Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  Kathleen looked over Emily’s shoulder as she uploaded the photograph of Angela and Sharon. They watched the rotating circle for a few seconds before the app reported that it had found no match for the image. A paragraph explained that it had searched over 40 billion images but that personal photos often lacked matches.

  Emily sighed. “Well, we tried.”

  CHAPTER

  20

  KATHLEEN UNLOADED PLASTIC containers of rotisserie chicken, rice, and beans from Casa del Mofongo, a local Dominican restaurant that delivered. Green trees brushed the screens of her kitchen’s double-wide window. The room was old-fashioned, with distressed wood cabinets and shiny appliances that winked at the rustic style of the room. The squawking of twilight birds gave Kathleen’s kitchen a country-cabin vibe, which was why this was her favorite room in her home.

  On her iPad, Emily searched for social media pages of people who had known Sharon. Kathleen had thought of several old employees whose phone numbers she didn’t have. But Emily had found few of them on social media and none had photos of Angela among their friends.

  “Eat,” Kathleen said as she sat. “It wasn’t as if I checked social security cards to make sure new employees used their real names. If they’re living square lives now, they’re probably using names I never knew. And if they’re using social media professionally, they’d use stage names I can’t even guess at.”

  “Do you have pictures of any of them? We could try reverse lookup of your friends like we did with Angela, maybe get stage names and work our way back from there.”

  “I’m not the selfie type and didn’t advertise. Sorry.”

  Serving the food onto blue ceramic plates, Kathleen felt nearly blissful sitting across from Emily. She’d have to resolve her secret soon but hadn’t figured out how to do it. The problem with deception was that it created a loop that trapped you in even more lies. She needed the truth to come out, but Emily might want nothing to do with her if she knew who Kathleen was. And Kathleen had no doubt that, once the secret was out, Emily would hear things from her mother that would make the situation even worse. Deservedly so. But she couldn’t bear to lose Emily now.

  Kathleen’s phone buzzed against the wood of a cookbook shelf. She reached behind her to see who was calling. Dunbar. She answered, mystified. Emily began reading work emails on her phone as Kathleen took the call. Emily was always on call, perusing emails every spare minute.

  “Miss Harris.”

  “Kathleen, please.”

  “Kathleen, I’m calling because, when the owner inspected the apartment, he packed up a box of stuff that he said wasn’t his. I had to change the mailbox lock too. We never found Sharon’s key to open it, and a new tenant is coming in. I took out Sharon’s old mail. It’s mostly junk, but there’s what looks like a credit card bill and a phone bill. The owner told me to just take the box and the mail and do what I want with it. That would be fine, but it’s not his to say that. I know you already sent her clothes to storage, but can you take the rest of her things?”

  “Of course. I’ll come. Are you still on duty?”

  “Until midnight. I’m working a double.”

  When Kathleen hung up, she turned to Emily, who looked at her with open curiosity.

  “Want to take a ride? Dunbar has Sharon’s credit card and phone bills. Maybe we can find out more about what she was doing over the last few weeks. It could give us more leads to find Angela too.”

  * * *

  Emily rode shotgun in the fast-moving traffic of the Henry Hudson Parkway. Across the blood-orange Hudson River, the sun morphed into fiery trails behind tall buildings stacked on New Jersey cliffs.

  “I’ve been thinking about the North Beach Killer,” Emily said. “It’s unusual that they found Sharon so quickly. A lot of the bodies on North Beach were hidden there for years before anyone found them.”

  “I think they’re keeping an eye out for bodies left there,” Kathleen said. “You don’t see much about it in the media anymore, but the family of one of the women was raising hell at one time, saying the investigation’s been shoddy.”

  Emily thought about it. “Maybe you could do that too.”

  Kathleen glanced at Emily. “Do what?”

  “Raise hell in the media. It can help.”

  Kathleen exited on West Seventy-Ninth Street and waited in a bottleneck at a traffic light at Riverside Drive, where cars fed in from the uptown and downtown exits off the highway.

