by Chris Pavone
With that first big check he’d gotten a sudden urge to learn to fly, either because of or despite JFK Jr.’s memorable disappearance into the Long Island Sound, one of the flight paths the author started taking regularly. His wife refused categorically to get into any aircraft piloted by him, ever. But there were plenty of other people in New York who were willing to keep him company on tours up the Hudson Valley, over the Catskill Mountains, out to the Vineyard.
The flight from the DC suburbs to the countryside of the Eastern Shore was short and quiet, the landing uneventful, the taxi out to the Delaware beach house exorbitant. He spent a few days in seclusion. He stood on the cold bleak December beach for hours, gazing at the Atlantic. Being seen by the neighbors: the old couple down the shore who took out their big standard poodle at dusk; the platinum-blonde boob-jobbed realtor who power-walked, fists pumping, clutching dainty little dumbbells. Pink dumbbells.
At the general store, in front of the dairy case in the rear corner, he broke down sobbing. This was witnessed by a handful of people, one of them the local gossip, who he was certain would be more than willing to share her theories with the police, in the coming days.
He wrote a rambling emotional letter addressed to “Everyone,” and a separate, very short note to his ex-wife, apologizing “for everything.” He left both on his dining table, under a conch shell.
He registered an early-morning sightseeing flight, and set off past the southern reaches of Delaware, following the Maryland coastline past Assateague and Chincoteague, out over the uninhabited barrier islands and marshes that separate the Eastern Shore of Virginia from the Atlantic Ocean, vast stretches of coastal wilderness, uninhabited and unmonitored.
It was a beautiful morning for flying.
Somewhere in that thick stretch of wetlands, the Piper went down. There was nothing in the voice-recorder that suggested any problem with weather, or turbulence, or pilot distress, or the aircraft; there was nothing in the forensic examination that indicated any mechanical malfunction. As far as anyone could surmise, the crash must have been intentional.
The plane broke apart on impact, a total wreck. The body, of course, was never recovered.
The Accident Page 134
Dave rubbernecked around to try to catch a glimpse of the street sign he’d just passed. He didn’t know where he was going. The old silver convertible was Charlie’s car, a toy given to a spoiled child by an indulgent mother. Dave didn’t have a car of his own, and hadn’t done much driving in Ithaca, and none of it in this area up the lakeshore.
In the backseat, both the girl and Charlie had their heads lolled back, perhaps passed out. Or maybe they were asleep. Or just staring up at the sky, letting the wind wash across their hot faces on a muggy May night.
Then Charlie stirred, jolted alert by a quick turn around a long bend. Dave looked in the rearview, saw that Charlie was leaning over the girl, with a hand on one of her breasts. She didn’t appear to be awake.
“Not cool,” Dave said, softly.
Charlie looked up, caught Dave’s eye in the mirror. Put his finger up to his lips, shhh. He turned his attention back to the girl, beginning to undo buttons, then his hand was inside her bra. Her neck was leaning on the leather headrest, head angled in a passed-out pose, mouth agape, chest rising and falling with quick shallow drunken breaths.
“Charlie,” Dave said, trying to project warning into his voice.
But Charlie ignored it. He started fiddling with the clasp of her bra, a front-loader.
The Accident Page 135
“Charlie,” Dave said, more insistently.
That’s when she came to, startled. She jerked her head upright, and she saw what was going on. She took a second to digest the situation, and she realized it was not good. She had no clue where she was, in the backseat of some car with her breasts hanging out and some drunken lecherous guy leaning over her. She looked to the side and saw an unfamiliar landscape, no streetlights or buildings. For all she knew she was in the middle of nowhere, with two men she didn’t know.
“Stop,” she said. “Stop the car.” She was panicked.
“It’s okay,” Dave said, trying to sound reassuring.
“Stop this fucking car, right now,” she said, pushing herself back into her bra and fumbling with the clasp. But she was nervous and kept losing her grip and couldn’t get the thing closed.
