking ball.

Peter looked down at Beckett with spine-tingling reverence. What a warrior. Baseball immortality was now within his grasp, and not even fifty thousand screaming New Yorkers could take it away.

One more. C’mon, Josh. One more, baby. Please, Peter prayed.

Beckett threw another off-speed pitch down and away, and Jeter swung and got under it. Youk went all out from first, but it bounced off the top of the Yankee dugout into the crowd.

Damn. Just missed, Peter thought. But at least it was just a foul ball.

A beautiful teenaged girl’s face filled the JumboTron in centerfield a moment later. She was holding the ball and hopping up and down like she’d just won the lottery.

There was something familiar about the girl, Peter thought, squinting at the six-story-tall high-def screen. Something in her smile reminded him of his dearly departed mom’s high school yearbook picture. Peter had loved that picture and his mom, despite her inability to keep her legs closed.

Peter watched, riveted, as they replayed the girl’s one-handed grab.

They even froze the frame.

Then his Heineken fell straight down out of his hand, splattering his ankles.

Because the good-looking blond woman embracing the teen girl reminded him even more of someone else.

His dead wife, Jeanine.

Chapter 54

“CAN I BORROW THOSE, SON?” Peter said calmly, despite his galloping heart.

“Sure, Dad,” Scott said, immediately handing over the binoculars that one of the Feds had brought.

Raising the glasses, Peter ignored the thunderous cheer that rose up as Jeter hit a liner into the gap, ruining Beckett’s perfect game. He slowly searched into the crowd behind the Yankee dugout, where the foul ball had landed.

He panned over people in suits. Billy Crystal. A bunch of pudgy Yankee fan goons pointing at a little black girl in a Boston cap. The new and improved Rudy, without the comb-over.

He scanned up and down the rows and sections, one by one, methodically. Looked through the crowded aisles.

He didn’t spot her. Even after five meticulous minutes. There were too many people, too many faces. None of them was Jeanine.

The woman had only looked like her, and he’d jumped to conclusions, he decided as he handed back the binoculars to his son. It made sense.

He’d been thinking more and more about Jeanine over the last year for some inexplicable reason. He’d even dreamed about her a few times.

In one of the dreams, he was eating dinner with her again by the seawall in their backyard like on their first date. In another, he had his hands around her throat, holding her down under the water on an empty beach as she tried to scratch at him.

All in his head.

When he lowered the binoculars, he saw that A-Rod was on first and Beckett was heading for the showers.

“Now that just sucks!” his son Scott yelled.

Tom Reilly, the Fed beside them, began to do a little victory dance as he giggled uncontrollably.

You know what’s even funnier, Tom? Peter felt like asking his FBI pal. The way you let me pump you for information about any large upcoming federal drug interdictions. You know what I do with that information and the other information I casually collect from all your asshole buddies at the DEA, Tom? I sell it to the cartels. Have you heard of air traffic controllers? Yeah, I’m like a drug traffic controller. Beckett might have just blown a perfect game, but I made seven figures last year, Tommy Boy. Tax free. Not bad for a hick Florida cop. Tee-hee.

Peter scruffed his tan son’s blond head with a grin.

“Don’t worry. It’s not the end of the world, Scott,” he said. “A man takes disappointment in stride. And what did I tell you about using the S-word?”

“Sorry, Dad,” Scott said sheepishly. “I meant to say stinks.”

“There you go,” Peter said, patting his son gently on his shoulder as he gave Reilly a wink. “Much more appropriate. Always remember, the words we choose reveal our true character.”

Chapter 55

IT WAS A QUARTER TO NINE on Thursday morning when I stepped into a gleaming black glass office tower at 57th Street and Third Avenue. With a temporary security pass hanging off my lapel, I smiled at the dozen or so other young Global 100 lawyers who sat as fresh and crisp as sharpened pencils in the twenty-third-floor conference room for the multifirm pro bono meeting.

I scanned the impressive corporate firm names on the place cards, some of which actually represented countries. It was heartening to see lawyers about to do some pro bono work.

If, in fact, that really was what we were going to do.

I hoped it was.

Unfortunately, I’d done pro bono initiatives before in which there were a lot of long expense-account lunch meetings and high-minded dialogues but not too much legit legal work that affected anything or anyone.

Whatever the case, the only thing I knew was that I was going to work my ass off for my boss, Tom Sidirov.

For the Derek Jeter foul ball Emma had snagged last night and for the front-row privilege of watching the Bombers turn a Beckett perfect game into a ninth-inning come-from-behind walk-off Cano grand slam?

I was prepared to work forty hours a day.

I was gathering up coffee and info folders when I caught a bright flash of red hair in my peripheral vision.

“No way!” I squealed.

“Yes way, José,” my pretty porcelain-skinned friend, Mary Ann Pontano, said as we bear-hugged. “Thank God. I just might be able to get through conference hell after all.”

I laughed as I hugged her again.

She’d been my first New York friend. She was my next-door neighbor in the crappy apartment I’d gotten on 117th Street in Spanish Harlem two weeks after I’d gotten off the Greyhound at the Port Authority.

Being the only single women and non-Spanish-speaking people in residence, we gravitated toward each other. Especially when we had to do laundry in the Silence of the Lambs–style basement laundry room. She’d helped me find a waitressing job and a pediatrician for Em. She was actually the one who’d encouraged me to become a paralegal all those years ago.

“It’s been way, way too long, Mary Ann,” I said.

Mary Ann smiled. She still looked more like an Iraq War news anchorette than a combat Iraq War vet and ex-NYPD cop. She’d parlayed her toughness and good looks into a plum international-law-firm investigator job.

“That’s fine,” Mary Ann said. “I know you greedy, capitalist corporate-lawyer types. Not a minute to spare counting all that filthy lucre. No time for the peasants.”

“Well, Mary Ann,” I said. “We can’t all be keeping it real in the hood up there in Scarsdale with our dentist husband and two toddlers.”

