Lauren began her lady-training in his apartment on the twentieth floor of a high-rise doorman building on the Upper East Side. He took her out to dinner and clubs and showed her off at family dinners. Until one of those family nights when she was sitting on a couch, smoking cigarettes and sniffing coke with a girlfriend of one of his buddies. The woman blabbed about Bobby’s main source of income. “You don’t know he’s a hit man?” she’d asked, incredulously.
Lauren didn’t believe it at first. But Bobby only sucked his teeth and stormed around the house calling the woman a fucking bitch when Lauren told him what she’d said. He never called the woman a liar.
After that, the apartment became a princess’ fortified tower. Lauren reasoned and still thought Bobby must have loved her because for some strange reason he didn’t kill her even after she started dipping into the pure dope he sold as a sideline. Heroin was the only escape for her. But once she started, she couldn’t stop. It seemed every week Bobby slapped her around for being high when he came home.
“Killing people?” she’d screamed at him. “I do dope. You kill fucking people! What the fuck?”
He grabbed her and held his hand over her mouth. “Shh, shh, shh. I don’t like when you curse at me.”
His hand slipped over her nose. She couldn’t breathe. She grappled with his hand, panicking, until he released her. She never knew whether his hand on her nose had been accidental, but after that, she knew she had to get away from him and hide, because there would be no peaceful breakup. Lauren fled to the only place she could think of. She checked herself into a residential drug-treatment program. They shipped her off to upstate New York for eighteen months, no forwarding address, at least somewhat protected by drug-treatment confidentiality. By the time she graduated the program and entered college, she’d learned that Bobby was in prison.
“Lauren,” Gary, the bridge officer, called from the entrance to the courtroom.
Lauren looked at her watch. It was after six. She followed Gary into the courtroom. All she needed to do was concentrate on the Winston kids for a few more minutes. She had to make sure they didn’t end up back home with their sadistic parents while the case waited for trial. That was turning out to be a lot easier than figuring out what to do about the tsunami that had struck her own life. A sense of desperation bore heavier on her by the moment. She’d been unwittingly living a lie for twenty years without the faintest hint that someone could have killed her at any moment. Her chronic sense of danger had returned as if it had never left. She didn’t have a clue what to do. One thing Lauren could see coming, though, was a conflict between Jessica’s needs, and Lauren and Emily’s safety.
Jessica had injected herself deeper into the crisis by destroying evidence of murder. The cops could look at her as being involved with Brian’s activities because of it. They might bust her for the evidence tampering if they couldn’t get her on anything else. It wasn’t something Lauren wanted, sacrificing Emily’s financial security and maybe even their home to asset forfeiture. Lauren couldn’t imagine giving up the life she’d worked so hard to create just to join the Witness Protection Program, but she would do it and call the cops herself if it were the only way to protect her kid.
Still, Jessica had been right about one thing: to get police protection, especially now that Jessica had committed crimes, they needed something to offer the cops. Lauren had nothing, even less than Jessica. She’d lived her whole adult life in a manner that ensured she’d have nothing, know nothing, see nothing to put her in danger again. The government didn’t spend millions of dollars to put people in Witness Protection just because they needed protection. The government had to want you. You had to offer something. And the only thing Lauren had to offer was Jessica. Lauren didn’t want to do that and, frankly, she doubted offering Jessica would be enough anyway.
“All rise,” Gary called out. The judge entered the room.
A half hour later, the Winston kids safely in foster care, Lauren made her way downstairs to the courthouse lobby. The silence had a buzz to it, surreal after the drone of hundreds of conversations constantly going on in every corner of the building. Two court officers stood on post at the metal detectors, although no one entered the building at this hour. Next to them, a huge orange-and-white tomcat sat on the aluminum table where the officers normally inspected parcels. Lauren scratched the cat’s neck before walking on, surprised by the secret life of the place after everyone went home.
Outside, Lauren turned right and crossed narrow, cobblestoned Leonard Street. No cars passed on the dark street. She walked alone on the high, stone-slab sidewalk. The mostly dark buildings towered close overhead. Her apprehension mounted. A picture flashed in her head: a man with a high-powered rifle aimed at her. Another with a handgun, darting out from a dark doorway. She’d been stupid not to spend the forty bucks on Uber instead of walking to the subway. She picked up her pace, even her loafers audible in the dead silence.
Up ahead, someone came around a corner, toward her. She took in sharp air. Then she saw a second figure next to him. A dog. They walked under a street lamp. She smiled. Carl smiled too, as he saw her.
“You have a way of just sort of being there, don’t you?” she said, rubbing Mookie behind the ear.
“After the tourists and workers leave the neighborhood, Mook and I like to walk around what we Tribecans used to call the Outback.” Carl looked up. “These office buildings are like canyons when they’re empty. They remind me of that old Harry Belafonte movie. The one where he comes to New York after a nuclear holocaust and walks up and down the empty streets shouting hello and listening to the echo back. Tribeca isn’t as much like that anymore, but the new condos don’t seem to have many people actually living in them. I always thought there was something appealing about that movie, and the one with Will Smith alone in New York with the zombies.”
