Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  “Then you want Seth, our head of security,” says the man with a wink. “Seth wears many hats. The one he likes best is heir apparent.”

  He directs her to a basement office, where a twenty-something slacker with impeccable bed head sits on a ratty couch, amusing himself on his cell. Mounted to a wall above him are two TV monitors, each split into quadrants displaying the feed from the store’s eight video cameras.

  O’Hara introduces herself as a detective and points to the live view of Orchard in the upper-right corner, which captures pedestrians as they stroll north and south. “You still have the tape from that camera from the night before Thanksgiving? That would be the twenty-third.”

  “We should. We try to hold them twenty-one days before we start to tape over.” The kid points to a cardboard box in the corner. “Knock yourself out.”

  “Or,” says O’Hara, after sniffing the air like a narc, “you could get off your spoiled ass and help me out.”

  “That sounds like a much better idea.” He jumps off the couch, pulls what he estimates is the right tape from the box and stuffs it into the player. As it spools backward toward the center of the tape, pedestrians lurch past the store on a sun-filled afternoon, and when he hits PLAY, they stride more gracefully in the opposite direction. Then he hits PAUSE and reads the time code in the upper-right corner: 11:23:13:07.

  “You got the right day,” says O’Hara. “Now fast-forward to eight-twenty p.m.”

  He does, but the tape runs out at 18:42, almost two hours short, and when he pops in the next one and reads the time code, it’s the following day.

  “Jesus Christ,” says O’Hara, “you’re taping over it now.”

  Seth hurries to the two four-deck recorders in the corner, ejects a tape, and, looking apprehensively at O’Hara, pops it into his player and spins forward until today’s overcast morning turns abruptly into the night of November 23. The time code reads 11:23:19:27.

  “No sweat,” says O’Hara. “We made it with an hour to spare.”

  Seth speeds forward to 20:20 and hits PLAY.

  In the right corner of the screen, chilled New Yorkers pass the store’s Orchard Street entrance. After so much fast-forwarding and rewinding, seeing them move in real time is like watching grass grow, at least until the time code hits 20:38, and Francesca Pena rushes into view.

  “Stop,” says O’Hara. “Rewind a little, stop, and play it again.” Pena reappears in the frame in her dark red jacket, her hands in her pockets and body tilted forward into the wind. With her short back hair and delicate face, she looks a little like Audrey Hepburn. “That girl is hot,” says Seth.

  “She’s dead,” says O’Hara, seeing her alive for the first time.

  Seth replays the tape three more times. From the way Pena carries herself and braces against the cold, O’Hara believes that Pena has started out on a journey of some distance, and is not just walking a couple of blocks. She also surmises that Pena is running late.

  “So what are you going to do when you take over, Seth?” asks O’Hara, already moving toward the stairs.

  “What do you think I’m going to do? I’m going to liquidate—make a deal with a developer and turn the building into condos.”

  “Dumb question.”

  Over the next couple hours, O’Hara works slowly north up Orchard on both sides of the block. When a squad car carrying Chamberlain and another rookie patrolman, Ivan Rodriguez, rolls slowly by, they stare right through her. From Delancey to Rivington, and Rivington to Stanton, she doesn’t get a thing, but from Stanton to Houston, she gets three new hits. The first is on a camera attached to a bridal shop called Adrienne’s, the next two at American Apparel, a big new clothing store at the corner of Orchard and Houston, whose gleaming white walls are covered with soft-porn photos of its wholesome girl-next-door employees. On the first camera, Pena is still trucking north at the same determined clip. On the second camera, she has turned west on Houston, and the third, mounted on the westernmost corner of American Apparel, catches Pena stepping off the curb and heading west across Allen. Pena steps out of frame halfway across the wide double block. O’Hara hustles out of the store and finds the spot where Pena stepped off the curb. Her line across Allen heads directly to the entrance of the Second Avenue subway station.