“It’s Bronxville, OK?” Mary Ann said. “Get it right. Bronxville eats those soccer-mom bitches from Scarsdale alive. Anyway, what are we doing here again?”

“We’re here to save some lives, that’s what,” said a short, friendly-looking man with an unruly mop of black hair, who burst into the conference room with a legal box.

“Welcome to Mission Exonerate NYC, everyone,” he said, dropping the box onto the table with a tremendous thud. “Since time is money, I won’t waste any. I’m the initiative cofounder and director, Carl Fouhy. You are the brightest legal minds in New York City, I take it. Or at least, New York’s currently most dispensable legal minds. Whatever the case, I need you and, more important, the men and women who are right now facing imminent execution need you even more.”

He hit the lights as a bright PowerPoint board hummed out of the ceiling.

The faces of tough yet defeated-looking men and women began to slideshow.

“You would not believe the amount of witness misidentification and forensic-science misconduct that we’ve found in some of these capital cases,” Fouhy explained. “That’s even before getting into some of the flat-out shitty defense lawyering we’ve uncovered.

“There are cases of counselors failing to investigate witnesses or call experts. Of defense lawyers actually being intoxicated and falling asleep during trial. That’s where you folks come in. You will level the playing field for these mostly poor, mostly uneducated men and women.”

He lifted the lid of the box, took out thick yellow envelopes, and began to drop them one by one in front of us.

“These are your assigned cases. You can open them momentarily, when you leave. On the first page, you will find the accused’s current attorney. We want you to work in conjunction with him. Your job is advisory, to go and do a face-to-face with each defense attorney. See that everything has been covered, the police report, the appeals. We’re looking for mistakes, people. Catching a mistake may save someone’s life.

“Now, if someone will hit the lights, I’ll go over a couple of test cases in which we’ve overturned executions. We’ll review the process and then, basically, you’re on your own. Any questions, myself or the initiative’s policy advisers, Jane Burkhart and Teddy Simmons, can be reached. Otherwise, I’m confident you guys will figure it out. Improvise and overcome, people. Save a life!”

Chapter 56

“AND I THOUGHT speed dating was fast,” Mary Ann said as we unloaded at Starbucks on Third Avenue half an hour later with Jane Joyce, a lawyer at Mary Ann’s firm.

“On your mark, get set, go,” I said as we all pulled out our assigned cases.

I flipped through a thick mound of pages. My case concerned a man named Randall King who was on death row for murdering two armored-car guards in a Waterbury, Connecticut, holdup. I showed Mary Ann the mug shot of the bullnecked, malevolent, cornrowed convict.

“Wow, they gave me a bank robber,” I said. “Lucky me. This is going to be fun.”

“I got a drug dealer who killed his family!” Jane Joyce cried out. “In Texas!”

“You think yours sucks?” Mary Ann said, gaping at her case. “I got a loser they caught on a cold homicide case in South Florida!”

As always, my stomach tightened at the mention of Florida.

“A fricking serial killer, no less,” Mary Ann said. “Check this out.”

I almost bit through my latte cup. A burning line of coffee sprayed from my nose onto my chin.

In Mary Ann’s hand was a photocopied Miami Herald article. She gave it to me.

It had a three-word headline: “Jump Killer Caught?”

Chapter 57

May 17, 2001

JUMP KILLER CAUGHT?Palm Beach County cold-case detectives placed a state corrections officer into custody for the 1993 murder of a Boca Raton woman Monday night. Police sources confirm that a DNA match led to the arrest of Florida City resident Justin Harris.Murder victim Tara Foster was still in college in June of 1993 when she was reported missing after volunteering as an office worker at the Homestead Correctional Institution in Florida City. Her remains were found wrapped in plastic in Everglades National Park a year later.With DNA evidence originally retrieved from Foster’s body, cold-case detectives restarted the investigation this month with an effort to obtain DNA from likely suspects. Because she’d been tied with paracord, the same ligature linked to the infamous Jump Killer disappearances in the early 1990s, cold-case officers cross-referenced original witnesses in the Foster case with former paratroopers.Justin Harris, a veteran of the 101st Airborne and a guard at the Homestead prison, provided DNA that matched samples found on Foster’s clothing.He is currently being held without bail.

My pulse hammered in my throat, against my temples. The photocopied article in my lap wavered in my vision like something seen through old glass.

As I sat there with Mary Ann and Jane, the traffic beeping outside on Third, the shouted coffee orders, the jet engine whoosh of the milk frother, all began to fade. In their place came a rush of images and sensations I’d thought I’d successfully blocked from my memory.

The Jump Killer’s strange dark eyes, the pungent smell of cologne in his car, the ache in my arms as I hung on for dear life as he crashed through the surf behind me.

“Hey, Nina,” Mary Ann said, looking at me with worry. “You OK? You look almost as pale as me.”

“Fine,” I heard myself saying. I braced myself and thumbed to the next page. I found another newspaper article that listed all the women whose deaths the Jump Killer was believed to be responsible for. I scanned the faces until I got to the second one from the bottom.

Above the caption “Victim 20” was a vaguely familiar face. I guess it should have been, since it was my high school yearbook picture.

Sitting there, I felt like you do in that dream where you’re back at school, and you have to take that one last test you never studied for. That sour, pit-of-your-stomach, panic-attack realization that the jig is up. The worst thing of all has happened. You’ve been found out.

“Earth to Nina,” Mary Ann said. “Hey, if you’re so interested, why don’t we switch? Connecticut’s what? Two hours away at the most. How am I going to arrange everything with my kids if I have to go to Florida? Besides, I’ve got red hair. Fluorescent bulbs give me blisters. Do ol’ Mary Ann a favor. This is a media case as well. Think of the publicity for your firm. You’ll make partner.”

A media case? It was worse than I thought. Why the hell hadn’t I heard about it?

“A media case? Really?” I said.

“Justin Harris? That’s right. I heard about it on Channel Four,” Jane said. “Get out of here. You got the Jump Killer case?”

“Yes,” Mary Ann said, annoyed. “Do you want to switch?”