“Okay,” Dave said. But they were going around another long curve, not a good place to stop, too dangerous in the middle of the night. So he kept driving, slowing, until finally the curve ended. He pulled the car to a scrubby shoulder, just a bit of weedy grass along the side of the road.
“I want to get out,” she said.
“Okay,” Dave said, “take it easy.” He shifted into Park but left the motor running. He got out and released the seat forward so she could climb out. Charlie was splayed out back there, not saying a word.
The girl stumbled around the car, onto the grass. With her back turned to the boys, she closed the buttons of her blouse. She started walking away. “Where are we?”
The Accident Page 136
“Edge of town,” Dave answered. “Not sure. Honestly I’m a little lost.”
She was still stumbling away, crying. Dave started to follow her, a nonthreatening distance behind, on foot. The weedy grass of the shoulder gave way to dirt. “Look,” he said, “I’m sorry about Charlie. But let’s get back in the car, and we’ll get you home. We’re … I don’t know where exactly, but it can’t be far …”
She was crying.
Then Dave and the girl both heard the car’s gears shift. They turned and saw that Charlie was now at the wheel, inching the car forward.
“Here’s Charlie!” he yelled. Dave turned back to the car, took a few steps toward it, then broke into a run, a sprint. As he got closer he could see a scary look on Charlie’s face.
Dave ran straight at the grille of the creeping old Jaguar. If Charlie insisted on continuing to drive, he was going to have to run over his friend. Dave put his hands on the hood, and started back-pedaling as the car crawled forward in first gear.
“Charlie,” he said, “come on, man.”
Dave glanced over his shoulder, saw that the girl was now running. She was about to disappear around the next bend in the road. He couldn’t let her vanish like that, in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night.
“Charlie, come on,” I said, “stop the car.”
CHAPTER 18
Ring.
Isabel pushes through the dense Times Square throngs, the foreign tourists and the domestic ones, the flip-flops and the fanny packs, the tween girls in their scandalously short skirts and the lanky acne’d boys in lacrosse jerseys, bored and awed at once, holding aloft shopping bags from American Girl and Abercrombie & Fitch, posing for smart-phone lenses with obscene gestures, grotesque grimaces, age-inappropriate flirty pouts. Immortalizing their childhoods, regrettably.
Ring.
She makes her way past the human mess of the converging avenues, into a reasonably calm side street in the Theater District, the famous-name marquees announcing the presence of visiting royalty from Hollywood, or resident Broadway lifers, plus “special guest appearances” and “8 Tony Nominations!” and raves from the Village Voice.
Ring.
Her call is rerouted to Alexis’s voice-mail box, again.
Strange. Maybe the girl is resentful about that early-morning call, on her day off, to discuss methods of manuscript delivery; Isabel wouldn’t blame her. Or maybe she set the device to mute so she could lie in bed peacefully, sleeping off whatever she did last night, perhaps with whomever she did it, not so peacefully, extending last night into today. Or maybe she’s at the doctor’s, legs aloft, staring at a rip in the wallpaper to distract herself from the cold instruments and latexed fingers. Maybe, perhaps, whatever: Alexis not answering.
Isabel doesn’t leave a message. She picks up her pace, and crosses Eighth Avenue, now definitely out of the Midtown bu
siness district and west of the Theater District and properly into residential Hell’s Kitchen, which according to real-estate agents is now supposed to be called Clinton. Trying to rebrand a whole neighborhood. But there’s apparently backlash, a re-rebranding back to the gritty old name and its mean-streets connotations, nostalgia for something that’s only a few years outdated, and not even gone. People who’ve lived here for four years consider themselves old pioneers, the avant-garde, yammering proprietarily about “back in the day.”
