by Ryan Quinn
“Something urgent?” Parker said from the doorway.
“I’m sure she’s overreacting.”
“Breaking news in Iran?”
“I can’t say.” She wanted to listen to him talk more about Dubai. She wanted to curl up next to him in bed. Anything but have to lie to him. She flashed him a look they both hated: don’t start this now. She’d been up front about her job when they first met. She worked a lot. She couldn’t talk about much of it because she had sources to protect. He’d known what he was in for, and he’d agreed to tolerate it. It would not always be like this, she promised. Just a few years. Then her career track at the Global Report would be made, and she could choose her own hours. She could work from home and have kids, if that’s what she wanted, though she didn’t want them now and suspected she might never. “Look, I gotta go.”
“Of course. Your editor calls. The news cycle must go on.”
“Don’t wait up for me. You’re exhausted,” she said, feeling for her TGR media credentials in her pocket.
“Babe?” Parker called out to her when she was at the door. She turned. “Be safe.”
She blew him a kiss and then she was gone.
THREE
Red and blue light bathed the entryway of Rowena Pete’s three-story town house. A half-dozen cruisers flanked a waiting ambulance, poised at the curb below the singer’s front door as if a lifesaving dash to the ER might still be in the cards. The town house’s facade looked surreally familiar to Kera. The fire hydrant on the sidewalk, the thin trees planted along the block, the tips of their branches sprouting May buds. The wide maroon steps and solid white banister that rose to the landing outside the open front door. Kera recognized it all from the Gnos.is coverage.
Onlookers persisted well past nightfall. She swung wide of a gaggle of bored paparazzi, telescopic lenses swinging from their necks, and cut down a narrow alley. She was stopped before the rear entrance by a pair of cops who took turns scrutinizing her credentials.
“You’re with the Global Report?” one of them asked.
“That’s what it says.”
The cop shook his head. “No media. You can wait out front with the rest of ’em. There’ll be a news conference soon enough.”
“Check with your supervisor,” she said. “I have clearance through the mayor’s office. We’re doing an exclusive, behind-the-scenes-with-the-NYPD’s-finest kinda thing.”
The cop flashed his partner a look that said, What the fuck? Do we really have to do this?
The other cop shrugged. “Call it in.” The first guy got on the radio, and within a minute he was stepping back and gesturing a sarcastic welcome with one arm as he lifted up the tape for her with the other. “Hopper’s gonna love this. Good luck in there,” he said.
She was asked to produce ID twice more between the perimeter and the entryway, where Gabby was waiting for her with an NYPD spokeswoman who didn’t seem too happy to be working overtime on account of a media request from the mayor’s office. The spokeswoman waited downstairs while Gabby led Kera through the town house.
“What are we doing here?” Kera whispered as soon as they were alone.
“An all-access piece on forensic evidence. Everything we see tonight is on background.” Kera hadn’t really been asking about their cover, but she heard Gabby’s response loud and clear: shut up and go along with it. “Come on, everything’s on the middle and top floors.”
Kera followed her up the stairs. She had to jog the final steps to keep up. The second floor was an open, loftlike space stretching from large, street-facing windows past a living area, dining table, and then finally to a spacious kitchen. She was now in unfamiliar territory. The cameras uploading footage to Gnos.is had not penetrated this far. Kera shut her eyes for a moment to focus. See everything, she reminded herself. Keep an open mind. You can only see a scene for the first time once.
Gabby pointed out clusters of evidence as she walked through the room. A translucent orange prescription bottle lay lidless on the rug by the coffee table. Small red and white capsules dotted the couch, collecting near the cracks in the cushions. It felt a little staged, Kera thought, a little cliché, like the opening scene to an episode of Law & Order. Deeper in the room, a cop with a video camera was shooting something on the kitchen counter. Gabby paused, allowing him to finish before they approached. “Here’s the note,” she said.
Kera stared down at the message, scrawled in fat blue marker on the back of an opened envelope: I dream every day of flying off the Brooklyn Bridge.