“Spend some personal time with a sexually sadistic serial killer? Gee, let me think about that. Uh, no,” the tall brunette said.

Mary Ann turned back to me. “Please? For old times’ sake?”

That’s when I noticed on the cover contact sheet that Harris’s lawyer lived in Key West. Fear of Mary Ann recognizing my photograph was replaced instantaneously with fear of death. My mind flashed on a memory. Elena’s bullet-riddled, bloody body splayed out on the gas station floor.

Go back to Key West? I thought, failing to banish the image with a sip of latte.

Not after seventeen years. Not after seventy.

If I bumped into Peter, I’d be the one receiving the death penalty.

I handed the case file back to her as if it burned my fingers.

“I can’t,” I said emphatically. “Sorry. Emma’s got the SAT coming up.”

The lies came as easily as always. I guess I should have felt guilty. I didn’t.

“Fine,” Mary Ann said. “Fine. Of course, I’d get the short straw. I always get the short straw.”

No, I felt like saying to her. I’d just missed it for once.

Chapter 58

I DECIDED TO WALK back to work. It was one of those bright, iconic New York spring days that make you forget about things like triple-digit parking tickets and transit strikes and construction crane accidents.

But for some strange reason, I wasn’t in the mood for thinking about April showers or stopping to smell the Park Avenue tulips.

Back inside my small office on the forty-fourth floor of my Lexington Avenue office building, I closed the door and just stood at the window, staring down at the people scurrying in and out of Grand Central Station. Beyond the Empire State Building to the south, downtown Manhattan sprawled and glinted under the midday sun, intricate and magical, like Monopoly pieces placed on a giant Oriental carpet.

Gazing on it, I thought about the Eighth Avenue pimps and potholes that formed my first vista on my first night in New York and how much I’d accomplished since then.

I continued to stand at the window, hugging myself. At first, I felt sad, then suddenly furious. For all this to get dredged up now, so close to home, just when my life was starting to take off, felt beyond coincidence. It felt intentional.

A media case? I thought. Hadn’t I suffered enough? I thought about the life I’d struggled to put together. All the comments and lewd offers I’d received from asshole restaurant managers and customers. The eyebrow raises I’d had to endure from my co-op board for the crime of being a young single mom. All the packed buses and subway cars and work, housework and homework, that never seemed to give me a moment’s peace.

Most of all, I thought about all the abject terror that I’d gone through in the middle of the night with Emma those first few months when she was colicky. Night after night, I would rock my swaddled baby, weeping along with her, convinced that I was a day away from failing, losing Emma, being fired, being found out.

That wasn’t enough, huh? I thought, staring up at the blue sky. Sacrificing for my daughter, constantly having to look over my shoulder as I worked my fingers to the bone? I haven’t paid enough?

Besides, it wasn’t like I’d done nothing to try to set things straight. After about a year, when I’d scored a decent studio rental and a solidly paying waitressing job at a SoHo supper club, I saw an article in the Post about the Jump Killer. As guilt started to eat away at me one night after I picked up Emma from day care, I took the PATH train out to Hoboken. From an I-95 highway pay phone, I called the New York office of the FBI and gave an answering machine a description of the Jump Killer and his dog and his car.

Over the years, from time to time, I’d think about doing the same thing about Peter, but in the end, I feared that he—with all his law enforcement contacts—might somehow find out. The call would be traced. Peter would know that I wasn’t dead and come looking for me and Emma.

I let out a breath as I finally sat at my desk. My brow beaded up with cold sweat as I remembered the Jump Killer’s face. The office seemed to fade, and there I was again, homeless and pregnant, running for my life in a pair of secondhand Doc Martens.

After a while, I tried to console myself. Things could be worse. At least I hadn’t actually been assigned the Jump Killer case. I’d definitely dodged a bullet there.

What was I getting so upset over? I’d just have to concentrate on my own case, I decided. Keep my head down and my fingers crossed that Mary Ann wouldn’t recognize me. This whole thing would blow over like a freak storm.

I lifted Randall King’s heavy case file and dropped it on my desk.

I even opened it.

Then I stopped kidding myself.

I shoved the file aside and turned on my computer. I clicked open Internet Explorer and typed “Justin Harris” into the Google search box.

A fraction of a second later, I pushed the hair out of my shocked eyes.

Harris’s ten-year-old arrest really was a big media case. There were dozens of newspaper articles. There was even an ongoing segment on the Today show about Harris’s impending execution.

I didn’t really watch the news, but the Today show! How the hell had I missed it?

I didn’t want to know, was how, I realized. I hadn’t checked up on the Jump Killer in seventeen years. I never even once tried to find out what happened to Peter. I knew it was a childish notion, but I thought that if I stopped thinking about all of it, there would be some sort of karmic reciprocity, and everyone I had known would, in turn, stop thinking about me. Subconsciously, I’d made the decision that if I didn’t dwell on it, it would be like it never happened.

But it had happened, I thought as I stared sourly at the computer screen. And wouldn’t ever stop.

I opened a taped 2006 Fox News story about Harris on YouTube. I was hovering my finger over the mouse’s left-click button to play it when my secretary, Gloria “Go-To” Walsh, came in. I immediately minimized the article with a guilty click.

“I thought you had that ProGen prospectus meeting,” she said.

“Tom put me on a pro bono case,” I told her. “No more ProGen for me.”

“Yes!” Gloria said. “Maybe I’ll get home before seven this week. Anything interesting?”

No, more like life-threatening, I thought.

“Sort of, Gloria. I’m kind of in the middle of something. I’ll let you know, OK?”

I turned up the volume on my computer as she closed the door behind her. Shepard Smith was finishing up an intro about the Jump Killer murders. I took a breath, steeling myself to come face-to-face again with the man who tried to kill me that night.

When a picture of Justin Harris filled the screen, I hit the Pause button, puzzled.

Because the man on the screen wasn’t the Jump Killer who’d given me a ride all those years ago on the Overseas Highway.

