Kathleen considered what she could do. She’d wanted to call Sharon back immediately after their call disconnected last night. But she’d worried that, if Sharon was in trouble, the call would reveal her position or, if she was being held captive, that she had a phone hidden away. After waiting a few minutes, Kathleen had texted instead, reasoning that Sharon might not have sound notifications for texts and that if she was able to make a phone call, she’d be able to read a text. But Sharon never responded.
After waking up and seeing no message from Sharon this morning, Kathleen had called, hoping her friend would answer, maybe just waking up after a hangover, even though Sharon had never been a big drinker. She would tell Kathleen it had all been a mix-up. But Kathleen’s call had gone straight to voice mail. She’d left a message but hadn’t heard back.
Kathleen perused the contacts in her phone and began making calls. She dialed several of her and Sharon’s mutual friends from the old days. No one had heard from her. It appeared she didn’t run in the same circles as before. No one thought it strange that they hadn’t heard from Sharon.
Kathleen hadn’t called the police last night, but should she call them now? She didn’t fool herself about how useless that would be. A call girl picked up in a car and not showing up at a friend’s house was not exactly a case that would interest the police, especially not on the day after a terrorist attack. The cops weren’t much interested in the safety of sex workers even on slow crime days. That was probably why Sharon had called Kathleen in the first place. It had once been Kathleen’s job to protect her girls, and old habits like that died hard. Many of Kathleen’s former employees still came to her for help from time to time, although nowadays the women usually just needed advice or a small loan.
Kathleen had no desire to step back into those old shoes. She’d gotten used to her quiet, normal life, and she liked it that way. But she couldn’t do nothing. Dreading the sleezy advertisements that would bombard her computer as a result, a small price for helping her friend, she began Googling strip clubs.
CHAPTER
8
THE PRESS OFFICE was still buzzing with energy when Emily arrived. She got on a Zoom call with FDNY executive staff, then rolled her chair over to sit next to Thea, the new intern. Thea had cream-colored skin and a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, as if she’d made the trip to New York City from Kansas on a spinning bed. But she was apparently from Iowa. Martha had sat her at the empty desk of the staffer who’d left to work on the mayor’s presidential campaign.
Emily explained to Thea how to assemble digital press clippings to email to City Hall staff, agency leadership, and agency press officers each day. Even the day after a terror attack, the City continued to have its usual problems, and staff needed to know about all of it.
Emily looked over the young woman’s work, and her eye caught on a story about attempts to clean up a spot known for prostitution in the Bronx. She’d received a call about it from the reporter last week. The article was one in a series about sex work, this one focusing on the drama middle-class people witnessed when living in a gentrifying neighborhood once famous for street prostitution. There were stories of residents hearing couples having sex in their backyards. A man said he’d once heard a woman shouting for help, but when the police finally arrived, they’d been unable to find anyone in trouble. The article said prostitutes sometimes shouted for help to attract embarrassing attention if a dishonest john refused to pay. Even the cheapest guy didn’t want to be caught on a viral video fighting about his bill with a pissed-off streetwalker. But sometimes the violence was real.
The article included a quote from Emily about Mayor Sullivan’s interest in providing more funding for programs for sex workers facing violence. The disdain for sex workers was so strong that they were often isolated, disconnected from family and friends, and had nowhere to turn for help. Emily was pleased with the quote, which illustrated how proactive the mayor was being. She knew Martha would like it.
Emily had become the go-to person on stories about addiction and the opioid crisis, especially when they intersected with policing issues. Her own mother had been a heroin addict. Sex work went hand in hand with addiction, although Emily’s mother had gotten clean at seventeen years old, before she’d had to do anything like that. Still, Emily was interested in the issue of the vulnerability of female addicts, how high the murder rate was for them, especially those who sold their bodies for drugs. Most of those murders went unsolved.
“The clips are good to go,” she said to the intern. “After you send them out, I have a project for you. I’d like to come up to speed on the issue of violence against sex workers, prostitution diversion programs, and the like. I’m thinking this reporter may have more questions soon. You can help by looking for news stories and research on violence against prostitutes and legislative responses.”