  39

  When O’Hara runs down the steps and sees the size of the station, whose walkways and platforms disappear into the distance in every direction, her heart sinks. Back in her motel room, with her feet finally out of those frigging Italian boots and thawing on the electric radiator, she can think more clearly. People entering the Second Avenue station can take the F or V train south to Borough Hall and Brooklyn or north to Thirty-fourth Street, Rockefeller Center and Queens. Since Pena just spent ten minutes walking north, the uptown option seems more likely. Pre-9/11, finding footage of Pena anywhere in the subway system would have been a logistical nightmare, if not impossible. Now at least there’s one central location, in the transit police precinct under Union Square, where detectives can review film from every camera in the subway system, but under the circumstances, O’Hara can’t risk going there herself.

  “Dar, you’re out of control,” says Krekorian when she gets him on her cell. “Callahan and Lowry are already up my ass.”

  “I’m sorry about that, K., but I’m in too far. I stop now, my career is over.”

  “Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”

  “I’m a fuckup, Serge. Always have been.”

  “Utter bullshit.”

  “But here’s the thing. I’m making progress. That last night after Pena left McLain at her apartment, I got her entering the Second Avenue subway station on Allen at 8:43 p.m. Almost certainly heading uptown.”

  “How the fuck you get that?”

  “When she left her apartment, she had to go somewhere. I guessed north, and got her on four different cameras. The last one has her heading straight toward the subway.”

  “Why do you think that’s so valuable?”

  “A couple reasons, but mainly because it’s all I got.”

  “That must have been quite a sight at the library last night.”

  “The sound was worse.”

  “Good acoustics in there?”

  “The best. But as disturbed as Tomlinson must have been, I don’t see an eighty-eight-pound anorexic breaking into a construction site, dragging Pena in and out, and loading her on and off a van.”

  “So you want me to find out where Pena got off the subway?”

  “I need it, K. It’s my only chance.”

  “Calm down, Dar. My shift doesn’t start till four. I’ll go to surveillance now. No one has to know I’m doing it for you.”

  “And if they find out?”

  “I go to business school, make more money than my brother.”

  “Then he’ll punch you.”

  “That will be the day.”

  “Listen…,” says O’Hara, but Krekorian, who senses that his partner’s gratitude and stress are pushing her dangerously close to tears, cuts her off. “It’s going to take me a couple hours at least. I’ll call you from there. And I’d stay off the street as much as possible. Lowry has warrants out on you—one for interfering with an investigation and leaving the scene of a crime.”

  “Fuck him.”

  “That’s how I feel.”

  40

  Over the next couple of hours, O’Hara becomes highly knowledgeable about the layout and contents of a double room at the Howard Johnson’s Express Inn at 135 East Houston Street. She straightens the bed and hangs up her new old clothes, throws away the wrappers from breakfast and rinses her Amstel empties like they’re family heirlooms. She calls down to the front desk and puts two more nights on her credit card and kills close to ten minutes washing her underwear in the sink and drying it with the tiny theft-proof hairdryer.

  When she can’t hold off any longer, she picks up the remote and turns on the TV. Judges Alex and Judy and the C-tier talk show hosts squeeze enter
tainment out of people’s tawdry little fuckups, and the soaps are like porn without sex. Her one great piece of luck is that her room is too dowscale to have a minibar. Overcoming the urge to head to the corner for another six-pack is hard enough.

  Somehow, she gets through the two hours and ten minutes before Krekorian calls back.

  “Sounds like you’re watching TV too,” says Krekorian. “Oprah?”

  “I’d cut off a big toe for Oprah,” says O’Hara. “She doesn’t come on till four.”

  “Dar, we got Pena getting off the 1 train at 168th and Broadway at 9:06 p.m. And she’s running.”

  O’Hara clicks off the TV and stares at the blank screen. Moreal and Consuela Entonces, the two girls from Pena’s Big Sister program, live three blocks from that stop. Tida Entonces, their ex–junkie mom, told O’Hara that because of Thanksgiving, Pena didn’t make her usual weekly visit and hadn’t been there since the previous Saturday. So now there are at least three lies about those missing one hundred and eleven minutes.