Wearing an orange jumpsuit above the “Justin Harris” caption was a very sad-looking, very African American man.

Chapter 59

I SAT THERE very confused. Breathing slowly, trying to calm myself, I looked everywhere on my desk except the screen. I perused the snazzy gold embossing on a leather-bound copy of McKinney’s New York Civil Practice Law and Rules, smiled at the framed picture of Emma and me on our Vermont ski trip last January. For a little while, I even watched the minute hand of my gag lawyer’s desk clock that broke every hour down into ten six-minute increments, the same way we fun-loving corporate party animals billed our clients.

Then I looked back at the computer screen and winced.

Justin Harris was still there. Nothing had changed in the slightest. He was still black.

Which didn’t compute. Harris was definitely not the man who’d tried to kill me the night I hightailed it out of Key West. The terrifying, muscled wacko who’d put a gun up my nose was definitely Caucasian, or a mixture of Asian American and white.

Staring at the goateed black man, I came up with the most probable scenario. The one that the Mission Exonerate people kept on harping about: The Florida authorities had convicted and were about to execute an innocent man.

With a queasy feeling in my stomach, I clicked on the link for the most recent Miami Herald article. After I read its first paragraph, I kicked back my rolling office chair and clicked my forehead onto the varnished edge of my desk.

The execution was going to take place on April 29? Which was next Friday! Justin Harris was going to die in nine days.

Unless I did something about it.

I spent some time staring down at the industrial Berber carpet between my pumps as I took it in. Then I began to moan.

I was the only person who could.

I would have to come forward. It wasn’t fair. I’d spent so many hard years keeping the lid shut on the can of worms I called my life. Coming forward would mean exposing every one of my dirty little secrets once and for all, up to and including my part in Ramón Peña’s death.

I’d lose my job, everything I’d struggled and scraped for.

And what about Emma? Her life would be flattened. Good-bye, dream MOMA internship. Good-bye, Brown. Not to mention: Good-bye, her trust in me. How was that going to work?

That’s when I made the mistake of peeking back up at the screen. Justin Harris’s sad, deer-in-the-headlights gaze seemed to look directly into my soul.

It wasn’t a choice. A man’s life was at stake. I would have to come clean.

Chapter 60

THEY SAY that a lawyer who represents herself has a fool for a client.

That described me to a tee.

For the next hour, I used my astute legal mind to go over my current situation. I started off by compiling a detailed damage assessment on a legal pad. I began scratching down notes under happy headings like “Friends I’d Lose” (pretty much all of them). “Likely Legal Ramifications” (firm would fire me and I’d lose my license to practice law). Then I wrote, “Statute of Limitations for Manslaughter”(?) and “Emma” (in family services?).

I had my reading glasses on the edge of my nose and was flipping through my trusty McKinney’s when I suddenly pushed the glasses up on my forehead and slammed the law book shut.

Because there was actually another option.

It was nuts. Absolutely insane. Not to mention an outrageously long shot. Of course it was. Insanity and long shots went together in my life like Ben and Jerry.

What if I did switch cases with my friend Mary Ann? I thought. What if I took Harris’s case?

I could stay on top of it. Maybe I could even figure out a way to free Harris without dismantling my life and especially Emma’s. Harris didn’t do it, right? I knew that. Therefore, there had to be something in his case, some overlooked detail, that proved it. It was just a matter of finding it and bringing it before the court.

“Down in Key West” came a tiny dissenting voice.

Right. I knew there was a rub. I’d have to consult with Harris’s lawyer, who lived in the last place I wanted to go.

Just the thought of setting foot in that beautiful, dangerous place again made me want to swallow a handful of Xanax.

I sat there for a little while on the horns of my dilemma.

Choice A: finally face up to my buried past.

Choice B: lie my ass off and try to continue the con that was my life.

It was no choice at all.

I’d have to figure it out, I decided. Key West was a big town. Sort of. I could just lie low. Maybe Peter wasn’t even living in the area after seventeen years.

I lifted my cell phone. It felt like it suddenly weighed twenty pounds. I spun down to Mary Ann’s number before I could change my mind.

“What?” Mary Ann said sharply.

“I’ve been thinking. Let’s trade cases,” I said.

“For real?” she said ecstatically now. “Are you sure?”

I wasn’t sure of anything, but I had to do it anyway.

“Say yes before I change my mind,” I said.

“Yes,” Mary Ann said. “See? I knew you were a good friend. I’ll help Emma with her SAT, whatever you need, I promise. Just remember, no backsies.”

“No backsies,” I agreed, biting the inside of my cheek.

Chapter 61

AS I DID WITH each of my long-shot plans, I arranged my newest one with gusto.

By the next morning, I’d managed to nail down everything. The flight to Key West, the hotel, the car to the airport. Emma was happily surprised to find out she’d be spending the next week at her best friend Gabby’s town house in Brooklyn. The only thing left to do was swing by my office on the way to Kennedy to pick up Harris’s case file, which Mary Ann had messengered over.

Then all I had left to do was try not to get killed by Peter as I saved a man from execution.

In a week’s time.

“Piece of cake,” I mumbled as I rolled my bag into the kitchen.

Em was listening to her iPod and drumming a pencil against her open trig book in front of a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. I stole a spoonful as I e-mailed Harris’s lawyer, a man named Charles Baylor, to tell him I was coming down.

I winced when I turned on the kitchen laptop and opened Internet Explorer. In “History,” I found searches for “Bloom Family” and even “County Wicklow,” the place I’d said Emma’s fictional dad was from.

Great! Another headache. What timing. As if my in-box weren’t currently full of disaster. The tape I’d made before Emma’s party had only whetted her appetite for more, I realized. More juggling. I was getting it from all sides at once. Leave my secret identity alone! I felt like yelling.

“Mom, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” Emma said, taking back the spoon. “Why don’t I look more like my dad?”

That was one of my biggest worries. That Emma might notice that Aidan Beck was fair instead of black Irish like Peter.

“I have no idea,” I said cheerfully, making it up as I went along. “I do know you have his good nature and his laugh.”

