Gone by Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

  Kathleen kept looking around until a CO checked her clipboard and pointed Kathleen toward the right side of the room. Kathleen focused. A woman waved. She was around forty years old, with dark, shoulder-length hair and black-lined eyes. She wore slim jeans and suede loafers. Kathleen recognized her. She lived with one of Kathleen’s tenants. They’d said hello if they crossed paths, asking each other politely how they were doing or commenting on the weather, nothing more. Kathleen couldn’t have been more surprised.

  Kathleen slid onto a wooden chair across from her. “Antonia. Hi.”

  “Hello,” Antonia said in measured and heavily accented English.

  “Thank you for coming. I’m surprised.”

  “I’m sorry you’re here,” Antonia said sadly. “None of us believe you set fire to the building.”

  “Thank you.” Kathleen felt a physical brightening, relieved that her neighbors didn’t think she’d done something so horrible to them. “I could never do something like that.”

  “Most of us are staying in the same hotel. For now.”

  “I hope it’s comfortable.”

  “Luckily, it’s just Javier and me in one room. It’s worse for the families.”

  “I’m not going to sell. When I get out, I will rebuild so everyone can move back in. It will be even better than before. Everything new. You can tell them that.”

  “They will be happy to hear that, but that’s not why I’m here—we know you got your own troubles. I’m here because Javier asked me to come.”

  “Oh?” Javier was Antonia’s live-in partner. He’d been a tenant in the building for decades.

  “He couldn’t come here.” Antonia looked embarrassed. “You know, he does not have papers.” Undocumented.

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “But he said we have to tell you …”

  “Tell me what?”

  “He saw a van near the building before the fire. An elevator-repair truck. Javier noticed it because there was nothing wrong with the elevator to need a repairman in the night. A man came out of the van. He was wearing”—she motioned with her hand toward her head, searching for her next word—“a hoodie. He went inside.”

  Kathleen leaned forward. “What happened?”

  “Javier said he was not a homeless guy or somebody loco who did it. That’s what we all thought at first. We would never think it was you. But Javier said no, he was a big man.” She raised her palms beside her shoulders. “Big here. In good shape, like he goes to the gym. A serious man. Javier saw him right before the fire started.”

  “You’re kidding.” Kathleen had also imagined the arsonist was someone who was mentally ill, loco, as Antonia had said, somebody sickly fascinated with fire. She couldn’t imagine anyone intentionally risking so many lives otherwise. She wasn’t a big believer in evil. But maybe she’d underestimated the idea of evil.

  She felt a glimmer of hope that she could prove herself innocent, now that there was a witness.

  “You know, Javier cannot tell the police or testify what he saw,” Antonia went on. “He could never take the chance.”

  Kathleen’s hope plummeted. “I thought they didn’t arrest witnesses for immigration status.”

  Antonia shook her head. “None of us trust that anymore since Trump. But it’s worse than that.” She chewed her lip, pausing, scared. “Javier said the guy who went in the building was police. He said he doesn’t know what kind of cop. But you don’t live without papers for twenty years without knowing a cop when you see one. Javier said he knows by the way he walked. By the way he moved. He said he’s sure.”

  CHAPTER

  47

  EMILY’S EYES WIDENED at the stacks of hundred-dollar bills inside the safe-deposit box. She picked one up. “I guess we should count them?”

  Lauren’s facial expression was all business. “Thumb through and make sure they’re all hundreds throughout the stacks.”

  While Emily did that, Lauren dug into her shoulder bag and pulled out a thin metal digital scale and placed it on the table. Emily frowned. “What—?”

  “Are they all hundreds?”

  Lauren picked up a pack Emily hadn’t checked yet. The only sound was the quiet shuffling as they fanned through the money.

  “This one is hundreds.” Emily picked up another stack. “This one’s twenties.”

  Lauren pressed a button to turn on the scale. “Separate the stacks of twenties from the hundreds.”

  “Is that Jessica’s?” Emily asked, mystified.

