Ed began reading the list of names of men on the flight back from India with Faith. “Hi, I’m Jag Singh.” Ed paused and then crossed the name off the list. It took Ed another fifteen minutes to get through this list of names. Cole listened to each one with his eyes closed. He barely moved other than to breathe. “That’s all of them,” Ed said when he reached the end of the list.
Cole opened his eyes. If he was disappointed, he hid it well. He looked at Ed. “Go find a woman who could read the women’s names to me.”
“Any woman?”
“Any woman who can read,” Cole answered.
Ed returned with a uniformed officer whom they’d never met before. He escorted her to the chair he had been sitting in, across the table from Cole. “What’s your name?” Cole asked her as she sat down.
“Officer Jones,” she told him.
“Okay, Officer Jones,” Cole said, “did my partner tell you what we need you to do?”
Jones stared at Cole. “You’re the Memory Detective,” she said to him. “Is this about the bombing?”
“Yes,” Cole said to her. “I need you to read the names of the women on these lists. I want you to read each name as if it’s your own and you’re introducing yourself to me. You understand? Don’t go in alphabetical order. Pick the names at random.”
“Okay,” she said. She thought about asking why, but she looked at the expression on Cole’s face and thought better of it. Whatever the purpose was, she could tell it was important. Cole closed his eyes. Then he nodded to Officer Jones.
“Hello, I’m Mary Peters,” Jones said. Like Ed, she waited for a reaction.
“Keep going,” Cole said. “I’ll tell you when to stop.”
“Hello, I’m Linda Berring.” Cole sat in silence. Officer Jones kept going. Ed was conscious of how little time they had left and of how much time this was taking. He had to hope the other investigators were having more luck. They were spreading out, trying to interview Faith’s friends and coworkers about her trip to India. Cole insisted that they weren’t going to find anything. He tried to clear his mind and focus everything on any hint of recognition.
Officer Jones made it through the entire first list. Cole felt nothing. He opened his eyes, grabbed the second list, and slid it over to her. “Now this one,” he ordered.
“Am I doing okay?” Jones asked before she started.
Cole nodded. “You’re going great. Just keep reading.”
The officer started anew. She was about a third of the way through the list when she read the name. “Hello, my name is April Eliot,” Jones intoned in as friendly a voice as she could muster after already reading more than a hundred and twenty names.
As soon as she said the name, Cole lifted his hand into the air. “Say it again,” he ordered her. “Introduce yourself again.”
“Hello, I’m April Eliot,” Officer Jones said, this time a bit of fear trickling into her voice.
“No,” Cole said. “It’s not a question. Say it the way you said it the first time.”
Jones cleared her throat. “Hello, my name is April Eliot,” she repeated with as much confidence as she could muster. Both she and Ed were staring at Cole. His eyes were still closed and his hand was still raised in the air.
A sound rang inside Cole’s head when he heard April Eliot’s name. He couldn’t place it exactly: music, but strange music. It wasn’t an instrument that Cole recognized. He simply heard a haunting, dissonant melody. It only lasted a second or two. Then, when Officer Jones said the name again, it triggered the same memory. A few of the other names had triggered memories, but they were all ones that Cole already recognized. When you have the memories of over a dozen people in your head, lots of names will mean something—but Cole was looking for something new. That music. Cole had never heard that music before. “I think that’s it,” Cole said. He opened his eyes.
“Should we go through the rest of the list?” Ed asked him, staring down at the names that Officer Jones hadn’t crossed off yet. “Should we make sure that none of the others do anything for you?”
Cole shook his head. He was certain. “We need to find everything we can about April Eliot.” He looked at his watch. “Tell everyone,” he said to Ed. “We need to know who she is, what she does, where she lives, who her friends are, where she’s from. Most of all, we need to find out what she was doing in India. Social media. Get me into her Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook accounts and whatever else she might be on.”
“You think she’s the bomber?” Ed asked Cole. Jones simply stared at the two of them, unsure of what was happening in front of her.
“I don’t know, but I think she knows something. I heard music, some sort of Indian music. Faith was with her in India. They shared something there. Let’s move. We don’t have much time.” Cole stood up. He looked down at Officer Jones. “Thank you,” he said to her. “You may have saved a lot of lives today.”
Chapter 31
SEVEN HOURS UNTIL THE SECOND BOMBING
They knew they didn’t have much time. They knew the clock was ticking. The image was in all of their heads: a giant red countdown timer from a movie, quickly ticking off seconds and moving closer and closer to zero. Other than Cole’s memory, and the fact that April had flown to India three days before Faith, they didn’t have anything to connect the two of them. They didn’t find anything about April’s trip to India on any of her social media pages. The trip was like a black hole in her life. That’s why they were confident it was her: She’d gone to India for almost three weeks and didn’t say a word about it to anyone. She had been active on social media before her trip, but her activity almost completely dried up after it. The pattern was identical to Faith’s. That coincidence, along with Cole’s connection, was too much to ignore. Like Cole said, if she wasn’t the bomber herself, she damn well knew something about them.
