“You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I’m sure,” she said. “Thank you for your concern.”
He told her good-bye and started off. He’d gone a few feet when Harper called after him. He halted, turned slowly, and returned. She thought she knew where she’d seen the face. Not certain, but if she was right, she couldn’t let this man simply walk away.
“If it’s not any trouble,” she said, coming to her feet. “I guess I could use a ride.”
TEN
February, Brickell Avenue, Miami
The man called Spider drove in silence, following Harper’s directions back across the causeway and onto the mainland. Out her window, there was a sad shimmer on the palms and roadside greenery, and though the sky was powder blue and cloudless, the light seemed oppressive, as though the sun were being suffocated by some universal force that only she could see.
Maybe this was to be the feel of the world from now on. Maybe her grief would permanently alter her vision the way a concussion can recalibrate the brain, cause a subtle slippage of gears, a new microscopic tremor in every frame of the film. Where even breathing becomes the solemn and tedious labor of someone trapped in an iron lung.
Spider turned into the Aqua parking lot and found a space in the guest area, turned the engine off.
“How did you know where I lived?”
He turned to her and gave her an anxious smile.
“You told me a while ago. You steered me here, turn by turn.”
“Did I?”
“I’m afraid you’re not thinking straight,” he said. “I mean, I’m a complete stranger. We just met at random. I could be anybody, I could mean you harm. You got in my car, let me drive you home. You’re muddled. It’s understandable, what you’ve been through. But still.”
“Do you mean me harm?”
He smiled, a nervous twitch in his lips. “Of course not. It’s just that because of your heartache, your loss, you’re confused and vulnerable. You need to be careful. You need to protect yourself. This is Miami, for god’s sake. Not the safest city.”
“Does this mean you don’t want to come up to my apartment?”
Spider looked out the windshield at the high-rise. In the afternoon sunlight Harper studied his profile. He had long, feminine lashes, and the angle of his long nose smoothly continued the slope of his forehead. From that angle and in that slant of light, his pale eyes seemed to have iced over, giving them a thin, foggy coating like cataracts.
On the back of her neck a set of cold fingers trilled a warning. She was no longer sure she recognized this face. Maybe he was right and this impulsive act of hers was a grave mistake.
“If you want me to, I’ll come up,” he said. “Only to make sure you get home safely. Nothing more than that.”
“I’ll make us some coffee.”
“No, I won’t come inside. Just ride up, see you to the door. Only that much.” He said it in an odd singsong as if making a vow to himself.
In the elevator he stood apart from her, cut his eyes to the stainless steel panel next to him.
On the seventh floor, Spider hung a few feet behind Harper, following her down the carpeted hallway to her door.
She fitted her key into the door and swung it open. In the kitchen, the blender was snarling at high speed.
“Come in,” she said. “I insist. Just for a minute.”
Maybe she was crazy, but after dragging the stranger this far, she had to double-check her hunch.
She called out a hello. The Cuisinart stopped, and a second later Nick appeared at the kitchen doorway, holding the glass jar of the blender.
“Nick, this gentleman was kind enough to drive me home from Sal’s.”
Nick nodded and said hello, but she could see from the subtle stiffening in his shoulders that Spider had tripped some alarm.
The two of them shook hands awkwardly.
“All this time you were at Sal’s? I was starting to worry.”
“Give him some of your protein shake, Nick. I need to take care of something.”
Spider cleared his throat and glanced around the foyer, his gaze settling on the bronze Buddha perched on the teak console table, then tracking across Nick’s collection of Asian watercolors, Japanese castles rising from mountain mists, two women in lavish kimonos standing shyly side by side, heads bowed, a landscape of Mount Fuji, a single owl on a branch printed on silk. Art from the Far East was one of Nick’s passions, rooted in his martial arts training and collected during his world travels.
As he stood engrossed before the wall of paintings, Spider withdrew into himself like one determined to memorize every detail laid out before him so he might recount them later.
Harper stepped down the hallway to the guest room, shut the door behind her, and went to the side table where Alvarez’s stack of photos lay facedown.
She fanned them out on the bedspread, eight shots from the night of the murders, most of her neighbors and a collection of strangers gawking from the sidewalk. She bent close and studied them, going from face to face until finally one stopped her. She took that photo to the sliding door that opened onto her balcony and drew open the shades and tilted the photo to the light and peered at the assembled spectators.
He was standing in the back row next to Teresa Wallace, who lived directly across the street. That night, Spider had been wearing a different guayabera, and his forehead gleamed in the rippling light. He seemed transfixed, more focused on the tragic event than any of the others around him. There was the blur of movement in the crowd, people speaking in whispers to the ones beside them. She could almost hear the murmur of empathy, a cringing sadness for the horror of what was unfolding before them. But there was no compassion in Spider’s face, only a stark, rigid focus, a narrowing of the eyes, not unlike the look she’d seen a few moments ago as he drank in every fabric, every shape and color and material in Nick’s apartment. A man mesmerized.
Nick sat at the kitchen table, drinking his blueberry-and-kale concoction, the same one he made every day, the morning paper open before him.