  “She left it at our house when she stayed with us while her bathroom was being remodeled. I thought it might be useful.” Lauren considered the money. “Each bill weighs a gram.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I learned it from your grandfather when he was selling drugs.” Lauren raised her hand in a don’t-ask gesture and added under her breath, “Some things you don’t forget. Your grandmother said we’d find money here, so it stood to reason we’d need to count it.”

  Lauren pressed a button to switch from ounces to grams. She put the first packet of hundreds on the scale. “Exactly a hundred grams. Ten thousand dollars. I’m getting the feeling your grandmother became quite the businessperson.” Emily noticed how Lauren was referring to Kathleen as her grandmother, as though the relationship had skipped a generation.

  Emily pushed the packs toward her mother and quickly pulled each pack toward her side of the table. She counted to twenty-eight.

  “Two hundred eighty thousand dollars. Plus ten thousand in twenties.”

  “How are we going to carry it?” Emily asked. The money took up too much space to fit in her mother’s shoulder bag and her own mini backpack. “We should have brought a suitcase. You didn’t think of that when you brought the scale?”

  Lauren smirked at her. “Actually, I did. But there’s no way we can pay the bail in cash without raising questions,” she said. “I’m not putting myself in that position. And I have no intention of walking the streets with a hundred thousand dollars.”

  In the box, a blank envelope caught Emily’s eye. She opened it. The document folded inside said LAST WILL AND TESTAMENT. Emily skimmed the first page, feeling queasy about invading Kathleen’s privacy. But, on the other hand, she felt as if she had a right to know everything about Kathleen, whose life had somehow wrapped around hers without her permission.

  Lauren also rummaged through the paperwork in the box. Always the lawyer, Lauren picked up some legal papers and perused them, not seeming to notice what Emily was reading.

  “She has property on an island called Bequia,” Lauren said. “There’s a deed. They probably wouldn’t accept it to guarantee her bail. I’ve never even heard of the place.”

  “It’s in the Grenadines,” Emily said, “It’s a small island. I heard it’s beautiful.” Emily scanned the will’s captions and wherefores until her eyes rested on a paragraph that mentioned her mother. She looked up. “She left you everything.”

  “What?” Lauren’s face dropped. “That’s her will?”

  Emily handed it to her, and Lauren took it and glanced through the document.

  “Her building. A house. Hundreds of thousands in cash.” Lauren paused. “I imagined she was living in some homeless-person nursing home by now, or dead. It hurt less to put her out of my mind entirely, as if she never existed.”

  “A lot must have changed.”

  “This is all so hard to believe.” Lauren put the will back into its envelope. “When the ADA said she did five years for your grandfather dying.…” Lauren shook her head, as if trying to clear her mind. “I don’t think she deserved to go to jail for that. And the idea that she would suddenly burn down a building with people—you, Skye, and herself—in it, that makes no sense, especially since she obviously had plenty of money to pay the mortgage. Not that she can say she has all this money, or she’ll be charged with tax evasion.”

  Emily pulled a notebook from the box and looked through the pages. “There’s names and ph
one numbers here. First names, and some look like code names. It must be the so-called black book.”

  They put everything back in the box except the one hundred thousand dollars they needed.

  “You stay here,” Lauren said. “I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m going to rent another box and put this money in my own box for collateral. If I put up the apartment, it won’t raise questions.”

  Emily gave her a look of grudging respect. “You should have been a criminal.”

  Lauren returned a half smile that told Emily she’d hit on a truth.

  Emily didn’t know as much about her mother as she’d thought. Emily spoke under her breath as Lauren turned to leave: “I guess Kathleen’s not the only one who’s changed.”

  CHAPTER

  48

  CARL HUNCHED OVER a computer screen, his back tired and aching. All morning he’d been going over emails that Emily had sent. He felt a shot of anxiety that his fatigue was related to the MS but then reminded himself that he just needed to take a break and walk the stiffness off. It was Friday. He had gotten through his first week back at work and felt good about that. He arched his back, stretching his hands over his head, and resumed reading. He would focus on the City Hall emails for a few more minutes, then go get coffee.