A team of investigators descended on April’s Upper East Side apartment. They weren’t sure if she, or anyone else, would be in the apartment when they arrived. They didn’t know if the apartment itself would be booby-trapped, so a team of bomb squad members moved in first. They made Cole stay behind, far from the scene. If they didn’t find any clues in the apartment, the memories in Cole’s head of Faith’s interactions with April were their best lead, even if he was still having trouble remembering them. April’s small one-bedroom apartment was one of more than sixty in the building, an old high-rise with a stone entryway, small windows, skinny hallways, and a twenty-four-hour doorman. The investigators didn’t want to draw too much attention to their search in hopes that, if April wasn’t in her apartment, she wouldn’t be tipped off. They didn’t want to do anything that might make her speed up her plan. They needed every second they could get—but they didn’t have time to do this with complete stealth.
The bomb squad team had five members and a robot. Everyone knew they were working on a tight deadline so the bomb squad was going to have to risk their lives in the interest of time. They likely wouldn’t have time to use the robot, but if it became clear that April’s apartment posed a greater risk than April herself, they could use it to defuse the explosive device. Hundreds of people were in the apartment building, not to mention the adjacent buildings, when the bomb squad went inside.
Cole was a block and a half away when the bomb squad entered April’s building. Since he knew that in the best-case scenario, they wouldn’t let him into April’s apartment for half an hour, he took a walk toward First Avenue, hoping that a coffee shop or a corner store might trigger some of Faith’s memories. That was even assuming she had spent any time with April near her apartment. The sun was up but it was still early enough on a Sunday that most of the people out on the street were either jogging or walking their dogs. Most of the stores were still shuttered, their metal grates pulled down and locked. The diners, coffee shops, and bagel shops were open, though. Cole walked toward the closest one, a bagel place on the west side of the street, and went inside. A small line had formed, customers waiting
their turn to order their Sunday morning bagel and coffee. Cole got on line behind them. He wanted everything to be as normal as possible, or at least to feel as normal as possible. The more normal it was, the more likely it might trigger a memory. Despite his efforts, Cole had trouble feeling normal. In the back of his mind, he couldn’t stop listening for an explosion.
Cole looked at the faces of the people in front of him, hoping that he might recognize one of them. A few looked familiar, but that’s what happens when you have the memories of dozens of people, most of whom lived and died in New York. Everybody on line at the bagel store on a Sunday morning begins to look familiar, from the old man carrying the newspaper under his arm to the nurse in his green uniform on his way to his Sunday shift to the woman in her twenties who lived on the Upper East Side because it was still one of the cheapest places in New York to rent an apartment in a doorman building. The line slowly shuffled forward.
“What can I get for you?” the man behind the counter asked Cole when it was his turn.
“Egg, tomato, and cheese on a toasted everything,” Cole ordered, “and a black coffee.” He surprised himself by not ordering an egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich, but he had simply let the order come out. He hoped it might be the start of something. It took only a few moments to realize it wasn’t. By the time the man behind the counter handed Cole his order, he knew that nothing more was going to come. Cole walked over to the cash register and paid for his breakfast. He still hadn’t heard any explosions. At least that was a good sign.
Cole walked back toward the bullpen where the other investigators were waiting. Ed was there with them. Cole walked up to Ed. “You want an egg sandwich?” Cole asked Ed, offering up the brown paper bag.
“You don’t want it?” Ed asked as he reached for the bag.
Cole shook his head. “I don’t like tomatoes. I don’t like the seeds.”
Ed pulled the sandwich out of the bag. “Then why the hell—” he started to ask, but then thought better of it. He could tell that Cole wasn’t going to know. “Thanks,” Ed said instead.
“Anything yet?” Cole asked.
Ed shook his head. “They’re in the apartment. Last I heard they thought it would be another ten minutes.”
So they waited. Cole could tell that every one of them was wishing for the same thing he was. Quiet. They all just wanted peace and quiet. A few minutes into their wait, Cole heard one of the officers’ radios crackle. “All clear,” the voice on the radio said. “We’re ready for you.”
That’s all they needed. The investigators, along with Cole, all began their sprint toward the apartment building. If there was anything inside to find, they needed to find it, and they needed to find it fast.
April’s apartment was on the fifth floor. Half the team took the stairs, while the others, including Cole, took the elevator. Everyone arrived at the apartment at about the same time. The bomb squad team was standing by the door. “We feel good about the sweep,” their leader said before letting them in, “but if you see anything suspicious, wires or chemicals, call us back in. We’ll be right here.” The truth was that they didn’t want to leave. They still wanted to help, even if they’d already done everything they could. Unless you were doing something, you felt powerless. Cole knew that feeling. It had been gnawing at him for days. The others were lucky, though. At least they didn’t have firsthand memories of the last bombing.
