The 6:20 Man

Chapter 26

6:20.

The train slid free from the station and Devine dutifully looked out the window. Sunday had hardly been a day of rest. He felt like he’d already worked a full week at Cowl, not simply starting another one.

The nosy journalist, Rachel Potter, Waiting for Godot, the meeting with Emerson Campbell, Ewes’s parents, particularly the suspicious mother, whatever the police had found there, the missing diary that might have him in it, and, finally, Valentine and the apparently earth-shattering invisible email revelation. It exhausted him just thinking about all of it.

The train stopped and picked up passengers, then chugged up to the knoll and stopped. It was so regular it was almost funny. Almost.

And there she was through the gap between the bottoms of the tree canopies and the top of the wall. She was already sitting by the pool. Her terry cloth robe was off, and her string bikini was once again shiny emerald. The color looked good on her.

“She’s an exhibitionist, you know. Least that’s what I figure. Why else would she be out here this early in pretty much her birthday suit for all of us to see? She can’t miss spotting a stopped train, can she?”

Devine turned to the man sitting next to him. He was around fifty and dressed in a stylishly cut dark blue suit, slim tie, and white shirt with matching pocket square. His hair was a wavy brown heavily laced with gray, his brow was lined, and saggy pouches undergirded his eyes. Devine thought he might be staring into a futuristic mirror and seeing himself in less than two decades. The man looked woeful and lustful in a hollowed-out, pathetic way, Devine thought. He eyed the man’s wedding band.

“What do you know about her?” asked Devine.

“Nothing other than she’s got one of the hottest bodies I’ve ever seen. And she’s probably a nymphomaniac. Women who are exhibitionists are usually nymphos, too.”

“Is that so?” asked Devine.

The man sniffed, eyed the woman, and in a wishful tone said, “Well, on the streaming shows they almost always are. And the woman before her was just as hot.”

Devine started. “The woman before her?”

“Yeah. I’ve been riding this train for a long time. I remember them building that house. That’s Brad Cowl’s place, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, that chick would come out in a bikini, too, from time to time. She was a stunner, just like that one. Cowl obviously likes them young, beautiful, and nearly naked.”

“What happened to the other woman?”

“I don’t know. One day she was just gone.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, a little over a year ago, I think. It was during the summer.”

“What did she look like?”

“Pretty much the same as this one, only brunette.”

Devine turned to look back at the woman. She just sat there, her legs crossed one over the other. She didn’t appear to even realize a body of water was there. She lifted her gaze and it appeared for an unsettling moment that she was staring right at him. But that wasn’t possible. Not with the distance and the angle and the glass in between.

Right?

She rose, picked up her robe, and walked into the house. He and every guy on the starboard side, and probably a bunch on the port side, watched her every step of the way, their focus so intense it was like the last minute of their lives.

Maybe she does get off on that stuff, thought Devine. She knew the train was there, with people on it, watching her. He wondered how Brad Cowl felt about it. But then again, he was having sex with his employees on desktops.

The train picked up speed and headed on.

Later, he walked out of the subway station in the Financial District and into the heat of the morning. It was early enough for the city to still be waking up. Delivery trucks were parked illegally, and cabs, cars, and Ubers were hammering their horns, besmirching the only quiet time of the day the city had. Birds pecked at pavement trash, street sweepers were sweeping, yawning suits and nonsuits were shuffling to their jobs looking like they were heading to their graves.

Food carts serving breakfast items were opening for business. Later, for lunch, there would be offerings of grilled halal, cheong fun, rice noodles, and Indian king biryani, and traditional fare like pretzels, hot dogs, falafel, Tex-Mex, steak, BBQ, and sushi. If you couldn’t find a food here it was because it didn’t exist.

Construction crews were muscling pipe and wheelbarrows and gripping shovels and lunch pails and smoking their Camels and drinking their non-Starbucks morning eye-openers.

The sky was clear, the heat already percolating over the fingertips of the skyscrapers. At lunchtime the funneled warmth between buildings, coupled with billions of tons and thousands of acres of reflective concrete and glass, respectively, would spike the temperature on the ground to near volcanic proportions, or so it would seem to the clothed inhabitants just trying to earn a buck or enjoy their holiday.

And while he thought about all of this, Devine also mulled over his very serious problems: He had paid a visit to, and raised the suspicions of, a grieving mother. He, and apparently only he, had received an untraceable email about a murder.