  “Dar, you there?”

  “Just trying to think. Serge, remember the girls in the program I told you about? They live on 170th and Fort Washington Avenue. Stay at that same station and switch over to the cameras on the downtown side. Let’s see if Pena gets back on that train.”

  O’Hara stays on the phone and hears a rush of tape, then a click when Krekorian says, “Stop.”

  “You’re right on again, Dar. At 9:14, we got her coming back in on the downtown side, and both girls are with her, one in each hand. That’s six blocks round-trip, plus in and out of the building, in eight minutes. I know the girl was a runner, but that’s Olympic-level hustling.”

  “K., I’m heading uptown to talk to Tida Entonces. You call me the second you find out where they get off.”

  O’Hara runs the two blocks to Allen and hurries down the same stairs Pena did fifteen days ago. After ten minutes on the empty platform, she catches an F train to Thirty-fourth Street, runs the block to Penn Station, and after another excruciating platform wait, boards an uptown A train. O’Hara is the only passenger in the car, and as the rattling local lurches through almost twenty stops, O’Hara thinks about Pena and her two young charges sprinting through the night. Where were they running to? Or what were they running from? At the deep 168th Street station, one of four elevators slowly carries O’Hara toward the surface. On the street, O’Hara tries to quicken the pace but her vintage boots don’t do her any favors. By the time she covers the short distance to 251 Fort Washington Avenue, her T-shirt is soaked.

  O’Hara checks her cell—still no call from K.—and waits for her heart rate to come down. She has barely thought out her approach to talking to Entonces, but with two warrants out for her arrest and cops cruising the neighborhood, she can’t hang out on the street. When a tenant steps out of the locked vestibule, O’Hara spins and slips through the door.

  On six, sour cooking smells fill the hallway. O’Hara tries to buy a little time by the elevator, but a dog goes ape shit from behind a chipped door, and an old crone, carrying her trash to the incinerator chute, eyes her suspiciously. Just like with Tomlinson, everything is moving much too fast. But she can’t loiter in the hallway any longer. She walks down the blackened tiles toward 6E.

  On the other side of the door, Entonces shuffles toward her in her house slippers. O’Hara hears the metal cover slip off the eyehole. The door opens and catches hard at the end of its six-inch chain.

  “I barely recognized you,” says Entonces. “You look different.”

  “Tida, can I please come in?”

  “It’s not a good time, Detective. The girls are home sick. You should’ve called first.”

  “Please, Tida. There’s something we need to talk about. It’s important.”

  Entonces unlatches the chain, and O’Hara follows her down the dreary hall. The new Justin Timberlake’s coming from behind the door of the first bedroom, and girls’ voices rise over it.

  “The girls don’t sound too sick, Tida,” says O’Hara.

  “What can I tell you? They fooled me.”

  They stop at the kitchen, spotless as ever, even with the girls home for the afternoon. Entonces nods toward the Formica table. “Have a seat. I just made coffee.”

  “Thanks. A glass of water would be better.”

  O’Hara drinks half of it in one gulp, as Entonces watches warily.

  “Tida, why’d you lie to me?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You told me Francesca didn’t visit the girls Thanksgiving week, hadn’t been here since the previous Saturday. I just found out that’s not true. She was here the night she was murdered. Wasn’t she?”

  Entonces’s face crumbles. On a good day, Entonces is still an attractive woman. At least you can see the parts that were, but when she cries, all that time on the streets pushes through the cracks. From across the table, O’Hara watches Entonces age twenty years.

  “I didn’t want to lie about the girls going out with Francesca Wednesday night,” says Entonces, “but I had to. The rules say Francesca can only take them out on weekends. To Children’s Services, a Wednesday is always a weekday, no exceptions. Children’s Services, they don’t play. They’ll use anything to take my girls away, even if it’s dirty dishes in the sink. To them, I’m a two-time loser who never deserved my girls back in the first place.”