“A little precious, if you ask me,” Gabby said.
Kera reached for the gloves she carried in her pocket and looked around to make sure the NYPD spokeswoman hadn’t followed them upstairs. “May I?” she asked Gabby.
“Go ahead. Everything’s already been photographed and dusted.”
Kera flipped over the envelope to check the return address. A talent agency in Midtown.
“Mean anything to you?” Gabby asked.
“Her managers,” Kera said. “Probably routine correspondence. A royalty statement, something like that.”
Gabby raised an eyebrow. “Should I ask why you know who Rowena Pete’s managers are? You a fan or something?”
“Something like that,” Kera said. She’d come across a mention of the singer’s manager in the Gnos.is coverage she’d read back at her apartment. The coverage had also mentioned that both the talent agency and the recording label that Rowena Pete was signed to were owned by the ONE Corporation. “Could mean something that she used this particular envelope,” Kera said. She looked around until she spotted the neat stack of mail—mostly envelopes and magazines—slanting out of a bowl perched atop a nearby credenza. “Or it could have just been the closest piece of paper to write on.”
“Wait till you see the rest. This is a girl who thought things through.”
In the master bedroom on the third floor, Gabby showed her the space in the walk-in closet where hanging skirts, jeans, and T-shirts had been parted to make room for a nylon cord secured tightly around the hanger rod. The noose was as crude as the act it suggested: a thin, simple loop formed by a series of inexpert knots.
Kera wondered whether it was too obvious to ask where the body was. Their tour had featured pills, the note, and now the noose, but still no corpse. Its absence grew more distracting with every room they entered.
“There’s more in the bathroom,” Gabby said.
Two NYPD detectives huddled outside the threshold of the master bath. They glared territorially at Kera and Gabby, but they’d gotten word to let the two women in for a look. When Kera stepped into the large bathroom, her eyes went immediately to the floor. At some point hours earlier, a pool of pink bathwater had splashed from the tub and dried against the white tile, leaving a papery, mortal pink dust. It would have been this very spot, Kera guessed, where Rowena Pete might have stood, unclothed, testing the water’s temperature with a hand, her toes curled against the cool tiles, until finally she slipped into the tub.
The knife was at the bottom, shimmering through the pink water.
“What do you think?” Gabby asked after she gave Kera a minute to take in everything.
“I’d say she’s trying to send a message.”
“Not a very clear one. A normal suicide letter would have been more helpful.”
“Where—” Kera began, but then stopped. There was writing on the mirror behind Gabby. She’d noticed it as she turned, and then the rest of the room disappeared. She stared at the words for a long, blank moment.
“You with us?” Gabby asked.
“Yeah, sorry. I was just wondering.” She pulled her eyes away from the mirror. “Where’s the body?”
She felt the detectives look her way. Kera glanced back at them and then looked to Gabby.
“There’s no body.”
Kera’s lips parted slightly to take in a breath. Her mind raced backward, back through the apartment—to the pills, the note in the kitchen, the nylon cord
, and the knife in the tub behind her—but her eyes remained level, staring past Gabby to the short string of words on the mirror.
“What about the bridge? The note downstairs mentioned—”
“NYPD has frogs in the East River. But I don’t expect they’ll find anything,” she said quietly so that the detectives couldn’t hear. “Do you?”
“No forced entry?”
“Nope.”
Kera’s eyes scanned the counter around the sink, taking inventory of the toothbrush, makeup, blow-dryer. Gabby seemed to understand.
“Wherever she went, she took nothing with her. Her phone, tablet, wallet, keys—it’s all downstairs.”
Kera nodded.
“You two, time to clear out,” one of the detectives said. Kera glanced at the badge hanging around his neck.
“Detective Hopper. I’m Kera Mersal.” She didn’t bother with a handshake. Instead, she held out her business card. The detective took it. “I’d love to see the lab results from the blood in this bathwater. I’m also curious how you process smartphone, tablet, and computer data as evidence in a case like this. In the meantime you can call me anytime if you get word about the girl.”