* * *
In the COW, several people were already at the conference table waiting for the morning muster meeting. Mayor Sullivan was running late.
“After the Beacon explosion, reporters are asking whether Jackson Mattingly might have planted other bombs with timers around New York,” Martha was saying to the others. “The dominant theory on social media is that Mattingly was an ‘incel,’ involuntary celibate. They’re angry young white men motivated by a hatred of women for not dating them. Incels fall into a rat hole of negative thinking, egged on by anonymous jerks on the internet. If he’d been a white supremacist, he would have attacked mosques, synagogues, or shopping areas where mostly people of color would be found.”
Chief Reilly was seated across from Emily at the table. “Mattingly was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, but we don’t think he was a boogaloo boi. He wasn’t involved with them on the internet, from what we can tell.”
Deputy Mayor Garcia, a tiny Ecuadorian American man, walked in. “Good morning, everyone.”
He sat beside Emily and opened his laptop. When he logged in, she could see that the last thing he’d watched was video of the explosion at the Mattingly house.
Roger, sitting across from the mayor’s customary chair, was looking down at his phone.
“So, it looks like Mattingly had no connection to New York City,” said Marlo, the mayor’s chief of staff, a thirtysomething Latinx of fluid gender. Marlo draped an arm over an empty chair. They wore a pencil skirt, silk blouse, and spike-heeled size twelves but had a large Adam’s apple and a trimmed beard.
“Thank god,” Garcia said. “I was waiting for the media to blame every teacher he ever had. The only thing worse than being his parent is being his teacher or principal. Even I want to know why they didn’t notice he was crazy.” He turned to Emily. “Am I a bad person to be happy that this problem landed in the lap of the Beacon school district?”
Garcia oversaw the City’s Department of Education. Emily snickered and replied, “Yes, you are a horrible person.”
“The Beacon news media can’t possibly be as cruel and unusual as New York,” Marlo said. “Any New York Post reporter would, without a doubt, throw educators under the bus for a chance to be an expert panelist on Fox.”
“When do you expect the mayor to return?” Roger asked Marlo.
“Any minute. He’s visiting Columbia Presbyterian,” Marlo said, scratching their beard. “At least a dozen people there have lost one or both of their legs. Spinal cord injuries, damage to internal organs too.”
Chief Reilly took a call on his cell, listened, then hung up. “Well, Mattingly’s phone is missing and his PC was incinerated.”
“I was on a conference call this morning with the fire commissioner,” Emily said. “He said, and I quote, ‘It was one hell of a timed explosion for a twenty-year-old kid to pull off.’”
Martha turned to Deputy Mayor Garcia with a smirk. “Maybe you would look good if he went to New York City public school. He was apparently quite the genius.”
As Garcia chuckled, Roger banged the tip of his pen against a legal pad. “Is this a joking matter to yo
u, Martha?”
They all turned toward Roger, the smirks wiped off their faces. He usually had the demeanor of everyone’s favorite uncle, other than the whisper-shouting match with the mayor the day before and an argument with Marlo once after the mayor was late for a memorial service for a firefighter. Roger had been right about how the Post would respond to that. The next day, the headline had read Can’t Wake for Hero Wake.
Emily looked down, chastened for laughing at the banter in the room. But she was also salty about Martha bearing the brunt of Roger’s anger. The joking in the room had been like the chatting at a wake. Nervous chatter. The undercurrent in the room was dark and tense. No amount of snark could bury it.
“Let’s get started, and we’ll circle back when the mayor comes,” Martha said, pissed, her words clipped. “Press avail is at noon in the Blue Room. He needs to talk about current public safety first. People are nervous after the Beacon explosion, worried that Mattingly left other bombs around. The mayor needs to reassure them.”
CHAPTER
9
TWO DAYS AFTER the subway attack, Kathleen had reached her saturation point with the news. MSNBC had found Jackson Mattingly’s first-grade teacher and a former classmate. Watching cable news after a crisis was like being a chain smoker, lighting up the next one even though you were already sick of smoking. Kathleen had quit smoking over twenty years ago but still remembered the feeling. She picked up the remote and shut off the TV.
