by Lisa Unger
“I tried to access it again from my computer here with the same results. Just the red screen,” I said when he didn’t say anything.
He nodded uncertainly, kept his eyes on me. He looked at me like that a lot, as if he was trying to figure out if I was lying to him, as if he might be able to see it on my face. I turned away; there was something about that gray gaze that made me nervous. There was a lot more I could tell him. But I didn’t. It was like flirting—give a little, keep a little. Maybe Ace was right about me after all.
“Do you have any idea what that site is?” I asked, my curiosity getting the better of me. I didn’t want to have a conversation with Dylan Grace, and yet here we were again.
He shrugged. “The best I can figure at this point is that it’s some kind of encrypted website. A place to leave and retrieve messages. There must be a way to log in, but I couldn’t figure it out.”
“And the video?”
He shrugged again. “We have some people working on it. We’ll figure it out soon enough.” His voice went low at the end of the sentence, as if he was issuing a warning.
I lifted my feet onto the couch, made myself comfortable. Fatigue was pulling at the lids of my eyes. Now that I knew Jake was okay, or at least that it wasn’t his blood on the floor of the studio, everything else seemed less terrifying and urgent. But that was just one of the many things I’d be wrong about in the next twenty-four hours.
THE NEXT THING I was aware of was sunlight streaming in my east-facing windows. It took me a second to orient myself, then everything of the day before came back at me with sickening clarity. Had Agent Grace really been here? Did he really tell me it wasn’t Jake’s blood on the floor? I felt nauseated that I might have dreamed it all. Or that I had fallen asleep while he was sitting in my apartment. How weird was that? I noticed then that someone had taken the chenille throw from my bed and covered me with it. A dull pain throbbed behind my eyes as I sat up. There was a note on my coffee table. We’ll talk tomorrow, it threatened, signed with the initials DG. It was the handwriting of an arrogant pain in the ass if ever I’d seen it—big looping letters, huge initials. I had to smile. I still hated him but he was starting to grow on me.
I tried Jake. Still no answer. I made some coffee so strong it tasted bitter in my throat. I walked into my office and looked over the notes I’d jotted down during my conversations with Jenna and Dennis. I checked the time; it was seven A.M. I had thirteen hours to find out as much as I could about Myra Lyall and about that website before I went to the Cloisters that night.
I know what you’re thinking: that I was at best reckless and foolish, at worst suicidal. What can I say? You might be right.
It was too early to call a hacker-wannabe like Jenna’s ex-beau Grant, but ambitious people don’t sleep in. A young assistant at the New York Times, especially one worried for her job, was likely to be at her desk before the sun came up. I called through the main number at the Times and was surprised and disappointed to get voice mail. I left a message.
“Sarah, this is Ridley Jones. Before her disappearance Myra Lyall was trying to reach me. Some pretty odd things have been happening to me since. I wonder if we can talk, get together for coffee?”
I left my number and hung up. I know, it was a pretty risky message to leave, considering how many ears and eyes might be on my communications—not to mention hers. But I needed the message to be interesting enough to warrant a callback. The phone rang before five minutes had passed.
“Is this Ridley?” Her voice was young; she was practically whispering.
“Sarah?”
“Yeah.”
“You got my message?”
“Yes,” she said. “Can we get together?”
We arranged to meet in a half hour at the Brooklyn Diner, a tourist trap in Midtown where no real New Yorker would ever eat. I wondered at her choice but figured she just didn’t want to run into anyone from the Times.
“How will I recognize you?” I asked her.
“I know what you look like.”
One of the advantages of infamy, I guess.
THE DINER WAS crowded; a cacophony of voices and clinking silverware rose up as soon as I opened the door. Strong aromas competed for attention: coffee, eggs and bacon, the sugary smell of pastries on a tray at the counter. My stomach rumbled. I stood by the door and scanned the room for a woman sitting alone. There was a petite blonde with her hair pulled back severely from her face, but she had her nose buried in a copy of the Post, sipping absently from a thick white coffee cup. A mix of people sat at the counter. A pink puffy family of three, all wearing I NY T-shirts, huddled over a guidebook with the Statue of Liberty on the cover. I said a silent prayer that they wouldn’t get mugged. A businessman chatted loudly on his cell phone, oblivious to the annoyed stares of people around him. An elderly lady dropped her napkin; the young man sitting next to her bent down and picked it up, handing it to her with a smile.
I watched, losing myself as I’m prone to do in wondering about people. Who are they? Are they kind or cruel, happy or sad? What causes them to act rudely or to be polite? Where will they go when they leave this place? Who will die in the next week? Who will live to be a hundred? Who loves his wife and family? Who’s secretly thinking about shedding his identity, hiding his assets, and running away for good? Questions like these move through my brain rapid-fire; I’m barely aware of them. I can exhaust myself with my own inner catalog of questions and possible answers. I think it’s why I write, why I’ve always enjoyed profiles. At least I get the answers about one person—or the answers they want to give, anyway.
