Sliver of Truth

9

In my mailbox at home there was a postcard from my father, sent apparently from their port of call in Positano. Having a wonderful time! it read in my father’s sharp, scrawling hand. Thinking of you as always. The thought of them traipsing around Europe snapping photographs and mailing off postcards, frankly, made me sick. I threw the postcard in the trash, poured myself a glass of wine from the half-empty bottle on the counter, and played my messages. I had an uneasy feeling, found myself looking around my apartment, peering through the doorway into my dark bedroom.

“Hey, it’s me.” Jake. “Can we get together tonight? Come to the studio around eight if you feel like it. We’ll go to Yaffa. Or wherever.”

I looked at my watch. It was six-thirty. I was hungry and lonely and considered heading downtown to meet him.

Beep.

“It’s me.” A low male voice, smoky and depressive. Ace. “Haven’t talked to you in a couple of days. I’d like to see you. I have some things on my mind.”

Great. Another catalog of indictments his shrink was encouraging him to bring up against my parents—and me, I’m sure.

“Yeah,” I said to my empty apartment. “Looking forward to it.” I suddenly had the horrible thought that I’d liked my brother better when he was a junkie. Though he’d been equally depressive and blame-laying, he wasn’t nearly as self-reflective.

Beep.

“Hey, there, it’s Dennis. It was nice to hear your voice. Give me a call back when you can.” That Times sportswriter I dated briefly. He sounded enthusiastic. I knew he worked late usually, so I took a chance, went into my office, looked up his number, and gave him a call. I forced myself to sound light and flirty when he answered, gave him the same spiel I gave Jenna about wanting to return Myra Lyall’s call.

“A very weird, scary thing,” he said when he’d finished telling me basically all the same stuff Jenna had revealed.

“That’s terrible, Dennis,” I said. I let a beat pass. “Do you know her assistant well? I got a call from her as well—what’s her name again?” Lie.

“Sarah Duvall.”

“Right.”

“Yeah, she comes out for drinks every once in a while with my crew. Nice girl. She’s a bit adrift at the moment. No one knows if Myra is coming back, but no one wants to admit that she isn’t, so Sarah’s in a kind of professional limbo. It’s been weird for her.”

There was an awkward silence on the phone. I remembered how Dennis and I went out together one night and he got so drunk over dinner at Union Square Café that he halfway passed out against the wall at a club we visited later. I literally had to support him as we stumbled to the street and deposited him in a cab while he tried to lick my neck. It was a bit of a turnoff.

“So…” he said finally. “Feel like getting together?”

“Sure,” I said. “Let me look at my schedule next week and I’ll give you a call back.”

“Great,” he said. “I’ll look forward to it.”

We hung up, both of us knowing that I had no intention of doing any such thing.

I had a strange sense of unease as I hung up the phone, as if there were eyes peering at the back of my neck. I spun around in my chair and confronted the emptiness behind me. I walked through my apartment, but there was nothing I could point to, nothing I could say might have been moved. I wondered if I was being paranoid, but something just didn’t feel right. The energy was off and I couldn’t wait to get out of the apartment.

I HEADED DOWNTOWN, deciding to walk. So I went south on Park Avenue South and cut through Madison Square Park at the point of the Flatiron Building, to Broadway. I went down Broadway, and then east on Eighth. I do all my best thinking in motion through the city. It energizes me, the noise and all the different personalities of each neighborhood. And as the self-conscious fanciness of Park Avenue South morphed into the bustle of Broadway and then into the familiar grit of the East Village, I thought about my time at Max’s apartment today. I tried to put my head around things, like the red website and the book of matches, the ghostly scent of Max and the wet bathroom, the call from Myra Lyall and her disappearance, the wiping of the Times servers, the things Jenna had told me. It gave me a headache, ratcheted the tension in my shoulders. The more I thought about these things, the foggier my head got, the more nebulous and vaguely menacing it all seemed. And then there was Agent Dylan Grace, his strange and threatening appearances, his hasty retreats.

“What’s happening?” I asked, saying it aloud without realizing. My own words startled me but no one on the street around me seemed to notice. The sky had gone dark and the air had grown colder. I wasn’t dressed warmly enough, as usual. I felt my phone vibrate in my pocket and I withdrew it with a stiff, cold hand gone pink from exposure. There was an anonymous text message. It read: The Cloisters. Tomorrow. 8 PM. Trust no one.

I WAS STILL shaking when I pushed through the studio door. I hadn’t stopped to think why it might be open as I bolted up the dark, narrow staircase and stepped into the large loft space. I felt as if someone was pursuing me, though I’d seen no one suspicious on the street. I could barely control my breathing and had to stop a minute. The studio was dark, the only light coming from Jake’s small office off to the left. I felt for the switch on the wall to my left and tried to turn on the lights but nothing happened. The space was an old warehouse, nearly windowless and bare; the electricity failed as often as it worked.

“Jake,” I called when I had my wind back. No answer. I moved past the large covered forms of his sculptures; they were as familiar to me as a gathering of friends—the thinking man, the weeping woman, the couple making love—though tonight each of them seemed weird and angry. For a moment I imagined them coming to life beneath their white sheets.

I moved past them quickly, toward the light coming from Jake’s office. I expected to see him hunched over his laptop, headphones blasting over his ears, oblivious to my arrival as usual. But the small room was empty. His laptop hummed. I walked over to the desk. A cup of coffee from the pizzeria downstairs was cold.

I sat down in the chair and rested my arms on the desk, my head on my arms. I could still feel my heart beating in my throat. But in the familiar space, I started to feel safer, calmer. After a few minutes, I sat up to take my phone from my pocket and look at the text message again. In doing this, I jolted Jake’s laptop. The shooting-stars screen saver vanished and it took me a second to register what I was seeing. It took another second after that to believe it.

It was the same red screen I’d been staring at on and off at my own computer. The same website. Except now there was a small window open in the upper right-hand corner of the page, some kind of streaming video of a busy street corner bustling with chic pedestrians. I leaned in closer. It only took the flow of traffic for me to identify the city—the fat black taxis, the towering red buses. It was London. The low brown buildings, boutique shop windows, and street cafés made me think it was SoHo, possibly Covent Garden.

I watched. It was night, the street lit by orange lamplight. People were dressed warmly, walking quickly. If the webcast was live, it would be after midnight. The people looked young, were mostly in groups it seemed, maybe heading home from the pubs, from late-night drinks after the theater. I moved my face close to the screen, looking for I don’t know what. I half-expected to see the shadowy form I had seen in the photographs that had started all of this. But there was nothing to see, just groups of jovial people, hurrying from one place to another in the cold evening.

After a while, I leaned back in the chair and rubbed my eyes, which had started to sting and tear.

“What am I seeing here?” I asked myself aloud. “Why would Jake have this on his computer?

A soft sound from the loft space was my only answer. That’s when it occurred to me that the door downstairs had been unlocked. In all the time I’d been coming here, that door had been unlocked only once. I felt my throat go dry as I got up slowly and walked toward the doorway that separated the loft and the office. I noticed that the high narrow window, the only window in the place, was open. The night had turned windy and the breeze blowing through the window rustled the white covers over Jake’s sculptures. It took only a second for me to identify with relief that this was the sound I’d heard. In the movement of the air the covered forms looked like a population of restless spirits, rooted to the ground but dreaming of flight.

