by Tim Weaver
‘Why?’ Houser had asked.
‘I need some video.’
She’d eyed him suspiciously.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It won’t affect what I’m doing for you.’
‘So what’s the case?’ But almost as soon as she asked, the answer had come to her. ‘Wait, are you still trying to work that thing with the artist?’
‘It probably won’t lead anywhere.’
‘But it might?’
Travis shrugged. ‘It might.’
Her eyes had stayed on him for a moment, a conflict playing out behind them. ‘I gotta ask, Frank. You’re not going to screw this up for me, are you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d never do that.’
‘Because I just took you up there to Walker, to McKenzie, and vouched for you. You know they’ll have me on traffic duty if anything blows back.’
‘It won’t. You have my word.’
And he’d meant it, and that had been enough for Houser.
Travis refocused on his laptop. In the folder marked ‘Montauk’ there were two files. The first was labelled ‘10/30/21 a.m.’ and, when Travis double-clicked on it, it opened onto a shot of Montauk harbour: the parking lot, a ticket office fringed with a green awning, a jetty extending out into the water, and a boat with CROW LINE printed on the side.
The video started at 7 a.m., an hour before the ferry left for Crow Island and, for the most part, the parking lot was empty. Putting the speed up to 2x, and then 4x, Travis watched the image: he could see the ferry’s ramp, its interior big enough to take between twenty and twenty-five vehicles, depending on their size; he could see crew members milling around; and, at the edges of the shot, he could just about make out some cars waiting to get on.
At 7.30 p.m., he switched back to normal speed, pulled in his notebook and flicked through to a page, somewhere near the back, where he’d written the cell-tower ping locations for Johnny Murphy and his sister. They mapped a trail all the way along the Expressway to Montauk, then out to Crow Island.
Onscreen, the ferry started to load.
There weren’t many vehicles going out, because 30 October was the last day of the season, which made it even easier to spot the one he wanted.
A Jeep Cherokee.
Using another temporary login that Houser had set up for him, so he could gain access to DMV records, he double-checked the licence plate, making sure the Cherokee was definitely the same one that was registered to Rebekah Murphy. It was. Her DMV entry listed her by her married name, Russo, but he knew – from talking to her friend Noella – that she’d switched back to her maiden name after splitting from her husband. The Jeep disappeared into the bowels of the ferry, and then, just before 8 a.m., the ramp was raised. Pretty soon, the ferry was chugging out of Montauk.
The video ended.
He opened the second, marked ‘10/30/21 p.m.’ The timecode said it was 7.30 p.m. After a couple of minutes the ferry started its slow emergence from the darkness, forming like a monster from the sea bed. Just before 8 p.m., it began manoeuvring into its slot at the same jetty.
Travis slowed the video right down.
The ramp dropped, revealing all the cars and vehicles that had come back to the mainland for winter. He watched them emerge, guided out by one of the crew, and each time one appeared Travis would take a note of the licence plate. More had come back than had gone out: the last ferry of the season would have returned people who’d been staying on the island.
But there was no Jeep Cherokee.
This was what he’d spent his retirement thinking about, the hunch slowly forming at the back of his mind: Johnny Murphy and his sister had never come back. It was why the BOLO he’d put out had never got any hits in Connecticut. It meant, if they actually went to Stamford, it was in another car – but, more likely, they’d never left the island at all.
It was just their phones that had.
It was a set-up, an attempt to throw the cops off the scent, and have someone like Travis looking in totally the wrong direction.
And, for a long time, it had worked.
His blood hummed into life as he minimized the video and returned to his browser. He went back to the DMV records and inputted the licence plates for all of the vehicles he’d seen come off the ferry on 30 October. Every time he brought up a new person, he returned to the video to compare and contrast the photograph on the driver’s licence with as much of the driver’s face as was visible on the video. It was slow work.
After a few minutes, Gaby came through from the living room, TV remote in her hands. ‘Are you coming to watch the movie, Dad?’
‘Definitely. Just give me five more minutes, sweetheart, okay?’
The interior of some cars was clearer than others, but most he could see some of, certainly enough to match the driver to the DMV version of them with a fair degree of accuracy.
But there was one that didn’t fit.
It was a white Chevy Traverse. The DMV said the vehicle belonged to a Karl Stelzik, but Stelzik was grey-haired and in his sixties; the man on the video, driving Stelzik’s car, was younger – late thirties, black hair, bright eyes.
Travis switched browser windows.
Logging into the NYPD database, he put in a search for Stelzik to see if there had been any flags against his name – a record, an arrest, anything.
He found something else instead.
Stelzik was missing too.
7
* * *
THE SECRET
64
Rebekah sat with Frank Travis in the shadow of the lighthouse and watched as the police got closer, shimmering into existence fifty miles out. There were five boats, one carrying two patrol cars and an ambulance, as well as what Travis said was a mobile crime lab.
