CHAPTER
26
IN THE CITY Hall press office on Monday, Emily checked her personal Twitter account during a rare idle moment. She noticed a post from Sophie. Sophie said she was taking a social media break to avoid the politics and snark. It wasn’t unusual for one of her friends to announce a break. It was stressful to see constant political vitriol, plus social media could eat up your life if you let it. But Sophie had helped her so much in the last year. It was amazing how important Sophie had ended up being to Emily, considering she hadn’t even remembered her from school. She didn’t have Sophie’s email address to keep in touch, and Emily felt a moment of loss.
Martha rolled her chair over and sat next to her. “You should tell us when something newsworthy is going on in your life that the press can get hold of,” she said firmly. “You know that.”
“Max told you?”
“What did you think? Gossip is his stock-in-trade. Don’t tell him anything you don’t want others to know. So that’s two takeaways: tell me when there may be press about you, and choose your confidants more carefully. Of course, there are times when you want information to get out through gossip.” Martha cracked a smile, relieving Emily’s tension. “That’s what people like Max are for.”
“So everybody knows?”
“Probably. Doesn’t it make you nervous?”
“That everyone knows?”
“That you’re the only person who saw a possible murderer?”
“I just think of him as a person of interest,” Emily said. “That helps me sleep at night.”
“Good idea.” Martha winked. “Come on, we’re having a prep session for the mayor’s afternoon avail.”
Emily and Martha entered the Bullpen on the second floor. The Bullpen was a massive open space. Huge windows. Carved ceiling. Chandeliers overhead. The deputy mayors, the chief of staff, and the senior staff worked at desks surrounded by low cubicles. Mayor Sullivan walked by, wearing a gray suit and red tie, heading toward the balcony conference room overlooking the Bullpen. He paused. “I heard, Emily,” he said. “If you need anything, please let me know.”
“Thank you. Nothing is really going on. They don’t even have a suspect.”
“That’s too bad. Well, anything you need …”
Emily walked alongside Martha, the mayor loping ahead by several strides.
Martha offered, “Marlo must have run him down about your involvement with that case.”
Emily cringed at the thought of the unwanted attention, imagining the mayor sitting in his office talking about her. Now he shook hands with Roger, and Roger glanced back at her too. Jesus, everyone knows.
“Don’t worry,” Martha said. “It’s not a major story. No one’s worried about it. And he’s happy about the Times mentioning the State Department’s delay in getting a visa for Rachel Ajiboye’s mother.”
At the bottom of the stairs to the balcony, the security details for the NYPD commissioner and mayor sat at empty desks and chatted while they waited for their bosses. They were all police detectives who drove for the mayor and the police commissioner, securing the area at each stop before they got out of their cars. Emily noticed one of the detectives giving her a once-over, studying her. Same old shit: leering men, twenty years older than her.
She met his eyes defiantly. But she saw something she hadn’t expected: meanness, not lust, behind his stare. She felt startled by it, tried to shrug it off, and looked away. He must be one of those guys who thought a woman was a bitch if she didn’t smile politely when he showed his admiration for her body parts.
On the balcony, the deputy mayors, Marlo, and a few others were already there, bringing plates of sandwiches and chips from a side table to the conference table. There was always a spread of food for staff up there, which was why it was the favored spot for lunch hour meetings. Chief Reilly was chatting with the police commissioner, the chief’s uniform contrasting with his boss’s tailored suit. The chief left the commissioner and headed Emily off before she sat. “Let me speak to you a minute.”
With five minutes left until the meeting officially started, Emily followed the chief out an exit door to an empty marble-floored corridor.
She noticed the chief’s face reddening from jowl to forehead as he leaned closer to her. “What the fuck did you think you were doing?”
“What?”
“Asking me for information on a murder case you’re personally involved with?”
Emily froze.
“Don’t you know that’s an ethics violation? Using your position to get personal information?” he continued, enraged.
“No, I didn’t think—”
“Stuff like that can ruin your career!” He threw up his hands. “And about a homicide? You’ve gotta be fucking kidding me. And now we know you’re a fucking liar. Jesus fucking Christ.”
Her eyes hot, Emily tried to keep the quiver out of her voice. She had made a huge mistake. There was nothing she could say. What could she say? “There was an inquiry from a reporter … about violence against prostitutes. But you’re right. I’m so sorry. I didn’t think.”
Chief Reilly’s red face began fading. He paced a moment, long enough for Emily to imagine Martha’s disappointment when she found out what Emily had done. And if Emily lost her job, Lauren’s disappointment. She was about to lose everything. How could she be so stupid?
The chief took Emily’s measure, probably noting the tears in her eyes. “Look, I’m going to keep this between you and me. You’re a good kid, and I’ve always liked working with you. But don’t ever do fucking shit like this again. Getting confidential information like that was some career-blowing shit, and it would have fucked me up too. If you want to be reckless with your career, at least think of the other guy.”