I scanned the room and my eyes fell on something else: a large black kidney-shaped stain on the floor near the standing artist’s lamps that Jake turned on when he was working. Beside the stain was the hammer he used to bend and shape the metal. I walked slowly toward it, wary of the rustling shapes behind me, my right ear (my stress alarm) buzzing loudly. I reached up the thin metal rod that held the light, felt for a switch and found one. Though the ceiling lights hadn’t come on, this one did. The glaring white from the bulb made me blink. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust.

When they did, I could see that the stain wasn’t black, of course, but deep red. Blood. Too much of it to be healthy for anyone. I stepped back. The room tilted unpleasantly.

There was thunder then, a distant and insistent pounding. I thought it might be coming from my own head, but eventually I recognized it for what it was: the sound of footfalls on the stairs. I was in a kind of shock, lost in a place of fearful imagining of the scene that might have left that stain on the floor, wondering whose blood it was, praying that it wasn’t Jake’s. I turned to see a man charging up the stairs, gun drawn. Every instinct told me to run, but there was only one way out of the loft.

And then I heard my name: “Ridley?” It was a voice I recognized.

When he stepped into the light, his face looked softer and kinder than I had known it; not arrogant, not full of some secret knowledge. Agent Dylan Grace.

“RIDLEY,” HE SAID, putting his hands on my shoulders. “Are you okay?” His eyes moved to the bloodstain on the floor. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I said. “No.”

“What’s happening? Why are you here?” he asked. I wanted to break away from the intensity of his gaze. I started to struggle against the grip he had on my shoulders, but he held me fast, forced me to hold his eyes.

“Listen to me,” he said. “Esme Gray is dead. Witnesses place Jake Jacobsen at the scene around the time of death. Where is he?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. There’s blood on the floor.”

I felt as if I was breathing through a straw. Esme was dead. There was a horrible amount of blood. Where was Jake? White spots bloomed before my eyes, a sickening fireworks display. I don’t remember much that happened for a while after that.

I HAVE TO ADMIT, I am prone to blacking out under extreme circumstances. It’s something I have recently learned about myself. If you’ve been with me since the beginning, you might remember this about me. It’s not a fainting or swooning. It’s more like a short circuit. Too much awful imput, too many terrified and confused thoughts, and poof!—lights out. But it’s not fainting. So stop thinking that.

My head was still reeling when I was aware of things again. I found myself slumped in the chair by Jake’s desk. Agent Grace produced a bottle of water; he cracked the lid and handed it to me. He looked sad, had dark circles under his eyes.

“Did you say Esme Gray is dead?” I asked, wondering if maybe I’d dreamed it.

He nodded. “She’s dead. Someone beat her to death with his fists.”

I thought about this; it brought to mind the horrors Nick Smiley had revealed, as well as my last encounter with Esme, her image of me with a sledgehammer, swinging at everyone’s life. That she was dead and that she had died so horribly were abstract concepts to me. It didn’t seem real and I felt nothing but a kind of light nausea.

“Not Jake,” I said.

He shrugged. “Jacobsen was last seen on her porch, pounding to be let in. About an hour later he was seen running from her residence.”

“When?”

“Earlier today.”

“Who called the police?”

“Anonymous caller.”

“But you have a positive ID?”

“Esme’s next-door neighbor recognized him from a prior visit. Apparently Esme had told her who he was, asked her to call the police if she ever saw him around when she wasn’t home.”

I shook my head. “If he was going to kill her, he’d have been more careful.”

“Unless it wasn’t premeditated.”

I shook my head again. I knew the heart of exactly one person in the world. Yes, I knew the sadness and the rage that dwelled there, but I also knew the sheer goodness of him. I knew Jake. No way.

It still hadn’t sunk in that Esme was dead. Later I would grieve her and everything she was to me once. Now all I could think about was Jake.

“Trust me,” I said. “I know this man. There’s no way he would ever kill Esme, especially not like that.”

He seemed to consider saying something, then changed his mind. I could almost guess what he was thinking: that I’d been wrong about people before, that maybe I wasn’t the best judge of character. He might have wanted to say that at one point nearly everyone I knew turned out to be someone different than I’d thought.

I stood and pointed toward the loft. “What about the bloodstain on the floor? Something’s happened here. Maybe the person who killed Esme hurt Jake, too.”

I thought about the red computer screen (hidden for the moment behind the screen saver), the street scene in London, the matchbook with its odd symbol and note still in my pocket. It was all on the tip of my tongue. But I remembered the text message: Trust no one. It seemed like good advice. I kept my mouth shut.

“What?” asked Agent Grace. His eyes were trained on my face as though he could read my thoughts there. “What are you thinking right now?”

I could almost believe that I might trust him, turn all of this stuff over to him to investigate or to dismiss. It is so easy to turn over power, to shift off responsibility and walk away. Maybe if Jake wasn’t missing (not that he was missing exactly, but we weren’t sure where he was at the moment), a bloodstain marring his floor, I might have been more willing to enlist Agent Grace’s help. Something deep told me to heed the advice of the text message, that Jake might be the one to pay if I didn’t.

“I’m thinking,” I said, sounding slightly hysterical to my own ears, “that something has happened to Jake. And I’m wondering what you’re going to do about it.”

He didn’t say anything, just kept those gray eyes on me.

“If someone killed Esme and there’s blood on the floor here”—I was yelling now—“doesn’t that seem like a connection to you?”

“I’m looking at the connection, Ridley.”

Now it was my turn to go silent.

“My missing couple, Myra and Allen Lyall. A dead woman, Esme Gray. A large bloodstain on the floor of Jacobsen’s apartment, Jacobsen nowhere to be found, last seen leaving the scene of a homicide. What do these people have in common? What links all of them?”

You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out where he was going.

“I’m not the only thing that links them,” I said defensively.

“No,” he said slowly. “There’s Project Rescue. But you’re intimately linked to that as well.”

I sat back down in the chair. Agent Grace pulled the other chair close to me and tilted it back against the wall, balancing on its two rear legs. I wished he would fall backward, hit his head and look like an idiot.

“When’s the last time you saw your boyfriend?” He leaned on the word boyfriend with some kind of sarcasm or even hostility, maybe both. I thought about telling him that Jake wasn’t technically my boyfriend any longer, but I didn’t want to be disloyal to Jake. Or answer the questions that would follow about the current nature of our relationship.

“The night before last.”

“And the last time you heard from him?”

“He left a message earlier today. Asked me to meet him here for dinner around eight.”

“What time did he leave the message?”

“I don’t know. Around three or four, I guess.”

“How did he sound?”

“Fine.” The truth was I couldn’t quite remember what he had sounded like.

“Did he call you from the landline here,” he said, nodding toward the phone on Jake’s desk, “or from his cellular phone?”

“I don’t know. I think from this phone. I can’t remember.” He’d called me from his cell; I could tell by the background noise. At least I thought so; I would check my caller ID when I got home. In any case, I didn’t want Agent Grace to know that he’d been on his cell; it seemed incriminating somehow. I was dying to call Jake now but didn’t know if it was wise to do this in front of Agent Grace.