  An agent from the IT team, Charlotte, entered the room. “Hey, Carl, did you see the email I sent you?” She sat in the chair next to his desk.

  Carl was glad for the break. “Oh, sorry, I was looking at the PDFs from City Hall. I didn’t have a chance yet.”

  “Open my email. Let me show you.”

  “Sure.” Carl closed the file he’d been looking at and opened her email.

  “You know we subpoenaed Amazon’s records of purchases. We’ve been looking for three things: purchases with Mattingly’s known Amazon account, purchases made from his home IP address from any email account, and purchases delivered to Mattingly’s home address. The deliveries could be purchases by him on IP addresses other than the one at his house, or he could have disguised his IP address by purchasing through the dark web. We also subpoenaed Walmart, Home Depot, and Lowe’s.

  “We’ve received some information. No nefarious orders from the home IP addresses or Jackson’s known email addresses, but there was quite an uptick in deliveries to the home. Computers, iPads, a TV. The spending at the Mattingly residence appears to have increased threefold, starting about a year before the attack. But here’s the kicker: even though he used Bitcoin, which is pretty much untraceable and highly suspect, the kid screwed up.”

  Carl leaned forward, looking at the document he’d opened on his computer screen, unable to decipher from the line of figures on the screen a conclusion that seemed so obvious to her.

  “He got sloppy.” Charlotte pointed to an entry in the spreadsheet. “He received a laptop at his home from Amazon. It was bought with a gift card, purchased with Bitcoin, from an email address we hadn’t known. There’s no identifying information associated with the email address, and the buyer used a disguised IP address to buy the gift card. We’ve found two other purchases at Home Depot from the same dark-web IP address using two more email addresses we had never seen before.”

  Carl grinned. “So he outed multiple email addresses. We can trace all his purchases associated with those email addresses now and probably come up with new IP addresses and maybe more email addresses. That will give us more to search for in the City Hall emails too.”

  “Exactly. And, most importantly, the two purchases from Home Depot were delivered to a Fifth Avenue address, not Mattingly’s home. So now we can trace all the purchases shipped to that address and find other emails he used for those purchases. My bet is that eventually we’ll find some communication with whoever gave him the Bitcoin.” She raised her palms in a sweeping gesture and said victoriously, “Pay dirt.”

  “What do we know about the Fifth Avenue address?”

  “It’s a commercial mail-drop place. That’s where he sent the more suspicious bomb-making components from Home Depot. The orders were delivered to a Yuri Ziskina there.”

  “A Russian connection?” Carl said. “Wow. Do we have anything on the guy?”

  Charlotte swiveled her chair around to look at Carl. “I don’t think there is a guy named Yuri Ziskina. It doesn’t look like there’s a real person by that name in New York. People rent a mailbox and have their stuff delivered to a chichi address. They don’t require ID, so the renter can use any name.”

  Carl thought aloud. “We’ll get a warrant, find out what we can about the rental and whether there’s anything in the box. We’ll have to send in the bomb squad and the dogs first to make sure the box isn’t booby-trapped.”

  “They’re sending a team as we speak.”

  Carl felt a twinge: they hadn’t included him. They were only filling him in after the fact. He sighed inwardly. His boss had built in redundancies to the investigation, so they wouldn’t lose a step if Carl woke up in bad shape on any given morning. It made sense. But it felt like a no-confidence vote. He was totally expendable. The MS was nothing if not humbling.

  “Great job,” he told Charlotte, putting aside his personal feelings about the way things had been done. He couldn’t afford to feel sorry for himself, and this was great news.

  Charlotte’s earnest expression spread into a smile of accomplishment.