She left her apartment and retrieved her Honda Accord from a garage under a neighboring building, where she rented a monthly parking space. The last time Kathleen had spoken to Sharon, she had been dancing at a club in Queens. After Kathleen closed her business and Sharon went out on her own, she’d begun dancing in an upscale Manhattan strip joint. But by the time dancers hit forty, they tended to work in the lesser clubs in Queens or New Jersey. Sharon had once mentioned to Kathleen where she’d been working. Kathleen had easily remembered the name—Easy Street Gentleman’s Club—once she’d Googled a list of Queens strip clubs.
On a normal day, Sharon would be getting to work around now for the blue-collar, after-work shift. Outer-borough dancing shifts started by four PM. Kathleen braved the typically heavy weekday traffic on the Cross Bronx Expressway, crossed the Whitestone Bridge over a wide gray bay, and arrived in Queens.
Neon lights and a sign with a yellow brick road announced her arrival at Easy Street. Kathleen pulled into a small parking lot between a Burger King and the side of the club. There were only three cars in the parking area.
As Kathleen headed for the door, she saw a young woman walking ahead of her. Kathleen’s breath hitched. “Sharon?”
The woman turned around. Not Sharon. She looked a bit like Sharon from behind, but she was a lithe version of the other woman, ten years younger. She peered back at Kathleen inquisitively, her features pinched and her lips scrawny, not resembling Sharon at all now. “Hi?”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were Sharon.”
The woman’s face slowly dawned with a thought. She didn’t have Sharon’s sharp intellect either. “Oh, gosh, I haven’t seen her for days. You can ask Sal inside what’s up with her.”
Kathleen found Sal standing beside a dimly lit bar that smelled of old booze and sawdust. Sal’s beer belly hung over his jeans, a black mariachi shirt smoothing the bulk. An Asian woman in a G-string danced on a U-shaped stage over the upturned face of a man of about thirty. The place was otherwise empty.
Kathleen put out her hand to shake Sal’s. She liked to establish with a handshake that she was a businessperson, an equal, in a world dominated by men. Sal’s hand was thick and chafed dry.
“She hasn’t showed up for a couple of days, didn’t give me notice. It wasn’t like her,” Sal told Kathleen after she asked about Sharon. “I’ve called her to find out whether she still wanted to be on the schedule, but no callback. She caught me flat-footed. I could normally depend on her, unlike a lot of the others.”
“She is the dependable type,” Kathleen said, keeping the conversation going. “That’s why it’s been weird that she hasn’t been answering her phone.”
“Yeah, no drugs or booze. She’s all business. I’m telling you, she’s the best girl I’ve had in the last couple of years.”
“Was anything bothering her?”
“Nah. Not that she’d tell me. In my experience, there’s two types of dancers. The talkative type that tell you everything, even the details of their girly infections, if you so much as ask how they’re doing. And then there’s the ones who keep shit to themselves. Sharon is of the latter variety. Good day, bad day, no way I’d ever know.”
“Do you have an emergency contact for her?”
“You mean like on a human resources form?”
“Yes, like that.”
“Come on. Get the fuck outa here.” He shook his head, smirking. “All the girls are independent contractors. We don’t want to know.”
Kathleen thanked him, ready to leave.
“Wait a second. One thing that may help,” Sal said, and Kathleen turned back to listen. “She has a chick she’s been dating who comes to pick her up sometimes. Dressed like she was coming from construction work or some shit like that. I haven’t seen her around for a while, so I don’t know if she’s Sharon’s current girl. But maybe she’d know Sharon’s whereabouts.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Angel, Angela, something like that.”
“Do you have any idea how to contact her?” Kathleen asked, although she knew it was unlikely.
Sal shrugged. “Nah. But, listen, if you see Sharon, you can tell her from me, no hard feelings. She can come back anytime. She was always a good example for the other girls.”