He continued with the questions, writing my answers in a little black notebook he’d extracted from his pocket. “Where were you today that you weren’t available to take his call around that time?”

I hesitated, thought about lying, decided against it. “I went to Max’s apartment.”

He looked up at me. “Why?”

I explained to him the reasons I sometimes visited that place. I could tell by the look on his face that he didn’t understand, thought my behavior was suspicious. Which, of course, it was.

“Can anyone confirm that you were there?”

“The doorman, Dutch.” I watched him write. “Is that the time around when she died?” I asked, deducing as much from his questions. “This afternoon around three or four?”

He didn’t say anything, just kept scribbling in his pad. I felt a tide of panic swell for Jake, a desperate worry aching in my chest.

“I have to be honest with you, Ridley,” said Agent Grace after a moment. “I don’t think you’re telling me everything you should be. I’m having a hard time trusting you right now.”

I tried for indignation but it didn’t take. I shrugged instead. “I really don’t give a shit what you think of me, Agent Grace,” I said, keeping my voice mild. It was true; I couldn’t care less. This was new for me; I used to be worried about what people thought, eager to please and play by the rules. But that was before. Before I knew I was Max’s daughter. “I don’t trust you, either.”

I wondered how long it would be before he started sifting through Jake’s office, before he looked at the computer and discovered the strange website. I wondered if he’d make the connection between the streaming video in London and the overseas call that had come into my apartment. Of course he would. He was all about making connections. I wondered how much he knew already. Probably a lot more than I did.

“I’m going to have someone take you home, and I want you to stay there, Ridley.”

“I want to stay here in case Jake comes back,” I said.

“If he comes back here, I guarantee he won’t be available for dinner,” he said coolly. “Give me your cell phone.”

“What? Why?”

“I want to call Jacobsen from your phone. We’ve been trying to reach him but he hasn’t answered. I’m wondering if he’ll answer a call from you.”

I didn’t know what my rights were here. I felt another wash of panic, folded my arms across my chest, and looked down at the floor. He held his hand out.

“Seriously?” he said. “Don’t make me wrestle it from you or take you into custody and confiscate your belongings, search your apartment. I might have to do that eventually, but it doesn’t have to be right now.”

It seemed like he was always issuing threats of this kind. I looked at his face and saw that he meant it. After another second’s hesitation, I handed my phone to him, watched him scroll through my address book and hit send. He put the phone on speaker and we both listened to it ring. I closed my eyes, praying silently for Jake to answer, until the voice mail picked up. My heart dipped into my stomach as Agent Grace ended the call. I held my breath, wondering if he was going to scroll through my call log, check my messages. But he didn’t do that; he simply handed the phone back to me. I was surprised; it seemed like a logical thing for him to do, to check my incoming and outgoing communications. We locked eyes and I considered giving everything up to him. Later I would look back on this as the last moment I could have asked for help out of the hole I was climbing into…a moment I let pass.

A STONE-FACED YOUNG man with a blond crew cut and a scar from his neck to his ear drove me home in a white Crown Victoria. I recognized him as Agent Grace’s partner. I didn’t remember his name. In the passing streetlights, his head looked like a wire brush. I stared out the window and cried quietly, hoping he couldn’t tell, until he handed me a tissue without a word. I was afraid for Jake, afraid for myself, unsure of what to do next.

The man at the wheel didn’t say a word as I exited the vehicle. I almost thanked him (that’s what a good girl I am), but I held it back and slammed the door instead. As I let myself into my building, I noticed that he turned off the engine and seemed to make himself comfortable, as if he were settling in for a while.

MEMORY IS ELUSIVE for me these days. When I learned that most of the things I had taken for truth about my life were lies, I lost faith in memory. The past events of my life? I started to remember them differently; odd tones and nuances started to emerge. And I couldn’t be sure any longer if my original memories or the new ones were truer to the things that had actually transpired.

Like the hours Max and my father spent in his study, for example. I had always imagined them in there laughing and relaxing, drinking cognac and smoking cigars. Now I wondered what they talked about in there. Me? Project Rescue? If Max had had this awful dark side, did my father know about it? Counsel him on how to deal with the “demons” he referred to that last night?

Or the harsh conversations between Max and my mother. She disapproved of the parade of anonymous women through Max’s life, resented bitterly their presence in her home and social life. They argued about it, but only when they thought my father was out of earshot. I wondered now why she cared. In the anger of their tones, was there something more? Intimacy? Jealousy?

I thought about those women. Who were they? All I remember was that they all seemed to be blondes, all in high heels, beautiful and distant, with something cheap about them. Were they call girls? Maybe some of them were. I didn’t really know. I never knew their names, never saw any of them more than once. What did that say about Max? I could have started making connections here: the picture Nick Smiley had painted of Max, the accusations of matricide, how Max had never had a serious relationship with a woman. But I didn’t. Not yet.

Max was not a handsome man. His skin was sallow and pockmarked from the acne he’d suffered as a teenager. His dark hair was thinning. He was big, awkward with his size. But he had a magnetic charisma that drew people to him like metallic dust. And, of course, there was his outrageous wealth. This drew people as well. But even though he was always surrounded by people, he carried an aura of aloneness. In fact, he was the loneliest man I’ve ever known. Maybe because he had so many secrets to hide.

After being dropped off at my apartment, I lay on the couch in the dark and searched my memories again for Max, for moments when I might have glimpsed the man and not my creation of him. But I couldn’t get past the myth, the one to which I had been clinging. When I was a kid, I used to bring my face up close to the television screen and try to look beyond its edges. I was sure there was more to see. But there was nothing, just the two-dimensional image. Now I tried to look beyond the borders of my memory. There was nothing there.

I tried not to think about Esme and how she’d died. I remembered what Jake had said, about how scared she’d been. I’d seen the fear, too. It seemed she’d had good reason to be afraid. Who had killed her and why, I couldn’t begin to imagine. I recalled the last words we’d said to each other.

I’ll keep swinging until I know all the answers, I told her.

You do and you’ll wind up like that New York Times reporter, she’d answered.

The memory was ugly and I cringed inside thinking of it.

I PERIODICALLY PICKED up the phone and dialed Jake’s cell, got his voice mail, and left a message or hung up. I tried not to think about the blood on his floor or what kind of trouble he might be in, or if he was hurt…or worse. Otherwise, my panic and helplessness were like something alive in my chest.

I called Ace.

“Took you long enough to get back to me,” he said by way of answering the phone, presumably having seen my number on his caller ID. Or maybe I was the only person who ever called him. He was living on the Upper West Side near Lincoln Center in a one-bedroom apartment looking out over the Hudson. It was pretty nice, though sparsely decorated with just a couch, desk, computer, and television in the living room, a bed and dresser in the bedroom. He claimed he was trying to write a novel, a claim that annoyed me to no end for reasons I can’t explain.

“I’ve got things going on, Ace,” I said, maybe more harshly than he deserved. “The whole world doesn’t revolve around you.”

“Christ,” he said. “What’s your problem?”