  “If I revealed publicly how I knew Sharon, I’d be dismissed just like the sex workers,” she said. “The family of the prostitute that’s been complaining about the North Beach investigation is just a square family with a troubled, addicted daughter. But having a sex worker for a daughter throws shade on them as far as law enforcement and the media are concerned. The sense I get from the news reporting is that the family is viewed as one step up from being prostitutes and addicts themselves. You can imagine how the media would look at me, basically Sharon’s pimp—even though that’s not true at all and never was. I’d hate to open myself up to the public scrutiny.”

  “I can understand that.”

  Kathleen turned into a sparkling circular driveway surrounding a lush garden. Emily took in her surroundings. A circular driveway in Manhattan was a sign of wealth. Any use of real estate was, especially in this part of town. A man in a maroon door attendant uniform, apparently Dunbar, approached the car. Emily rolled down her window. He bent to look in and held out a batch of mail in a rubber band.

  “This is all of it. Even the junk mail.”

  Kathleen exited the car. She opened the back door, and Dunbar placed an open cardboard box on the back seat. After he closed the door, Kathleen stood next to Emily’s window to talk to Dunbar. A warm evening breeze carried the scent of flowers, trees, and summer car exhaust, something soothing about the combination. It brought Emily back to summer evenings of childhood innocence, going to the Bennett Park playground with her father after he came home from work.

  “Have the police come by or contacted anyone?” Kathleen asked Dunbar.

  “Not that I know of. No one on the building’s staff has been interviewed. It’s a damn shame.”

  Through the sideview mirror, Emily saw Kathleen touch his arm. “Thanks for helping me. I’ll let you know when we’re having a service. No worries, though, if you can’t come.”

  “I’ll come if I’m not working.”

  As they drove away, Emily’s phone rang. An unidentified number.

  “Emily, this is Chief Reilly.”

  “Oh, hello. You’re working late.” Emily noted it, but there was nothing unusual about nighttime calls and emails. He was on twenty-four-hour call, like her.

  “The day got away from me and I wanted to get back to you. I received the ME’s report on Sharon Williams. Her throat was cut. That was the cause of death. She suffered a massive loss of blood.”

  “Did she die on the beach?”

  Kathleen’s face snapped to Emily with surprise before her eyes returned to the road.

  “Dumped,” the chief said. “The North Beach Killer has been using that location for years. He doesn’t kill the women there. We’ve added the case to the other open cases. We don’t close them when the serial killer is still at large.”

  After the call, Emily turned in her seat toward Kathleen. “The investigation was moving so slowly, I asked a friend from the NYPD.”

  “I wish you hadn’t done that,” Kathleen said, seeming startled.

  Emily got the point: for all her air of respectability, Kathleen still distrusted cops. She’d told Emily that the cops had been brusque and uncaring when she’d spoken with them, as if they viewed her as a potential suspect. Emily hadn’t consulted with Kathleen before asking the chief. She’d overstepped her bounds.

  “What did he say?” Kathleen asked quietly.

  Emily took a deep breath. “Her throat was cut. Her body was left on the beach afterward.”

  Kathleen accelerated the car o
nto the highway, heading home, her eyes glittering with moisture. “Did he tell you when she died?”

  “Yes, the same night she disappeared.”

  Kathleen nodded. “Okay. At least that.”

  Emily knew what Kathleen was thinking: at least her delay in calling the police after Sharon called her hadn’t contributed to her death.

  * * *

  Emily carried the uncovered box of Sharon’s things from the car to Kathleen’s apartment. Kathleen had seen that it held a French coffee press, a landline phone, and some soaps and lotions. Kathleen sat on the couch in the living room and began thumbing through the mail, Emily sitting beside her. Most of it was junk, but finally Kathleen tore open a Visa bill. She and Emily scanned the purchases: Amazon, a clothing store, a restaurant dinner the night before Sharon died, and Whole Foods.

  Kathleen raised her eyebrows and pointed to an entry. “This is interesting. A fifty-dollar bill from Securus.”

  Emily frowned. “What’s that?”

