by C. S. Poe
Angela snorted. She scrubbed her cheeks and tossed the napkins to the floor without second thought. “I should have known. They got along so well, after all.”
“When you worked at the Museum of Natural History?”
“How’d you know that?”
“Er—I mean, a lot of names and titles and big dinosaur words got hurled at me while I was looking up details on Cope,” I said, stumbling to recover.
I’m not sure she bought my attempt at feigning stupidity.
Angela reached over my arm on the counter, picked up her shot, and finished it in a single gulp. “Sure, I worked there,” she hissed. “So did Frank. So did Daniel.”
“Daniel was the intern.”
“Hm-hm.” Angela licked some spilled drink off her fingertips.
“What can you tell me about the Cope exhibit?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you asking Frank?” she shot back.
Tread carefully. Shit-faced or not, she might be trying to trap me. I couldn’t trust her. For all I knew, those tears had been that of a crocodile.
“I tried,” I said, which was sort of the truth. “He wasn’t available.”
Angela narrowed her eyes. “How’d you say you found my phone number?”
“Ms. London, if I could ask you about Edward Cope.”
“Edward Cope is dead,” she clarified.
For fuck’s sake.
“Yes,” I agreed. “He’s very dead. About his skull—”
She slid off her barstool, nearly crashing to the floor. I lunged and grabbed her forearms, keeping her standing on heels that were destined to kill her.
“I. Didn’t. Take. It.” She punctuated each word by drawing closer and closer to my face, until the smell of cheap alcohol wafted from her lips. “Understand?”
“Yes.” I looked down, and her pointy, professionally styled nails dug into the sleeves of my coat. “Where is it?” I dared to ask.
The question made her smile.
Wickedly.
Dangerously.
I shouldn’t have—
Angela leaned in, pressing her mouth close to my ear. “If I knew…,” she said lightly, in an almost singsong voice. It was deranged.
I swallowed and tilted my head to look at her. “Where’s Daniel?” I asked very quietly.
“Daniel. Daniel is….” Angela considered the question for another moment. “On his back, with a one-inch dick tickling his asshole.”
I shook my head and looked away.
She laughed, stepped back, and grabbed the counter to steady herself. “I have to piss,” she declared. Angela turned and wobbled from foot to foot as she struggled across the room to the dimly lit sign indicating where the bathrooms were around the corner.
I sat on the barstool as the bathroom door slammed shut behind Angela. I noticed the large purse she’d left on the seat to her right, which had been blocked while she sat at the bar. I stood, moved two seats closer, and opened the purse. Pawing through a drunk woman’s bag wasn’t my idea of a good time, but I needed something.
Anything that would help me connect Angela to past or future events.
Wallet. Spare change. Gum—lots of gum. Half a dozen packages, all cotton-candy flavor. I shoved those back in and tried again. Tampons. Come on. I retrieved a ring of keys and nearly put them back before the weight of them gave me pause.
It seemed to be too many keys for one person. There were some charms attached that advertised it as definitely belonging to Angela—a pom-pom, Minnie Mouse, one that said “angel” in glittery, fake diamonds, and a massive A in what I suspected was a fake gold polish. But then I realized the excess in keys was due in fact to the second ring attached. Four additional keys. No charms but for an F that matched the A.
Why did Angela have Frank’s key-ring?
I looked up, intending to watch the bathroom door, but made eye contact with the bartender by mistake. Caught red-handed.
“She’s too drunk to drive,” I blurted out, holding up the keys. “I’m holding on to these so she doesn’t get any ideas.”
If he was suspicious, I must have come across sincere enough. “Good call. She’s been pounding whiskeys for a while. I was about to cut her off.”
When the bartender turned his back, I got to my feet, quickly unhooked Frank’s keys, and shoved Angela’s ring back into her purse. I pocketed his, dropped some cash on the counter for the soda water, and slipped out the front door as Marilyn Manson asked if I was willing to kill for him.