I unloaded. I told him everything that had happened over the last few days, everything I’d learned, everything I’d found, about my trip to Detroit, about Esme, about Jake missing. I even told him about the text message in spite of its ominous warning. When I was done I went silent, waited for him to make some sarcastic comment, tell me to move on, or claim that I was losing it completely. He didn’t say anything right away. I listened to him breathing.

“Ace, are you even listening?”

Sometimes he’d channel-surf when he was talking to me, or I’d hear him tapping on his keyboard, engaged in an online chat during our conversation. But God forbid I’d get a call on the other line while he was talking, or if he got the sense I wasn’t giving him my full attention. He’d flip out. I know; he’s kind of an asshole.

“I’m listening,” he said. He sounded strange and grave.

I paused. “Did you ever get the sense that Max was someone…else?” I asked. “Did you ever see anything in him that would make you think there was something wrong with him? Like really wrong with him?”

He let go of a sigh, or maybe he was exhaling smoke—even though he’d given up cigarettes as part of his detox after rehab.

“Well,” he said softly, “I never saw him the way you saw him.”

I didn’t say anything; I could tell he was collecting his thoughts.

“He was always a hero to you,” he said finally. “You didn’t know he was your father, but maybe on some cellular level you did. You used to look at him with these wide eyes, this adoration on your face. I never understood your relationship. It confused me as a kid. I was never sure what you were seeing.”

I was surprised by what he said, by its presence and wisdom.

“What did you see?”

“Honestly? I saw someone angry and very lonely, someone who glommed on to our family because he didn’t have one of his own. He was always drunk, Ridley, with some prostitute on his arm.” He paused a second and inhaled sharply, telling me definitely that he was smoking. “I’m not sure why Ben and Grace allowed him so much unsupervised time with us. I was never sure what they saw in him, either.”

I took this all in.

“You know he hit me once, hard in the mouth,” he said.

“When?” I asked, surprised.

“I was thirteen, maybe. I was arguing with Mom.” I hadn’t heard him call her that in so long. He always called our parents Ben and Grace, as a way to express the distance he felt from them, I guess. “We were screaming at each other—I can’t remember about what. Seems like there was so much screaming between us. I can’t remember a whole lot of peace in our house, can you?”

I couldn’t answer him. We’d had such different childhoods, though we grew up in the same house with the same people. I’ve said before that the two of us extracted different people from our parents, saw different faces. From Max, too, I guess. Max had never so much as raised his voice to me, never mind his hand. He’d never even been stern with me.

Ace didn’t wait for me to answer. “He came at me quickly,” he said. “Told me not to speak to my mother like that, and he clocked me in the jaw.”

“With a closed fist?”

“Yeah. Probably not as hard as he could have, but hard enough.”

“What did Mom do?”

“She freaked. She kicked him out. She comforted me, put ice on my jaw, but she made me promise never to tell Dad.”

“Why not?”

He was quiet for a second. “I don’t know.”

I felt sorry for him, also angry with Max that he would hit my brother like that, and confused that my mother would want to keep the incident from my father.

Ace lied a lot; it’s an element of the addictive personality. He exaggerated much of the discord in our house, or so I thought most of the time. I’d always believed that it was his way of excusing the bad choices he’d made over the years. But he wasn’t lying about this. It lacked the usual self-conscious drama. It wasn’t followed by a tirade about how it made him feel and what it led him to do to himself.

“Do you believe me?” he asked. He sounded almost sad. The curse of the liar: When you have a truth to tell, no one believes.

“Of course I do,” I said. If we’d been beside each other, I would have wrapped my arms around him. “I’m sorry, Ace.”

“For what?”

I thought about it for a second. It seemed lonely for him that he’d had these feelings about Max. Max was my father’s best friend, my hero, my mother’s…I don’t even know what. It seemed so strange and sad that all along Ace was seeing Max as someone else completely, and that he might have been right.

“I don’t know,” I said finally.

I heard the metallic flick of a Zippo, the crackle of burning paper, and a sharp inhale.

“Ridley, is it even possible for you to keep yourself out of trouble?” he said with a long exhale. His usual arrogance and sarcasm were back. It was almost a relief.

“I didn’t ask for this. Not for any of it.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I mean, a year ago you could have chosen to turn away from all of this. You didn’t. Now you have the chance to turn all of this over to that FBI guy, but you’re not going to. You’re the one who’s always going on and on about choices, how they impact the course of our lives, blah, blah, blah. So what’s it going to be?”

No one likes their own philosophies thrown back at them. Though I had to admit that he was right in certain respects. I had made some questionable choices. I had been guilty of putting myself in the path of harm when I could have easily crossed the street. But sometimes turning away just isn’t an option.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have to think.”

“Well, I bet I know where to find you tomorrow night at eight.”

I thought about the text message, about Jake. The fear in my chest made my breathing shallow.

“Ace?” I said, remembering suddenly what it felt like to be a kid, needing my big brother to chase nightmares away.

“Yeah?”

“Will you come with me?”

“Shit,” he said, drawing out the word softly. I thought of how he never wanted me to crawl into bed with him when we were little, but that he always shifted over to the side to give me room.

“Will you?” I said, surprised at how scared my voice sounded.

I heard him sigh. “Okay.”

I DRIFTED OFF into a fitful sleep on the couch, the cell phone in my hand. I woke up a couple of times, sure I’d heard it ringing, expecting to see Jake’s number blinking on the screen, only to find I’d imagined it. When it did finally ring, I answered it without even looking to see who it was.

“Jake?” I said.

“No. Not Jake.” Agent Grace.

“What time is it?”

“Three A.M.”

“What do you want?”

“Your boy is O negative, right?”

I thought of the pool of blood, how dark and thick it had been.

“Yeah,” I said. I knew this only because the time we’d been in the hospital together, I’d peeked at his chart. He is what they call a universal donor—he can give his blood to anyone but can receive blood only from another type O negative. This seemed so unfair to me. And Jake is most definitely a giver; he never asks for anything in return.

“The blood in his studio is AB positive.”

I felt something release its grip on my heart, let relief wash the tension from my muscles. Whatever had happened there, it hadn’t been Jake bleeding out on the floor. That was something. Then I wondered: Was it Jake who sent the text message?

“I thought you’d want to know.”

I didn’t say anything. It was uncharacteristically nice of him to call. But I figured he had another agenda.

“Did you happen to look at his laptop while you were there?” he asked me.

I thought about lying but couldn’t seem to force the words out.

“Don’t bother answering,” he said. “Your fingerprints are all over the keyboard.”

I found it fascinating that he could carry on an entire conversation without my having to say a word. It was a real skill.

“That website with the streaming video of London—does it mean anything to you?”

“No,” I said, just to feel as if I was part of the conversation. “I have no idea what it is.”

“Have you ever seen it before?”

There was a knock at my door then; I heard it on the phone, too.

“Can I come in?” he said.

I walked over to the door and opened it for him. He looked tired. His hair was a mess, and there was some kind of grease stain on his shirt.

He ended the call and put the cell phone back in his pocket. “One of your neighbors let me in downstairs. Must have been coming in from a late night,” he said, answering a question I hadn’t asked.

“Where’s your partner?” I said, shutting the door. I was starting to get used to these little intrusions, found that tonight I didn’t even mind. Now that I knew it wasn’t Jake’s blood on the floor, I was feeling less tense and had my sense of humor back. All the other things seemed far away, almost like a vanishing nightmare.