  “It means she had a friend in prison. People buy calling cards for prisoners. Securus is the company that sells them. It used to be that inmates in upstate prisons could only make collect calls. Now there are calling cards.”

  “The cops will subpoena the company if they think it’s important,” Emily said. “But the company won’t tell us anything.”

  “Sharon must have been close to the inmate, or she wouldn’t be paying for the calls,” Kathleen said. “The person must be going crazy trying to reach her. Calls to the outside can be the only light in an inmate’s life. Believe me, I know.”

  “Really?” Emily always seemed surprised, as if she’d forgotten Kathleen’s background, but she wasn’t outright shocked anymore. Kathleen felt a deep need for Emily to know.

  “Long before I was a madam, my husband died of an overdose. They charged me with murder because I bought the drugs for him.”

  “You’re kidding. They do that?”

  “Yes. He’d been dope-sick that morning and asked me to call his connection to come over. Begged me. The cops got a record of my call. Calls were on landlines back in those days. Dealers weren’t using throwaway phones like they do now. I even left a message on the guy’s answering machine, not that I said much on it. When they busted him, he turned state’s evidence on me. I wasn’t even a heroin user, and I wasn’t a dealer like him. But they gave him a reduced sentence for agreeing to testify against me. I think he ratted out a lot of people to get the no-jail deal. I didn’t have anyone to offer to get a deal.

  “I pled guilty to manslaughter. They had proof that I bought my husband the drugs that killed him. I did five years in prison, but it could have been fifteen if I hadn’t pled guilty.”

  “It’s crazy that they charged you for that.”

  “I try not to dwell on my regret for every step I took that day that led to my husband dying and me going to prison. Some regrets are too big to fade away, although a tornado wouldn’t have kept my husband from copping that morning, whether I’d helped him or not. In the final analysis, prison probably saved my life. I got clean there and stayed clean. I never did heroin like my husband, but we both smoked crack and I developed cocaine psychosis from it. I heard voices, saw things. It cleared up after I got clean, thank god. I haven’t touched a mood-altering substance in over thirty years.”

  “Wow. I thought my mother’s story was extreme. She was an addict too. She’s been clean almost as long. You know, you guys have a lot in common. I would love to introduce you. Maybe we could have brunch?”

  Kathleen shook off her reverie, wanting to avoid that meeting. “Sure, maybe.” She turned her attention to Sharon’s telephone bill, opening it. “Nothing much here. All local calls. They don’t give the phone numbers for local calls.”

  “The police would have to subpoena that too. They may have done that already and it’s just a matter of time.” Emily looked toward the open cardboard box she’d carried upstairs. “Wait a sec. Can’t we get the list of recent calls on a landline?”

  Emily rose and pulled the black landline phone from the box. She plugged it into an outlet near the couch and brought the base and receiver back to Kathleen.

  Kathleen took the phone from her and pressed the LIST button. “There’s me, my number.” Kathleen pressed again and the next number showed up. “She called this other number right before she called me.”

  “Let’s Google the phone number first. If that doesn’t work, there are apps for reverse phone lookup. They work better than the reverse photo ones.”

  After a moment, Emily showed her iPad screen to Kathleen. “There’s a bunch of hits for the number. It’s for this law firm.” A sleek web page opened to a sky-blue background and white lettering. “Does the firm mean anything to you?”

  “Sharon could have kept a lawyer on retainer,” Kathleen said. “There had to be a connection between her calling a law firm and calling me right after them. Maybe she was in legal trouble and wanted to talk to me about it.”

  “Let’s scroll through the staff listing,” Emily said, clicking into a link called Our Attorneys. “Most firms have a page for each attorney with their picture and bio, and their specialties. Jeez. They’ve got hundreds of lawyers at this firm. And how do we know the person she called was a lawyer? It could be anyone who worked there. They could be IT or a clerical worker.”

  “True. But let’s look.”

  Kathleen scanned the list of names on the first page. Nothing. Emily clicked into the second page. Kathleen ran down the names starting with B, then C, and then she saw it: Carrier, Wayne. All the synapses in her brain lit up. Kathleen knew him. So did Sharon.