  CHAPTER

  49

  AFTER WORK, EMILY stopped at the Airbnb to change, a slapdash race to replace her office clothes with shorts and a T-shirt. She’d needed to work late, then been stuck on the subway for nearly an hour.

  The elevator stopped at each floor when Emily left the apartment, automatic stops for the Sabbath. A wave of anxiety surged in her every time the door opened and she had to wait for it to close, nobody entering. The stress of the whole week weighed heavier on her each time. Too much had been going on—the fire, Kathleen’s arrest, the tectonic shift within her family—and she was late to pick up Rusty at the Puppies-in-Prison van on 125th Street. Her nerves were shot.

  Thankfully, it had been a quiet week. She and Skye had settled into something close to their normal life. Skye had new toys and clothes. They’d slept comfortably together in their room. Skye would return tonight after her normal two days with Hector. Emily only wished she could turn off her own brain. A slow elevator ride down, a little bit late, and her brain was roiling with worry.

  At the first floor, she rushed from the elevator. In the vestibule outside the building’s locked inner glass door, a man was examining the directory and standing there, not going in. She paused. Her anxiety ramped up. Was she taking enough precautions?

  The man turned toward her, and she took in his beard and hat. He was Orthodox. She exhaled, realizing he couldn’t ring an electric intercom buzzer on the Sabbath. He was waiting for someone to let him in.

  Emily opened the door.

  “Thank you. I’m going to the second floor, the Meltzers.”

  “Oh, okay, sure.” Emily held the door open so he could pass.

  Emily laughed inwardly at her own nervousness. But when she turned onto Overlook Terrace to walk to the subway, she had a strange feeling, almost a physical shiver at the back of her neck. She turned around.

  A black van passed.

  She knew those vans: they were the “discreet” limos megarich people used nowadays. From what she’d seen at a showroom on Park Avenue, they had more space inside than a limo but were less obvious to the “little people,” who could be hostile toward them. It was maybe the only concession rich people made in New York to the huge income gap between them and most everyone else.

  For a second, she saw the outline of the driver. He looked at her. A bouncer type. It seemed that large, fit men were everywhere lately. It gave her a moment’s pause. But then the car sped up and pulled away. She talked herself down: one more sleezy creep checking her out, nothing new about that. But everything had been so sketchy lately.
She picked up her pace to the subway.

  * * *

  Rusty’s mouth-breathing in the back seat was the only sound as Lauren drove over the RFK Bridge onto the Grand Central Parkway in Queens. They passed the limestone Bulova Watch building with its giant clock. Modest single-family homes lined residential side streets once they exited the highway. The GPS directed them to a parking area near a bus stop, where dark water lapped the rocks at its perimeter. Private vehicles weren’t allowed to park on Rikers. Emily and Lauren waited a long time for a bus.

  Emily took in the oldest, creakiest bus she’d ever seen as it approached. She imagined mostly Rikers visitors used it. The driver waved them on. Long after visiting hours, the bus was empty except for one corrections officer who sat near the driver, chatting with him.

  In a reception area, they sat for hours on bolted-down plastic seats while the paperwork was processed for Kathleen’s release on bail.

  “They must be making copies with carbon paper,” Lauren complained to Emily, who was already sick of reading the work emails that were still flowing in on a Friday night.

  Emily smirked. “What’s carbon paper?”

  Lauren laughed, waving the question away.

  Emily understood her mother’s anxiety to get out of there. The dark energy of Rikers made Emily want to back away from the place with a crucifix held high, shouting, “Get ye back, Satan.” And the cloying disinfectant smell made Emily uneasy, like it cloaked a secret. But Lauren was also about to break a thirty-year separation from her mother. Emily could only imagine how that felt.

  The door buzzed. Lauren and Emily looked toward the noise.

  Kathleen walked out, wearing wrinkled street clothes, the same ones she’d been wearing when she was arrested. She scanned the room to see who’d bailed her out. When her gaze fell on Emily and Lauren, her eyes glistened. Emily could see her trying to stiffen her face, but she swiped away a tear.