“Very appealing.” Despite herself, Lauren slipped her hand through the crook of his elbow. “Could you walk me to the subway? This place just doesn’t have much charm for me tonight.”
“No problem.”
She felt a rush of comforting warmth with his hand covering hers, but she didn’t want him to notice it trembling. She pulled her hand away, trying to make it seem natural. Her inner voice warned: keep things on the surface, Lauren. No matter how much she wanted to tell Carl everything and beg for help, and even if she’d jumped to unwarranted conclusions about him, she didn’t know him well enough to trust him with life-and-death information.
They rounded the corner onto Broadway, which was also relatively empty of traffic and pedestrians.
“Why aren’t you taking my calls?” Carl asked. “I thought we had a great time the other night. I hate to make a fool of myself by saying this, I mean it sucks to have to ask this, but I would have sworn we really liked each other. Did I get everything wrong?”
“I ghosted you,” Lauren said.
“Why?”
Lauren stopped and looked at him. “Are you married, Carl?”
“No! Why would you even think that?”
“You used a burner phone with me. You had two phones.”
His eyes narrowed for a moment, as if caught, but the impression passed just as quickly. “Lauren, no.”
“Come on, Carl. There’s no reason to have two phones unless you’re hiding something.”
“One was my work phone.”
“For a sports bar?” she asked, incredulously.
“I never give up my personal phone number when I start a job. If they want me to use their device for security, I end up with a second phone.”
“Security for a sports bar?”
“Look, take my number again, and I’ll give you the number for the other phone, too. And I’m going to give you my address and apartment number, so you know I’m not married. You can visit anytime. Even now.”
“Oh, no.” Lauren smiled at him, feeling a far gr
eater sense of relief than she had any business feeling after only one date with a guy. She took out her phone, “But okay.”
Lauren put all Carl’s information in her contacts and resumed walking. Her blood pressure calmed. Her fear of the street seemed distant, even unrealistic, with Carl and Mookie alongside her.
As they walked, Carl spoke. “How are things with your ex’s estate?”
“Brian was screwing his partner’s wife, and his partner closed his eyes to it. He needed the business Brian brought in—at least until Brian died and he got the business by default. It’s amazing, even though we were divorced, Brian still managed to screw Emily and me by thinking with the wrong head.”
“Wow.”
Lauren blushed, wishing she hadn’t mentioned her ex’s genitalia. That must have broken all ten cardinal rules of dating. They turned onto Reade Street.
Carl looked in a restaurant window, crowded with people behind etched glass, then glanced back at her. “Did you ever think that maybe the fire wasn’t an accident?”
“What?” The casual question didn’t feel casual at all.
“A man who has one enemy for something as low as that, probably has others. Maybe people were waiting in line to kill him.”
Lauren tried to respond as if she hadn’t moved her daughter from home and school for fear of murder, as if there weren’t a contract out on her. “It only happens like that in the movies, people lining up to kill the bad guy.”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Sometimes people have secret lives that put them in with a bad element. It can be pretty hairy for the people close to them.”
Her neck knotted, her back bristled. She didn’t like the way the conversation was going and didn’t know how it had gotten so close to the truth. Lauren spotted the lit green bulb above the iron rail of the subway entrance—saved by the bulb—and quickened her step. “I’ve gotta go, Carl.” She turned to him, trying to smile but barely forming a slash across her face. “Thanks for walking me.”
“Listen, Lauren, if it gets heavy and you want to talk … call.” He put his hand on her arm and brought her toward him, the same electric intensity between them again.
“I have to go.” She pulled away, looking quickly around to make sure no one had followed them, and ran down the stairs.
“Lauren—”
She waved, saw the confused look on his face, and kept going.
CHAPTER 25
In the living room overlooking West 181st Street, Emily paced like a caged lemur in the Bronx Zoo’s Zanzibar exhibit. She turned on the TV, looked out the window, rummaged in her knapsack, and looked out the window again. Finally, she turned to Jessica, “I want to go to Daddy’s office.”
Jessica laughed. Emily had taken the words right out of her mouth. It had taken every bit of Jessica’s willpower not to storm over to Brian’s office hours ago. Where else could she look for information? She’d already turned the house upside down. Apparently, Emily had too.
Before Jessica could respond, Emily launched into a campaign speech: “You’re not doing anything, and there are killers keeping me from going to school.”
“School?” Jessica asked, dubiously.
Emily shrugged. “Okay, from my friends.”
“We don’t know they’re killers.”
“I googled about internet gambling and how criminals infiltrate websites. They’re killers, Mafia or something.”
Jessica’s spine stiffened, but she didn’t want Emily to sense how terrified she was. “You’ve been watching too many movies, Emily.”
“What are we gonna do? You’re just sitting around when we should be finding out where the money is.”
“I’m going to call the people who came to the house, but I promised your mother that I wouldn’t do anything else until we talked more about it.”
