Carl Cintron looked out of his boss’ corner office. Below, on the Reade Street side of the Federal Building, Federal Police used a mirror attached to a long metal selfie stick to scan the underside of a delivery truck. An explosives dog, a black lab, sniffed the truck’s tires. Carl turned from the window.
Tall, red-haired, and freckled, the ASAC—Assistant Special Agent in Charge—signaled Carl and Rick to seats in front of his large desk. “The Brian Silverman connection, we’re not going to pursue it anymore.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding,” Carl said.
Rick shot Carl a hard “shut up” look.
The ASAC steepled his hands. “Brian Silverman is dead. We need to focus on Arena.”
Carl leaned half out of his chair. “There was a cash transaction, twelve million dollars through Silverman’s attorney escrow account two days before his mysterious death. We’ve been tracking Jordan Connors for months. We all know Connors has been dealing with the Chinese billionaire Xi Wen, to name just one. Silverman had to be helping Connors run the gambling money. I haven’t been able to find anything in court data systems to indicate why Silverman would be receiving and paying out that kind of money.”
“Listen, Carl, Xi Wen is, as far as we know, a legitimate Chinese businessman who’s committed no US crimes. He places big bets, likes nosebleed poker games with stratospherically high stakes. His gambling would not please the Chinese, who don’t want their billionaires sending large sums of money out of their country. But the FBI is not in the business of assisting Chinese law enforcement.
“We’re on an austerity budget. We’ve got to triage the most promising cases and follow the best leads. Realistically, we’d hoped to catch and turn Silverman. One greedy lawyer running internet gambling payouts is a good media bust. But now that Silverman’s dead with no indication of foul play, he won’t be an example for other lawyers playing fast and loose with their escrow accounts.” The ASAC spoke in the tone of Carl’s fifth-grade teacher. “So, I want you to shift your focus from the dead lawyer to the living criminals.”
Carl blanked his face, knowing he had to quickly adjust to the idea that months of his work was skittering away. Nobody liked a complainer.
The ASAC paused, assessing Carl, and continued. “Jordan Connors is routing bets through a server in New Jersey, ergo, breaking US law by operating here.”
“Nice,” Rick said ironically.
The New Jersey server really was a great find, Carl knew, and it was very bad news for Jordan Connors, whose foreign headquarters were little more than a villa where he vacationed. The internet betting sites needed servers closer to the US bettors or the online action was too slow. Local servers tempted internet bookies like second base tempted runners with a lead off first.
“So we’ve got him where we want him, but our top priority is still Arena,” the ASAC said. “The evidence is piling up that the Arena syndicate has infiltrated Connors’ operation. Jorge Arena is fixing sports bets and extorting internet gaming sites all over the world. We’ve recently turned another guy who’s in with the Arenas. I’m hopeful he’ll get us to the goal. He was selling drugs on the side that his people didn’t know about. So they have no idea we busted him. He’s above suspicion. We’ll bring down the whole crew, including Jordan Connors. We’ll even have a crack at the twelve million, wherever it is, if it has anything to do with Jordan’s operation.”
“Fair enough,” Carl said, making sure the ASAC knew he had Carl’s full buy-in to the investigation’s shift.
“Good, because I have an assignment for you. I want you to work at the Home Game sports bar in Hell’s Kitchen. Our informant manages it. His name is Juan Lachman. They call him CB, short for college boy. He’s American-born Dominican. His family comes from the same town where Arena has his roots.
“There’s an illegal casino upstairs at the sports bar. Jorge Arena is a silent partner. They run blackjack, roulette, poker. They cater to the investment-banker crowd, young men who are always looking for ways to give away their excess money to unworthy causes. We’ve already got a warrant to set up a stingray to listen in on the phones. But folks are sensitive nowadays about the way stingrays catch innocent signals going through their cell tower, so we can’t overuse it, especially given the upstanding citizens who frequent the place. We’ve got to get closer.”
