“If you can’t see faces, then how do you know what he’s facing? Where he’s looking?”
“I’m not blind. Which direction are his feet pointing? I can tell if I’m looking at someone from the back or from the front. And in that footage, I saw him turn around.”
“So it’s only faces.”
“Which is probably why the condition is called face blindness.” That was a smart-aleck thing to say, but it really wasn’t as difficult as people wanted to make it. “If you think of me intentionally blurring out the faces of people I see in order to protect their identities, then that would be an accurate way to think about it.”
“Okay. So you see that he turned toward the camera. What else?”
“Can you play it back again?”
He rewound it a few seconds and then let the footage play.
I gave a running commentary as I watched. “He turns away from the dumpster. Pauses to look at his watch. Now he’s facing the door. It seems like he’s about to turn away again, but he looks up instead.”
The detective paused the footage. “How do you know that if you can’t really see his eyes?”
I shrugged. “I mean—” There were multiple ways. “The angle of his shoulders? The shift in the tilt of his hairline?”
“Okay.”
“Why? Is there anything wrong with any of that?”
“It’s windy.”
“It is,” I answered cautiously because I couldn’t figure out where he was trying to go with that information.
“He was looking up and down the alley, he was checking his watch.”
“Sipping his coffee. Maybe he was waiting for someone.”
“Right. That’s what I’m thinking. So why did he look up all of a sudden?”
“Is that rhetorical? Because if it was, I would ask in return, ‘Why do any of us do anything?’”
“He was surveying the place. There was no reason for him to look up. Not when he was clearly intending to repeat his pattern. Up the alley, down the alley, turn and check the door. But he did glance up. I’m thinking he must have heard something.”
He let the footage play on.
Immediately after looking up toward the roof, at 1:46, Joe took an abrupt step backward and then seemed to wilt. His knees buckled and he fell to the ground as his coffee cup hit the pavement and rolled away.
At 1:51, I came out.
I watched myself, on the screen, as I lurched over to the body and knelt beside it. I put a hand to his shoulder. Shook him. Put a hand to the pavement and braced myself so I could shake him again.
I remembered none of that.
Then I turned around and looked up as I put a hand to my forehead. When I drew it away, I left behind streaks of blood.
I stood.
Stared down at my hands for a moment.
And then my fingers pulsed wide as my head sank into my shoulders.
“You screamed.”
“What?”
“You screamed.” The detective pointed to the footage. “You were screaming.”
I didn’t remember any of that. None of it. I remembered nothing. I couldn’t even recognize myself. And I hadn’t even heard myself scream.
Chapter 4
The detective pushed away from the desk, strode to the door that led out to the hall. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Not willing to be left behind, I followed him out into the alley where he was standing in the middle of the pavement, hand shielding his eyes as he tilted his head toward the roof. He walked over to the stain on the asphalt where the victim had been shot. Turned to look up, over his shoulder, at the roof.
I was still standing in the doorway.
He shook his head as he came toward me. “The roof is the only place the shooter could have been. And there’s no way to get up there from the alley.” He gestured for me to go back inside, ahead of him.
I punched in the code for the back-room door.
He sat back down in front of the computer and started the footage again at 1:50.
At 1:51, the door swung open. It was me. I recognized my shirt. As I paused to spin my hair into a bun, the door swung out of view.
It felt extremely odd to be watching myself. I’d been completely unaware of the camera.
He let the footage keep rolling. I could feel my heart slam against my chest as I watched. My vision was going hazy. A sweat broke out above my lip. I stepped away from the detective. “I’m sorry. I just—” I gestured toward the footage. “I need a minute.”
“Hmm?” He turned around to face me. “Sorry. Sure. Can I get you something? Water?”
“Thanks. No. Just give me a minute.” I concentrated on breathing. Tried to blink away the memory of the murder.
The detective was watching the footage again.
I angled my head so I didn’t have to look right at it.
“Do customers normally leave by the back door?”
“No. But the bathroom is down the same hall. And people use that all the time.”
“You say the victim was a regular customer. Did he always use the alley door?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. I have no idea.”
“I don’t mean to pressure you. If you don’t know, you don’t know. It’s not a problem. This isn’t a test; there’s no right answer.”
“I just wish I could be more helpful.”
“Well, tell me this. Do you normally leave by the back door?”
“Sometimes. When I want to avoid someone out on the floor.”
“Who would you want to avoid?”
“Customers, if they had issues with their order. Why give them another chance to yell at you? Or my coworkers, if I’m afraid they might want me to do ‘one last thing’ on my way out the door.”
“Sure. I get it. So how often would you say you use the back door? Every other day? Every third day?”
“Once or twice a week.”
“And the victim was your customer for how long?”
How long had I been making those mochas? “Since I’ve been working here, I guess. I started in May.”