“That’s the whole problem.” Emily sat on the arm of the sofa, facing Jessica. “If you wait for my mother, she’ll never let us go to Daddy’s office, and she’ll get us all thrown into the Witness Protection Program. I don’t know about you, Jessica, but I’m not leaving my friends. So, you guys can forget about that. You can go sell movie-theater popcorn and live in a trailer park in Idaho if you want, but I’ll run away and come back here.” Emily slid onto the couch facing Jessica. “Please, we have to go to Daddy’s office. If we find out more about where he hid the money, we can give it back, and my mother might go along because it’s easier and safer than calling the police. Anyway, I want to find out why Daddy died … if it wasn’t an accident. Please, Jessica.”
A half hour later, Emily and Jessica checked in at the after-hours security desk at Brian’s office building. At the elevator, Jessica looked down at Emily and said, quietly, “It was really painful coming here the first time. I had good memories here.”
Emily’s eyes glistened. “I came here for Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.”
At the twenty-second floor, Jessica swiped Brian’s ID at the glass door, and she and Emily stepped inside. They walked empty corridors and turned the last corner before Brian’s office when a man rounded the corner from the other direction and nearly slammed into them. Jessica jumped backward, trying to catch her breath before he became suspicious of her overreaction.
He was young, a recent law-school grad she’d never met. His tie and collar button were open, and he looked quizzically at them. “Oh, sorry. I didn’t see you.”
Jessica straightened up. “No problem.”
He paused, probably wondering who they were there and how much ass-kissing was necessary. “Do you need any help?”
“No, thanks.” Jessica gave him her most condescending smile. “We’ve been here late more times than I’d like to admit.”
Jessica and Emily watched him go, then slipped into Brian’s office. Emily headed straight to the desk. Half-lit office buildings towered outside the windows behind her. She picked up the picture of her and Brian. She studied it, her shoulders hunching, and put it down.
Emily’s knapsack thumped to the carpet, and she sat in Brian’s chair. She turned on his computer and slouched backward while the computer booted up.
“What are you doing?” Jessica looked over, surprised.
“I don’t even need Tabu for this I hope,” Emily whispered, although she could have spoken normally without anyone hearing.
A black screen appeared, then Emily was clicking within a menu.
“Tabu?” Jessica grabbed her hand. “What the heck?”
“I’m hacking into Daddy’s computer.”
“No! You can’t do that!” “Wait, wait. Just a minute.” Emily pulled her hand from Jessica’s. She shoved up her sleeve and consulted notes she’d scribbled with ballpoint on the inside of her forearm. “I didn’t want to pay Tabu for the easy stuff.” She typed. “There were a bunch of videos on YouTube about bypassing passwords.”
Windows bloomed on the screen.
“Oh my God.” Jessica felt her face heating up with panic. “What—”
Emily had reached into her jeans pocket and pulled out a thumb drive, holding it up to show Jessica. “It’s about this.”
“What is that?”
“I don’t know. It’s Daddy’s. I couldn’t read it on his computer at home. I need to unencrypt it. I’ll explain more, give me a minute. I promise, it will be okay.” Emily took out a cheap flip phone from her backpack and sat it on the desk beside her. “Let me just check Daddy’s list of files.”
Jessica was anxious and shocked but more than a little impressed with Emily. Focused and all business, Emily had grown up before Jessica’s eyes. Emily clicked into the PC’s program list.
“Yes!” Emily half-shouted before shushing herself, staring at the computer screen. “That’s it, a Crypt file. That’s what Tabu said to look for.” Emily made a call on the black phone. “Tabu, Tabu, it’s here!” Emily listened to her friend on the
phone. She googled a program name and downloaded it. “I’ve got it, Tabu.”
Jessica started looking around, her nerves jangling. This thing with whoever-the-hell Tabu scared her, and it was taking too long. The program Emily was downloading said it was only 2 percent complete.
“Bro, it’s saying there’s two hours remaining on the download.” Emily listened and turned to Jessica. “He said don’t worry. It will only be five minutes. It was fast before.”
Jessica started rummaging in Brian’s desk drawers, needing to keep busy while they waited but not letting her eyes stray far from whatever might happen on the computer screen.
Emily spoke into the phone, “It’s downloaded.” A box appeared on the screen, asking whether to allow a person to control the computer remotely.
Jessica straightened up and grasped Emily’s shoulder. “Are you sure?”
Emily held her finger over the phone’s speaker again. “He’s helping me. I don’t know how to do it myself. Of course, I’m sure. He’s already been on the house computer.”
“You’re kidding?”
“Listen, Jessica, if he wanted to steal, he could hack Target or Walmart. Stop worrying. I did my due diligence.”
Due diligence? What did she know about that? And what if he did end up stealing from the firm? Jessica didn’t care about the firm, but she didn’t want to go to jail. Jessica sighed, letting go of Emily’s hand. It was too late to turn back now, and she wanted to know what was on the thumb drive as much as Emily did.
Emily let Tabu control the computer. She sat back and covered the phone’s mouthpiece again. “He’s cloning the encryption app then he can download all Daddy’s documents that are on the app onto the PC again. It will think we’re Daddy and come up unencrypted.”
The cursor began moving as Emily’s hacker worked remotely on Brian’s computer. Programs flashed on and off at high speed. Taking instructions over the phone, Emily inserted the thumb drive into the PC. A document appeared written in what looked like hieroglyphics.
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