  Emily looked at her. “Any ideas? Are any of them familiar?”

  Kathleen paused, pretending she was still reading. She shook her head. “Let’s look at the next page.”

  After they’d read all the names on all the pages, Kathleen said, “I’ll call the firm tomorrow to see if they have a record of her as a client. I can tell them she died and we found the firm’s number in her apartment. Maybe they drafted a will for her.”

  CHAPTER

  21

  THE NEXT MORNING, Emily called Marlo, checking on the status of negotiations with the State Department and Nigerian embassy. Nine days since the attack and Marlo was still trying to smooth the way for the mother of a critically ill subway victim to come to New York from Nigeria. So far, it hadn’t been easy. Emily had received a voice mail from a reporter at the New York Times and needed to give him information, at least somebody in the State Department to talk to … and blame, if need be. City Hall was doing all it could.

  “This is the thing,” Marlo said. “The victim, Rachel Ajiboye, was a Dreamer, born in New York, but her mother has a ten-year bar on entry after she was deported several years ago.”

  “Why was she deported?”

  “Overstayed her visa. Not because of a criminal conviction, thank god. The State Department just has to issue a waiver for her to return. We’ve been pushing, but it takes a lot to move the federal bureaucracy.”

  “Do you have a name and number at State?”

  Emily called the reporter from the Times to tell him that they were working on it. She gave him their contact at the State Department.

  Then she pulled up the day’s news clips that Thea had worked on with Max. The Post had written a scathing editorial about Sullivan not canceling his fund raiser, which had taken place a week after the terror attack. The story was picking up steam. Other news outlets were starting to hype it.

  Emily looked over at Max’s desk. She let out a breath, surprised: a photo of Sharon was on his screen. It was a story about the police finding her body and the medical examiner’s report about her cause of death. It was only a short story, but it had rated a mention in the Daily News.

  Emily rolled over to Max, two feet of navy carpet separating their desks. “Is that going in the clips? What’s that have to do with the mayor?”

  “It just came in. The woman was last seen in
Inwood. The mayor was asked about it when he was visiting a senior center near there. He said he didn’t know about it. Now the News is accusing him of being too busy campaigning across the country to know what’s going on at home.”

  “I didn’t think the newspapers were going to cover it.”

  “His being away a lot?”

  “The murder.”

  “You knew about it?”

  “I saw her.” Emily said. “I live in Inwood.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding. You have streetwalkers in your neighborhood?”

  “No! Jeez, why would you even say that? She wasn’t a streetwalker, anyway. That’s why they call them call girls. People call them.”

  He put up his hand in surrender. “Sorry. You really knew her?”

  “No, but I saw her the night she was killed. I was questioned by the police. I think I’m the last one who saw her. A man pulled up in a car and she went with him. But she wasn’t turning tricks. She was just walking to my building.”

  “Wow … so you’re, like, a murder witness now?”

  “Not really.”

  “I’m impressed. I’ll put a notation on this that you’re involved.”

  “Please, don’t,” Emily said, more intensely than she’d meant to. She modulated her voice. “It’s not positive attention, or relevant.”

  Max shrugged. “Okay.”

  Emily returned to her work, regretting that she’d told Max. There was a gossipy quality to his interest in the clips and in her. She was starting to get the feeling that maybe she should have just kept what she’d witnessed to herself.

  * * *

  Carl and Rick walked together on Cabrini Boulevard, alongside the complex of buildings where Carl and Lauren lived. Rick was tall and fit, wearing a leather backpack on one shoulder. His brown skin had turned a deep russet after a recent Caribbean vacation. Rick was probably visiting him out of pity, although Carl tried to push that thought away.

  They stopped at Café Bruuni, a tiny Ethiopian coffee shop on Pinehurst near 187th Street. Carrying cardboard cups, they doubled back to sit in the shade on a bench in Bennett Park. The sound of children playing in playground sprinklers mixed with raucous birdsong from within the park’s tall trees. Dogs barked, several of them meeting up on the path that circumnavigated the small park’s perimeter—two blocks in length and a block wide.