The day dragged after this. Neither Harry nor Mike responded to her texts or calls. Further digging revealed that Hopper’s wife had disappeared along with the son.
Later, she’d look at that day as the turning point. Before that day, she had been a hardworking detective with a good marriage and a lovely home. She had great rapport with her partners and loved her job.
On that day she found out her partner had executed a plan that made no sense to her, a low-level criminal was suddenly the ringleader, the drug lord was an upstanding citizen, and at home there was Theo and the three suitcases, and a silenced son.
After that, she didn’t have it in her to pursue Harry’s reasons for pinning the entire case on Owen Hopper. She wasn’t even sure if Harry had done the pinning or if someone else had. She couldn’t get a minute alone with any of her teammates.
Surely the raid was one big, huge cock-up. Harry would find the evidence to prove all those bags of coke and firearms were planted, most likely by Orlov himself, and refocus his investigation where it belonged. But the case wound its way through the justice system, with Harry testifying to everything he’d seen and found with a confident, steady voice and easy posture.
Surely Theo would call her on her birthday, or at least send a card. And when her birthday came and went without a word from Theo, she thought, okay, he needs space. Fine. Then Christmas neared, and still no call or package. Afraid to believe Theo would not send his only son a Christmas present, she’d bought a card, just in case, wrote as closely as she could in Theo’s graceful, angular script, added a gift certificate to GameStop, and mailed it from Manhattan. Alfie took it to his room silently, and she never knew if he’d guessed.
The holidays that year were the worst since her parents died. Thanksgiving at a diner with Alfie, Christmas at the mall. She hoped two hours at a Dave & Buster’s plus a movie plus pizza and ice cream would make up for their sheer solitude, but they didn’t. Midnight found her in Alfie’s room, holding him as he cried and heaved and finally ran to the bathroom and vomited pizza and ice cream into the toilet.
And through all this, she had to work. She had to drive to her precinct, sign into the system, run checks on suspects and crime scenes. She had asked for a transfer to a detective squad in Queens, a closer drive from Long Island, but transfers take time. Meanwhile she was back on buy-and-busts, ghosting. Everything that used to be so exciting, so meaningful (she was making the world safer!) no longer meant anything. Her team’s buy rates slipped lower and lower. She found she didn’t care.
At the precinct, Harry typed up his reports, went out on cases, avoided her, and all the while she watched him. And the more she watched, the less she cared about what she saw. Because if she allowed herself to care, then what would that say about the only job she’d ever wanted? About Harry, who had been her mentor, her best friend, her partner?
Two months after the raid, Alfie had his meltdown in the mud and Laney resigned.
Three months after that, she was driving a school bus in upstate New York, and her son would not leave her side when she was home.
So be it, she told herself. She’d changed her life. She’d moved on. She rarely discussed her old life, except sometimes with Holly, and only because Holly loved crime dramas. Her friend couldn’t believe Laney had lived the life she’d only seen on the TV screen.
It wasn’t until a year after the raid that the Internal Affairs Bureau contacted her and asked if she would meet them. The two IAB officers drove to Sylvan and sat in her living room, drank her coffee, and asked her about Harry and Mike and the Orlov case. They asked and asked, and the more they asked, the quieter she got. Their questions turned a spotlight onto her own actions, and now she was obliged to ask herself—did she really not know? Not see?
She answered the only way an ex-cop and a cop’s daughter could answer—with selective silence. Harry, she said, had been an exemplary detective. No, she never saw anything untoward. No, she never heard him say anything odd. Of course she never saw him take evidence from a scene. Definitely not plant any evidence either. Why had she quit so soon after the Hopper raid? That’s personal, but if you insist, divorce, a bad time. Yes, she’d call if she remembered anything. Yes, she’d keep their cards. No, she had nothing else to add.
CHAPTER
43
FOUR DAYS AFTER her son vanished, and one hour after she found out Orlov had known her identity all along, Laney decided to go visiting.
She changed her clothes—black, loose-fitting slacks, blue shirt buttoned to the throat, a thick, blocky sweater, also black. She combed her hair and parted it to the side. No makeup. No perfume. The mirror reflected a tired woman nearing middle age—colorless skin and lips, red-rimmed eyes.
Good. Not threatening. That’s what she needed to be where she headed next.
Her car was warming when Holly tramped along the snow toward her, leaving deep hollows, her tiny besweatered dog shivering in her arms.
“How’s it going?” Holly leaned into the driver-side window. She looked done in by the dreary February gloom, broken vessels under her eyes, a deep worry line between her brows, and her thin hand trembled under Buster’s belly.
“I need to go somewhere,” Laney said, then, “Hey, you all right? What’s up?”
But her friend shook her head and grinned briefly, becoming her usual cheerful self again. “Any news?”
“I’d tell you if there was.” Laney sighed. Rubbed her eyes. “Obviously.” She reached out and petted the little dog under its chin, and it squinted, straining toward her fingers. “How about you?” she asked, because clearly something was up. “How are the kids today?”
“Oh, you know, the usual. Basketball games, birthday parties. It never ends.” Holly shifted her eyes sideways in guilty discomfort, then looked back at Laney. “I’d rather go sleuthing with you any day.”