Emma, no dummy, frowned at my utter bullshit. “Why do I get the feeling that you don’t want me to find out about him?” she said.

I had to struggle to keep from pulling my hair out. “Do I give you that impression?” I said.

“Whatev,” Emma mumbled, fat tears suddenly springing into her big blue eyes.

I knew that Em was just being a sixteen-year-old girl, a ball of hormone-charged emotion. But I couldn’t let her do this. I couldn’t afford it, and neither could she. What the heck was I supposed to say? Sorry to have to tell you this, kid, but your dad’s a psychopathic killer, and I’m a pathological liar?

Instead, I used my secret weapon.

I dropped my keys loudly on the countertop, collapsed onto the island stool, and started crying myself. “I wish I could make your life make more sense, but I can’t,” I said, sobbing.

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Em finally said, coming around to embrace me. “You don’t think I know what you’ve done for me, but I really do. I’ll stop freaking you out with all this stuff.”

“No, I’m sorry. You could look up your Irish roots, just not right now, OK? You have college prep and so many other things on your plate. When I get back, we’ll rent The Quiet Man. And eat Lucky Charms for breakfast. I hear they’re magically delicious.”

My iPhone rang as Emma hugged me again. It was a number I didn’t recognize. Terrific. What now?

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Carl Fouhy from Exonerate NYC. Is this Nina Bloom?”

“Yes, Carl. What’s up?”

“Since you’ve got the Justin Harris case now, I thought it would be a good idea for you to meet Harris’s mother.” Mary Ann must have called him, I surmised. No backsies indeed. “What’s your schedule looking like?”

“Real tight, Carl. I’m actually on the ten o’clock flight to Florida,” I said.

“Could you come by Rockefeller Center before you leave? Justin’s case is making big news now. The Today show is doing a piece on it this morning, and we’re actually out here right now, protesting. Trying to get some national publicity.”

The Today show? Publicity? That would really help my fly-below-the-radar strategy.

A fist-sized ball of fear suddenly clenched in my stomach. I knew I shouldn’t have done this. Taking this case on had been a mistake.

“Nina? You still there? I know it’s a crunch, but I feel it’s really imperative that you meet.”

I couldn’t think of an excuse. I’d have to figure it out. If I was asked to get anywhere near a camera, I’d just refuse and walk away. Run away, if it came to that.

“Um, OK, I guess,” I said, checking my watch. “But only for a minute. Give me half an hour.”

Chapter 62

“AND FOUR, THREE, TWO,” said some wimpy bald guy all in black and wearing a headset. He pointed at the massive high-tech television studio camera beside him as its red light came on.

“And we’re back,” Al Roker said, reading off the teleprompter screen mounted beneath the saucer-sized bluish lens of the camera. “We’re concluding our three-part series today on Florida’s Jump Killer execution by talking to a family member of one of the alleged victims.”

Sitting on the couch across from America’s weatherman, wearing jeans and a light blue cashmere sweater, Peter Fournier smiled. Behind him outside the Rockefeller Plaza studio window, a crowd of people were waving signs. This was the reason Peter had traveled up from Key West to New York for the weekend.

“Peter Fournier’s wife was only twenty-three years old,” Roker continued, “when she was believed to have crossed paths with Justin Harris. Mr. Fournier, a Key West, Florida, police officer, is the head of the victims’ rights group for the Jump Killer’s victims. Good morning, Mr. Fournier. Has Harris actually admitted to murdering your young wife, Jeanine?”

“No,” Peter said sadly. “He has not, Al. He maintains his innocence not only in the case of my wife’s death, but even of the Foster girl, for which he was convicted.”

Peter took a breath as the glossy eye of the camera stayed on him.

“That’s why I, and all the other families, are gratified that the execution is finally going to take place next week. This man needs to pay for his crimes, and on Friday night, God willing, that’s exactly what he’ll do.”

Al nodded. “I can’t imagine your pain, but it’s long been debated whether capital punishment actually helps the victim’s family. What’s your take on that?”

“Seventeen years ago, this person abducted my wife and killed her, and he doesn’t even have the semblance of humanity to tell me where he dumped her body so I can have a proper funeral,” Peter said calmly. “What do I do with that, Al? Forgive and forget? My pain and the pain of all of the victims’ families will never go away. Dante said that hell is the place where all forgotten things go. That’s exactly where I want to put Harris. I just want him to be forgotten by me, by the other families, and by every other human being on this planet.”

“What are your plans now?” Al wanted to know.

“I, and the other family members in our organization, have learned that death penalty opponents are scheduling protests, so we will be front-row center to make sure that our voice, and the voices of the people that Harris truly disenfranchised, are heard.”

“Thank you, Mr. Fournier. I wish you well, sir,” Al said. “Up next is Meredith with some money-saving travel tips.”

Chapter 63

MY AIRPORT CAR let me out in front of Rockefeller Center on the corner of Fifth and 50th and kept going. I’d asked the driver to go ahead to my Lexington Avenue office building to pick up the Harris case file and wait for me there. After my aggravating meet and greet with Harris’s mom, I would hustle over to my office and, by some miracle, make my flight.

I spotted Fouhy standing in the crowd in front of the 10 Rock Center window where they taped the Today show.

Beside him, a large black woman wearing a YES WE DID ball cap was holding a large handwritten sign:

FREE JUSTIN HARRIS!

DON’T KILL MY SON!

“Mrs. Harris. Hi, I’m Nina Bloom,” I said, coming through the crowd.

Mrs. Harris almost knocked me down as she barreled into me, wrapping her arms around me in a full embrace. She pressed her smiling face against my cheek. She seemed enthusiastic, strangely upbeat despite her son’s predicament.

“Oh, she’s a good one. I can feel it, Mr. Fouhy,” she said in a honey-smooth Southern accent, her soft brown eyes staring hard into mine. “You’re going to save my Justin.”

“I’m going to, um, try,” I said, eyeing Fouhy for help.

