One Small Sacrifice

by Hilary Davidson

  “Um, yes.” Diana gulped. “Sorry, I need to use the bathroom. I’ll be right back.” She dashed in and shut the door behind her. Alex heard the lock turn.

  He shrugged. “She was here when I came home,” he said. “I don’t know where she came from.” He handed his neighbor the signed book. “You are the best, by the way. For making people read this.”

  “I love it.” She held it up and gazed at the cover. It was a photograph Alex had taken in Aleppo, the ruins of a series of bombed-out apartment buildings at sunset; if you looked closely, there was a group of very young, malnourished kids playing in the wreckage. “I look at that photo and think of all my cousins who died in the war.” Her voice was soft. “I always wanted to think the world learned from that, but we’ve learned nothing.”

  “I used to think that if the public saw what was going on, wars would stop,” Alex said. “But that’s not what happens.”

  “History repeats itself,” Mrs. DiGregorio said.

  Alex took a deep breath. The book had been his attempt to communicate what life in a war zone was like. It had garnered a lot of media interest, but not for the reasons he’d hoped. It turned out that the public at large didn’t want to know about the omnipresent fear and the stench of rotting things and the bodies you stepped over because you were alive and you had to carry on. It overwhelmed him when he dwelled on it for too long. Emily understood; she was one of the few people he knew who truly did. She’d lived it herself, and that knowledge was in her bones.

  “Thanks again for sharing it,” he said.

  “Of course. Take care of yourself.” Her eyes darted toward the bathroom door. “And maybe lock down the silverware.” She gave Sid one last pat and headed out.

  After the room was quiet for a couple of minutes, Diana opened the door. “Is she gone?”

  “For now. So where was this clinic where you met Emily?”

  Diana ducked her head. “Sorry, I just made that up. That lady was . . . I don’t like being asked a lot of questions like that.”

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” Alex said. “I’m going to try calling Emily. I want to hear what she says about you.”

  “That would be great. Thank you.” For the first time, Diana’s anxiety appeared to abate. It was as if she wanted him to talk to Emily. While Alex’s inclination was to be suspicious of her, it almost made him think that she was telling the truth about being there to see his fiancée.

  “Don’t thank me yet. If she’s not there, I’m calling the cops.”

  Diana blanched at that. While he dialed, Diana examined the wall of bookcases. Neither Alex nor Emily had ever been interested in collecting possessions, so it hadn’t been hard to merge what they owned into Alex’s one-bedroom apartment. The one exception had been their books. They both liked to read on paper, and they found it hard to part with books even after they’d read them. One wall of the apartment was a mass of double-packed shelves, a haphazard blend of hardcovers and paperbacks; framed photos perched precariously at the outer edges, taking up every final inch of space. The most prominent shots were of a grade-school-age Alex hugging his mother, and a teenage Emily with her arms around her brother and their parents. But there were plenty of others, including a couple of Emily with her Doctors Without Borders colleagues and Alex’s friend Maclean holding up Sid in front of a burned-out wreck of a building in the Syrian city of Homs.

  Emily’s phone went straight to voice mail, again. He hung up and tried a text instead. Then he opened up his email and wrote a short message. I’d try carrier pigeon if I could, Alex thought, feeling his own fear for Emily’s safety rising again. I have to trust her. That’s all I can do. But in that moment, it wasn’t a reassuring thought.

  Diana suddenly made a strange sound, as if she were choking. She stepped back and tried to cover it up with a cough, but Alex realized she was staring at a particular photo. It was taken the day his friend Cori had dragged him to the Bronx Equestrian Center. In the shot, Alex looked terrified, as if he knew the horse was about to throw him; Cori, who’d been riding since she was six, looked coolly confident.

  Alex moved next to her. “You knew her?”

  She gave him a furtive look. “Cori Stanton. How did you know her?”

  “Before I had Sid, I had a dog named Lupo,” Alex said. “He was a rescue, too, and he had a lot of health problems. I met Cori at her father’s veterinary clinic.”

  “Cori was pushed off the roof of a building in Hell’s Kitchen,” Diana said softly. “It was this building, wasn’t it?”