Laney snorted in spite of herself.
Holly stepped away, little Buster yelping as if she’d squeezed him too hard. She patted him and he licked her thumb. “Lasagna will be done in an hour. Want to come over?”
“Maybe later.” An evening in Holly’s warm, child-filled, husband-enhanced house sounded both horrifying and maddeningly appealing. “I’ll call you.”
She backed out, fishtailing slightly on the ice, and aimed for the road that would take her to Long Island.
The late Harry Burroughs had grown up in Rockville Centre, Long Island—summers at the beach, clubbing long before he reached legal age, construction jobs until he spent one winter too many out of work. Then community college and the police academy. He was Laney’s senior by eight years, though it didn’t show. He’d remained an exuberant, youthful man well into his thirties and only settled with a girlfriend after his thirty-eighth birthday.
The image of him spiking a vein at the age of forty-four, when he hadn’t even as much as smoked a joint his entire life—not even in the clubs, not even at the shore when he was fifteen and beautiful and could have had anything he wanted for free—that image was impossible. Did he die in his living room? In an alley? Was Owen Hopper the last person he saw? What thoughts did dying Harry think?
Under all this festered an ache Laney barely understood. It’s acceptable and rational to mourn one’s parents, a brother, a failed marriage, even the loss of a beloved career. But Harry was so many conflicting things, she didn’t know where he belonged. He’d taught, and helped, and made many a workday glitter with humor.
Yet he betrayed his oath. He betrayed her and put her in mortal danger. She’d loved him and trusted him, and now all she could see was the shit-stain he’d left over every interaction. Of all the things he did wrong, that was the one she had the hardest time accepting—that whenever he guided her, supported her, bought her a round, made her laugh, through all of it he’d been ready to sacrifice her life for a new car.
Laney rang the buzzer of Harry and Cynthia’s condo. The forty-mile drive had taken over two hours, the traffic constipated over the bridges and down t
he LIE.
The lights were on, and she could hear a television’s faint murmurs. Even if Cynthia had not been home, Laney would have waited. Through the night, if necessary.
Footsteps, then a swish at the peephole. She felt Cynthia standing at the other side of the door—a cessation of sound.
“Cynthia,” Laney said. “I need to talk to you.”
The door opened, but Cynthia didn’t move aside; stood with her arms crossed over her chest.
“What do you want, Elaine?”
Was this woman still jealous of her? Even now?
“Cynthia.” Laney tried to smile, realized it wasn’t working, cleared her throat. “Please? Can I come in?”
The woman breathed out sharply and moved aside, gesturing for her to enter. Laney removed her boots in the hallway, taking her time, cataloging everything she saw. Generic photographs of beaches and sunsets on the sage-green walls. Thick, Persian rugs on polished hardwood floors. A kooky juxtaposition of bland Ikea TV stand and what looked like antique bookcases, ornately carved mirrors, a mahogany dining room table, midcentury, well kept.
Other than the TV stand and those dumb photographs, there was nothing of the Harry she’d known in this expensively furnished apartment. But, as she’d been finding out lately, she didn’t really know anybody in her life. Was she going to visit Holly’s house one day to discover a basement BDSM sex chamber?
She tried that smile again, her face nearly breaking in the process. “Cynthia,” she said. “Did they take Harry’s laptop?”
Cynthia narrowed her eyes. “Why?”
This was thorny. She’d debated approaches to this conversation during her entire tortured drive. Cynthia loved Harry. Had truly, madly, obsessively loved him. Laney knew all about that kind of love. But how much had Cynthia known about Harry and his secrets? How did she feel about them now that it was too late for excuses and explanations?
“I think I know who … did it to him,” Laney said. She couldn’t say killed. The word stuck and wouldn’t come.
The other woman pursed her lips, said nothing.
“Do you think you know, too?” Laney asked, her voice softening.
Cynthia turned away abruptly and walked toward the window. It was dark now, the streetlights refracting through the cream curtains. “He lied to me,” she said after a while, then nodded, as if giving herself permission to go on. “He said he was at work.” Her voice wavered and she tilted her head up, took a deep breath. “So many nights. So many nights he said he was at work. But he wasn’t. I checked. I don’t know why I didn’t confront him. I figured he still came home to me. He told me he loved me. He was generous. He took me to Italy. He bought me flowers every other day, like clockwork.” She shrugged. “Yes, they took the laptop, but Harry deleted everything before he gave it up. Not that it helped him.”
“Where did he store the stuff he deleted?”
Cynthia shook her head. “It’s gone, Elaine. He erased it.”
Laney didn’t want to push this woman (too much), but she was tired and desperately worried. “We both know he’d never completely erase anything he might need later,” she said. “Please. I need to know what he was doing.” And with whom, and what he told them, and what they knew, and the degree to which they held Laney responsible.
“It’s all in the news,” Cynthia said. “Everything you need to know.”
Impatience twitching within her, Laney said, “No, nowhere near. I need serious details, Cynthia. Please. Is there another laptop he might have used? A thumb drive?”