“Where is he?”
“Your friend left,” Nick said.
“Just now?”
“A minute ago.” Nick put down his glass. “What’s wrong?”
“We need to catch him. He’s involved.”
“Involved?”
Harper hustled to the door and stepped into the hallway. It was empty. Nick followed her to the elevators. The lighted panel showed both cars were in the lobby.
“You going to tell me what’s going on?”
“The guy was standing outside the house on Margaret Street the night of the murders. He was in the crowd shots Alvarez left. Bumping into him this morning, that wasn’t an accident. At the very least, the guy’s stalking me.”
Harper mashed the “Down” button once, twice, three times, but both elevator cars remained on the ground floor.
“The stairs,” she said.
Seven floors, rubber legged, Nick passing her halfway down. Out the front door, past the valet stand, trotting at half speed while they scanned the parking lot.
“In the guest lot,” she called to him, “second, third row.”
A moment later she spotted a man with his profile, same hair, same shirt, slipping between a row of cars. Not in a particular hurry, not looking back. A guy with nothing to hide. A few steps farther, she lost sight of him as he rounded the back of a parked UPS truck.
“Come on. That’s him.”
Harper broke into a sprint. After a few strides she could hear Nick breathing evenly a step or two behind.
At a shoulder-high hedge, she came to a halt. She’d lost him again. Nick stopped beside her. “Maybe he saw us, he’s hiding.”
“There.”
Twenty yards away, Spider appeared from behind an oversize SUV with darkened windows. Still sauntering. He didn’t look over. Stopped at the driver-side door of the car he’d been driving and dug out his keys.
Harper pushed through
the hedge, shifting into a brisk walk, no hurry now; she was well within range and didn’t want to spook him.
Ten yards away, as Spider fit a key to the lock, the windshield of the car beside him exploded. More slugs peppered the adjacent cars.
“Down, down.” Nick grabbed Harper and dragged her to her knees in the aisle of parked cars. She heard the scream of tires and the thuds of a dozen more rounds slamming into fenders and doors and trunks. Then everything was quiet again.
PART TWO
ELEVEN
February, Coral Gables, Florida
Alvarez said, “The shots came from that building, you’re sure of it? The yellow-and-white one?”
Harper said yes, as sure as she could be with it happening so fast.
Alvarez asked what floor the shooter was on.
Nick said, “How many times do you need to hear it? We didn’t see the shooter. We were hiding. We stayed down for five minutes, maybe longer.”
“You heard the actual shots?”
“No.”
“How do you know for sure the guy was in that building, not the next one over?”
Nick said, “We saw what we saw.”
“I think he was hit,” Harper said, “maybe a couple of times.”
“Yeah, yeah,” said Alvarez. “From the blood trail, looks like he was winged pretty good. He’ll be lying low somewhere unless he’s stupid enough to show up at a hospital.”
“He didn’t seem stupid. Brazen, maybe. Not stupid.”
“Before he was shot, while he was with you, Ms. McDaniel, driving over from the beach, he do anything physical? Touch you?”
“No.”
“Why?” Nick said. “You think he was planning to hurt her?”
Alvarez shrugged. “He was at the fire, and we’ve also spotted a man resembling him on two neighbors’ security videos, walking toward the McDaniel residence earlier that same evening, just after nine, a minute or two after Ms. McDaniel leaves for her fundraising party. They missed each other by a hair. Few days later, same guy shows up on Miami Beach, bumps into her, clearly no accident.
“What’s he up to? I see two possibilities. He wants to pick her brain, see what she might know about the investigation. Find out if he’s in danger, needs to run. So he’s insinuated himself in her life for information purposes. Second possibility, not one I like, maybe the guy’s not finished. Ms. McDaniel is his target. Maybe she was the primary target all along.”
“Harper the target? Why?”
“Can’t say for sure.”
“Then who shot him?”
“Don’t know yet, but look, I’ll put some men on you, Ms. McDaniel. Twenty-four-hour watch, a week or two until we sort this out.”
“Not necessary,” said Nick. “She has protection already.”
Harper asked him what protection he was talking about, but Nick said nothing more.
The next morning, Friday, Harper forced herself out of bed. Had silent coffee with Nick, read the morning paper, a front-page account of the mysterious shooting in the Aqua parking lot. No one hurt, several cars damaged by gunfire. Shell casings found in a ten-story empty condo next door. Miami PD had no comment on the incident at this time.
Harper sent Nick on his jog. She didn’t need around-the-clock babysitting. When he was gone, she took a seat at his Mac, logged on to her e-mail account, and read through dozens of notes of condolence, friends she hadn’t heard from in years. Answered most in a sentence or two.
She watched the cursor pulse, then on impulse, she tapped Ross’s name into the search window.
Thinking maybe she could bring alive some memory, some tangible scrap of him. She’d already exhausted the photos on her phone. Scrolled through them again and again, wept over each one, mined them for every association, every hour surrounding the split second when the image was captured.