The team entered April’s apartment. What was a terrorist’s apartment supposed to look like? While the rest of the team rushed in and immediately started rifling through drawers and closets, looking for diaries, notebooks, diagrams, schedules, anything that might give them clues as to April’s plan, Cole did the opposite. He entered the apartment last, slowly. At first, he didn’t touch anything. He simply walked into the middle of the apartment and looked around, trying to take in every detail.
The apartment had a view of the East River from the kitchen window. The other windows looked across a narrow alleyway at a similar apartment building. The walls were painted a powder blue with white trim. Cole guessed that April, or maybe April’s parents, had chosen that color. It was pleasant, and brightened the apartment, which was useful because her small windows didn’t let in a lot of light. Her kitchen table and bookshelves were white but Cole could see plywood where they were chipped. He assumed they were from Ikea. Her gray pullout sofa looked a little bit more substantial, though not new. Cole guessed that it was a hand-me-down. The sofa faced a television screen hung on the wall about ten feet away. If the sofa was pulled out, there would barely be room to walk around it to get to April’s bedroom. Her bed was neatly made, with white sheets with yellow flowers on them. Next to her bed was a small nightstand and across from it was a dresser, all again likely from Ikea.
Cole took a deep breath, trying to see if he could recognize the smell of the apartment. A flash of laughter ran through his head but disappeared as fast as it came: two women laughing together. It had to have been Faith and April. Faith had been here. Cole walked into the bedroom and sat on the bed, thinking that any change of perspective could trigger something more. He almost began to believe that Faith’s memories were hiding from him, trying not to out her friend, but he knew memories didn’t work that way. Whatever was going on in his head, his brain was causing it; his brain wasn’t letting him get to these memories. Nothing more came to him from sitting on the bed, so he stood up again.
Cole walked over to the bookshelf next to the television in the living area. The shelves held few tchotchkes, souvenirs from different parts of April’s life, some pictures, and a few books. Cole wondered what type of books a woman of April’s age kept on her bookshelves. He assumed she would have done most of her reading on electronic devices, so these would be as much decoration, as much sending a message to anyone who visited her, as anything else. He expected to see her favorite novels, perhaps a copy of Pride and Prejudice, or maybe a Bible or some other religious book or book of poetry. Instead, there was a strange amalgamation of world history books, math books focused on probability, and science books about the history of the universe. Cole heard a voice: “It’s all random. Everything. It’s all chaos.” The voice was soft. It didn’t sound angry or excited. If anything, it sounded sad.
Then another, different, voice: “But it’s beautiful or at least it can be.” Even though the words were hopeful, this voice sounded sad too.
The first again: “That depends where you look and how close. Anyway it’s all going to get worse. Chaos eats everything.” Cole knew that it was Faith and April again.
The second voice—Cole was pretty sure that this was April: “We can fight the chaos.” She didn’t sound as certain as her words implied.
“Can we?” the first voice finally responded.
“Or should we just embrace it,” Cole mumbled to himself, even though he had no idea where the words came from. He pulled a book off the shelf and began flipping through the pages. He thought that if Faith had read any of these books, more memories might come. They didn’t, but as he read random passages, he began to feel cold, like the sun was setting all around him.
Cole put the book back on the shelf. “We found a laptop,” one of the other team members shouted from the bedroom. Cole looked over. They’d dug a laptop out of one of the dresser drawers. April hadn’t left it out on the kitchen table but she also hadn’t worked too hard to hide it. The officer with the laptop ran over and handed it off to one of the others, apparently the person most likely to be able to get through any passwords or firewalls.
Cole continued to eye the items on the shelf. There were a few pictures of April in different locations, smiling with family and friends. In one, April had her arm around another woman who, based on likeness, must have been her sister. They were standing on an observation deck, overlooking a waterfall. In another, April stood in a similar pose with her mother and father in front of the ocean. April’s head was turned to one side so that she could kiss her father on the cheek. Faith wasn’t
in any of the photos.
Starting at the bottom shelf and working his way up, Cole began to eye the various tchotchkes. His eyes glossed over an assortment of candles and dishes. On the top shelf, his eyes landed on a small statue, carved out of wood and stained a deep red. The statue depicted someone—Cole couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman—with four arms, dancing in a red ring on top of the prone body of a small child. “That’s Shiva,” one of the other cops said to Cole as he stared at the statue. Cole didn’t hear him. He had already been sucked into a memory.
It was nighttime and there were voices everywhere. Cole was running through the streets. Nobody looked at him as he passed them. He was out of breath but kept on running. He looked back. Two men were chasing him. Nobody was stopping them. Cole tried to make eye contact with people as he ran. Nobody would look him in the eye. Nobody would help him. He kept running. He was small, smaller than the people chasing him. He kept turning from one street to the next until he turned down a street that led nowhere. At the end of the street was a wall. Cole still ran, ran all the way to the wall and turned around.
The Murderer's Memories Page 19