The detective held up her card between two fingers as if he might fling it aside. “My advice, don’t wait by your phone. Someone down at City Hall owes you favors, not me.”
Aware that Gabby was watching her, Kera kept her eyes level on Hopper’s. “Look, mayor’s orders. You can take it up with him, if it’s worth your time. But it seems like you’ve got bigger problems than me. You’re one body short of a crime scene, and pretty soon someone’s going to have to tell that pack of reporters outside that you have a missing celebrity on your hands. You keep me in the loop, I’ll stay out of your way, and we can both keep the mayor out of it.” Kera gave the detective a cooperative smile, but he only moved aside to let them leave.
“All right, we’ll get out of your hair,” Gabby said. “It looks like you’re in for a long night. When you find the girl, or come up with a good reason why you can’t, please let Kera know.”
Kera let Gabby get a few steps ahead of her before she paused at the bathroom door and glanced back at the mirror. The words were clumped in two slanting lines near the base of the glass. They had been written in the same blue marker and the same lowercase handwriting that had crafted the vague note on the envelope in the kitchen. The words said: have you figured it out yet?
Parker awoke as Kera got into bed.
“Everything OK?”
“Yeah.”
“Want to talk about it?”
“You know I can’t.”
“I know.”
She laid her head on his chest. Parker resented the secrecy. She knew it. He took it personally. He had asked, “Want to talk about it?” but what she heard in his voice, even through the half-sleep haze, was, “We’re engaged. We’re going to spend our lives together. Is there really something—anything—you can’t tell me?”
You don’t trust me. Wasn’t that what he was saying?
She’d learned to live with this guilt, both with Parker and with her parents. It was unavoidable, but it was supposed to be manageable. Never forget there’s a difference between your undercover life and your real life, Lionel would say occasionally when he recognized that guilt in her eyes. They are not the same. Your real life matters more.
Maybe, she thought. Either way, it seemed impossible to earn complete trust in one without betraying it in another.
She lay on her back, listening to Parker’s breathing and thinking too much about the sleep that would not come.
FOUR
Kera tapped her ID badge and pushed through the security turnstile in the ground-floor lobby of the steel and mirrored-glass skyscraper where Hawk leased office space under the name of the Global Report. Exiting the elevator on the twenty-seventh floor, she waved hello to the receptionist, who sat behind a sleek metal counter imbedded with a wide flat screen displaying the TGR logo and a digital news ticker that announced headlines as they went live on TGR’s site. Two sides of this room were glass, providing views straight into the open-plan newsroom behind the receptionist. On Kera’s first day at Hawk, she had sat in this very waiting room and noted the ironic transparency evoked by the office’s open design. The appearance was of a busy, high-tech newsroom; what couldn’t be seen beyond the newsroom’s walls did not exist.
The waiting area was empty at this hour, as it was most hours. But the newsroom itself, which Kera entered through glass doors that slid open after another tap of her ID badge, maintained a staff around the clock. This staff consisted of copyeditors, headline writers, and a few senior editors who processed the unclassified reports fed to them from servers programmed to aggregate content for the Global Report. They assembled the reports into news stories and prepped them for publication. In addition to the editorial staff, a lean but highly capable department of web designers and IT personnel kept the news site updating constantly.
There was a cubicle in the newsroom with Kera Mersal’s name on it. The desk had pictures of Parker and her family, the drawers contained binders with notes pertaining to stories filed under her byline, and the phone rang there when someone called the number on her TGR business card. Kera had sat at this desk only a few times—when Parker had visited the office, for example, or when she met with anyone who did not possess a high enough security clearance to be inside Hawk’s secure quarters. Kera walked past the cubicle now, as she did every morning, and turned down a short hallway that branched off the newsroom and led to a conference room, kitchen, copy room, and bathrooms. At the end of this hall was a solid, nondescript door. Kera waved her ID badge at an unmarked reader built into the wall next to the door frame. Inside she greeted the three security guards by name and unloaded her bag and phone onto the X-ray machine’s conveyor belt. Making small talk with the guards, she steadied her face in front of the retinal scanner that hung at face level in the center of the room. She waited, unblinking, for the approving beep that came a half second later. The display next to the scanner read:
KERA MERSAL, INTELLIGENCE ANALYST
CLEARANCE LEVEL: TS/SCI
Beckoned by one of the guards, she passed through the metal detector and collected her things. It was eight thirty. A typical start to the day.