Chapter Ten
I LEFT St. Marks in a hurry, crossed Third Avenue where the street morphed into East Eighth, and didn’t stop until I’d reached the famous Cube at Astor Place. I moved around the massive, ugly sculpture and let it block me from view so I could take a moment to catch my breath and check the timer app.
Forty-two hours remained.
I was glad to be away from Angela London. Not least because I was spoken for and didn’t enjoy being pawed at. But mostly, she was… unnerving. Of course she’d also been so falling-down drunk that it’d made any sort of serious discussion a lost cause. Except for the acknowledgment of the Cope skull. Angela had said she didn’t take it. That didn’t mean she didn’t at least want it.
I stared at my phone’s screen as I recounted that haphazard dialogue. Automatically, I found myself pressing the text icon and choosing Calvin’s name out of the list of ongoing messages. It was an involuntary motion—to check in, to say hello. I scrolled through older conversations and smiled. A lot of I-like-yous and see-you-tonights. Written promises. Vows of safety. Assurances of dinner dates and errands run. Everything I could ever wish for—hope for—in a lifelong partner.
I dipped my chin and pressed my scarf to my nose as it started to run with the threat of tears.
“Come on,” I said to myself in a firm voice, forcing the tightness in my throat to ease. “Stop.” I clicked off the screen, but then it lit up and started vibrating with an incoming call. No one I knew, but the area code was local. A startling fear punched me right in the chest. What if this was the Collector? I answered with a rushed “Hello?”
“Sebastian Snow?”
“Yes?”
“This is Detective Alex Wainwright. I work in Major Cases for the NYPD.”
“O-oh. Uhm, hi.”
“I’d like to meet with you and discuss your fiancé, Detective Calvin Winter.”
“What? Why?”
“Are you busy?” he asked with a bit of an accusatory tone.
Yes, technically. I had the keys to Frank Newell’s apartment and was going to… uh, well, what, exactly? Let myself in and poke about? Hope to uncover a clue Calvin overlooked after Frank had been reported missing, when Calvin would have already thoroughly scoped out the paleontologist’s home first and foremost? I needed to speak with Neil. And Quinn. I had to know if the intern had come up in their initial investigation. Daniel was my next stop in the ongoing adventure of Where in the World is Edward Cope? I knew it.
“I’m not—no. But this morning the NYPD told me to get lost.”
“And now I’m telling you to unlose yourself,” Wainwright replied, firm but polite. “Why don’t you come downtown to 1PP?”
One Police Plaza.
“Or should I send a car?” he asked.
I craned my head and could barely make out stairs to the Downtown 6 across the street. “No,” I answered. “I’m only a few subway stops away.”
I WAS put in a room for questioning. As if I was a suspect.
I mean, look to the spouse. That was policing 101. And being gay didn’t seem to make a difference in that angle of approach.
But Calvin wasn’t dead.
So I was pretty goddamn offended. Not that anyone bothered to ask me.
“I was under the assumption these rooms had more space to stretch out,” I said as the door opened and a well-built middle-aged man with what I guessed was salt-and-pepper hair stepped inside. He pulled it off well. In fact, he probably looked sexier now than he did a
t twenty-five.
He smiled, bemused. “You must be Sebastian Snow.” He sat at the table with me. “Detective Wainwright.”
“The production value of real life is always a bit of a letdown after comparing it to the movies,” I continued.
Wainwright opened the file he slapped down on the tabletop. “What do you say we skip the bullshit, hmm?”
“That’d be preferable,” I said.
Wainwright motioned to his own face, as if he were wearing glasses. “Take them off.”
“No.”
“Excuse me?”
“I have a light sensitivity.” I motioned upward. “And fluorescents give me headaches without sunglasses.”
Wainwright was quiet for a moment. He leaned back in his chair, rested an ankle on his knee, and folded his hands into his lap. “You met Detective Winter last year during the Nevermore murders.”
“Is that in your file?”
He smiled.
“That’s private,” I added.