  Tida Entonces’s explanation is not implausible, and she’s right about Children’s Services. A sniff of trouble and they’ll snatch Moreal and Consuela back in a second. Entonces sobs softly, and O’Hara feels her own grip slipping too. Is she so hard up for a break in this case that she’s grasping at straws, taking a couple of snatches of MTA video and blowing them up into more than they are?

  “Detective, you don’t look so good. You need more water?”

  “Please,” says O’Hara, and after Entonces refills her glass, takes another long gulp. “What did they do that night, Francesca and the girls?”

  “Francesca took them out for a quick dinner,” says Entonces. “It was her Thanksgiving treat.”

  “Where, Tida? Where did they go?”

  O’Hara struggles to steady herself, as she runs the times through her head. They don’t add up. At 9:14 Pena and the girls get on the subway, and barely an hour later, Pena is buying CDs one hundred seventy blocks away. Where’s the time for dinner? Before Entonces can answer, Consuela, the younger of her two daughters, wanders into the kitchen.

  “I’m talking to the detective, baby,” says Entonces.

  “I’m thirsty,” whines Consuela. She ignores her mother and opens the fridge.

  “Then take your drink and let us be.”

  On the shelf at the bottom of the door is a carton of strawberry Nesquik. Consuela reaches for it, and her sweatshirt rides up on her skinny back, uncovering black markings surrounded by red skin. Squinting, O’Hara makes out the shape of a heart and a dollar sign at the center, and before she can stop herself, jumps up from the table and grabs the girl’s thin wrist much too hard. Startled, Consuela drops her carton, and the pink-colored milk spills onto the kitchen floor.

  “Consuela,” says O’Hara, the kitchen spinning around her. “When did you get that tattoo?”

  “Momma,” cries Consuela, “that hurts.”

  “Get your hands off my daughter,” screams Entonces. She is already out of her chair and rushing toward them. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “I’m sorry,” says O’Hara. “I didn’t mean to frighten Consuela. But I need to know where she got that tattoo.”

  “You don’t need to know shit. Get out of here this minute. Or I’m calling the police.”

  41

  O’Hara pushes back out through the vestibule, to the curb, where a wash of milky light is all that’s left of the day. Fort Washington Avenue is filled with the braying of just released Dominican and Puerto Rican schoolkids, one of whom careens through the clogged sidewalks on a small black bike just like the model in the
window of Evelyn Lee’s boutique. Still unsteady on her feet, O’Hara makes her way through the chest-high crowd, attracting hard stares from the more precocious preteens. The nascent street toughs are more adept at making a cop than Rodriguez and Chamberlain.

  O’Hara buys a bottle of water and takes it to an island bench in the center of Broadway, rush-hour traffic whipping by in both directions. She’s got a new message from Krekorian on her cell, and pressing the phone tight to her ear can just make it out. “Dar, spent two more hours in the MTA but never saw Pena and the girls get off. According to the tech, 103rd, Fiftieth and Christopher Street all have multiple cameras out, and there are so many holes in the coverage, they could have slipped through almost anywhere. I’d stay longer, but some of us still work for a living. Please call me before you do anything else ridiculous.”

  Too late for that, thinks O’Hara, but doesn’t beat herself up with her usual brio. She shouldn’t have grabbed Consuela, but spotting her tattoo more than makes up for it because it proves her instincts about the tattoo were right, and Lowry’s were wrong. Whatever the reason, Consuela has the same heart-shaped pattern inked on her lower back as Francesca. And Consuela’s tattoo was still fresh, the skin around it raw and pink. It couldn’t be more than a couple of weeks old.

  O’Hara extricates herself from the middle of upper Broadway and descends into the subway. On uptown trains, commuters are pressed up against the windows like aquarium guppies, while the southbound trains are empty. By 6:30, she is back on Houston, and just like on Fort Washington Avenue, she’s the oldest human being in sight, not that that matters to the red-eyed counterman at her adopted bodega.