  “She fell,” Alex answered brusquely. “No one pushed her.”

  He waited for Diana’s next question, but she didn’t speak. She picked up a miniature brass dinosaur but immediately dropped it. He noticed that her hands were shaking when she picked it up again. In that moment, Alex realized Diana had figured out exactly who he was. A hard lump formed in Alex’s throat, and he struggled to swallow it down.

  Diana dropped the brass figure again. “Sorry,” she muttered.

  “No worries.” Alex crouched to pick it up. The dinosaur was Emily’s; she had told him it was from a set she’d had as a child, but only a couple had survived into her adulthood: a stegosaurus and this greenish T-rex. He held it in the palm of his hand for a moment, wondering where Emily was and what she would think if she came back while this odd woman was waiting in her home. He didn’t notice that Diana had moved until he heard the front door open. As he turned his head, he caught a glimpse of Diana fleeing his apartment just before the door slammed shut behind her.

  MONDAY

  CHAPTER 4

  SHERYN

  Sheryn loved Monday mornings; from her perspective, the earlier they started, the better. At five thirty, she was up and heading into the shower. By six, Douglass had breakfast for four on the kitchen table, and she was dragging the kids out of bed. Come seven o’clock, Sheryn was in her car, driving south from Washington Heights, dropping off eight-year-old Mercy at her before-school program in Harlem and Martin at Hunter College High School on the Upper East Side. By the time she got to the Midtown North Precinct on West Fifty-Fourth Street, it wasn’t quite eight yet. It should’ve felt like a good morning, but it didn’t because thoughts of Alex Traynor were dogging her every step. She wasn’t satisfied with the answers she’d dug up so far about his weekend misadventure; there had to be something more. It was too odd, too out of character. She couldn’t let it slide.

  “Morning, Detective,” the desk sergeant greeted her as she walked in. “It’s going to be one of those days.”

  “When isn’t it?”

  “This one’s starting early. A woman called about her missing coworker, Emily Teare.”

  “Dr. Emily Teare?” Sheryn repeated. “As in, Alex Traynor’s girlfriend?”

  “You’re quick.” The sergeant handed her a folded note. “I took the call ten minutes ago. Lady who called is named Yasmeen Khan.”

  His words were like an electric shock jolting Sheryn’s spine, snapping her to attention. This was shaping up to be serious, her first real break in almost a year on the Traynor case. Something had gone wrong over the weekend; she was sure of it. It wasn’t a coincidence that the man was wandering around Times Square in the middle of the night while his girlfriend was suddenly missing.

  “Thanks,” she murmured, but she was already off and running. There was a catch in her chest when she got to her desk. It had been eleven months since she’d flagged Alex Traynor in the system, along with every close associate of his she could find. Any police contact those people had, no matter how insignificant—a noise complaint, a parking ticket—was routed to her desk. The call that had come in that morning was no small thing: a doctor named Yasmeen Khan who worked at NewYork-Presbyterian had called at seven forty-eight, asking how to file a missing persons report. She was worried about her friend and coworker Dr. Emily Teare.

  Sheryn called her back and got voice mail. Her first instinct was to hustle over to Traynor’s apartment, just a few
blocks away on West Forty-Eighth Street. But she didn’t have to be told that was a bad idea. Her new partner wasn’t even at his desk yet, and showing up solo could open her up to a charge of misconduct or even harassment. Alex Traynor had had a smart, tough lawyer in his corner when she’d investigated Cori Stanton’s death. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t use the slightest miscalculation or misstep on her part to screw her over. She couldn’t go after Traynor until she was damn good and ready.

  But she was too impatient to sit on her hands while waiting for a return call. Instead, she reclaimed her car and headed for the hospital where Dr. Khan worked. That took her up to East Sixty-Eighth Street, where a massive series of buildings between York Avenue and the East River made up NewYork-Presbyterian’s Weill Cornell Medical Center. In all her forty-three years, Sheryn had never set foot in the complex. She knew NewYork-Presbyterian’s outpost on West 168th Street all too well, since that was where some of the gunshot victims she interviewed ended up. The complex on the East Side was another world altogether, calm and serene, at least at this early hour. There was noise from the cars on the FDR, but also a view of the East River.