Luckily, the Leica R8 she’d used to snap those final photos of Ross and Leo playing with shaving cream was still in the backseat of her car. For no good reason, she’d carried that old camera out of the house last week when she’d left for the charity event. Thank god for that. But those images of Ross shaving, Leo strapped to his chest, would have to wait until Harper was strong enough. And that could be a long while.
Every other scrap of their life together was lost. Albums, snapshots she’d developed herself, dozens of framed photos, even Ross and Leo babbling a recorded message to callers on their antiquated answering machine was lost in the fire.
She clicked on their joint bank account, knowing this was pointless masochism, but Harper found herself looking at the images of Ross’s checks, his handwriting, his signature, the wild inconsistent scrawl of a man dashing headlong through a chore he hated. Caught in a mindless pattern, she clicked and clicked. Phone bills, Florida Power & Light, the check for his credit card, their cable bill, their Internet bill.
Telling herself to stop but unable to, looking at just one more, and another. The hot pressure of tears building behind her eyes. Water bill, online movie streaming service, and then with a jolt, she realized what she was really doing.
Her heart rolled. She closed her eyes, settled her breath as the weight of this exercise became clear. For days she’d been feeling her way through the haze of anguish and confusion, fending off despair, thinking she was lost when all along she’d known this one thing was lurking just below the surface of her thoughts: a key.
She blinked away the mist in her eyes, straightened her shoulders.
She moved cautiously through the checks, one by one discarding them and moving on. She knew exactly what she was searching for, even knew the amount they paid once a year. But she couldn’t allow the word to take shape in her mind, as though it might somehow jinx this process.
She paged through the months until she reached the previous July, and there it was, the due date for their yearly bill. Eighty-nine dollars paid to Epic Enterprises. She stared at the image of the check.
For years, Ross used Epic as his cloud backup service. Any article he was writing was automatically saved and would still be alive on Epic’s server, flickering somewhere in cyberspace.
She navigated to Epic’s website, typed in Ross’s e-mail address, then tried his most common password. LovelyLeo#1.
Access denied.
She tried their landline number, another password they’d used off and on. Same thing, no access.
Their bank account password failed, as did the one they used for shopping websites.
She tried the oddball mixture of numbers, letters, capital and lowercase, with four asterisks in a row at the end. It was their top-level password for their single credit card. Same deal, access denied.
She scrolled through the company’s web page, located the customer-service number, and used her cell to call. She worked her way through Epic’s automated obstacle course and finally heard a human voice, a curt older woman.
Harper explained her dilemma, trying to access her husband’s account, didn’t know the password, tried several with no luck.
“The e-mail associated with the account?”
Harper gave it to her. The woman was clearly reading from a script.
“Your name?”
“Harper McDaniel.”
“No such name listed on the account.”
“It’s in my husband’s name. Ross McDaniel.”
“Unless your name is attached to the account, you’re not permitted access.”
“My husband’s dead. Murdered a week ago.”
There was a lengthy pause. This wasn’t on her script.
“Sorry for your loss,” she said, not sounding at all sorry. “But if the person on the account is deceased, I’ll need an official death certificate to release the password. Are you ready? I’ll give you the fax number.”
“Give me your supervisor, please.”
Without another word, the woman broke the connection and the empty line buzzed in her ear. She tamped down her fury and redialed.
It took her four more tries be
fore she found someone with enough daring to bend the rules. The employee sent the password to Ross’s e-mail. Harper got it and unlocked the Epic account, and there, filling the screen, was every file on Ross’s hard drive.
Pages and pages of JPEG icons, his collection of snapshots, more pages of music files, and, at the tail end, a single movie file.
On the final page were two folders of Word documents. One held all of Ross’s finished articles arranged by date. She ticked through them and saw the final one was titled “The Mobster Living Next Door.”
There was no rough draft of whatever he’d been working on next.
The other folder had its own password protection. But it opened on the first try. LovelyLeo#1.
Inside was a single document many pages long.
Leaning close to the computer screen, she scrolled quickly till she reached the end. Just over fifty pages. Most of it seemed to be notes about chocolate. Research on the history of cacao beans, methods of agriculture, names of manufacturers and chocolatiers.
At the very end of the file, Ross had made a short list. He’d labeled it Contacts. And he’d numbered the items, one to four. A person’s name, location, and contact information.
The first two were Jean Luc Diallo and Moussa Kouacou, both with addresses in the Ivory Coast.
The third was Adrian Naff with a Zurich, Switzerland, address.
And last was Jackson Sharp, living in South Florida.
She scanned the pages again, and her eye lit on a section set apart from the notes on chocolate. Ten pages, dialogue, scene, action. A different font and double-spaced. It looked like a short story embedded in the center of his research notes. It was dated early December, two months back. She read the first few pages. A scene set in a Denny’s restaurant in downtown Miami, told in the first person, as though the material was too raw to be handled in his detached newspaper-journalist voice.
TWELVE
Miami, Florida
“Know anything about chocolate?”
I didn’t care for Jackson Sharp’s pissy tone, but, hey, I’d agreed to meet the guy, listen to his tale, see if there was a story worth telling. So I was straining to be patient.
When They Come for You Page 6