* * *
Emily couldn’t look anyone in the eye as Martha ran down the topics of discussion for the press conference, calling on people to brief Mayor Sullivan on each subject. Max reported on talking points and questions that had been bubbling up on social media. Barely able to make out their words, Emily’s mind roiled with residual fear and embarrassment. She felt like crawling under the conference table and hiding. She hated to make even mundane mistakes, and this one was huge.
“So, last item,” Marlo said, “not for public consumption. We now have IT searching to see if Mattingly sent emails to the mayor or staff relating to the inauguration or anything else. The search will try to rope the emails in through rolling key word searches and Mattingly’s IP address. They believe Mattingly used aliases and multiple email accounts. The FBI will be feeding us information about any known accounts Mattingly had so we can expand our search. Emily will ride herd on that project, interfacing with IT, reviewing the emails and reporting to us on content, and updating the FBI as needed. She’ll be our point person.”
Emily perked up. She hadn’t expected that assignment, but it was a good one. All heads turned to her, and Martha smiled encouragingly, obviously having known about it. Max gave Emily a thumbs-up, which was nice of him, since he probably wanted the assignment. The chief nodded slightly at Emily, a sign that all was forgiven if not forgotten. Emily breathed a little easier.
CHAPTER
27
IN A WAITING room at Mount Sinai Hospital, the sun shone through the windows, which overlooked a railroad trestle and East Harlem housing projects. Lauren was doing everything she could to hide her nervousness. They’d been waiting a long time. They always did. But Lauren wasn’t complaining—not aloud, at least. Carl had a great doctor at a great hospital. They were lucky to live in the city, where the hospitals and doctors participated in cutting-edge studies that benefited patients who suffered from an insidious disease without any known cure. Besides, if she let Carl go to his doctor’s appointments alone, he came home either beaming with hope or miserably depressed, offering an incomplete story of what was going on. She needed to know.
Carl had a love/hate relationship with Lauren’s new rule about attending every
appointment with him. He still enjoyed her company and support, but it was just one more chink in his self-image as a strong, independent man. And it interfered with Carl’s ability to act as if nothing were happening. He didn’t have to pretend for her, but it was second nature for him to try to protect her. Even today, when his doctor would evaluate how the study drug was working, the most important appointment in the last two years, he was trying to act like it was nothing.
But Lauren wasn’t in denial about how important today was. Carl’s recent improvement could be the regular MS roller coaster, or Carl might be one of the lucky ones who ended up with long-standing recovery because of the new drug. Lauren dreaded news that might crush Carl, and she didn’t dare hope too high herself.
Carl picked up a copy of Sports Illustrated from a low table in front of the couch where they sat. He thumbed through it.
On her iPad, Lauren logged in to a real estate website. She told herself it was just curiosity, but doing this had been on her mind since her conversation with Emily at the zoo. Lauren often used the website when a new client came to her and she wanted a quick read on the property involved in a potential divorce proceeding. Now she typed in the address of Emily’s building. She was concerned that a criminal had wormed her way into her daughter’s confidence. Former criminal, she reminded herself. And Lauren was the last person to judge someone for that. Still, she worried that Emily wasn’t streetwise enough to discern between a former and current criminal. It wasn’t as if the woman would tell Emily the truth about it.
Lauren knew she was overprotective of Emily, who had grown into a self-sufficient, intelligent woman. She was a great mother and had an amazing career. When Emily lost Brian as a teenager, Lauren had been terrified that Emily would end up self-medicating with drugs or alcohol like Lauren and her parents had. Emily had shown her rebellious streak early in adolescence, and there had been rough patches when she’d cut school and hung out with a worrisome crowd. But luckily, Emily must lack the gene that made a person dive headlong into the rabbit hole of addiction. By the time Emily emerged from the bleak period of mourning for her father, she’d corrected her own course, focusing on school and swearing off self-destructive behaviors. Lauren hadn’t needed to worry about her for a moment since. But nothing in Emily’s life had prepared her for manipulation by criminals. Besides, no harm could come of Lauren poking around a bit.
She pulled up the listing for Emily’s building and its vital statistics. Thirty rental units. Built in 1920. The page linked to public documents: filings for fixture replacements, an old Department of Buildings work permit, and a mortgage filing. The building had a twelve-year-old mortgage for just over a million dollars, although it was worth four times as much. The building could have been bought during the recession at a discount, or the owner could have paid mostly cash for it. She looked for the owner’s name: Inwood Associates, LLC.
She next went to the home page for the state Division of Corporations and entered the corporate name in a search box. A page appeared that listed a contact person for the corporation: Kathleen Harris. The famous Kathleen. Lauren switched to Google and typed the name. She sighed when two hundred thousand results came up. LinkedIn said there were over two thousand profiles with that name. Lack of privacy on social media was one of Lauren’s pet peeves. But, ironically, you could hide in plain sight if you had a common name.
Carl put down Sports Illustrated with an air of boredom and glanced over at Lauren’s screen. “Work?”
Lauren wouldn’t lie to Carl, but she’d promised Emily. So, a half-truth: “Just idle curiosity. Nothing too interesting.” She closed the iPad.
“Rick is coming back from Lake Placid tomorrow,” Carl said. “They’re almost done interviewing Mattingly’s family members. The media is camped out at the grandparents’ house.”