***
Knowing he’d have a late night, Carl stopped at the gym, which was midway between work and his apartment in a middle-income complex on the far-west side of Tribeca. The gym was nearly empty. The lunch-hour crowd from the nearby government offices was gone. The after-work correction officers from the Tombs, cops from One Police Plaza, and prosecutors from the DA’s office hadn’t arrived yet. Only a sprinkling of locals who lived in Tribeca’s multimillion-dollar condos and set their own hours were working out.
An iPhone strapped around his thick biceps, Carl mounted an empty treadmill with a view of a baseball game playing on an overhead screen. Embedded in the side of his thigh, a long white scar ended in a knob-shaped indentation. That and a two-inch scar over his eyebrow were the only remaining evidence of the accident that had ended Carl’s own hopes of a baseball career. It happened just after his eighteenth birthday. The first responders cut him out of the car where his best friend and both of their dates lay dead. He’d been lucky, miraculously alive in a crumpled tomb, but he hadn’t felt lucky. He was the designated driver. He’d only had one drink, well under the legal limit, and the accident wasn’t officially his fault. But the question roiled in him for years afterward: Would his reflexes have been better if he hadn’t drunk at all? Half measures had availed him nothing that night. He never lost sight of that lesson if he could help it.
His feet pounding the moving mat, his thoughts fast-forwarded to Brian Silverman’s twelve-million-dollar transaction. Before Silverman’s death, Carl had gotten subpoenas on Silverman’s telephone toll records. Toll-record subpoenas only gained you access to the list of calls made and the caller’s locations. That information would at least continue to trickle in about Silverman’s last days without Carl violating the ASAC’s orders. The sports bar was a good opportunity for Carl, he knew that. But he wasn’t ready to let go of the Silverman issue just yet. He was sure there’d been a screwup or rip-off, and that was why Brian Silverman was dead. Silverman and his twelve million dollars were a loose end Carl meant to tie up.
CHAPTER 9
Jessica lay in bed in a fetal position, holding Brian’s pillow tightly. She’d always loved their home, a remodeled old Dutch Colonial with a large front lawn, separated from the road by a line of tall trees and cradled in back by a patch of woods. It was a low-lying, rambling place with two bedrooms and ample living space on the first floor. Only the slope-ceilinged master bedroom suite occupied the second floor in what had once been the attic. With every window shuttered tight, the once-romantic wood-paneled room had become dark and coffin-like. Floating within that airless cocoon, she found herself wondering whether she would lose her home too. She felt a fresh stab of pain: she wanted to ask Brian what he thought. She wanted to ask Brian or tell him something a hundred times a day only to realize that she couldn’t.
She could still make out Brian’s scent on the pillowcase, but it was fainter. It would be gone soon. The thought threw her to the edge of abyss. She could barely breathe.
A knock sounded at the door. She opened her eyes and looked back. Emily stood in the doorway, silhouetted by the light from the staircase. Jessica spoke blurrily, her mouth too relaxed to form clear words. “Don’t you have to go to school?”
“It’s after school, Jessica. Remember? You already told my mother on me.” Emily approached, haltingly, carrying a small bowl. “I brought you some fruit salad. The lady next door brought it.”
“No. I can’t.” Tears leaked from Jessica’s eyes. She wanted to be strong for Emily, but she hugged the pillow and turned her back on the teenager. For th
e umpteenth time that day, a horrible picture played in Jessica’s head: Brian burning, screaming, dying. She tried to muffle her cry in the pillow, hating herself for being so fucking weak.
“Why don’t you get up, Jessica?”
Jessica shuddered and shook her head, using all her will just to do that. She could feel Emily staring at her back and turning away. She could imagine Emily’s own eyes burning. Emily had lost her father, and Jessica was useless to her.
When Jessica opened her eyes again, Emily was gone. The meds were wearing off, weighing her down less. She coached herself, scolded herself: Get up, Jessica. You’re breaking your promise. You promised you’d take care of Emily. If you don’t get up now, you may never get up.