“He’s in the car.”

“Aren’t you supposed to go everywhere together? How do you run the whole good cop, bad cop thing without him?”

“We don’t get along very well.”

“Imagine that.”

He gave me a dark look. “Believe it or not, I’m not the bad guy here. I may be the only friend you have.”

I thought again about how he didn’t look or act like any FBI agent I’d ever seen. The agents I’d dealt with during the Project Rescue investigation had been all about rules and procedures; they’d been clean-cut and officious, bureaucratic and precise. In other words, the exact opposite of Dylan Grace.

“Where did you first see it?”

“What?”

“The website.”

I sighed and sank into the couch. Ace’s words rang in my ears. You have the chance to turn all of this over to that FBI guy, but you’re not going to. What was it? Was I just being stubborn? Did I want to get myself deeper and deeper into trouble until I couldn’t get myself out again? Maybe I was on some kind of self-destructive jag, acting out because of this low-grade depression that permeated my world. I decided to prove my brother wrong.

“At my parents’ house,” I said with a sigh. “I saw it on my father’s computer.” The admission felt like a failure on my part. It was like saying, “I can’t handle this alone.” It also felt like a betrayal of my father. I didn’t know what the website was or who was using it. But it couldn’t be good.

“But when I saw it there, it was just a red screen, no video,” I added.

He pulled up a chair at the table, straddled it in that way he had, rested his arms on the back of it. He had an odd look on his face. I might have thought it was concern if I believed he was capable of it. Maybe I was being too hard on him. Then again, Trust no one. I should have had it tattooed on my arm.

“I tried to access it again from my computer here with the same results. Just the red screen,” I said when he didn’t say anything.

He nodded uncertainly, kept his eyes on me. He looked at me like that a lot, as if he was trying to figure out if I was lying to him, as if he might be able to see it on my face. I turned away; there was something about that gray gaze that made me nervous. There was a lot more I could tell him. But I didn’t. It was like flirting—give a little, keep a little. Maybe Ace was right about me after all.

“Do you have any idea what that site is?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me. I didn’t want to have a conversation with Dylan Grace, and yet here we were again.

He shrugged. “The best I can figure at this point is that it’s some kind of encrypted website. A place to leave and retrieve messages. There must be a way to log in, but I couldn’t figure it out.”

“And the video?”

He shrugged again. “We have some people working on it. We’ll figure it out soon enough.” His voice went low at the end of the sentence, as if he was issuing a warning.

I lifted my feet onto the couch, made myself comfortable. Fatigue was pulling at the lids of my eyes. Now that I knew Jake was okay, or at least that it wasn’t his blood on the floor of the studio, everything else seemed less terrifying and urgent. But that was just one of the many things I’d be wrong about in the next twenty-four hours.

THE NEXT THING I was aware of was sunlight streaming in my east-facing windows. It took me a second to orient myself, then everything of the day before came back at me with sickening clarity. Had Agent Grace really been here? Did he really tell me it wasn’t Jake’s blood on the floor? I felt nauseated that I might have dreamed it all. Or that I had fallen asleep while he was sitting in my apartment. How weird was that? I noticed then that someone had taken the chenille throw from my bed and covered me with it. A dull pain throbbed behind my eyes as I sat up. There was a note on my coffee table. We’ll talk tomorrow, it threatened, signed with the initials DG. It was the handwriting of an arrogant pain in the ass if ever I’d seen it—big looping letters, huge initials. I had to smile. I still hated him but he was starting to grow on me.

I tried Jake. Still no answer. I made some coffee so strong it tasted bitter in my throat. I walked into my office and looked over the notes I’d jotted down during my conversations with Jenna and Dennis. I checked the time; it was seven A.M. I had thirteen hours to find out as much as I could about Myra Lyall and about that website before I went to the Cloisters that night.

I know what you’re thinking: that I was at best reckless and foolish, at worst suicidal. What can I say? You might be right.

It was too early to call a hacker-wannabe like Jenna’s ex-beau Grant, but ambitious people don’t sleep in. A young assistant at the New York Times, especially one worried for her job, was likely to be at her desk before the sun came up. I called through the main number at the Times and was surprised and disappointed to get voice mail. I left a message.

“Sarah, this is Ridley Jones. Before her disappearance Myra Lyall was trying to reach me. Some pretty odd things have been happening to me since. I wonder if we can talk, get together for coffee?”

I left my number and hung up. I know, it was a pretty risky message to leave, considering how many ears and eyes might be on my communications—not to mention hers. But I needed the message to be interesting enough to warrant a callback. The phone rang before five minutes had passed.

“Is this Ridley?” Her voice was young; she was practically whispering.

“Sarah?”

“Yeah.”

“You got my message?”

“Yes,” she said. “Can we get together?”

We arranged to meet in a half hour at the Brooklyn Diner, a tourist trap in Midtown where no real New Yorker would ever eat. I wondered at her choice but figured she just didn’t want to run into anyone from the Times.

“How will I recognize you?” I asked her.

“I know what you look like.”

One of the advantages of infamy, I guess.

THE DINER WAS crowded; a cacophony of voices and clinking silverware rose up as soon as I opened the door. Strong aromas competed for attention: coffee, eggs and bacon, the sugary smell of pastries on a tray at the counter. My stomach rumbled. I stood by the door and scanned the room for a woman sitting alone. There was a petite blonde with her hair pulled back severely from her face, but she had her nose buried in a copy of the Post, sipping absently from a thick white coffee cup. A mix of people sat at the counter. A pink puffy family of three, all wearing I NY T-shirts, huddled over a guidebook with the Statue of Liberty on the cover. I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t get mugged. A businessman chatted loudly on his cell phone, oblivious to the annoyed stares of people around him. An elderly lady dropped her napkin; the young man sitting next to her bent down and picked it up, handing it to her with a smile.

I watched, losing myself as I’m prone to do in wondering about people. Who are they? Are they kind or cruel, happy or sad? What causes them to act rudely or to be polite? Where will they go when they leave this place? Who will die in the next week? Who will live to be a hundred? Who loves his wife and family? Who’s secretly thinking about shedding his identity, hiding his assets, and running away for good? Questions like these move through my brain rapid-fire; I’m barely aware of them. I can exhaust myself with my own inner catalog of questions and possible answers. I think it’s why I write, why I’ve always enjoyed profiles. At least I get the answers about one person—or the answers they want to give, anyway.

I felt a hand on my elbow and turned around to see a fresh-faced girl with hair as orange as copper wire, skin as pale and flawless as an eggshell. The smudges under her bluest of blue eyes told me that she was stressed and not sleeping. The urgency in her face told me that she was scared.

“I’m Sarah,” she said quietly. I nodded and shook her hand; it was cold and weak in mine.

The hostess showed us to a booth toward the back of the restaurant and we both slid in. I noticed that she didn’t take off her jacket, so I left mine on as well.

“I can’t stay long,” she said. “I have to get back to the office.”

“Okay,” I said. I got right to the point. “Why was Myra trying to reach me before she disappeared? I thought originally that she wanted to talk to me about her article, but I know now that it went to bed before she started trying to reach me. What did she want?”

