And she notices, right there, near the foot of the bed, a purse. Most likely where she will find the cell phone. Nicole reaches into her pocket and quietly draws out the white plastic bag. Waves it lightly to open it up.
In a second, she leaps onto the bed, uses it as a springboard to get to the far side. By the time her prey realizes she’s not alone, it’s too late. Nicole has the bag over her head.
She lets out a muffled scream, but then, just as Nicole knew she would, she’s clawing at the bag, trying to rip it from her face. But Nicole has twirled her wrist around several times, drawing the bag so tight it is a second skin.
The woman, in her final gasping seconds, collapses onto the air conditioner as the car with the unusual contraption on its roof drives past. She rests there for a second, then drops to the floor.
Nicole, kneeling, keeps the bag tight around the woman’s head for a good minute, just to be sure. Then, once she is certain the woman is dead, she removes the bag, wads it into a tight ball, and returns it to her jacket pocket.
Next, the phone.
She grabs the purse that’s resting on the bed, unzips it, and finds the phone almost immediately, tucked into a pouch in the side. She slips it in her pocket with the bag.
Then she gets out her own phone, unlocks it, presses twice.
“Done. Cleanup set to go?” This is a job where the client doesn’t want a body left behind. Nicole is good at what she does, but removals are not her area of expertise.
“Yes.” Lewis.
She ends the call without another word, puts her own phone away. A golden performance. No falls. No marks lost for poor form or empty swings. No fumbling on the dismount. No cause for deductions whatsoever, in her own humble opinion.
No roaring crowd, either, but you can’t have everything.
She stands, takes one last look at the dead woman, and is getting ready to leave when she hears the apartment door opening.
It’s too soon for the cleanup crew to be here.
TWENTY-FIVE
I rapped on Thomas’s door to tell him that dinner was nearly ready.
“What are we having?” he asked.
“Burgers on the barbecue,” I told him.
When dinner was over, and the dishes put in the sink, I put my hand on his arm so he wouldn’t jump up from the table and head back upstairs.
“I really have to go,” he said.
“I need to talk to you about something.” I took my hand off him but felt I might have to grab him again to keep him here.
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You brought Dad’s laptop in off the porch.”
He nodded. “Someone might have taken it.”
“What did you do with it?”
“I put it in the kitchen.”
“I mean, did you do anything on the laptop?”
He nodded. “I turned it off. The battery might have been dead by the time you got home if you’d left it on.”
“Did you do anything else with it?”
“Like what?”
“Did you do anything with the history?”
“I erased it,” Thomas said.
“You did.”
He nodded.
“Why did you do that?”
“I always do that,” he said. “Before I turn off a computer I always erase the history. Every night when I go to bed I erase the history on my computer. It’s like, I don’t know, brushing my teeth or something. It’s like the computer is all clean for the next morning.”
I felt very tired.
“Okay, so that’s what you do with your computer. Why did you do it with Dad’s?”
“Because you left me to deal with it.”
“Did you always erase the history on Dad’s laptop?”
“No. Because Dad would shut it down himself. Can I go now? There’s something really important on my screen.”
“It can wait. When you erased the history, did you look at it first?”
Thomas shook his head. “Why would I do that?”
“Thomas,” I said very firmly, “I want you to answer me honestly here. This is very important.”
“Okay.”
“Do you ever use Dad’s laptop?”
He shook his head emphatically. “No, never. I have my own computer.”
“Did Dad ever lend his computer to anyone? Or did anyone ever come here and use it?”
“I don’t think so. Can I go now?”
“Just a second.”
“I already lost time this morning vacuuming.”
“Thomas, please. If no one has used that computer since Dad died, why was there still some history on it when I used it this morning? Why hadn’t you erased it?”
“Because when Dad used it, he turned it off himself. I’d tell him to erase the history, but he didn’t worry about it like I do.”
I rested my back against my chair. “Okay. Thanks.”
“So I can go?”
“Yeah, you can go.”
But instead of getting up and going back to his room, he stayed in his chair, like now he had something to ask me.
“What is it?” I asked him.
“I know you’re still mad about when the FBI people came to the door. And I haven’t sent any e-mails to the CIA or to President Clinton since then.”
“Good to know.”
“But what if I saw something I really needed to tell them about?”
“Like what?”
“If I saw something I thought the CIA really should know about, like a crime, would it be okay if I sent them just one little e-mail?”
“Thomas, I don’t care if you saw someone putting a nuclear bomb on a school bus. You are not calling the CIA.”
I could see the frustration on his face. “Thomas, what is it? Another fender bender or something?”
“No, something bigger.”
“Because when you got all worked up about that before, that just wasn’t important.”
“It’s not like that.”
“So what is it?”
“It’s about a window.”
“A window.”
“That’s right.”
“Someone broke a window and you want to report it to the CIA?”