Her thoughts floated to the last time she’d given in to the darkness, letting herself burrow in it, starving in the dark like a wounded animal. It had been so hard to dig out from that and return to life. During her teenage years, her father had been a popular figure in their suburban town, friends with everyone, holding court in the local diner each weekend. He had even served a term as mayor after he retired from his corporate job. But at home, he’d flown into rages, terrorizing their household for little apparent reason. Fearing criticism and desperate for his praise, Jessica did well in school and tried her best to be the perfect daughter. Meanwhile, her mother was keeping the plastic surgery industry afloat, and she expected physical perfection of Jessica too. So at twelve, Jessica had the mandatory nose job, and when her ballerina’s body rebelled and sprouted large breasts that screwed up her mother’s ideas about Jessica’s premarital dancing career, Jessica had needed to fight with all her teenage fury to avoid reduction surgery. Her breasts had been too mixed up with her newfound womanhood to chop up so easily. Luckily, the dancing had been her mother’s obsession, not her father’s.
In the end, Jessica had made her parents proud. She overachieved in high school, stayed away from keg parties where girls humiliated themselves on a weekly basis, and headed off to college. She’d worked hard to get into an Ivy League school and had been more than ready to get out of her parents’ house. She’d made big plans for herself, including medical school. She had a roommate she liked, and everything seemed to be lining up perfectly.
But it took only one fraternity party two weeks after Jessica arrived on campus to turn the whole thing around on her. She never knew what happened that night. Memories came back to her afterward in hazy flashes. She never knew whether she’d been roofied or had a weird reaction to alcohol. She remembered how heavy her arms had been, how she’d battered her fists against the chests of the three men who had sex with her, her strikes as light and ill-coordinated as thrown tissue paper. She pieced together that they dropped her back at her dorm afterward, as if they were dropping off a date.
She filed a complaint with the school two days later, but it only made things worse. That was long before women started carrying mattresses around campus and tweeting #metoo. Jessica remembered how her roommate told her she’d seen her go to the room with the men as if she’d wanted it. “Why didn’t you scream if you didn’t?” her roommate accused. “You can’t ruin their lives because you were too drunk to think straight.”
Jessica couldn’t believe life had taken a hair-turn on her again. The old despair had returned. It was the same hopeless sinkhole that had changed the course of her entire life after the rape. Jessica’s memories paused long enough for her to feel a surge of self-hatred for thinking about her own life, her own losses, so self-involved at a time when Emily was much more important. Emily was just a child. She’d lost her father. Jessica was sick of herself for being all she thought about. She couldn’t do this anymore.
She groaned and, with all the energy she could muster, swung her feet out of bed. The bottle of Klonopin her mother had left was sitting on the night table, staring at her. Pills were always her mother’s solution. Sometimes Jessica wondered whether her mother had so much plastic surgery just so she could have an excuse to do more pills. A consolation prize for aging. Jessica angrily grabbed the bottle and got to her feet.
In the bathroom, she flushed and watched the pills circle the toilet, horrified at the thought of facing her ruined life. Alone. But she had no choice. If she chose the darkness for another minute, she knew she would lose herself in it for good this time.
CHAPTER 10
Four blocks from Family Court, the phone was ringing when Lauren opened her office. She answered with her coat still on. “Hi, this is Lauren.”
“Lauren, this is Peggy Hall.”
“Oh, hi. Thanks for coming to the service last week. It was good to see you.”
Since Lauren and Brian’s separation, the two never saw each other, but they’d spoken many times. Peggy had always been formal but friendly and Lauren could count on her to remind Brian to send his support payment if she called.
“Steve asked me to return your call. Emily’s insurance will be in force for another year.”
“That’s great.”
“I’ll email you all the information. You can change the contact information online.”
“And about the support check … to tide us over.” There was a silence, a long silence, as Lauren waited for Peggy to pick up the ball and relieve her discomfort about asking for money the way Peggy normally did.