“So during all those times you left by that door, did you ever see him in the alley?”
“Not that I know of. I rarely see anyone out there. But like I said, I don’t always leave by the back door.”
“Do people come in that way?”
“Only if you have the code. Or if someone opens it for you. We get morning deliveries through the back door.” I hadn’t opened for a few weeks and I didn’t really want to ever again.
He started up the footage again and watched it through the shooting.
I averted my eyes.
“I’d be interested in knowing if anyone left the shop from the main entrance right before or right after our victim left by the back. You have a security camera inside the store too?”
I didn’t think so, but I got the manager and she brought up footage of the floor from several different angles. I hadn’t even known there were security cameras inside the store. “You never know what’s going to happen,” she pointed out. “And if something ever does, then I’ve got the cameras on my side.” She wound one of them back to one o’clock.
That camera was posted behind the counter, but it was pointed toward the door. Most of the shop floor was within its view.
At 1:34, the door opened. The detective straightened. “There he is. That’s our victim.”
He slowed down the progression.
Joe went straight to the mobile-order counter. Seemed to look at his watch. He turned back toward the front door, and then he walked away from it, around the front counter, and disappeared from view.
“Where’s he going?”
The manager answered, “The back hall. It’s the only way he could have disappeared from the camera.”
“Okay.” The detective started the footage again. Several minutes later, Joe came back into view. He went back to the mobile-order counter and picked up his coffee. Seemed to look at his watch again. Then he wal
ked toward the back hall, out of the footage.
The manager’s phone rang. She stepped out to take the call.
The detective paused the video. “So he picked up his coffee and made a beeline for the back door. Although he looked at his watch first.”
“Maybe he was worried about the time.”
“Maybe. Okay. Let’s go through it again. This time we’ll look at who else comes in or goes out.”
He went back to 1:10. Paused it. “We’ve got—” He counted underneath his breath. “Fifteen people before our victim comes in. Seven sitting down and eight in line.” He resumed the footage and slowed the speed.
“Okay. One goes out.” The video kept playing. “Three go out together. Joe comes in.” He stood at the counter for a moment and then left the footage. “Two come in. Joe comes back. Another goes out.”
It was Mustache Man.
“He comes in most days.”
“What’s that?”
“The guy with the mustache. The one who just left. He’s a regular too.”
“Okay. Two come in. One goes out. What’s our line doing?” He slowed the footage and counted the people waiting to order.
About the time Joe walked out the back door, someone had approached the pastry case and then backed off and left. Several other people got up from tables and left as well. If the detective was looking for the shooter among the customers, there were several possibilities.
“Could be one of those who left at the end,” he muttered. “And I’d like to know more about that man with the mustache. Especially if he’s a regular. Maybe he saw something. Does he come at the same time every day?”
“Generally. After noon. Before my shift ends.”
“You have my number. Can you call me next time you see him? The only people we were able to interview were those still in the shop after it happened. Which by definition . . .”
I finished his thought. “Makes them not the killer.”
The detective had me wait while he wrote up my statement. The last time I’d given the police a statement was just before I’d moved to Arlington. I’d spoken to the police in DC—haltingly, awkwardly, pushing my words past a swollen lip. Blinking back tears from a blackened eye. Trying to ease the pain from a rib that I assumed was broken.
As that memory surfaced, I tried my best to block it.
I took out my phone instead. Replied to the students who had texted me back.
Then I clicked through to the latest edition of a financial news digest I subscribed to.
As I read the latest headlines, I felt an eyebrow rise in surprise. A bill that I had worked on when I’d interned on the Hill, a bill that had finally made it out of committee several months before, had died on the House floor. I clicked through to the article to read the names of the dissenters. Four of the representatives who had voted for the bill in committee, including the congressman I had interned with, had ultimately decided to vote against it.
How could that be?
The bill would have strengthened some of the most important financial oversight measures that had been put in place after the Great Recession of 2008. And those four representatives had been the loudest voices supporting those measures.
I was still puzzling over the failure of the bill when Detective Baroni approached. He offered me the statement. “Read it over. If it’s accurate, go ahead and sign.”
I read it.
“Any corrections?”
“Here.” I pointed to a box on the form.
He picked it up. Read the box. “Age?”
“Twenty-eight, not twenty.”
“I thought that’s what you’d said, but it didn’t sound right.”
There seemed to be an assumed correlation between height and age with some people.
“Sorry.” He corrected it and handed it back to me along with his pen. “Sign it for me?”
I signed.
“You’re good on my end. Any questions on yours?”
“Just one.” And it was really starting to worry me. “The killer saw my face. He knows who I am. I don’t have any idea who he is. That scares me.”
“He’s probably miles from Arlington by now.”
“But what if you’re wrong? What if he hasn’t disappeared? What if he tries to find me?”