He shook his head. “It’s about something that’s happening in a window. Sometimes things happen in windows.”
“Thomas, look, whatever it is, just don’t worry about it.”
Abruptly, he pushed back his chair and stood. “Fine.” He marched toward the stairs.
“Thomas, do not send a message to the CIA. I swear to God.”
He kept moving. When he was at the bottom of the stairs I shouted, “Thomas! Jesus, are you listening?”
He stopped, his hand on the railing. “You’re the one who isn’t listening, Ray. I’m trying to talk to you. I’m trying to do what you asked. You don’t want me to call the CIA so I ask you what I should do about what’s happening in the window and you don’t listen.”
“Okay, okay. You want me to have a look?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Fine. I’ll have a look.”
I followed him up the stairs and was going to enter his room when he suggested I get an extra chair so I didn’t have to lean over his shoulder the whole time. Which meant this was going to take a while.
There was a plastic folding chair tucked into a closet in Dad’s bedroom. I grabbed it, returned to Thomas’s room, and opened it up next to him in his computer chair. Thomas had waved his mouse to bring the monitors back to life.
“So where the hell are we tonight?” I asked.
“This is Orchard Street.”
“And Orchard Street is where?”
“In New York. In Lower Manhattan.”
“Okeydoke,” I said. “Show me what you’ve got.”
Thomas pointed, his finger half an inch from the screen. He was pointing to a window, one of several perfectly arranged windows on the side of what appeared to be a five-story structure. An old tenement build
ing, probably dating from the late 1800s, although early New York architecture was not something I knew a lot about.
“You see that window?” he said. “On the third floor?”
I looked. There was a white blob in the window’s lower half. “Yeah, I see it.”
“What do you think that is?”
“Beats me.”
“I’m going to zoom in on it,” Thomas said. He clicked twice on the image. That had the effect of making it larger, but slightly less distinct. But it was starting to look like something.
“Now what do you think it is?” my brother asked me.
“It kind of looks like…it looks like a head,” I answered. “But with something wrapped around it.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “You look here and you can see the shape of the nose and the mouth, and there’s the chin, and up here’s the forehead. It’s a face.”
“I think you’re right, Thomas. It’s a face.”
“What do you make of it?”
“I don’t really know what to make of it. It looks like someone with a bag over their face.”
Thomas nodded. “Yes. But because you can see all the person’s features so well, the bag has to be on really tight.”
“I guess,” I said. “Maybe it’s a mask or something.”
“But there are no holes for the eyes, or the mouth, or the nose. If that’s a mask, how is the person supposed to breathe?”
“Can you zoom in on it any more? Can you get closer?”
“I could make it bigger, but it starts to get blurry. This is as good a picture as I can get out of it.”
I stared at the image, not sure what to make of it. “I don’t know, Thomas. It is what it is. Someone goofing around with a bag on his head. People do dumb shit. Maybe someone knew the Whirl360 car was coming and thought they’d do something silly for the camera when it went by.”
“On the third floor? If you wanted to do something silly, wouldn’t you stand on the sidewalk?”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“I don’t think this person is goofing around,” he said.
“Okay, so you tell me what you believe is happening here.”
“I think this person is being killed,” Thomas said. “This is a murder.”
“Sure it is. Come on, Thomas.”
“This person is being smothered.”
I turned from looking at the screen to stare at my brother. “That’s what you think.”
“Yes.”
“And just what the hell do you want me to do?” I asked.
“I want you to check it out,” Thomas said.
“Check it out,” I repeated.
“Yup. I want you to go there.”
“You want me to go to New York and check out this window,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“Well then, I guess I’ll have to make some calls,” Thomas said, “and I’m sorry, but I’m going to have no choice but to e-mail the CIA and ask them to look into it.”
“Thomas, listen very carefully to me. First of all, you are not making any calls to the CIA or Homeland Security or the Promise Falls Fire Department, for that matter. And as far as my going into the city to look at this stupid window, that’s not happening.”
I went downstairs.
A few minutes later, as I was making myself comfortable on the couch, wondering what there might be to watch on Dad’s big flat screen, Thomas came down the stairs.
He said nothing to me, didn’t even look in my direction. He went to the closet by the front door, opened it, and grabbed a jacket. He slipped his arms into it and was zipping it up when I asked, “Where you off to?”
“New York,” he said.
“Really.”
“Yes.”
“Where in New York?”
“I’m going to look at that window.”
“How you getting there?”
“I’m going to walk.” He paused. “I know the way.”
“That’s going to take a while,” I said.
“It’s 192.3 miles,” he said. “If I walk twenty miles a day, I’ll be there in—”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said.
TWENTY-SIX
IF the traffic’s not bad, you can drive from Promise Falls to New York in about three and a half hours. But that’s a big if certainly where the latter part of the drive is concerned. You can be clipping along just great, the Manhattan skyline looking close enough that you could stick your hand out the window and touch it. Then some idiot in a delivery van cuts off a cabbie, sets off a chain reaction crash, and you’re bumper to bumper for two hours.