Lauren put the iPad in her leather shoulder bag. “They all work at Clinton-Dannemora, right? By the Canadian border?”
“Rick said the interviews were basically a bust. They’re a prison guard family with generations of Mattinglys working in the state’s prison complexes. Mattingly’s parents worked at the prison near Beacon, and yeah, his cousins and grandparents work at Clinton-Dannemora. There’s nothing particularly weird about them. The grandparents say they never felt close with Jackson and they never liked him much. It looks like he had a higher IQ than all their other grandkids combined. They’d hoped he’d become a movie star, or just be the one to get rich.”
“They must be devastated.”
“Yeah, they’re especially pissed off that he used his talents to ruin their lives rather than making sure they all lived happily ever after. But I don’t think the family was completely blameless.”
Lauren turned to him. “No?”
“There were warning signs. Missing pets, a decade ago in Beacon,” Carl said. “It got bad enough that people began keeping their pets inside. The local newspaper reported at the time that the coyote population had grown in upstate New York and, with the forests shrinking, they’d begun wandering into towns.”
Lauren was pretty sure Carl had been doing independent research online and that Rick hadn’t told him that. Still, she was glad Carl had that outlet. “When I lived upstate for the first couple of years after college,” she said, “there were reports of coyotes, bobcats too, in residential areas. We stopped letting our cat go outside.”
“Yeah, but there were similar news reports up north one summer, when Jackson spent the school vacation with his grandparents. And in Beacon, one of the reporters noticed that the pets were mainly missing from within a small section of town, about four square blocks. Not just cats, either.”
Lauren’s eyebrows lifted. “What does that mean?”
“There were some who questioned the coyote theory back then. Some of the missing dogs were unusually big for coyote prey, and there would have been bones if a coyote took a big animal. It’s not too important now. I’m just connecting the dots in Mattingly’s biography. But Mattingly’s house was dead center of the four-block radius where animals went missing. He couldn’t have been more than eight years old when it started happening. And there was a string of break-ins at homes in that area a few years later. Nobody hurt, just items randomly broken, as if the burglar went in and took a baseball bat to people’s prized possessions.”
“So they missed all the signs that he was a psychopath. Even as a child.”
“Mr. Cintron,” a nurse called from the door to the inner sanctum of the medical office.
Carl and Lauren rose, holding hands as they walked toward the door. Lauren didn’t feel like she was helping Carl maintain his balance. It was better. Her heart pumped hard with hope. She said a silent prayer that his tests would confirm that the study drug was truly working and the doctor would give Carl his back-to-work note.
CHAPTER
28
HISTORIC TOMBS AND mausoleums shaded by ancient trees occupied several square blocks between West 153rd and West 155th Streets from Riverside Drive to Amsterdam. Broadway separated the west and east halves of the pastoral cemetery, but the wide roadway hushed as it passed through the twin graveyards, barely noticed. Just over two weeks since Sharon’s death, Emily walked with Kathleen on a winding path bordered by imposing oaks to a small single-story building.
Inside was an elegant room. Tall glass vases filled with long-stemmed purple flowers graced its front corners. A framed photo of Sharon, the one Kathleen had saved from her phone contacts, stood on a grand piano at the back corner of the room. A floor-to-ceiling window looked out on the cemetery forest from the far side of the piano. The room was small but could fit seventy-five people in rows of upholstered folding chairs facing a podium.
Over Kathleen’s protestations, Emily had insisted on attending. She knew how hard it would be for Kathleen if no one showed up.
Emily had chosen a playlist of mellow jazz to play as people arrived, if any did. Since Kathleen didn’t know what music Sharon would have liked and had warned that t
here was a good chance no one would come, Emily had done her best at picking music she thought Kathleen would find soothing.
The allotted time came. The music played. Sun and shade dappled the room in rhythm with a breeze that swayed the trees beyond the glass wall. Kathleen’s former employees began to arrive. At first a trickle, then dozens of them, mostly women. A couple of young men, muscular like bouncers, came from the Easy Street Gentleman’s Club. Sharon’s doorman, Dunbar, entered and sat in the back row. Three heavyset men who had the look of plump, retired weight lifters kissed Kathleen on the cheek when they entered.
“They used to provide security for us,” Kathleen told Emily.
Emily found herself studying the face of each man who arrived to see whether he might be the person who’d taken Sharon away in his car. But no.
The women, who outnumbered the men five to one, were all in their thirties and forties, most tall, all of them attractive. Although some had become comfortably middle-aged and probably plainer with the years, Emily could see that they’d all been beautiful in the way of an actress or model. The women greeted each other with long-lost kisses and shook hands with Emily when Kathleen introduced them. Emily guessed they might have come to the memorial more for Kathleen than for Sharon.
Emily saw the mix of melancholy and joy in Kathleen’s face when she saw her former employees and fawned over a woman carrying a sleeping infant in a sling. Emily couldn’t help but be impressed by the love the women evidently felt for Kathleen, although it shouldn’t have been a surprise, given how attached she herself had become to her.
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