He was quiet alongside her, as if conscious of not crowding her. After he had shot and killed Lima at the sawmill, he’d guided her away from the body, back towards the Cherokee. But as he made the 911 call on his cellphone, Rebekah could hold back no more: she started to sob. Even though Travis was midway through a conversation, he came back, pulled open the door and placed a hand on her shoulder. And when his call was over, and the cops were on their way, he remained in the same spot, keeping his silence, letting her cry.
Eventually she asked if she could use his cell to call home. He handed it to her and told her he’d give her some privacy, going back to where Lima’s body lay, and she sat there for a moment, just staring at the phone, not quite believing no one was going to stop her. I get to talk to my girls. This is everything I’ve been waiting for. She’d believed the same thing with Caleb, inside his shack, but that opportunity had been snatched from her. This time, there was no one to get in her way. All she had to do was dial.
Except she didn’t know what she would say.
How could she ever explain a five-month absence in the lives of two girls too young to understand? For Kyra and Chloe, it would be black and white.
One day, their mother had walked out on them.
And she hadn’t come home.
Just hearing their voices will be enough for now.
But she couldn’t remember cellphone numbers for Noella, or for Gareth, and when she thought of Gareth, she kept thinking of the email she’d found in Karl Stelzik’s Inbox. She looked up, into the long grass, and saw Travis wading through it. She didn’t know him, but there was something about him she trusted, and that meant she didn’t need to worry about what Gareth might or might not have done. Not for now. Travis would protect her from Gareth, from anyone else who might still want to hurt her, or why would he have come all this way? Why work her case? Why stop the men who were trying to kill her?
She looked at the cell again and put in the number for the brownstone. Her thumb hovered for a second above Call and then she dialled.
It just rang. No answer.
Heart beating fast, she hung up, wondering what the lack of an answer meant, panicking that it meant something bad, and then she calmed herself and call
ed directory assistance. She didn’t know Noella’s number off by heart. The operator rerouted her, and Rebekah listened again to a long line of rings until, this time, it hit a machine.
‘Hey, this is Noella. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you.’
The sound of Noe’s voice made her tearful again, but Rebekah hung up before the tone, not wanting a recorded message to be the way in which Noe – or anyone else in her life – found out she was still alive. As a last resort, she dialled assistance again and asked to be connected to Mendelson, the ad agency Gareth worked for. When an operator picked up, Rebekah asked for him.
‘I can’t connect you, ma’am,’ the operator said.
‘Why not?’
‘I’m afraid we don’t have anyone of that name here any more.’
Rebekah frowned. ‘What?’
‘Gareth Russo left the business at the end of February.’
‘What? Where did he go?’
‘I don’t have that information, I’m afraid.’
Rebekah killed the call, her head swimming, a flutter of nausea in her throat. Gareth had left his job – for another? Or did it mean he’d left New York entirely? Had he taken the girls with him? She tried to recall the name of the place Noella worked at, tried to think of anyone else in the life she’d had before this one whom she could possibly call.
‘You all right, kiddo?’ Travis asked, as he got back to the car.
‘I can’t get hold of anyone.’
She didn’t want to break down again. She knew she was so much stronger now, so different from the person who’d first been abandoned on the island. But now she was so close to going home, to seeing her girls – so close to this nightmare finally being over – her whole body felt like it was trembling.
‘It’s okay,’ Travis reassured her.
‘I just want to speak to them.’
‘I know you do.’
‘I can’t get hold of my ex, or my best friend.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get hold of them for you, okay?’
‘They said Gareth moved, and I don’t know if they mean –’
‘Rebekah.’ When she stopped, he smiled, told her to breathe. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘You don’t need to worry any more. You’re going home tonight.’
Going home, just without my brother.
‘Do you know where Johnny is?’
‘No,’ Travis said. ‘Not yet.’
It looked like he was desperate to add something else, some theory that might explain what had happened to Johnny, some small sliver of hope – but he obviously couldn’t come up with anything. Across five months, Rebekah had allowed herself to taste some of that hope. She’d even allowed herself to picture an escape – a courageous act of survival on Johnny’s part – where he’d made it out alive.
Except it had always felt like a fantasy.
Once she’d made the decision to drop her suspicions about him – to embrace what she knew in her heart was true about her brother – she realized there was no way that Johnny would ever have left her behind, even if he feared she was dead. He would always have come back for her.
The reason he hadn’t was obvious.
65
Travis told her they should go and fetch his car from where he’d left it – on the Loop, north of the sawmill – and then they drove back to the lighthouse, where he’d told the cops to arrive. Soon, the Dodge Ram emerged into view at the edge of the road, its crushed hood, its shattered windshield. As Rebekah saw the empty driver’s side, she felt a sudden flash of alarm. ‘What about Hain?’
Travis looked at her. ‘He’s missing.’