I felt a hand on my elbow and turned around to see a fresh-faced girl with hair as orange as copper wire, skin as pale and flawless as an eggshell. The smudges under her bluest of blue eyes told me that she was stressed and not sleeping. The urgency in her face told me that she was scared.
“I’m Sarah,” she said quietly. I nodded and shook her hand; it was cold and weak in mine.
The hostess showed us to a booth toward the back of the restaurant and we both slid in. I noticed that she didn’t take off her jacket, so I left mine on as well.
“I can’t stay long,” she said. “I have to get back to the office.”
“Okay,” I said. I got right to the point. “Why was Myra trying to reach me before she disappeared? I thought originally that she wanted to talk to me about her article, but I know now that it went to bed before she started trying to reach me. What did she want?”
A waitress came. We ordered coffees and I asked for an apple turnover.
“I don’t know what she wanted,” she said, leaning into me. “I know that she was working on the Project Rescue story. It wasn’t a news piece, just a series of profiles on these people who might have been some of the children removed from their homes. She wasn’t that into it, did it more to make a new editor at the Magazine happy. But she learned something during her research that really got her jazzed.”
“What?” I said. There was something skittish about her, as if she might get up and bolt at any second. I had the urge to reach out and hold on to her wrist to keep her from fleeing.
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
I looked at her, tried not to seem exasperated. “Okay,” I said, releasing a breath and giving her a patient smile. “Let’s start at the beginning. She was working on these profiles…” I began, letting my voice trail off. She picked up the sentence.
“And she was doing some background research about the investigation, about Maxwell Allen Smiley and about you. She talked to some people at the FBI. She got really annoyed one day. She’d just come back from an interview at FBI headquarters and said that she’d never had so much resistance on a ‘fluff piece,’ especially when the investigation was already closed. She said she was getting the feeling that there was much more to the story than had been revealed.”
“So she set out to find out what that was?”
She looked at me with wide eyes. I was starti
ng to think there might be something wrong with this girl. She was either a little on the slow side or scared and reticent because of it. I wondered why she had agreed to meet me.
“I’m not sure. I think so. Everything happened so fast.”
She looked down at the table, and when she looked back up at me, she had tears in her eyes. I was quiet, waited for her to collect herself and go on.
“She was in her office. I heard her phone ring. She took the call, then got up and closed her door. I couldn’t hear her conversation. About a half an hour later, she left her office, told me she was leaving for the day on a lead, and she was gone.”
“You didn’t ask her where she was going? What she was working on?”
She looked at me. “She wasn’t like that. She didn’t talk about her work. Not until the words were on the page. Anyway, I guess she was right about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“During my last review with her, she told me she worried that I wasn’t curious enough, that I didn’t seem to have a ‘fire in the belly,’ as she put it. And that maybe I was more cut out for research than news investigation.”
I could see that the comment had hurt her, but I could also see that it might have been dead on.
The waitress brought our coffee and my pastry. I wanted to shove the whole buttery, sweet turnover in my mouth all at once in an effort to comfort myself.
“When I went to shut down her computer and turn off her light for the night,” she said, after a sip of her coffee, “I saw something strange on her computer.”
I paused my own coffee cup between the table and my lips, looked at her.
“There was a website open. The screen was completely red.”
She slipped a piece of paper across the table. I recognized the website address as the same one I’d seen at my father’s and at Jake’s. That humming I get in my right ear started up. I found myself looking around the restaurant, wondering if anyone was watching us. Just the mention of that website made me nervous. I didn’t know why.
“Did you tell this to the people investigating her disappearance?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered, with a shrug. “They didn’t seem to think much of it.”
“Do you know anything about that site? What it means?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know much about computers,” she said, casting her blue eyes down.
I put my coffee cup on the table and rubbed my forehead. I was getting the feeling that she didn’t know any more than I did about any of this. I wondered again why she had wanted to meet with me. This time I asked her as much.
“I want to help her. I feel like if I’d been more curious, the way she wanted me to be, then I might have been able to tell the police more. They might have been able to find her. I thought you might know something,” she said plaintively. After a moment’s pause: “Do you?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“You said weird things have been happening to you. Like what?”
The warning in the text message came back to me. I’d already confided in Ace; for all I knew, that had been a mistake. I looked at this girl and wondered what could be accomplished by telling her anything, if there was more potential for gain than for risk. Finally I slid the matchbook across the table at her. She picked it up and held it close to her face, squinting and wrinkling up her nose. She took glasses from her pocket, placed them on her face, and gazed at it a while longer. She opened it and read the note inside. She handed it back to me with a shrug.
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was something odd on her face.
“It doesn’t mean anything to you?” I said.
She was rummaging through her bag then. She placed five dollars on the table and got up quickly. “I have to go,” she said. “I don’t think we can help each other. You should—” I noticed she was looking over my head at something behind me. I turned to follow her eyes but I didn’t see what she was seeing.
“You should,” she repeated, “be careful.”
“Careful of what?” I said, turning back to her.