  Dr. Khan worked in the Brain and Spine Center. Sheryn found herself striding through a series of labyrinths to get there, which felt like a bad joke. I’m trapped like a rat in a maze, she thought. Sheryn had a fine sense of direction, if you left her outside. But malls and casinos and anywhere else devoid of natural light threw her off. The hospital, with its endless corridors lit with overly bright fluorescent light, made her disoriented. It was a relief to finally hit the right clinic.

  “I can’t believe you’re here in person!” Yasmeen Khan said, shaking Sheryn’s hand. “I got your message, and I . . . well, I was going to call you back, but I kept hoping Emily would call me first.” She was a short, solidly built woman with long black hair woven into an elaborate topknot. Her skin was sepia brown, and her long-lashed eyes were so dark the irises looked black. Sheryn pegged her at close to forty, and in the initial eyeball sweep she’d mastered long ago, she noted that the doctor wore expensive gold earrings and a bangle at one wrist, but no jewelry on her hands.

  “I take it that hasn’t happened.”

  “No.” The doctor shook her head. “I don’t know what’s wrong. Emily would never do this. I really think something’s off.”

  “Let’s start from the beginning, Dr. Khan.”

  “Please, call me Yasmeen. I hope I’m not wasting your time. Honestly, I’m worried that I’m overreacting. The main reason I called was because I wanted to find out how to file a missing persons report. For some reason, I thought you had to wait seventy-two hours.”

  “There’s no set amount of time in New York,” Sheryn said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  “I saw Emily at work on Friday,” Yasmeen said. “We’re good friends, but we didn’t get to talk much that day. That isn’t unusual. We both had busy mornings, and then I was out in the afternoon. But when I was leaving, I said, ‘See you tomorrow?’ and Emily said, ‘Definitely.’”

  “You had plans to meet Dr. Teare on the weekend?”

  “We have a standing date at nine o’clock Saturday morning. Emily’s my running partner. I’m training for my first half marathon.” She gave Sheryn a shy look. “You didn’t laugh.”

  “Why would I?”

  “When I started running, my husband told me I looked like a dumpling with legs,” Yasmeen said. “He’s my ex-husband now. But I still expect everyone to laugh at me like he did.”

  “Sounds like you’re well rid of him.”

  Yasmeen smiled. “Emily loves to run, but she wants to share that love of the sport too. She’s been helping me train for months.” Yasmeen’s face clouded over. “But she didn’t show up for our run on Saturday. I texted her but never heard back. I tried calling her a few times on Sunday, but the calls went straight to voice mail. Her phone didn’t even ring.”

  “And this is out of character for Dr. Teare?”

  “Definitely. She’s the most responsible person I know. If she makes a commitment, she will meet it, come hell or high water.” Yasmeen shook her head. “I actually checked to make sure she wasn’t in a hospital. I don’t know what I thought, maybe that she was hit by a car or something.”

  “You called really early. She might still come in today.”

  Yasmeen shook her head. “She should’ve been in at seven thirty this morning. Something is wrong.”

  “Has she missed work lately?”

  “I’ve known her for four years. In that time, she missed work once, because of food poisoning. Even then, she called in.” Yasmeen paused for a moment, frowning. “Before I called the police this morning, I tried her cell again. I also called her fiancé, but he didn’t answer. It made me wonder if something happened to both of them.”

  “Her fiancé?” Sheryn cleared her throat. “I didn’t realize Dr. Teare was engaged.”

  “Emily and Alex got engaged six weeks ago. She didn’t make a fuss about it, but she has a ring.”

  “How well do you know Alex Traynor?” Sheryn asked.

  “We’ve met several times. I really like him. They’re a great couple.” Yasmeen’s gaze dropped to the floor, which made Sheryn suspicious. There was a but in there somewhere, a qualifier that meant she’d seen something off about the relationship.

  “When did you first meet Mr. Traynor?”

  “In February, just after they moved in together. They threw a housewarming party. It was lovely.”