A waitress came. We ordered coffees and I asked for an apple turnover.

“I don’t know what she wanted,” she said, leaning into me. “I know that she was working on the Project Rescue story. It wasn’t a news piece, just a series of profiles on these people who might have been some of the children removed from their homes. She wasn’t that into it, did it more to make a new editor at the Magazine happy. But she learned something during her research that really got her jazzed.”

“What?” I said. There was something skittish about her, as if she might get up and bolt at any second. I had the urge to reach out and hold on to her wrist to keep her from fleeing.

She shook her head. “I have no idea.”

I looked at her, tried not to seem exasperated. “Okay,” I said, releasing a breath and giving her a patient smile. “Let’s start at the beginning. She was working on these profiles…” I began, letting my voice trail off. She picked up the sentence.

“And she was doing some background research about the investigation, about Maxwell Allen Smiley and about you. She talked to some people at the FBI. She got really annoyed one day. She’d just come back from an interview at FBI headquarters and said that she’d never had so much resistance on a ‘fluff piece,’ especially when the investigation was already closed. She said she was getting the feeling that there was much more to the story than had been revealed.”

“So she set out to find out what that was?”

She looked at me with wide eyes. I was starting to think there might be something wrong with this girl. She was either a little on the slow side or scared and reticent because of it. I wondered why she had agreed to meet me.

“I’m not sure. I think so. Everything happened so fast.”

She looked down at the table, and when she looked back up at me, she had tears in her eyes. I was quiet, waited for her to collect herself and go on.

“She was in her office. I heard her phone ring. She took the call, then got up and closed her door. I couldn’t hear her conversation. About a half an hour later, she left her office, told me she was leaving for the day on a lead, and she was gone.”

“You didn’t ask her where she was going? What she was working on?”

She looked at me. “She wasn’t like that. She didn’t talk about her work. Not until the words were on the page. Anyway, I guess she was right about me.”

“What do you mean?”

“During my last review with her, she told me she worried that I wasn’t curious enough, that I didn’t seem to have a ‘fire in the belly,’ as she put it. And that maybe I was more cut out for research than news investigation.”

I could see that the comment had hurt her, but I could also see that it might have been dead on.

The waitress brought our coffee and my pastry. I wanted to shove the whole buttery, sweet turnover in my mouth all at once in an effort to comfort myself.

“When I went to shut down her computer and turn off her light for the night,” she said, after a sip of her coffee, “I saw something strange on her computer.”

I paused my own coffee cup between the table and my lips, looked at her.

“There was a website open. The screen was completely red.”

She slipped a piece of paper across the table. I recognized the website address as the same one I’d seen at my father’s and at Jake’s. That humming I get in my right ear started up. I found myself looking around the restaurant, wondering if anyone was watching us. Just the mention of that website made me nervous. I didn’t know why.

“Did you tell this to the people investigating her disappearance?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered, with a shrug. “They didn’t seem to think much of it.”

“Do you know anything about that site? What it means?”

She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know much about computers,” she said, casting her blue eyes down.

I put my coffee cup on the table and rubbed my forehead. I was getting the feeling that she didn’t know any more than I did about any of this. I wondered again why she had wanted to meet with me. This time I asked her as much.

“I want to help her. I feel like if I’d been more curious, the way she wanted me to be, then I might have been able to tell the police more. They might have been able to find her. I thought you might know something,” she said plaintively. After a moment’s pause: “Do you?”

I shook my head. “Not really.”

“You said weird things have been happening to you. Like what?”

The warning in the text message came back to me. I’d already confided in Ace; for all I knew, that had been a mistake. I looked at this girl and wondered what could be accomplished by telling her anything, if there was more potential for gain than for risk. Finally I slid the matchbook across the table at her. She picked it up and held it close to her face, squinting and wrinkling up her nose. She took glasses from her pocket, placed them on her face, and gazed at it a while longer. She opened it and read the note inside. She handed it back to me with a shrug.

“I’m sorry,” she said. There was something odd on her face.

“It doesn’t mean anything to you?” I said.

She was rummaging through her bag then. She placed five dollars on the table and got up quickly. “I have to go,” she said. “I don’t think we can help each other. You should—” I noticed she was looking over my head at something behind me. I turned to follow her eyes but I didn’t see what she was seeing.

“You should,” she repeated, “be careful.”

“Careful of what?” I said, turning back to her.

She moved out of the booth and headed quickly for the door. I put another five on the table and followed. On the street, she had broken into a light jog.

“Sarah!” I called, picking up my pace. “Please wait.”

She stopped abruptly then, almost as if something had startled her. She stood still for a second as I moved closer. Then she reached her hand behind her, as if she was trying to scratch an itch on her back she couldn’t quite reach. She jerked again. By the time I caught up with her, she was on her knees and all the street noise around us seemed to go deathly silent. I dropped to my knees beside her. Her face was a mask of pain, her skin so pale it was nearly blue. She opened her mouth to say something and a rivulet of blood traveled down her chin and onto the pink collar of her shirt. People around us started to notice something was wrong and cleared a path; someone screamed.

“Help me. I need an ambulance,” I said, holding on to her as she sagged into me. Soon I was supporting her full weight. A young man stopped beside us and used his cell phone to dial 911, dropping his briefcase on the sidewalk.

“What’s wrong with her?” he said.

I didn’t answer him; I didn’t know. He lifted her off of me and laid her on the ground, opened her coat, moved the strap of the messenger bag she wore slung across her body. Her hair fell around her like a halo. Two bloodred blossoms marred the front of her shirt. She looked like a broken angel lying there on the concrete.

He looked at me, incredulous. “She’s been shot.”

I stared at him, then past him. In the crowd of people gathering around us, a man in black moved slowly away. He wore a long dark coat and a black felt hat. He seemed to glide, to be swallowed by the crowd. I heard the wail of sirens.

“Hey!” I yelled.

The young guy kneeling over Sarah turned to look at me, his face flushed. “What is it?”

But I was already up and running, pushing my way through the throng.

“You can’t leave!” I heard him call after me. “Don’t you know her?”

My eyes locked on the man in black as he moved quickly up the crowded street. I kept losing and regaining sight of him as he got farther away. He was moving west, impossibly fast. By the time we’d crossed Eighth Avenue, I was breathless. At Ninth, I lost him completely. I stood on the corner and looked up and down the avenue.

A homeless guy lying on a cardboard mat gazed at me with interest. He looked as relaxed and comfortable as if he were lying on a couch in his own living room. He held a quivering Chihuahua in his right arm, a sign in his left hand. It read DON’T IGNORE ME. THIS COULD BE YOU ONE DAY. I ignored him.

“For five bucks, I’ll tell you where he went,” he said after a minute.

I regarded his dirty face and matted blond beard, his ripped Rangers team shirt, his mismatched shoes. He didn’t look that bad for someone who was lying on the street on a piece of cardboard. I pulled a five from my pocket and handed it to him. He pointed south.

“He dropped something in those trash cans, hailed a cab.”

“He hailed a cab?” I said, dismay and annoyance creeping into my voice.

He shrugged. The little dog yipped at me nastily.

I walked over to the trash cans he had pointed out; there were three gathered together at the curb. The smell was awful. “Which one?”