“Try won’t do, Ms. Bloom,” Mrs. Harris said, rapidly shaking her head at me. “Try won’t do. You are going to do it, and that’s an end to it. It’s going to end with you. There’s no other choice.”

She released me and rummaged through the brimming Duane Reade bag beside her and showed me a picture. It was of a teenaged Justin in a drum major high school uniform. There was another one of him on a stage playing with the rest of an all-black marching band.

“That was at Carnegie Hall for a Wynton Marsalis tribute.” She laughed as she stared at the photo. “All them lessons and practicin’. The neighbors used to call the police twice a month. That was the proudest moment of my life.”

Then she placed something cold and metal into my hand. At first I thought it was a coin, but it was a military medal, a bronze octagon with a green, white, and blue ribbon.

“Justin earned this medal when he responded to a helicopter accident during his Ranger training. Last time I checked, serial killers don’t go around pulling bodies from burning wreckage. You know, I used to believe in the system. That the truth would come out. But every day, it just got worse. I wish I knew the words to express how wrong this is, the legal terms and such. You’re going to have to do it for me, Ms. Bloom.”

Mrs. Harris let out a breath, trying to keep herself composed.

“That’s why I needed to meet you. To try to make you feel what I know. So you can know Justin like I know Justin. He didn’t do it. Justin isn’t a monster. It’s all lies. All of it. Justin was my best child, my nicest boy. His brother was the mean one. His brother would tussle with him. But Justin would never strike him back. He’s incapable of hurting anyone.”

“Ms. Bloom is going to do everything she can, Mrs. Harris. Now she really has a plane to catch,” Carl Fouhy said gently.

“Wait, please,” Mrs. Harris said, without taking her eyes off me. “Do you have a child, Ms. Bloom?”

“A daughter,” I said.

“What’s her name?” she said with a smile.

“Emma,” I said, smiling back.

“What would you do if people had Emma and were about to kill her?”

“Everything I could,” I answered immediately.

Mrs. Harris let out a loud breath. “Good,” she said. She nodded. “Justin is in good hands. My prayers have been answered. My baby is safe now.”

I tried to hand back Justin’s medal. Mrs. Harris shook her head.

“No. You hold on to that,” she said as a tear, a single tear, slid over the soft brown curve of her cheek. “Don’t lose it, now.”

I stared at the medal, then at Fouhy. I could see why he’d wanted me to come. The son of a bitch wanted me motivated, emotionally involved, not just going through the motions. He wanted me to see that Mrs. Harris was flesh and blood, a good, warm person and a desperate, loving mother who would do anything not to lose her child.

Mission accomplished, I thought, my own eyes wet as I walked away.

Chapter 64

IT WAS FIVE TO NINE when Peter Fournier walked out the tunnel-like NBC studio exit onto West 50th Street beside Rockefeller Center.

“Baby, you did so good!” his wife, Vicki, cooed when he opened his ringing cell. “I still can’t believe it. It’s like I’m dreaming. You having a chat with Al Roker, like he’s your best buddy. I would have passed out. Let me put the boys on.”

“Dad, you rocked!” Scott said.

“Yes. That’s right. My dad is Mr. Cool!” Mike yelled in the background.

“Thanks, guys. I love you, too. I’ll tell you all about it when I get back to the hotel,” Peter said.

Peter smiled as he closed his cell. He had done well. He thought he might be nervous about going on live national TV, but once the red camera light came on, he’d felt perfectly fine, like himself, calm, in charge. He’d always suspected that he’d be good on TV. Now he knew. In another life, he could have been an actor, a talk show host. He had the looks, the charm.

Was it narcissistic if you knew you actually were the biggest swinging dick in the room? he wondered. Any room? Every room?

Flying under the radar was his usual game plan, but in this case he’d taken a calculated risk because there was business involved.

One of the victims’ group members, Arty Tivolli, was an elderly multimillionaire hotel chain owner from Palm Beach. After befriending the silver-haired gent with bottomless pockets, Peter had persuaded him to take a serious look at bidding on Key West’s only run-down golf course and turning it into a massive luxury resort.

For the last year, he’d been working with Arty’s company, the Tivolli Group, introducing them around to the “right” city council and zoning board members. If all went as planned, Peter’s slice of the proceedings would be massive, a seven-figure windfall. It would be the most money he’d ever made in his life. Well, at least legally.

So in actuality, his Today show appearance had exactly squat to do with his desire to steal Matt Lauer’s job or to mourn his dearly departed other half, Jeanine. His victim group activism and nationally televised righteous indignation at Justin Harris were all for Arty, who had lost his only daughter to the Jump Killer in 1991.

Peter, still jazzed, looked out at midtown Manhattan’s swirling chaos of delivery trucks backing up and double-parked taxis honking. It was morning rush now, and rock concert–sized crowds of businesspeople and hard hats hustled past him up and down the cavernous side street.

What absolute suckers, he thought. Get to work, you ball-less serfs. Step to it!

Though his cell phone camera stunk, he decided to take some pictures with it anyway to show the kids. He snapped a shot of the famous television studio’s door, a passing mounted cop, a bike messenger across the street smoking a cigarette.

He was about to take a shot of a pigeon pecking at a doughnut in the gutter when a blond woman flashed out from the east corner of the building by Rockefeller Center. There was something so New York about the tall head turner: her creamy thigh, her get-the-fuck-out-of-my-way pace, her just-so salon-colored platinum hair.

Then she turned to her right to check the approaching traffic, and Peter’s serene smile faded as he lowered the phone.

All he could do was watch in silence as his dead wife, Jeanine, stepped across the street.

Chapter 65

“DAMMIT,” I said, checking the time on my iPhone as I cornered onto Fifth Avenue. I needed to be on my way to the airport already. My driver, waiting at my office, was going to have to floor it and maybe eat some red lights on our way out to JFK if I was going to make my flight.

I thought about calling and having him come back around onto Fifth to pick me up, but then I decided against it. Midtown morning rush hour was so insanely gridlocked and unpredictable, it was actually quicker for me to go to him on foot.