Silently, without looking at her, Cynthia disappeared into a bedroom and came out a minute later holding a phone.
“He asked me to hold on to this. I don’t know how he found out when they were going to get the warrant, but he knew,” she said. “He told me to stay with my parents for a few weeks, and that’s when they searched the apartment.”
“The detectives didn’t ask for it?”
Cynthia rolled her eyes. “He had more than one phone, Elaine. He gave them his regular one.”
She placed it on the dining room table and sat down, turned away from Laney, withdrew her own phone, started tapping and swiping.
Laney powered it up and stared at the lock screen.
“Would you be able to guess at Harry’s password? Or do you know it?”
Without looking up, Cynthia said, “He wasn’t very creative with passwords.”
Laney waited. Then, “His birthday? Your birthday?”
“Reverse shield number plus initials.”
“Have you looked though it already?”
Cynthia said nothing, but her shoulders tensed and her tapping grew more aggressive.
For some reason the obviousness of the password demoralized Laney even more. The man who helped wreck her career and put her in harm’s way time and again hadn’t even bothered with a strong password.
Well.
He had two email accounts, one immediately accessible from the home screen, the second one hidden in settings.
The first account opened right away, and now she knew that Harry liked Japanese porn, MMA, and Alex Jones.
But when she switched to the second account, a password screen popped up, and the shield number didn’t work this time. She turned to Cynthia again.
The other woman raised her head, her brow wrinkling. “What? Did you find something?”
“Do you know the password to his other mail account?”
Cynthia’s eyes were dark and tired and resentful and mean. “What other mail account?”
Laney tapped her fingers. “He had a second account.”
“I didn’t find it when I looked.” Dry, cool tone.
Time for honesty. “Cynthia, please tell me everything. What do you know that didn’t come up in the trial? You must know something. You were the closest person to him.”
The ensuing silence was charged, Cynthia’s body so tightly coiled that Laney was afraid to touch her lest she lash out.
“You need to leave now,” Cynthia said, without looking at her.
“What do you know, Cynthia?”
“You must go.”
“Are you in danger? Cynthia? Look at me! Tell me, are you in danger?”
The woman darted a pained glance at her. “No more than you.”
“My son is gone,” Laney said, not as a trump card but because that’s why she was there, because that’s why she did anything now. “He got my son.” She reached and placed her hand on the other woman’s shoulder. “You know who I mean, right? You know who has him? Owen Hopper.” Not a question. A confirmation.
“What? Alfie? Why would anybody take Alfie?”
Laney waited, her throat working and her face prickling under Cynthia’s worried stare.
And then Cynthia’s face banged shut, grew paler. “I can’t help you,” she said.
Laney released the breath she’d been holding. The words, when they came, were barely audible. “It’s my son, though. My son. You really won’t help?”
Cynthia got to her feet, her body in that fighting stance again.
It seemed to take Laney an hour to walk the twenty feet to the front door, and just before leaving, she said, “You have my number. In case you change your mind.” And then, with the door already open and her foot over the threshold, “If you still hate me, I get it. I do. And if you’re scared for yourself, I understand. But it’s my boy. My baby. It’s my baby. If there’s anything at all in those emails that can help me find him, I need to know. Don’t you see? I know Harry was working with Orlov, but maybe there’s something else there. Maybe there’s a place they all went to or, I don’t know, where they took hostages. I don’t know where he took my son, Cynthia! I need to know!”
Cynthia paled, then shook her head. “I don’t have the password,” she said.
Laney drove home through traffic, construction squeezing the highway down to one lane, through the accidents, her eyes dry, burning. Halfway there, on the Palisades, she nodded off, then snapped awake
when her right wheels hit the gravel on the shoulder, and she drove the rest of the way with the windows wide open and the radio set to the hard-rock station at top volume.
Even so, as soon as she coasted into her driveway and turned off the ignition, she placed her arms over the steering wheel, dropped her head onto her arms, and closed her eyes. The sleep overtaking her was dark and absolute, a passing out in its purest form—she’d crossed from consciousness to oblivion, no thoughts, no dreams, no feelings.
’Round eleven, Holly, out yet again with her dog (always an excellent excuse to see who on the street was awake and who wanted a chat), rapped on her window, startling her into a blurred alertness. She stumbled out of her car, stiff and freezing, thirsty, her mouth dry, her stomach hurting.
Wordlessly her friend walked her into her house, guided her to her bedroom—barely used since Alfie disappeared—removed her boots and her jacket and her belt, slid her under the heavy covers, disappeared, then came back with a glass of water. Laney wondered if the power had been restored yet, was about to ask Holly, then immediately forgot, her mind circling back to Cynthia instead.
“Alfie’s going to die,” Laney croaked. “Nobody will help. Nobody.” The words felt like a fire in her throat, enflaming her face, whooshing down into her chest and bowels.
“Shhh.” Holly held the tumbler to her lips, and she took a few sips of cold water. Her friend sat on the edge of the bed. “Your son is smarter than you think.” She leaned down and kissed Laney on the forehead. “He takes after his mother.”
PART THREE
CHAPTER
44
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