Isabel consults her phone for the address. She’s never been to Alexis’s apartment, doesn’t know what type of building it will be, but her suspicion is one of those soulless contemporary high-rises, with a doorman and a health club and concierge service and a lobby filled with black-leather Mies van der Rohe knockoffs. Buildings with logos. Branded buildings, in rebranded neighborhoods, orchestrated by branding consultants. She walks by one of these new developments now, stares up at a banner that proclaims “limited edition residences.” As if there’s any other type. She hates those goddamned buildings, and the spoiled entitled people who live in them.
Isabel herself had never been especially political, but she was embarrassed—she was humiliated—when the seemingly apolitical man she’d married started veering sharply to the right. Luckily, he wasn’t the only one in town. As bank accounts ballooned in the nineties and aughts, a lot of New Yorkers leaned away from their youthful ideals, their philosophical intentions. Personal politics raced to catch up with the practicalities, rationalizations to catch up with greed.
She stops in front of the number for Alexis’s building, but this can’t be right. Isabel looks again at the building, then back at her phone, then up again. At the sloppily painted steel security door with the ripped locksmith stickers, at the security-gated windows with the reggaeton spilling out, at the scrawls and the soot and the screwed-on signs prohibiting loitering and drug use and solicitation. At this mini-slum.
Isabel peers at the aluminum panel of the intercom: MAURIER, 1F. Sure enough. Isabel knows from 1F: the very worst apartment, bottom floor front, down at street level, windows facing the garbage cans, the big industrial rat traps, the baggies filled with scooped-up dog shit that people toss in the general direction of the bins, often missing.
Poor girl, in her poor crappy apartment. This is the opposite of what Isabel was expecting, and she feels embarrassed at her own ungenerous assumptions, chastened.
She presses the wide horizontal button. No answer.
She waits a half-minute, and presses again.
Isabel was hoping to recruit Alexis now. To take the girl along in Isabel’s flight from ATM, to help open up the new agency, in exchange for sincere promises of equity, independence, fast-track advancement. Isabel doesn’t want to do this completely alone; she can’t. There will be a lot of work, a lot of hustle, a lot of calls. It will all start today.
She buzzes a third time, waits a few seconds, but finally gives up, starts to walk away.
Then something occurs to her. Isabel turns back to the building, opens the gate to the dry moat, walks past the garbage cans, to the thick iron security bars at what she presumes is the 1F window. She opens her phone, hits redial. She holds the phone down at her stomach, pressing the earpiece against her body so she can’t hear the digital ringing through the device, straining to listen for ringing in the physical world.
Ring.
From inside the apartment, through the half-open window, past the fluttering drapes.
Ring.
Isabel leans forward, holding the black iron bars, and looks inside. The glow of a newly ignited electronic screen catches her eye. The girl’s phone is lying on the floor.
Ring.
Then something else catches her eye.
Isabel is having trouble breathing. She grips the bars tightly, the rusty flaking iron scratching her fingers and palms, struggling to hold herself upright on wobbly knees.
She turns away from the horror on the other side of the parted curtains, stares at the building’s walls, at the vulgar graffiti, the mottled discolored stone. Her mind reels with the implications of this situation for herself. She tries to grasp, firmly, the reality of what’s going on, but her thoughts keep sliding away from her, slipping toward irrationality.
She needs to calm down, to think.
In an instant it’s now clear to her that the manuscript is, without a doubt, true. It’s an accurate account of Charlie Wolfe’s life and career, and the shocking activities of Wolfe Worldwide Media, written by someone in a unique position to know. If this information is published, if it’s brought to light in any way, it will bring down Charlie Wolfe, and initiate a tremendous scandal implicating multiple American presidents and CIA directors, and create a crisis of confidence in one of the most visible media companies in the world. A shitstorm. No question about it.
So there are a lot of powerful people who would want to suppress it, if they were aware of its existence. The author would of course anticipate this. So he would write a book like this secretly, and possibly anonymously. He would hide somewhere as he wrote, and he’d probably stay hidden until it was published, and hope that the publicity kept him alive. Maybe he’d stay hidden forever.