“It’s not really a secret,” Wainwright countered. “Not anymore.” He looked at the papers. “How would you describe your relationship with Detective Winter?”
“Well, I can’t be certain, but I think he likes me,” I replied, holding up my left hand to show off the band on one finger. “Why am I being interrogated?”
“You’re not. We’re talking.”
“I wasn’t born yesterday.”
Wainwright let out a breath through his nose. He shut the file. “You’re agitated.”
“You’re damn right I am.”
“Why?”
“I know that’s a rhetorical question—you’re hoping to glean some sort of proof I’m responsible for Calvin’s disappearance and make this an open-and-shut case. Poke and prod all you want. It’s not going to prove anything more than I love Calvin. And with every single second that ticktocks by, my very foundation is falling out from under me.”
Wainwright considered my response.
I gave him nothing but the sincere upset that’d been festering inside me since this morning.
Straightening, Wainwright leaned over the table, elbows resting on the folder. “Tell me what happened.”
“You’re the cop. I think you have access to the investigation Calvin was working.”
“No. This morning. Tell me what happened.”
I turned my head and studied the large, public-school-style clock on the wall. “We don’t have time for this. Calvin is going to be dead in forty-one hours.”
“Says who?” Wainwright asked, his voice still neutral.
“I sure as hell hope you’re not serious,” I replied. “The person who abducted him. The Collector. My final note said I had forty-eight hours before my reward—Party C—Calvin—would be forfeited.”
Wainwright removed a pen from his suit coat pocket. He clicked the top absently.
My eye twitched.
“I read the note,” he confirmed. “It doesn’t say he’ll be dead. Why do you believe the wordage implies this outcome?”
“Uh. There are two unidentified chopped-up bodies and a third person has been missing for five days. Call me melodramatic, but I’m pretty sure Frank Newell is dead somewhere. Maybe in pieces. I’m not willing to take any chances. I refuse to be called in to identify parts of Calvin.”
Wainwright click, click, clicked the fucking pen some more. “How do you know about Mr. Newell?”
“Calvin told me.”
“He told you details about an ongoing investigation?” Wainwright confirmed, raising an eyebrow.
“We tell each other all sorts of secrets,” I said, deadpan. “Sometimes we even stay up late, write in our diaries, talk about boys.”
“I’d appreciate honesty without the sarcasm, if you don’t mind.”
“Why am I being questioned?” I protested. “This is harassment.”
“No, this is protocol.”
I stood up.
“Sit down,” Wainwright said, raising his voice.
I did not.
I never was good at taking direction. Sue me.
“We spent the night at a hotel near Times Square. We woke up at seven o’clock,” I said. “Calvin took the dog out. I lay in bed.”
Wainwright opened the folder again. “What else?”
“What else,” I echoed mockingly. “Let’s see. We took a shower together, jerked off… oh, was that not the detail you were looking for?”
“Mr. Snow—” Wainwright started, and now he was frustrated again.
“I love Calvin,” I said over him, thumping my own chest hard with each word spoken. “I wouldn’t ever raise a hand to him. I get down on my knees.”
“Just walk me through the rest of the morning,” Wainwright replied tightly.
“There’s nothing else to tell,” I argued. “Officer Rossi came to the hotel—he was assigned as police protection for me, when the assumption had been that I was the Collector’s next target. Calvin left first, and I went to work maybe… fifteen minutes after.”
Oh.
“Calvin’s brother called,” I added.
Wainwright waited.
“When Calvin had gone downstairs to meet Rossi. I talked to Marc.”
“Go on.”
I slowly, reluctantly, slid back into my chair. “Marc’s in the city on business. He’s an architect. He wanted to speak with Calvin, but I didn’t think it was a good idea.”
“You told him as much?”
I considered my shortness with Marc at the Emporium. “Sort of. Over the phone I asked him to meet me at my antique store. I didn’t want Calvin to stress over family matters while he was so wrapped up in this case. They have an… estranged relationship.”
“Why?”