He sat down across from me. “Crime seems irrational, but people who commit them have their own logic. That shooter knows you saw him. He won’t want to have anything to do with you, won’t want to be anywhere near you, because he won’t want to be identified. We know you have face blindness, but he doesn’t. In his mind, he gets away with this by making sure he can never be identified. You don’t have to be afraid, don’t have to go into hiding, because chances are, he already has.”
I followed his argument; it was logical; it made sense.
I wanted to believe him. I really did. But I couldn’t convince myself to do it.
Chapter 5
After the detective left, I stayed at the Blue Dog. I canceled the rest of my students because I was afraid to go back outside.
I shifted to the table farthest from the windows, sat in a chair with my back to the wall. Then I spent some time calling parents to reschedule all the coaching sessions I’d missed. When I was done, I pulled my study guide from my backpack and did some review for the bar exam. But eventually, I didn’t have any excuses left to stay. And I needed a study guide that was at my apartment.
If Corrine had still been working, I might have convinced her to walk outside with me to the scooters. Instead, I told myself that there was nothing to worry about, that the street out front was busy enough, that there were plenty of people walking to and from the metro, that nothing bad was going to happen. Still, after scanning the sidewalk, I jogged over to the scooters, quickly unlocked one with the app on my phone, and wasted no time as I started toward home.
* * *
My new basement apartment was located in a part of Arlington I couldn’t have afforded even to visit. As I headed away from Virginia Square, the modern high-rise apartment buildings gave way to older retail buildings and restaurants, which tapered off to several-story duplexes and townhomes and then into a century-old residential neighborhood. As the buildings shrank, the trees got older and taller. The sidewalks became more uneven, the streets more serpentine.
The cars changed from Priuses and Subarus to Teslas and Audis.
The gusty winds had mellowed into a stiff breeze. It carried with it the cloying scent of some kind of flower. Fallen crepe myrtle petals had drifted across the streets, accumulating in piles, clogging the sewer drains.
I was still getting used to not having to look over my shoulder for my ex all the time. After I’d gathered my courage and finally broken up with him, he’d shown up everywhere, trying to apologize, begging me to give him another chance.
At school.
At work.
At my tiny studio apartment across the river in the warrens of DC.
I’d tried to ignore him at first. It wasn’t easy. He called, he texted, he sent flowers. But I wasn’t open to persuasion. I had proof that he had cheated on me; he couldn’t gaslight me anymore. I had a picture from his other Instagram account—the one someone had finally shown me—of him with another woman.
Of course, he insisted that it hadn’t meant anything. He told me he deserved a second chance. So I tried to reason with him. He’d cheated on me, so clearly he wasn’t happy with me. At that point, I didn’t mind labeling myself as the villain. I just wanted out. It was an awful, heart-shattering end to what I had once thought was a beautiful beginning. The best day of my life and the worst were both thanks to him.
I’d never met anyone like him. He was smart, charming, charismatic. And I’d felt so lucky that the person he wanted to be with was me. I actually tried to reason him out of a relationship at first. I’d made every argument I could think of: the difference in our ages, the fact that I was still a student, and the reality that we came from two different worlds. But he nev
er took no for an answer. That was how he’d come up with his innovative made-in-America secure-server solution to cybersecurity. By not taking no for an answer, he’d done what most people had considered impossible. He’d sourced all of his components and materials in-country. It wasn’t that difficult for him to argue me around to seeing myself from his point of view.
It was his appeal to reason that had seduced me. He’d done it by laying down actual answers to all of my questions.
Why do you like me? Why do you want to be with me?
He said I was brilliant. I was passionate. I was committed to making the world a better place. Why wouldn’t he want to be with me? If anyone was lucky in our relationship, it was him.
Eventually, I didn’t have any arguments; I gave in to what my heart had wanted all along.
Growing up, I heard people say all the time what a beautiful girl I was. Though I could never see myself the way they did, I understood that to them, beauty was important. To my ex’s credit, he never, not once, used my beauty as one of the arguments for why we should be together. He’d already figured out it wouldn’t have worked with me.
One of the joys of our relationship, early on, was that we could debate anything. To the lawyer in me it was stimulating. Exhilarating.
When I was still new to dating him, I’d been left breathless once or twice by the sheer audacity of his arguments. He could take a point I made in support of a position and send it back to me as an argument against it.
The machinations of his mind were dazzling.
But that wasn’t his only attraction. I melted at the way he was so thoughtful. The way he always asked about my day before telling me about his. The way he brought me flowers randomly, spontaneously, just because. I loved the way he towered over me, the way he always leaned into me. And the way he always seemed to be waiting for me. It seemed so protective.
And manipulative.
Only I didn’t see it that way at first. It took me sixteen months and three weeks. Two black eyes and—finally, after our breakup—one restraining order to see him as he really was.
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