And of course it would make sense—it would be practically inevitable—that he’d entrust his manuscript to Isabel.
But what if he wasn’t able to keep his project a total secret? What if someone—Charlie Wolfe, or the CIA director, or maybe even the president of the United States—found the author? Knew what he was doing? Discovered that he’d sent this manuscript to Isabel?
What would they do?
Isabel turns her head back to the window, looks inside again, at the girl lying in a pool of her own blood, a gaping hole in the middle of her forehead.
They would do this.
CHAPTER 19
She should call the police. Isabel feels it in her bones that she should, while at the same time that she shouldn’t, terrified …
She needs to be deliberate. To articulate to herself: why precisely call the police? It won’t help Alexis. There’s no way the girl is alive, with that hole in the middle of her head, lying in that pool of blood. No phone call is going to save her.
Isabel stands on the sidewalk in front of the dingy building, and fumbles out a cigarette with trembling hands, manages to ignite the lighter after five tries, takes a long desperate drag of nicotine. She’s flooded with nausea. A convulsion begins deep in the pit of her stomach, works its way quickly up through her alimentary canal. She drops the cigarette to the pavement, and closes her eyes, trying to will the queasiness into submission.
She feels her phone begin to vibrate an instant before the audible ring. It’s her office’s main number, probably Meg, almost certainly calling to fire her, explicitly and vociferously. She hits Ignore.
If she dialed 911 right now, the police would want to know who she was. She’d be questioned, maybe even detained. Could Isabel herself become a suspect in Alexis’s murder? Of course she could. Then she’d have to explain everything: the manuscript, the subject, the probable author. And as implausible as her story sounded, the police would have to consider her explanation. Then what? Then they’d call someone in Washington. And then …?
And then she’d be ushered into the back of a tinted-window SUV, and that would be the last anyone ever saw or heard of Isabel Reed. Because if they were willing to kill Alexis Maurier, they wouldn’t feel constrained to stop there.
No, Isabel won’t be safe in any police station, or in police custody. She needs to stay away from the police. But someone ought to find Alexis’s body. Someone should call the girl’s parents, tell her friends. She can’t just lie there, rotting, in her sad little apartment, ground floor with all the mice and the rats, feeding on her flesh—
There’s a pay phone on the corner. Do you need a coin to dial 911 from a public phone? It’s been … how long? … it’s been never. Isabel has never dialed 911, from any phone. She picks up the gray h
andset, then remembers the ubiquitous presence of security cameras, of surveillance cameras, of little globes integrated into ATMs, of traffic-safety cameras in sturdy boxes affixed to streetlamps, of good-old generic scare-tactic federal-government cameras … There are more than thirty million security cameras in America, aiming everywhere, recording everyone, all the time, producing hundreds of millions of hours of footage, every single day.
Isabel puts on sunglasses, trying to hide from whoever might eventually triangulate this audio with some visual, recorded from who knows what device, where. But it will happen.
It occurs to her that it may not be solely cameras that are watching her. From the privacy of her dark lenses, she scans the street life, taking mental snapshots. A man is standing across the street, leaning against a lamppost, talking on his cell phone. Across the avenue, two youngish guys are sitting in the front of a crummy-looking white Toyota sedan, both wearing sunglasses. A woman is standing in the gutter, as if to hail a cab, though plenty of unoccupied taxis seem to be passing her by, and her hand isn’t raised.
Isabel turns to the keypad, punches in the three buttons. “Someone has been shot.” She gives Alexis’s address, then replaces the handset without identifying herself.
She looks around again, standing in the semi-seclusion of the cut-off-at-the-knees phone booth, watching through the scratched cloudy Plexiglas, waiting for the stoplight to change on the avenue, for the heavy stream of downtown traffic to resume. The light turns green, and the cars pull away, one after the other, half of them occupied taxis, until she sees the telltale lit-up sign, then she takes a couple of long strides to the curb and off it, her arm shooting up, hailing the taxi.