CHAPTER
10
BY THE END of the workweek, the city had nearly returned to normal, at least for those who didn’t know anyone killed or maimed. As she often did on Saturday mornings, Emily ran, pushing Skye’s jogging stroller, from Inwood to Washington Heights. A balmy wind blew Emily’s hair back from her face. Sweat trickled down her spine beneath her tank top and running shorts. The mile-long path along the Henry Hudson Parkway was wooded on one side, the Hudson River peeking through tree branches. On the far side of the three-lane highway—lightly trafficked on a Saturday morning—stood the forested cliffs of Fort Tryon Park. Emily breathed in the scent of jasmine.
Skye was laughing, shouting, “Run, Rusty.”
Rusty, a copper-colored golden retriever, ran in step with Emily, wearing a mesh Puppies-in-Prison service vest. Rusty lived in Bedford State Correctional Facility, where female inmates trained service dogs. He was eighteen months old now and would soon be donated to a veteran with PTSD or become an explosives-detection dog.
Emily hadn’t planned to take on the responsibility of training a dog with Skye still so young. Usually two weekends a month, volunteers acclimated the puppies to an outside world of cars, crowds, and smells they couldn’t experience in the rural prison, and it was a lot of work. But Emily had previously trained several dogs for Puppies-in-Prison, starting when she was in college. The director had called three months ago, needing an emergency placement for Rusty after a volunteer bailed. Emily had hoped it would be a good experience for Skye, and it had been so far.
Carl’s son, Alex, greeted Emily with a hug at the door to her mother’s apartment on Cabrini Boulevard. Twenty-one and six feet two inches tall, her stepbrother had dark Caribbean-Latino eyes like his dad and a scraggly black goatee. He attended City College and lived with roommates in the Bronx, but he was at Lauren and Carl’s apartment a lot.
A fat black-and-white cat observed Emily’s arrival from where she sat on a shoe bench in the vestibule. The cat leaned down to sniff Rusty, less perturbed by the dog’s visit than by Skye’s awkward petting, which swiftly sent the cat to higher ground.
Emily smelled brewing coffee. In the sunny eat-in kitchen, she kissed Carl’s cheek. He grasped her hand, a hand hug that didn’t r
equire him to get up. Emily’s mother, Lauren, was making pancakes next to a window that overlooked the tall oak trees of the gardens behind the Castle Village apartments, the Hudson River beyond that. Forty-eight and fit, Lauren wore jean shorts and a Puppies-in-Prison T-shirt Emily had given her, her thick, long curls tied up only half successfully. Lauren was lean and strong. She could probably still beat Emily in an arm wrestle, even though Emily was in reasonably good shape.
Spatula in hand, Lauren gave Emily a half hug and Skye a kiss on the head. Alex placed a booster seat on the chair next to Emily and sat at the round wooden table. Rusty settled himself between Alex and Emily, lying with his chin on the floor. Emily poured herself coffee from a carafe.
“Are they saying anything interesting about Mattingly at City Hall?” Carl asked.
“His parents were normal people, quiet,” Emily said. “Not a lot of friends. They think he made the bombs there, in the house. They found traces of the chemicals he used.”
“He must have used a timer for the house … to set it off.”
Carl’s words slurred slightly, Emily noted with a wrenching in her gut. She’d studied up on MS on the web and knew slurred speech was a symptom. It wasn’t clear yet whether Carl had relapsing MS or the more serious progressive type, which kept getting worse until the person was totally incapacitated. They were all praying that the new drug trial would work. Some days were better than others, today apparently being on the worse end of the spectrum.
“Yeah, FDNY thinks it was a timer,” Emily said.
“Mass murderers sometimes kill their parents before their rampage, like Adam Lanza in Sandy Hook,” Carl said, his voice clearer now. “It was two in the morning when the bomb went off.” Carl took a pancake from a plate Lauren put on the table. “He would expect his parents to be home.”
Alex reached for the plate after Carl. “Dibs on the chocolate chip.”
Gone by Morning Page 4