So I opted for the train. The plan was to catch it early in the morning, do what I’d promised to do, and catch one home the same day, so I wouldn’t be leaving Thomas alone overnight. Maybe, another time, I would have trusted him to be on his own from one day to the next, but ever since the FBI incident, I didn’t like to let him out of my sight for any longer than I had to.
He’d promised he wouldn’t do anything that would upset me while I was gone, so long as I kept my part of the bargain.
If Thomas wanted to think I was making this trip into New York just for him, he was welcome to. But the moment he started pushing for me to go into the city, I thought of the woman Jeremy wanted me to meet. This was something I really needed to deal with. It meant future money for me, and from the sound of it, quite a bit. As soon as I left Thomas’s room I called Jeremy and asked whether he could set something up for the following day, and he said he’d get back to me. An hour later he reported that while Kathleen Ford already had a luncheon engagement, she could meet us for a drink afterward at the Tribeca Grand Hotel.
I said I’d be there.
Jeremy said we should grab lunch beforehand, and we arranged to meet at the Waverly Restaurant, on Sixth Avenue between Waverly Place and Eighth Street, which would be handy enough to get to the hotel, and to run my little errand for Thomas.
When I told Thomas where I was having lunch, he closed his eyes and said, “At Avenue of the Americas, or Sixth Avenue, as I believe it is more commonly called, and Waverly Place. There’s a neon sign hanging over the door, ‘Waverly’ in green letters and ‘Restaurant’ in red, right across the avenue from a Duane Reade drugstore, and to the south, across Waverly Place, there’s a store that sells vitamins. The ‘t’ in ‘Restaurant,’ the first one, isn’t lighting up when you look at the sign if you’re coming down Waverly from the west.”
I was up before the sun, drove into Albany, caught the train at Rensselaer, and managed to get some more sleep during the two-and-a-half-hour trip. While I was awake, looking out the window at the scenery flying by, I had time to think about whether agreeing to go by the Orchard Street address, where Thomas had seen the smothered head in the window, was a stupid thing to do—whether it would just encourage him.
But if it kept Thomas from sending another message to a federal agency and attracting any more unwanted attention, it was a smart thing to do. Short of straitjacketing him, there really wasn’t any way to keep Thomas from getting in touch with the outside world. I wasn’t about to unplug his computer again, and even if I’d been willing to deal with the fallout from doing so, Thomas could always pick up the phone and just call someone. He could write a goddamn letter and put it in the mail. And while Thomas chose to stay in the house, I didn’t want him to feel as though he was some kind of prisoner whose access to others was strictly controlled.
The problem with giving in to Thomas on this particular occasion was, what if he saw something else, in another window, in another city, tomorrow, and that city just happened to be Istanbul? Would he expect me to check that out, too?
I figured I’d deal with Thomas on a case-by-case basis. If he did come across something else on one of his virtual travels that he wanted me to investigate, I’d be able to point out that the last time I’d indulged him it had cost me an entire day, not to mention a train ticket. Whether that would persuade my brother to let something go was anyone?
??s guess.
I’d been able to dissuade him from doing anything rash when he’d gotten himself in a lather about that possible minor traffic mishap in Boston. So it was possible to discourage him from pursuing frivolous matters. But there was something about this covered face in the window that had gotten to him.
“People don’t look up enough,” he said to me.
Once on the train, I was grateful for the time to myself, to think. My thoughts kept returning to my father. Perhaps I was making too much of those two words he’d entered into the search field.
He saw something on child prostitution on the news.
He was appalled.
He decided to learn more.
End of story.
I chided myself for allowing my mind to go places it should never have gone.
I’d left home with a printout of the scene in the window, and took it out of my pocket as the train ran down alongside the Hudson. I had to admit, there was something intriguing about the image. I wasn’t inclined to buy Thomas’s theory that the passing Whirl360 camera car, while on its mission to video all the streets in Manhattan, had caught an actual murder in progress. That was pretty far-fetched. But the longer I looked at the image, I had to concede Thomas’s interpretation was not entirely off the wall. It did kind of look like a person being suffocated, as though someone had come up behind and slipped a bag over his or her head and drawn it tight.
But I also knew it could be any number of other things. For example, it looked like one of those white Styrofoam heads that are used to display wigs. Maybe one was sitting on top of that A/C unit. Or someone, at the moment the image was snapped, passed by the window with one.
It was a very grainy image.
Before embarking on this mission, I suggested to Thomas we do some online research. Thomas was very good at what he did on the computer, but when it came to searching the Net for specific information, I was better. So I got Dad’s history-cleared laptop and entered into the search field “Orchard Street New York” and then, before hitting the button to start the search, added the word “murder.”