I was picking up the pace, crossing to the east side of the street, when my iPhone jingled its incoming text alert.

I glanced at the screen, fearing another delay, but then let out a breath when I saw that the message was from Em.

Who else? I could almost see her there on her early free period in the Brearley library illegally texting. Her books open in front of her, her phone under the table.

I thumbed the View button on the touchscreen.

“Willlllsonnnnnn!!” her text read.

Despite my full-blown hurry, I smiled. Then I laughed out loud. It was a reference to the stupidest and our hands-down-favorite part of the movie Cast Away, in which Tom Hanks, a plane crash survivor, nonsensically befriends a Wilson volleyball.

It was also our way of saying hi. All day long, Emma and I texted each other silly inside jokes like that.

There was another jingle as another text came in.

“Worst 80s band?” Em wanted to know. “REO Speedwagon?”

Since I’d actually been there, I had to disagree: “Close,” I texted back as I walked. It was a glacial process for someone over the age of sixteen. “Culture Club. Their hit song was ‘Do You Really Want to Hurt Me.’ The answer was yes. Google ‘Boy George’ if you don’t believe me.”

“Fine,” Em texted back in a finger snap. “Movie quote throwdown! Toy Story. ‘That’s not flying. That’s falling with style.’ ”

“What does a space ranger actually do?” I texted her back pretty quickly this time. Em would be proud.

Then I pocketed my phone as a sudden lump caught in my throat. After a moment, I started crying. As I walked, I started sobbing uncontrollably right there in front of Fifth Avenue’s tourist shops and luggage stores and overpriced pizzerias.

Because I suddenly realized, Em actually wouldn’t be proud of me.

What would Em think of me when everything came out? I wondered, snorting into the lapel of my faux Burberry coat. When she found out that I’d been lying to her ever since she could walk? That I was an impostor? That someone had died because of me?

Who was I kidding here? The idea that I could exonerate Harris in a week while keeping the house of cards that was my life from quickly becoming a game of 52 pickup was a tall order even for someone with my extensive creative skills. I’d dodged a bullet at Rockefeller Center, but it was just the beginning, I knew. The deeper I went into this, the more I would be at risk. What the hell was I doing? I had one mother of a skeleton in my closet, and here I was about to put the key in the lock and turn.

My phone text jingled again.

“There’s a snake in my boots,” Em had typed.

There’s a snake in your family, I thought, shaking my head at the phone.

Chapter 66

PETER MOVED SMOOTHLY with the morning rush hour crowd on Fifth Avenue, a half block behind Jeanine.

He couldn’t decide what surprised him more. The fact that Jeanine was actually alive or how incredible she still looked. She was what now? Forty? Yet, look at her—stylish, confident, model thin, regal. Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Despite the fact that he’d only glanced at her, Peter knew it was her, didn’t have the slightest doubt. He knew now that he’d seen her at the Yankees game as well.

The unlikeliness of coincidences didn’t matter to him. He paid close attention to things and made it a point to remember everything and everyone. Especially faces. The way he operated, you forgot a face at the peril of your life.

He was fifty, yet his senses and instincts were as sharp as ever. Bravo, Jeanine, he thought, as he trailed her. Not too many people walking around on this earth could brag about putting one over on Peter Fournier.

In fact, Jeanine, Peter reflected, besides you, there’s nobody at all.

He ran to catch up as she turned the next left around a corner. Dead-ending the shadowed side street two blocks to the east was a massive, dirty old building: Grand Central Terminal. He and his family had visited it on their first day up here.

Tunnels, he thought. Darkness, speeding trains, crowds. A place where accidents happened. Or random acts of violence.

He had his small police backup Glock in his ankle holster, but since the station was crawling with antiterror cops, there was no way he could use it. That left the illegal spring-loaded blackjack he kept snug in the small of his back, ever since his days on the Boston PD, or his belt buckle knife. The knife, then. He could have it out and in and back as quick as a coin trick. Open the femoral in her leg and keep going. He began to visualize it. Don’t even make eye contact. Flank her, stab, and saw.

He relished what he had to do now about as much as a carpenter relished using a hammer to hit a nail. There was no glee. There was just brutal necessity, covering his margins, business. He was no animal. He was just one of the rare breed of men who were born unafraid to wield violence as the efficient tool that it was.

A soft, aching warmth filled his chest as he remembered the outrageous romantic times he had shared with Jeanine. The way she looked coming out of the Gulf with the water sluicing off her tan, incredible body. The bullhorn outside the bathroom was a classic. The cut-your-throat creases she used to iron into his uniform shirts.

No question, of all his dead wives, she was by far his favorite.

Heading down the slightly sloping street toward Grand Central, Peter shook his head sadly at his runaway wife.

“Oh, Mermaid, we had ourselves some times, didn’t we?” he whispered, keeping his eyes centered on the back of her fancy ivory spring coat.

What a shame.

Chapter 67

I WAS ONLY MILDLY MELTING DOWN by the time I came off Vanderbilt into Grand Central. I’d managed to stop crying at least by the time I hit the west marble staircase above the main concourse.

It never failed to amaze. Cream-colored marble everywhere, the famous tsunami-sized windows, the constellation mural on the massive green ceiling.

Walking through its old-world elegance in my business clothes, I always felt instantly classy, a true New Yorker. I’d often pretend I was in an old movie, Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest.

Thirty seconds later, I was across the massive cathedral-like space in the long corridor that led toward Lexington Avenue. The mall was lined with businesses. I passed a jewelry store, a boutique, a shoeshine stand, a Starbucks.

I dodged all the way to the left as a fresh batch of people started spilling into the corridor and up the stairway that connected to the Lexington Avenue subway lines.

But not far enough, apparently. I winced in pain as some Wall Street jackass in a pinstriped suit rushing past stepped on my right foot.

My toes felt severed. I stopped against the wall in the crowded passageway and slipped off my open-toe pump to count my toenails.

“Excuse you,” I yelled, pissed and in pain.