“They only instructed me to tell you about the insurance …”
It wasn’t the words Peggy spoke but something else—her pause—that punched Lauren like Marvel’s Jessica Jones. Instantly, Lauren’s head spun with calculations for her mortgage and maintenance payments and the last payment to Emily’s orthodontist and—Lauren caught her breath. “Peggy, is there a problem?”
“No.”
“If there’s a problem, could you ask Steve to call me?”
“I’ll ask, yes.”
“Thanks.”
“Sorry.” Peggy said goodbye and hung up.
Lauren leaned back in her chair. Why was Peggy saying “sorry”? The thought came to her loud and clear: Brian was murdered and Steve is going to screw us. He wasn’t going to make good on the money he owed. Lauren’s lungs tightened. For days since she’d first heard about the fire, she’d had a bad feeling that it hadn’t been an accident.
Stop, she ordered herself.
She had no reason to think that. So Peggy had seemed uncomfortable. Many people were uncomfortable with death and its aftermath. So Steve hadn’t bothered to call back personally after his solicitousness at the hospital and funeral. Well, he was back in his world now, caught up in court and the old self-centered swing of things. Brian’s needy family wasn’t his priority.
Lauren felt a shot of shame, as if she were an embarrassing relative asking for money. It was an old tape, humiliation she used to feel when visiting her father’s family on rare holiday dinners. Lauren was the poor relation, the one with stained, too-small clothes and inebriated parents. Asking for her own money now made her feel low as a coffin termite, but she knew it shouldn’t. Her emotional baggage affected her perception.
No one who dealt with her as a parent or lawyer, or even a friend, could see the world of memories that roiled under her calm surface. She was like a duck gliding along the water but paddling furiously beneath it. She thought back to her first year of high school, doing homework in the living room. She tended to sit there when she studied because it gave her a vantage point on her parents’ bedroom door, so she’d be ready to deal with any drama that might crop up. Her parents smoked back there, day and night, with an ever-changing crew of slimy characters they called friends. Lauren’s home felt as safe as an East Village subway station at three in the morning. And on the occasions when Lauren’s dad went away to detox, her mother had men in. Lauren never told her father but the first time she realized what her mother was doing was the last time Lauren had said more than three words in a row to her. Lauren’s father wasn’t much but at least he was loyal.
Lauren’s mother was screeching, her whole body shaking, “What do we do?”
Lauren’s dad lay sprawled out, already stiffening in the bathtub, a needle still jutting from his arm. Lauren didn’t have time to cry or scream like her mother, even though she felt as if every cell in her body had been pulverized. The police would be there soon. They’d take Lauren’s mother to jail and take Lauren to foster care, maybe to juvenile detention, arrested for the crap they found in the house. Lauren grabbed a black plastic garbage bag from the kitchen and rushed around her parents’ bedroom, picking up crack pipes and vials, needing to clean the house before the cops came.
After Lauren dumped all the pipes and torches into the garbage bag, she opened an unlocked safe inside the closet. She took out her father’s illegal gun and freezer bags full of cocaine and threw them into the garbage bag too. She raced from the apartment with all the illegal goods, her mother still jittering in place in the bedroom. Lauren never came back. There was nothing left for her there. That day she concluded that her nightmare would never end, and she’d set about figuring out how to survive within it.
Years later, in the wake of Brian’s many betrayals, Lauren finally glimpsed how, despite her adult life appearing normal on the outside, her past still controlled her. She began seeing a therapist. It had done wonders, giving her the courage to finish college, go to law school, and become emotionally self-sufficient without depending overly on men as she’d done with Brian. Lauren’s therapist had warned her, though, that the extreme circumstances of her childhood might lead her to catastrophize and feel irrational shame or fear over situations that reminded her of her past. He’d said: If it’s hysterical, it’s historical. That had been an aha moment for Lauren, explaining so much about her reactions to life. With his help, Lauren had broken the mind-habit of feeling as if she were about to careen off a cliff at the least provocation. And she wanted to keep it that way.
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