“Why do you think?” I shot back.
“You?”
“By proxy, yeah. I’m a threat to the picture-perfect all-American 1950s lifestyle the Winters try to present their family as being.” I shut up suddenly and stared at the dent in the middle of the metal tabletop. I hadn’t given Marc even a nanosecond of my time since I’d left the Emporium that morning. But wasn’t it odd… very odd… that after a year, he suddenly walked back into Calvin’s life within an hour of his disappearance?
If I hadn’t answered the phone, Calvin might have been missing now with no one the wiser. He’d have almost certainly met with Marc, if even for a few moments. Because Marc was his brother. Despite the emotional distance between them akin to that of a canyon, Calvin wouldn’t hesitate to get into a car with Marc. Except Marc had been with me at the time of those text messages and phone call from the Collector.
Another consideration. Calvin had a younger sister. Ellen. I think she was a CPA or whatnot at an international tax firm. Hirth & Lock—Hirth & Stock? Lock, Stock & Barrel? Something like that. Point was, she too had a sufficiently high-paying, impressive-sounding, and extremely white-collar career. She and Marc wouldn’t have callused hands like Calvin. Wouldn’t have bullet scars like Calvin.
Calvin, hero or not, stood out like a sore thumb in that family. He was the stereotypical middle child who couldn’t be as impressive as the firstborn, and who would never be as innocent as the baby. He was forever overlooked and underappreciated until he somehow let down the Winter name.
I wondered where Ellen was today…. Pennsylvania with the rest of the family? Or perhaps… did CPAs travel?
Was I really considering the possibility of Calvin’s siblings conspiring to kidnap him? Okay, maybe not kidnap him. Take him back to Pennsylvania—to his parents. To be talked straight, so to speak. Especially now that Marc knew we were engaged. The mere notion of Calvin being forced into some backward-ass therapy—to be conditioned to hate me, or hate himself—was enough to make me want to vomit. And I’d done that one too many times this week already.
My face must have blanched considerably while I worked through this possible motive, because Wainwright paused whatever line of inquiry he was on that I was ignoring to ask, “Are you all right?”
“No.” Wainwright stared at me for a beat, then added, “Not yet.”
Good. So he had plans to.
“Calvin also has a younger sister. Ellen. Except her last name is hyphenated. Winter-Brown.”
“Is she in the city too?”
“I don’t know. You should find out,” I answered.
“Why?” Wainwright asked. It wasn’t a simple inquiry. He was digging deep into human connections—untangling and interpreting motivation, reasoning, witnesses, clues—all from the words I said. Or didn’t say.
“Because I find it very strange that his brother, who hasn’t once picked up the phone to ask Calvin how he’s been in twelve months, is suddenly ready to make amends the same morning he goes missing. That’s why.”
Wainwright nodded, made a note on one of the sheets of paper, then asked, “How’s business?”
“Sorry?”
“You mentioned you had a shop.”
“It’s been fine,” I said warily, sensing a trap.
Wainwright clicked the pen again. “Victorian curiosities and oddities, is that right?”
“Do you have my tax returns in that folder too, chief?”
Wainwright chuckled. I was glad someone was getting a kick out of this waste of time. “You’ve been involved with the NYPD a few times, Mr. Snow. We notice things like that.”
“Even here, all the way downtown?”
“Even all the way down here, inside this ugly-as-hell Brutalist building,” he agreed, smiling. “For example, I noticed during your last three run-ins—”
“I’ve only had three run-ins,” I corrected.
Wainwright continued without amendment. “There were a number of extremely rare, highly valuable artifacts involved.” He regarded me with a very stern, cop-like expression. Calvin had used that same stare on me when he once upon a time didn’t like me so much.
I waited for Wainwright to continue.
“Detective Winter’s investigation notes suggest we ought to expect a similar occurrence again.”
“You mean, stumbling across a valuable artifact of American origin, circa 1837 to 1901?” I asked, feigning clarification.
“That’s right.”