But I suddenly wasn’t angry anymore. The pain in my foot faded, instantly forgotten.

At the mouth of the swirling corridor was a tall man. He was handsome and had short salt-and-pepper hair and blue eyes. He stood like a rock in the stream of the crowd, and he was staring at me.

I ripped my eyes away and stuffed my foot back into my shoe. Hobbled and blind with fear, I pointed myself forward toward the exit and broke into a full-out finish-line sprint.

It couldn’t be. It shouldn’t be.

But it was.

Peter had found me at last.

Chapter 68

SHIT, PETER THOUGHT, flattening himself against the wall next to a pay phone. He’d been following too close. Jeanine had stopped. She’d looked back. Had she seen him? It was hard to tell with the trillion-people march going on in the passageway between them. It was a definite possibility.

He could have whipped himself. The last thing Jeanine would have been expecting after all this time was a visit from him. The element of surprise was critical. But he’d crowded her and blown the whole thing.

What the hell had gotten into him? What happened to that cold patience and reserve he was so proud of?

Too late to cry about it. He needed to move.

He counted to three and then chanced a look back up the wide concourse. He thought she might have headed down the subway entrance on the right, but then he thought he caught a flash of ivory going out through the distant exit door.

What the…? She was leaving? he thought, as he started to run. She’d only cut through the station? So she wasn’t getting on a train?

“Yo, slow down!” someone scolded him.

Peter turned. In the doorway of a camera store was an NYPD cop decked out in full antiterrorist gear, bomb vest, M16. There was a no-nonsense expression on his face as he looked Peter over. He didn’t need that kind of scrutiny. Not now. Instead of giving the cop the finger like he wanted, Peter slowed immediately, nodding to his fellow peace officer with an apologetic wave.

He squinted when he came out onto bright Lexington Avenue. He looked up and down the block, across the wide street clogged with delivery trucks and buses and yellow taxis. He looked up at the Chrysler Building, right in front of him now.

There was no white jacket in either direction. Audrey Hepburn had left the damn building. Nothing. He’d taken his eyes off her for five seconds.

That was the problem with this rat race city! he thought, infuriated. Too many damn holes for the rats to hide in! She must have seen him.

Jeanine had disappeared.

Chapter 69

THAT DIDN’T JUST HAPPEN.

Inside the wall-to-wall-crowded Grand Central Starbucks, I stood at the milk and sugar stand by the window.

Bathed in sweat, I tried to keep myself from hyperventilating.

Peter? Here? Now? How was that possible?

I didn’t know. I was having trouble breathing, let alone thinking.

When I wasn’t looking out over Lexington Avenue, I had my head craned around at the shop’s side window and side door, which opened onto the train station’s corridor. If Peter came in, my plan was to run screaming through the door back into the train station’s main concourse and try to flag down one of the many antiterror cops. I shivered like a cornered rabbit.

I hadn’t even gotten down to Key West, and already I was playing a game of hide-and-seek, with my life as the prize.

Maybe I was just being paranoid, I thought, scanning the passing faces beyond the plateglass window. Couldn’t it have been somebody who just looked like Peter? I was heading down to Key West now, after all. Peter was certainly at the forefront of my mind, not to mention embedded in my subconscious. Maybe my overstressed brain had jumped to the wrong conclusion.

Then again, maybe not!

I needed to act. I looked across Lexington. I could actually see my town car, idling outside my office building. I quickly fumbled open my bag. I took out the card that the driver, a very pleasant West Indian man who called himself Mr. Ken, had given me.

“Hi, um, Mr. Ken?” I said. “This is Nina Bloom. Were you able to get my package from my office?”

“It’s right here in the front seat beside me,” he said.

“Great. Do you see the Starbucks on the west side of Lex in front of you? I’m right here by the window. Would you come over and get me?”

“On my way,” he said.

“Thanks, Mr. Ken,” I said to him in person when I bolted across the sidewalk and dove into the car ten seconds later. And thank God for cell phones, I thought.

I locked the door before I scrunched down low in the seat.

Mr. Ken raised an eyebrow at me in the rearview mirror.

“Did you forget your coffee, Ms. Bloom?” he said in his lilting accent.

“Oh, I already drank it, thanks,” I lied, glancing out the window, panicked. “If we could head out to JFK now, Mr. Ken, that would be really great.”

I scrunched down even farther in the seat. I didn’t breathe again until Mr. Ken hit the gas.

Chapter 70

ON THE CORNER of 42nd Street and Lexington, Peter stood scanning faces. He looked frantically up the unbelievably crowded street in front of Grand Central. Nothing. No ivory jacket. Not across the street or anywhere. He’d screwed up. His rat had found her hole.

What a bust! He’d had her, and then he’d lost her again.

As he stood there fuming, a memory bubbled up. It was of his first and only bow hunting trip with his dad in New Hampshire when he was seven. He was in the forest taking a leak when an enormous black bear appeared ten feet in front of him. Before he could yell out, there was a thwap from his dad’s compound bow, and the shaft of an arrow popped out of one of the bear’s eyes. The animal dropped like a tipped-over piece of furniture.

His father climbed down from the blind and knelt over the fallen monster, inhaling loudly as he wafted the blood aroma into his face like a chef over a pot. Peter had almost wet himself when his dad suddenly grabbed him and shoved his face down toward the blood-splattered bear until they were nose to black-and-bloody nose.

“This life, you either get the bear,” the crazy drunken bastard had said in his French Canadian accent, “or the bear gets you. Your choice, yes?”

Exactly, Peter thought.

At least he knew Jeanine lived in New York City, knew that she worked somewhere around here. Hell, knowing that she was still alive was enough. Catching up with her wasn’t an if anymore, it was a when.

His phone rang. He glanced at the screen. His wife, Vicki.

Horns honked as he stared up at the endless windows, his rage cooling now, replaced by his hunter’s natural, cold patience.

“Don’t worry, I’m going to get that bear somehow, Pop,” Peter said as he lifted his phone. “Always have. Always will.”