And the email had not stated that Sara had died by suicide. Devine realized he had just assumed that was what the email had implied. Yet it had only said that she was dead. And then it had gone on to describe the hanging body. It was Wanda Simms who had mentioned suicide. She said she’d overheard the police. And Detective Hancock had confirmed that initial opinion during their first meeting.

He had to talk to people to find the sender of the weird-ass email, because it apparently could not be done with computer keys and a server. For Devine, it was actually refreshing to see that not every single problem today was solvable by technology alone. Sometimes a little shoe leather and the semblance of a personality and a few well-formed questions might just do what artificially intelligent thinking and petabytes of data hovering in fake clouds couldn’t. But the email was tied to Ewes’s murder, which had to be tied to whatever nefarious things were going on at Cowl. And this was exactly what Emerson Campbell had told him to work on in order to stay out of a military prison. His marching orders couldn’t be clearer.

He knew the guard currently on duty at Cowl. His name was Sam. He was around sixty, grizzled hair, pale skin, sloped shoulders, big gut that stretched his shirt’s fabric to near its breaking point, and a pleasing smile to top it all. He seemed like a favorite uncle or grandfather who would get down on the floor and play with the little ones, a beer in hand.

Devine walked up to the granite-topped reception console and placed his leather briefcase on it, rubbing a few sweat bubbles off his forehead.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Hey right back, Devine.”

“Pretty crazy shit happening around here.”

“Got that right. Police have been in and out. New developments.”

“Right, I heard. Murder instead of suicide. Pretty damn big difference.”

“Hell yes it is. You knew the woman?” asked Sam.

“A little. You ever see her?”

“Oh yeah. Always a smile and a wave. Nice young lady, damn shame.”

“Understand one of the custodial staff found her.”

Sam shook his head and grimaced, as though something foul had entered his mouth. “Jerry Myers. Thought the poor guy was going to stroke out. He come running in here screaming about this gal hanging in the storage closet. I thought he’d lost his marbles. I mean, in this building, what the hell, right?”

Devine stiffened. “Wait, he came all the way down here to tell you? He didn’t call you or the cops from up there?”

“No, he didn’t, the knucklehead, but he was upset. Poor guy had never seen anything like that. He went into the storage room to get something and bam, there she is. Would’ve shocked anybody. So I cut him some slack on not phoning from up there. I called the cops and then me and Jerry both went up there. I was really hoping the guy was drunk or having hallucinations or something. But nope, there she was. Poor lady. I used to be with the Newark Police Department, but I have to tell you, I felt my breakfast coming back up on me, too.”

“I bet. By that time of the morning there must have been a full house up on the fifty-second.”

“That’s why I hustled up there as soon as I made the 911 call, and had another guy cover the front, to let the cops up when they arrived. I mean, it was a potential crime scene and there are protocols and all. See, at that point I didn’t know how she died, nobody did. But you got to preserve the evidence.”

“Lucky you got up there so fast before anyone knew what had happened.”

Sam eyed him closely. “Well, fact is, I can’t vouch for that.”

“What?”

“Jerry left the door partially open. Least that’s how we found it.”

“Did he say that’s how he left it?” asked Devine.

“Hell, he was so shaken up he could barely remember his own name. The cops got there about five minutes later. I didn’t want that responsibility any longer than I had to.”

“And what’d you do after that?” asked Devine.

“Hung around up there in case they needed anything.”

“Talk to anybody?”

“Just Jerry and one of the cops.”

“None of the office staff or people like me?”

“By the time the staff started trickling in, the cops wouldn’t let them get off the elevator. I didn’t see anybody else.”

“Never mind the admin folks, there must have been the crew like me up there by then. It was going on nine.”

“What can I tell you. I didn’t see any.”

What the hell. He thought about Wanda Simms up there getting people out of their offices. That did not mesh with what he had just been told.

“So I guess Jerry probably quit after finding the body? Or took some time off at least?”

Sam waved this off and sipped on coffee in a mug emblazoned with the New York Giants football logo. “Nah. He’s a single guy with no kids whose job pays real good with benefits and all. You can’t just throw that away. He’s here now, in fact. Up on the thirty-fourth changing light bulbs. Least that’s what he told me a few minutes ago.”

“Okay. Hey, hang in there.”

Sam smiled. “I got it easy, Devine. You’re the one busting your hump. And for what, I ask you? All you need is some food, a roof over your head, a few brewskies a day, baseball in the summer and football in the fall, a missus to watch over you, and you can be a happy man.”

Thinking that Sam was more right about that than wrong, Devine got on the elevator and headed to the thirty-fourth floor.