“That one,” he said, pointing to the right. I hesitated.

“Pretty girl doesn’t want to get her hands dirty,” he said to his little dog, giving me an amused grin. “Welcome to my world.”

I gave him a dirty look, grabbed the lid, and lifted it up. I was assailed by the odor and by what I saw inside. On top of the white trash bag lay a handgun with a silencer on its muzzle. I don’t know if it was the smell or the gun, but I felt as if I might vomit. In spite of that, I reached in and picked it up, more to convince myself it was real than anything else. It was real. I stared at it in disbelief. I’d watched a girl get shot on the street, chased her assailant, and found his gun with a silencer. I felt a weight on my chest; my hands started to shake. I’m not sure how long I stood like that.

“Put the gun down. Put your hands in the air.”

I froze and lifted my eyes from the object in my hand. I was surrounded by cops. Four uniformed officers stood around me. Two patrol cars pulled up next to us. The homeless guy was gone.

DEPRESSION IS NOT dramatic, but it is total. It’s sneaky—you almost don’t notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you’re sleeping. It takes little things at first: your appetite, your desire to return phone calls. Then it comes back for the big stuff, like your will to live.

The next thing you know, your legs are filled with sand. The thought of brushing your teeth fills you with dread, it seems like such an impossible task. Suddenly you’re living your life in black and white—nothing is bright, nothing is pretty anymore. Music sounds tinny and distant. Things you found funny seem dull and off-key.

I was sinking into that hole as I was questioned by homicide detectives at the Midtown North Precinct. I told my half-truth to them, over and over in as many different ways as they wanted me to: I was returning a call from Myra Lyall and found out about her disappearance from Sarah. Sarah asked to meet me. There was a misunderstanding; she thought I could help her find out what happened to Myra. She left the diner when she realized I didn’t know any more than she did. I went after her, feeling bad. I watched her fall to the street. By the time I got to her, she had two gunshot wounds in her chest and was dead. I saw the man who I thought might have shot her running away. I gave chase and found his gun.

If Sarah had saved my message, they’d know there was a bit more to my story than I’d mentioned. But I imagined she would have deleted it, as skittish as she’d seemed.

“So why was Myra Lyall trying to reach you?” said the third guy who’d come in to talk with me. He was older, looked pasty and tired. His belly strained the buttons on his shirt; his gray pants were too short. He’d introduced himself but I’d already forgotten his name. At this point, my depression felt more like apathy.

“I guess for a story she was working on, a profile on Project Rescue babies.”

He looked at me for a second. “That’s where I know your face.”

“That’s right,” I said, yawning in spite of how rude and arrogant it seemed to do so, or maybe because of that. I was so sick of all these cops, playing their stupid games. They all thought they were so savvy, that they knew something about the human condition, that they knew something about me. But they didn’t. They didn’t know the first thing. I’d sat in too many rooms like this since the investigations into Project Rescue began. The process had lost its ability to scare and intimidate me.

The cop kept his eyes on me. They were rimmed red, flat and cold. He was a man who’d seen so much bad, he probably didn’t even recognize good anymore.

“Are you tired, Ms. Jones?”

“You have no idea.”

He gave a little sigh, looked down at his ruined cuticles. Then he looked at me again.

“A girl is dead. Do you care about that at all?”

His question startled me. Of course I cared about that. In fact, if I let myself think on it at all, on my responsibility for what had happened to her, how she was the second person to die in front of me in less than two years, I would crumble into a pile of broken pieces on the floor.

“Of course,” I said softly. The admission brought a pain to my chest and a tightness in my throat. I hoped I wouldn’t cry. I didn’t want to cry. “But I don’t know who killed her or why. I’d only known her for twenty minutes.”

He nodded at me solemnly. He got up and left the room without another word. I folded my arms across the table and rested my forehead there. I tried not to see Sarah collapsing on the street in front of me, tried not to remember the night that Christian Luna had slumped over on the park bench, a perfect red circle in his forehead. I tried not to see the gun and silencer on the trash bag. But of course, all of these images flashed through my mind like some macabre slide show. Those black fingers were slowly tightening their grip around my neck.

The door opened and closed. I gave myself a few seconds before I looked up to see who was next to question me. I never thought I’d be happy to see Dylan Grace, but the sight of him caused every muscle in my body to relax. That’s when I started to cry. Not sobbing, just tearing with a little nose running. He walked over to me and helped me up.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said quietly.

“You’re not going to cuff me, are you?” I said, wiping my eyes with the tissue he produced from his pocket. I figured that he was taking me into federal custody. I couldn’t think of any other way for him to spring me from the NYPD.

“No. Not if you behave yourself.”

HIS PARTNER, WHOSE name I still didn’t know and didn’t really care to know, escorted me out to the sedan while Agent Grace filled out the necessary paperwork. They were calling me a federal witness, I’d overheard in the discussion between Agent Grace and one of the detectives who had questioned me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

His partner didn’t talk to me, just opened the back door and closed it once I slid inside. He stood right outside. It was a bright, sunny day, cool and windy. He lit a cigarette with difficulty, then leaned against the trunk. I tried the door handle; it didn’t open from the inside.

AFTER AGENT GRACE got in the car, we drove uptown. I assumed we were heading to the FBI headquarters but eventually I realized we weren’t. I didn’t ask where we were going. I just used the drive to close my eyes and figure out how I was going to get away from these guys in time to get in touch with Grant, and get up to the Cloisters. Believe it or not, it wasn’t even one o’clock in the afternoon yet. I still had time.

When the car came to a stop, I opened my eyes. Agent Grace handed his partner a manila envelope.

“This paperwork needs to be filed,” he said.

“Why do I have to do it?”

“It’s part of your training,” Agent Grace said with a smile. “When you’re training a rookie, then you can get him to go and do your paperwork.”

“Where are you going with the witness?”

I watched their reflection in the rearview mirror, saw resentment on the partner’s face and indifference on Agent Grace’s. Agent Grace got out of the car without a word and then opened the door for me. We were at Ninety-fifth and Riverside. I wasn’t sure what was happening. His partner gave him a dark look through the glass, then pulled out quickly into traffic, tires screeching.

“What are we doing?” I asked him.

“We’re taking a walk,” he said.

I felt my heart start to flutter. I didn’t like Agent Grace’s partner, but he did seem like the “good cop.” He might be personally unpleasant, but he didn’t seem dangerous. I guess I didn’t trust Agent Grace very much. There weren’t many people around us. It was a residential neighborhood, working class, bordering Morningside Heights. Riverside Park is a narrow strip of land nestled between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. It rests atop a high divide and the highway runs alongside it, down a couple stories below. I could hear the traffic racing by, though a tree cover blocked my view of the road. A couple jogged by us as we walked the path into the park. Other than that, the park and the surrounding neighborhood seemed deserted.

“What are we doing here?” I asked him again, coming to a stop. I didn’t want to walk any farther with him until I understood what he wanted. He stopped, too, put his hands in his pockets, and looked at me. Then he strolled over toward one of the park benches that lined the path and took a seat. Somewhere a car alarm blared briefly, then went silent. I hesitated a second, thought about sitting, then decided to stand.