‘Missing?’
‘He was already gone from the pickup when I drove past earlier.’
Travis was right: there was no Hain, only the evidence of him. A faint trail of blood led away from the driver’s side door, across the road in the direction of the lighthouse. When they parked up and got out, Travis swept the building for any sign of him, but all he found was more blood, heading past the lighthouse to the edge of the water.
‘Was a boat ever docked here?’ he asked Rebekah, clearly thinking Hain might have commandeered one – except Rebekah couldn’t remember. She’d been past the lighthouse so many times, but she’d either never seen a boat or never thought to look for one: boats had quickly become a reminder of her failure and a symbol of her fear.
They stood there for a while, looking in the direction Hain might have tried to head, searching for any evidence of a wake, or a hint of a swell – but the sea was vast, and grey, and entirely untouched.
‘He could still be on the island,’ Rebekah said, horrified at the idea.
‘And if he is, they’ll find him,’ Travis replied, gesturing to the water, to the police boats coming towards them. ‘If he’s injured, he won’t be able to get far. And if he’s hiding out, they’ll use the dogs. His scent’s all over the pickup.’
At the mention of dogs, Rebekah thought of Roxie, of locking her inside the room at the hostel, of her still being there, and her heart plunged. Barely able to get the words out fast enough, she told Travis about her, where she was, and Travis assured her they would go back for her, once the authorities had arrived. ‘We’ve got to wait and see how the cops want to play it first,’ he added.
They were quiet for a time, their silence comfortable, and then, slowly, they started talking about the island, about the events that had led up to Rebekah being left behind, about how she’d survived alone for so long. They talked about the night that Hain and Lima had come ashore, looking for a body to bury, and then of Caleb, and Rebekah remembered that she’d left him injured at the shack. Travis called one of the cops he’d been in contact with and told them to send a paramedic straight to Helena and, soon after, they saw one of the boats veer off towards the harbour.
‘How did I get left here, Frank?’
He nodded, as if he’d been expecting the question. ‘I called around and the people here at the harbour, they’re supposed to keep records of the licence plates that enter and leave the island so they know who’s gone and who still remains. I mean, that seems a pretty essential tool when you’re this far from the mainland in a place that closes for five months a year. But, from the calls I made, it seems those records stopped being taken some years ago. The vast majority of people who come here are fishermen, and they all have their own transportation so the island authorities became sloppy.’
Rebekah’s head dropped.
‘I’m sorry, kiddo.’
‘So how did you find me?’ she asked.
‘You heard of someone called Louise Mason?’
Her thoughts went to the corridor in the hostel, to the wall of paper she’d mounted. She’d never known Louise’s surname until now, and she’d never been on Rebekah’s suspect list, but a piece of string had branched out from Louise to a name that was.
Her brother’s.
‘She was the woman Johnny dated.’
‘Right. She disappeared back in September.’
‘She’s missing too?’
Travis nodded again. ‘Your brother was one of the last people to see her alive. For a time, I’ll admit, I thought Johnny might have had something to do with it. I got this anonymous call that kind of turned everything on its head, so I went back in and looked at him again. That was when I found out that he – and you – had been missing since October thirtieth. Three disappearances, and two of the people unaccounted for – Louise and your brother – had a clear and obvious connection.’ He grimaced, as if he didn’t like having to remember some of the theories and decisions he’d made before this moment. ‘I’m starting to wonder if my anonymous caller might have been one of the two men who came here to find your body today. I can’t imagine why, but maybe they felt I was getting too close to them. Maybe they needed to shift the blame to Johnny to protect themselves.’
Travis then started telling her about the cell-tower pings: ‘Something always bugged me about them – why Connecticut? You two had n
o links there, far as I could tell. I got no hits on your Cherokee up in Stamford or anywhere nearby – I even checked in with state troopers after I retired, and that was still the case in February and March – so I started to think it might just have been another diversion. I knew I was right when I got hold of some video from a security camera at Montauk harbour, taken on October thirtieth: Lima came off that boat behind the wheel of Stelzik’s Chevy. He took both your cellphones to Connecticut to throw cops like me off the scent, knowing they’d ping towers all the way there. From what you’ve said, it sounds like Hain wanted him to bring your car, but Lima forgot to get the keys from you before he tried to kill you, so I guess he figured getting rid of Stelzik’s Chevy was the next best thing. Either way, the plan would have been the same: ping the towers and lead the cops to a dead end in another state.’
He smiled, but it was sad, almost an apology. ‘I watched that video from Montauk a week ago, and waiting a week to come out here, it felt like a year. I can’t imagine what it’s been like for you. If I was still on the force, I could have got boats in the water straight away to come here with the troops and find out what happened. I thought about alerting a friend of mine – she’s a cop at the NYPD – but, I don’t know, she was … It wasn’t …’ He seemed conflicted.