She moved out of the booth and headed quickly for the door. I put another five on the table and followed. On the street, she had broken into a light jog.
“Sarah!” I called, picking up my pace. “Please wait.”
She stopped abruptly then, almost as if something had startled her. She stood still for a second as I moved closer. Then she reached her hand behind her, as if she was trying to scratch an itch on her back she couldn’t quite reach. She jerked again. By the time I caught up with her, she was on her knees and all the street noise around us seemed to go deathly silent. I dropped to my knees beside her. Her face was a mask of pain, her skin so pale it was nearly blue. She opened her mouth to say something and a rivulet of blood traveled down her chin and onto the pink collar of her shirt. People around us started to notice something was wrong and cleared a path; someone screamed.
“Help me. I need an ambulance,” I said, holding on to her as she sagged into me. Soon I was supporting her full weight. A young man stopped beside us and used his cell phone to dial 911, dropping his briefcase on the sidewalk.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said.
I didn’t answer him; I didn’t know. He lifted her off of me and laid her on the ground, opened her coat, moved the strap of the messenger bag she wore slung across her body. Her hair fell around her like a halo. Two bloodred blossoms marred the front of her shirt. She looked like a broken angel lying there on the concrete.
He looked at me, incredulous. “She’s been shot.”
I stared at him, then past him. In the crowd of people gathering around us, a man in black moved slowly away. He wore a long dark coat and a black felt hat. He seemed to glide, to be swallowed by the crowd. I heard the wail of sirens.
“Hey!” I yelled.
The young guy kneeling over Sarah turned to look at me, his face flushed. “What is it?”
But I was already up and running, pushing my way through the throng.
“You can’t leave!” I heard him call after me. “Don’t you know her?”
My eyes locked on the man in black as he moved quickly up the crowded street. I kept losing and regaining sight of him as he got farther away. He was moving west, impossibly fast. By the time we’d crossed Eighth Avenue, I was breathless. At Ninth, I lost him completely. I stood on the corner and looked up and down the avenue.
A homeless guy lying on a cardboard mat gazed at me with interest. He looked as relaxed and comfortable as if he were lying on a couch in his own living room. He held a quivering Chihuahua in his right arm, a sign in his left hand. It read DON’T IGNORE ME. THIS COULD BE YOU ONE DAY. I ignored him.
“For five bucks, I’ll tell you where he went,” he said after a minute.
I regarded his dirty face and matted blond beard, his ripped Rangers team shirt, his mismatched shoes. He didn’t look that bad for someone who was lying on the street on a piece of cardboard. I pulled a five from my pocket and handed it to him. He pointed south.
“He dropped something in those trash cans, hailed a cab.”
“He hailed a cab?” I said, dismay and annoyance creeping into my voice.
He shrugged. The little dog yipped at me nastily.
I walked over to the trash cans he had pointed out; there were three gathered together at the curb. The smell was awful. “Which one?”
“That one,” he said, pointing to the right. I hesitated.
“Pretty girl doesn’t want to get her hands dirty,” he said to his little dog, giving me an amused grin. “Welcome to my world.”
I gave him a dirty look, grabbed the lid, and lifted it up. I was assailed by the odor and by what I saw inside. On top of the white trash bag lay a handgun with a silencer on its muzzle. I don’t know if it was the smell or the gun, but I felt as if I might vomit. In spite of that, I reached in and picked it up, more to convince myself it was real than anything else. It was real. I stared at it in disbe
lief. I’d watched a girl get shot on the street, chased her assailant, and found his gun with a silencer. I felt a weight on my chest; my hands started to shake. I’m not sure how long I stood like that.
“Put the gun down. Put your hands in the air.”
I froze and lifted my eyes from the object in my hand. I was surrounded by cops. Four uniformed officers stood around me. Two patrol cars pulled up next to us. The homeless guy was gone.
DEPRESSION IS NOT dramatic, but it is total. It’s sneaky—you almost don’t notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you’re sleeping. It takes little things at first: your appetite, your desire to return phone calls. Then it comes back for the big stuff, like your will to live.
The next thing you know, your legs are filled with sand. The thought of brushing your teeth fills you with dread, it seems like such an impossible task. Suddenly you’re living your life in black and white—nothing is bright, nothing is pretty anymore. Music sounds tinny and distant. Things you found funny seem dull and off-key.
I was sinking into that hole as I was questioned by homicide detectives at the Midtown North Precinct. I told my half-truth to them, over and over in as many different ways as they wanted me to: I was returning a call from Myra Lyall and found out about her disappearance from Sarah. Sarah asked to meet me. There was a misunderstanding; she thought I could help her find out what happened to Myra. She left the diner when she realized I didn’t know any more than she did. I went after her, feeling bad. I watched her fall to the street. By the time I got to her, she had two gunshot wounds in her chest and was dead. I saw the man who I thought might have shot her running away. I gave chase and found his gun.
If Sarah had saved my message, they’d know there was a bit more to my story than I’d mentioned. But I imagined she would have deleted it, as skittish as she’d seemed.