“Let’s cut the shit, shall we?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just you and me now, Ridley. No one can hear us. Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you and I have a common goal. We can help each other.”

I looked up at the trees above us, the blue sky with its high white cirrus clouds. I smelled exhaust and wet grass. I heard a radio playing a salsa tune somewhere.

“I can’t imagine what you think might be our ‘common goal.’”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“We’re both looking for your father.”

I knew he meant Max, and I hated him for saying it like that. Maybe because it was true. I was looking for my father, literally and figuratively. Maybe I always had been. A denial bloomed in my chest, then lodged in my throat.

“We’re all looking for him,” he went on. “I am, you are, your boyfriend, too.”

“Max is dead.”

“You know what? You might be right. But you still need to find him, don’t you? You still need to know who he was…or who he is.”

I looked anywhere but into his face.

“Do you even know why?” he asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. I sensed another of those one-sided conversations coming on. “Because until you know, really know, you think you can’t find out the answer to an even more important question. You can’t know who you are. Who is Ridley Jones?”

“I know who I am,” I said, raising my chin at him. But he’d opened a chasm of fear through my center, a fear that he might be right, that I wouldn’t know who I was until I truly knew Max. Since last year, the only thing I knew for sure about myself was that I wasn’t Ben and Grace’s daughter. That I wasn’t the good child of good people. I didn’t know whose daughter I was, not really. I had a better knowledge of my biology, but that was it.

You might be thinking that I am wrong. You might be thinking that if I was raised by Ben and Grace, taught and loved by them, then they are the people I come from—they are my true parents. And of course, in part that’s right. But we’re more than just our experiences, more than the lessons we have learned, aren’t we? Isn’t there some mystery to us? Any mother will tell you that her child was born with at least a part of his own unique personality, some likes and dislikes that had nothing to do with learning or experience. That was the piece of myself I was missing. I was missing my mystery, the part that existed before I was born, that lived in the strands of Max’s DNA. If I didn’t know him, how could I ever know myself? For some reason, I didn’t have the same burning questions about Teresa Stone, my biological mother. She seemed distant and almost like a myth I didn’t quite believe. Maybe those questions would come later. Max occupied this huge space in my life.

I’d been so hard on Jake for his obsession with Max. I guess I was really angry with myself for having one of my own.

“Do you?” Agent Grace asked. “Do you know who you are?”

“Yes,” I said, defensively.

“So why are you chasing him?” he asked.

I gave a little laugh. “I’m not chasing him. Why are you chasing him?”

“It’s my job.”

“No,” I said, sitting down beside him and looking at him hard. “It’s more than that.” Now it was his turn to look away. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized why I didn’t trust this man. He had an agenda, something that ran deeper than just a drive to do his job. He needed something from Max, too. I had sensed it in him, without being able to name what I was feeling.

“What is it, Dylan?” It was the first time I’d called him that. It felt right all of a sudden, made us equals. I’d noticed he’d started calling me Ridley a while back, though I’d denied him that privilege more than once. “What are you looking for?”

I expected him to snap at me or to tell me he didn’t have to answer any of my questions. But he released a long breath instead, let his shoulders relax with it a little. I saw something I hadn’t seen on his face before. It made him look older somehow, sharper and sadder around the eyes.

“Max Smiley—” he started, and then stopped, shut his mouth into a firm, tight line. The words seemed to stick in his throat. He looked at something off in the distance, something very far away. I didn’t push him, cast my eyes to the concrete so it didn’t seem as if I was staring at him. I shoved my hands in my pockets against the deepening cold.

After a while, maybe a minute, maybe five, he said, “Max Smiley killed my mother.”

I LET HIS words hang in the air, mingle with the sounds of traffic and distant salsa music. Somewhere I heard a basketball bouncing on concrete, slow and solitary. In the distance I caught sight of a painfully thin teenage boy alone on a court, shooting for the basket and missing.

I didn’t know what to ask him first. How? When? Why? The information spread through my body. I tingled with it; a headache started a dull roar behind my eyes.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Forget it,” he said. “It’s irrelevant.”

I put a hand on his arm but quickly withdrew it.

“Don’t do that,” I said. He still had his eyes on that faraway place. “Tell me what happened. If you didn’t want to, you wouldn’t have brought me here, you wouldn’t have said anything at all.”

I thought about Jake then, all the secrets in his past that I’d had to find out slowly, sifting through layers of lies and half-truths. The wondering of where he was and why he hadn’t called was like having a sprained ankle—I was walking around but was always mindful of the pain. Since we met, there’d been only one other time that he’d disappeared like this, and that had occurred amid desperate circumstances. I’d wondered more than once if maybe he had killed Esme, if he was on the run. But I couldn’t really see it. Or maybe I just didn’t want to acknowledge the possibility that Jake’s rage might have finally got the best of him.

“The details aren’t important,” he said.

“But you think he killed her.”

“I know he did.” He finally turned to look at me.

“How?” I asked him.

He remained stone-faced and silent.

“You can’t just throw out an inflammatory statement like that and then clam up. Who was she? How did she know Max? How did she die?” I asked. “Why do you think Max killed her?”

He released a long breath. “Her body was found in an alley behind a Paris hotel. She was beaten to death,” he said. The information chilled me. I thought about the things Nick Smiley had told me. But Dylan’s voice was flat, his face unreadable. He seemed to have checked out on an emotional level.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

No response. I didn’t understand this guy’s communication style. One minute you couldn’t shut him up, the next he was doing his best impression of a brick wall. I sighed, stood up, and walked a little back and forth to get my blood flowing through my freezing limbs. Something seemed off to me. I kept my eye on the time.

“Why do you think Max killed her?” I asked again. Without any details, the whole thing just seemed made up. It didn’t ring true.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then: “Let’s just say he had ample motive and opportunity.”

I shook my head. I didn’t want to disrespect him or his tragedy, but that wasn’t exactly proof positive.

“You’re going to have to do better than that,” I said. “Anyway, I don’t see what this has to do with me.

“I mean,” I went on when he didn’t answer, “if you’ve focused in on me because you think I know something about Max, you’re talking to the wrong person.”

“I don’t think I am,” he said. “I think you’re exactly the person I need to be talking to. I’ve told you before that I don’t think you’re telling me everything you know. I’m giving you the opportunity to do that now, just you and me. Right now you’re not a federal witness, I’m not an agent; we’re just two people who can help each other find what we need to survive. You need to find your father. I need to find the person who killed my mother. They’re the same person. We can help each other or we can hurt each other. It’s up to you.”

“I have a better idea. Why don’t we just leave each other alone? I watched someone die today. I want to go home and forget that any of this ever happened. How about you go back to work and I go back to my life and we forget we ever met? You can get some therapy. Maybe I will, too.”

At that, I started backing away from him.

Maybe we did have similar agendas: We both wanted Max Smiley to answer for things he might have done. But I didn’t believe for one minute that we were on the same side. For all I knew, this was just some ruse to gain my trust so that I’d ally myself with him, share what I know, possibly lead him to the arrest of his life—a real career-maker.

I felt confused and scared, angry, too. I felt battered by the events of the last few days and by this man who wanted me to think he was my friend and my ally. I did the only thing I thought I could do in that moment. I ran.