  Sheryn filed that bit of intelligence away for future reference. There was something ghoulish about hosting a housewarming party in the very building where Alex Traynor had thrown a woman off the roof. She’d been stunned when Emily moved in with him. It was one thing to alibi him, quite another to put yourself in a vulnerable spot. Then again, Sheryn had never understood the ladies who’d lined up to marry Charles Manson either.

  “Lovely,” Sheryn repeated. Her tongue felt like it was tipped in acid as it tapped against the roof of her mouth. “Have you socialized with him beyond that?”

  “We had dinner one night, the three of us,” Yasmeen said. “When my divorce was finalized.”

  “I know this is a tough question, but did you ever see any evidence that your friend was afraid of her boyfriend?”

  “Afraid of Alex? No, never.” Yasmeen sounded incredulous at the thought. Yet her hands moved anxiously as she spoke, reflexively touching her ring finger as if a band of gold was supposed to be there.

  “But?” Sheryn prompted her.

  “But what?”

  “I’ve been doing this job for fifteen years,” Sheryn said. “In my experience, most people, when they tell me a story for the first time, tend to leave some details out. They think they’re not important, or they’re worried about getting someone in trouble. What is it you’re not telling me? Everything was great, but . . .”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Yasmeen said. “It’s just . . . well, this one thing. Alex came here, to the office, on Friday.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “I don’t know. He walked in at lunchtime, around noon. He wasn’t here for long. They had a fight.” Yasmeen’s dark eyes were worried. “I don’t know what it was about. I didn’t hear details, just the shouting.”

  “They were shouting at each other?”

  “No,” Yasmeen said. “Alex raised his voice at Emily: ‘How could you do this?’”

  “Yelled it?”

  Yasmeen nodded. “Yes, he yelled it. He was upset about something.”

  “That’s why you called early this morning. That’s why you’re worried about your friend.”

  Yasmeen blinked at her. A shadow passed behind her eyes, and Sheryn leaned forward, ready to ask what else she was holding back. “I don’t want to get him in trouble,” Yasmeen said softly. “I know he’s had problems with the police before . . .”

  So that was it. Sheryn sat up straighter. “Don’t worry about that. Don’t even think about it
. Just be straight with me. Does Alex Traynor come into the office often?”

  “Not really, though sometimes he meets Emily after work. He doesn’t come in during the day, though. The only other time I can think of was on the anniversary of her parents’ death, in May.”

  Sheryn racked her brain, trying to pull up some detail about Emily’s family. “Haven’t her parents been dead for some time?”

  “Yes. A drunk driver killed them when she was in college. It’s always a hard day for Emily. She’s not someone who talks a lot about personal things, but I know she still struggles with this. Alex came in with flowers and took her to lunch. It’s so clear that he cares deeply for her.”

  “In other words, it’s rare for Mr. Traynor to come here,” Sheryn said, brushing aside any sentimentality. “His showing up on Friday was the exception, not the rule.”

  “That is true.”

  “So, Alex Traynor came by here on Friday and fought with Emily Teare. Then she disappeared by Saturday morning,” Sheryn mused.

  “I’m not saying their argument had anything to do with it.” Yasmeen looked startled. “That’s not what I meant. I truly doubt that it did.”

  “I’m a person of faith,” Sheryn said, “but there’s one thing I definitely don’t believe in, and that’s coincidence.”

  CHAPTER 5

  ALEX

  Alex slept badly that night, but when he finally started dreaming, it was of Emily. They were standing at the edge of a medieval monastery, looking out over a river. For a moment, while the scene came into focus, it felt as if they were in some romantic European village together. Then Alex looked beyond the river and saw New Jersey. He was dreaming of the Cloisters in New York’s Fort Tryon Park, which sat above the Hudson River. Only it wasn’t so much a dream as a memory: it was hot, and the sun was high in the sky, just as it had been on the August day they’d visited the museum. He looked at Emily beside him. Her dark-blonde hair was bleached by the intensity of the sunlight, like a halo. She was casually dressed in denim shorts and black sandals. Her white cotton T-shirt was knotted loosely at her waist. Even in the simplest clothes, Emily was dazzling to him. That had been true when he’d first met her in a makeshift medical unit in Syria; she’d been in blood-splattered scrubs. He could remember that, even in the dream. It was as if he were reliving the moment.