Kera noticed the light on in Gabby’s office, which was several doors down and across the hallway from her own, much more modest work space. It was rare that Gabby beat Kera into the office. Kera set down her bag, turned on her desktop computer, and went across the hall to say good morning. Gabby wasn’t at her desk. Nothing unusual about that, though. Hawk’s deputy director was constantly in meetings, often with Director Branagh, whose office was next door and whose door was always shut. Kera had met the director only once, and on that occasion—her first day at Hawk—they’d hardly exchanged more than a few words in greeting. She got the impression Branagh was an old-school spy, antisocial unless it served whatever mission was at hand, and protective of the inner bubble he created around himself. Gabby operated as his enforcer and, internally, as the face of the higher brass for Hawk employees. As such, she spent a good deal of her day in the Control Room, the windowless chamber at the center of the floor plan where agents monitored data collected by HawkEye, the firm’s proprietary surveillance software, and created reports that were disseminated to clients throughout the intelligence community, including—not infrequently—analysis that made its way into the president’s daily briefing.
Kera had never been inside the Control Room. It was a restricted area that required need-to-know clearance for a particular classification of sensitive compartmented information code-named UNIVINT, or universal intelligence, which was the sort of all-source intelligence that was HawkEye’s specialty. UNIVINT referred to a form of supercomputing that combined all available surveillance methods to construct a comprehensive, unifying understanding of a target or an evolving situation.
When it pertained to her work as an analyst,
Kera had been granted access to raw reports generated by HawkEye, and she’d occasionally filed intel requests that were fulfilled by agents in the Control Room, such as obtaining IP addresses or tracking the precise movements of a hacker or suspected terrorist. But she had yet to work a case that required her to set foot in the room herself.
Gabby had e-mailed Kera early that morning to call her to a ten o’clock meeting. Kera could guess what that meant. Gabby wanted an update on the Rowena Pete investigation. What was there to report? She still wasn’t sure why she’d been assigned to the investigation, or even what they were supposed to be investigating. It didn’t seem clear to anyone that a crime had even been committed. It was even less clear to Kera why any of it was Hawk’s concern.
After a detour to the kitchen for her first cup of coffee, Kera retreated to her office to start prepping for the day. She began with the intention to start digesting what little she knew about Rowena Pete, but when she sat down at her desk, there was an e-mail from Travis Bradley, the ex-ONE quant. It was two sentences: I CAN GET EVIDENCE. WHAT DO YOU NEED FOR A STORY?
There’s no story, Bradley, she thought, closing his e-mail without responding to it and wondering how long it would take before he gave up on her and sought out a real journalist.
She was halfway through the cup of coffee when an e-mail came in from Detective Hopper. It was terse. The prints on all the evidence were a match to Rowena Pete. The town house had been examined top to bottom, and there was no sign of forced entry. There also was still no body. The NYPD was classifying Rowena Pete as a missing person. The detective’s tone seemed to imply that the singer had simply run away, an interpretation that made it seem like she didn’t want to be found, as opposed to the alternative—that the detective was too incompetent to find her. This irritated Kera. The runaway theory didn’t make sense. Run away to where? And why? And, OK, say for a moment Rowena Pete had run away; why go through the trouble of staging multiple, symbolic suicides? Why leave behind her phone and wallet? Kera felt torn. A missing persons case seemed insignificant compared to the global threats of cyberwar and terrorism that she was accustomed to monitoring. But she couldn’t suppress her curiosity. “Where did you go, Rowena?” she whispered aloud to herself, letting her eyes drift over the scissoring intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue below her window.