His implicit trust made Wally feel guilty for holding out on him.
“I can tell you, though,” Wally said, “that over the past couple of days I’ve actually had a chance to appreciate some of your smart advice.”
“What particular wisdom are you referring to?” Lewis peered dryly at her over the rim of his reading glasses. “I’ve offered you so much.”
Wally smiled. It felt good to be back in the office—Lewis was really good at pulling her out of a dark funk.
“The part about how it’s not really in our power to rescue people,” she said, leaning back in her chair and meeting Lewis’s eyes. “We can play a part, but ultimately they have to fix themselves. I sort of stuck my neck out for someone who wasn’t ready to be helped, and it did no good at all.”
Wally had absorbed that lesson from her relationship with Kyle. It had hit home when she had called 911, potentially making things worse.
“You’re welcome for the wisdom,” Lewis said, studying her. “But don’t be too hard on yourself. The impulse to help is an essential thing. It just needs to be exercised with caution.”
“You’re not gonna say ‘I told you so’?”
“Not hardly,” Lewis said, climbing out of his chair in order to fill both their cups from the teapot. “One day, Wally, I’ll bring you up to speed on my own litany of mistakes and regrets, covering the full span of my long life. I promise you—my countless shortcomings will make yours seem like small beer.”
He ambled back into his office, leaving Wally to guess what “small beer” meant.
“Thank you,” she said, and she meant it.
They both got back down to work in silence. Wally quickly returned to her hyperproductive mode, an almost hypnotic state in which she processed another dozen case files. When she finally came up for air, it was almost six o’clock in the evening and Lewis had gone for the day—she only vaguely remembered him mumbling a “goodbye” on his way out.
He’d attached a note to her messenger bag: “Nice to have you back where you belong. Keep up the good work.”
Wally felt pretty good on the train ride home—reenergized, maybe—and allowed herself to consider her next move. Every question remained open: Where was Tiger? Where was Kyle? How long would it be before Alabama and the others made another run at her? The burner phone she had grabbed upstate was still the only lead she had, and finding its point of sale hadn’t brought her any closer to the answers she needed.
Paige had said she would try to dig more information from the phone, but she hadn’t been in touch. Wally texted her, assuming it would go through once she emerged from the subway.
Anything? Wally typed. It wasn’t until she emerged from the subway station that Paige’s reply finally came: Wrkng on it stay tuned.
Wally walked the half mile home from the station, stopping in her apartment just long enough to slip into workout clothes. Jake and Ella weren’t back yet. She jogged down Nassau Avenue to Orson Dojo, where she went through the usual warm-up torture and then prepared for some sparring exercises.
“Not so fast,” Orson said, leading her to the far corner of the floor where he had brought in a fighting target—basically a punching bag that had padded arms sticking out at several angles. “I can’t have you breaking any more of my clients.”
“You’re putting me in the corner?”
“Just to demonstrate consequences,” Orson said. “Most people come to my dojo only for exercise, Wallis, not to prepare for war. If too many of them leave here with broken noses, I will lose all my business.”
“Fine,” said Wally, annoyed. “Okay if I break the target?”
“Do what you will.”
Wally began her striking sequences and quickly discovered the training value of the target dummy: it never got tired, never retreated. You could beat the crap out of it and it was always ready for more. After just ten minutes of work she was so exhausted she could barely raise her arms to wipe the sweat from her forehead, and her hands and feet felt bruised from the nonstop barrage of contact. It felt oddly satisfying.
Orson stepped in then and returned Wally to the sparring rotation with the others in the class. She fit in much better from that point on, too tired and sore to do any real damage and a little more on par with the rest of the class.
By the time she made it home, Jake and Ella had crashed on the couch with the TV on. Wally spotted a couple of takeout bags on the kitchen counter, and the tantalizing aroma of food made her stomach rumble.
“How was it?” Wally asked them. “Did you get to the city?”
“Yeah,” Ella said, sounding unenthusiastic as she munched a handful of pretzels. “It was okay.”
Wally looked to Jake for details.
“It was weird to see some of the old crowd from the streets,” he said. “The ones who were still around, anyway.”
“They haven’t changed, Wally,” Ella said. “And I guess we were feeling like we had, a lot. We didn’t fit in the same way.”
“I know what you’re saying,” Wally said, sitting down on the arm of the couch. “Sometimes when I’m out in the city I see some of them—Leila and DJ and that group. I always want to hang with them, but when I have it’s never been good. So I usually just keep walking.”
Then a thought struck her. “Do you guys want to go back to the farm?” she asked. “I mean, it’s okay if that’s what you want—”
“No,” Ella said. “I mean, eventually yes, of course. But there’s nowhere else we want to be now. Just here with you.”
“You’re sure?” Wally braced herself for the answer. It seemed obvious now that they’d want to go back home. Because the farm was their home, now.
“Yeah, of course,” Jake said, straight-faced. “Especially since we found this good Mexican place on the way back, in Brooklyn. We have a bag of burritos over there, just waiting ’til you got back. So we’ll definitely stick around long enough to have dinner.”
“You’re an ass,” Ella said to Jake, laughing, then turned to Wally. “Take a shower and we’ll heat up dinner.”
Wally did as directed, relieved that her friends weren’t leaving yet. But as they ate together—huddled on the couch with Gossip Girl reruns on the TV—she couldn’t shake the weird feeling of alienation she was experiencing. Her reunion with her closest friends couldn’t have happened at a better time—but there was no question that Jake and Ella were firmly on their own path, one that could easily lead them farther and farther away from her.
And where would that leave her? The new life she had begun seemed fragile, as if it could come apart at any time. Where was she really headed in her life? Would she always be the bad girl alone in the corner, like she had been at Orson Dojo that afternoon, segregated and angry?
When Ella and Jake eventually left for the farm—which they would—Wally would be left alone in her secluded, rooftop apartment with an antisocial snapping turtle. What the hell kind of master plan was that? She suddenly felt annoyed and disappointed with herself. Things had been different when Tevin was around. She’d had her person—someone to always turn to—and she missed that more than anything.
Wally’s cell phone vibrated loudly on the kitchen counter, and she set aside her food to go check the incoming text.
“Is it from Paige?” Ella wanted to know.
“Yeah,” Wally replied, reading the new message. “She was able to dig the phone log from the memory of the burner. It’s only ten numbers, but she said she’ll keep working.”
Wally hit the speakerphone button and clicked a few buttons—the texting program automatically read phone numbers in texts and turned them into hypertext. All she had to do was click on the numbers one at a time, and the phone would automatically dial them. From the speakerphone came the rapid, high-pitched key tones of a phone number being dialed. After just one ring, an au
tomated female voice sounded from the phone’s speaker.
“I’m sorry. The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
Of course. Even in her distracted state of mind, Wally systematically thought the problem through. Alabama and the other gunmen wouldn’t have made calls to any traceable phone numbers—Alabama had bought all two hundred stolen burners, according to Afrika Neems, and this was why. Any phone he had dialed had been destroyed and dumped by now.
“It’s a dead end,” she said, setting the phone down and dropping back onto the couch. She picked up her burrito and took a huge bite, even though she’d lost her appetite.
“What are you talking about?” Ella asked. “It’s still your best and only lead.”
When Wally didn’t respond, Ella shook her head in exasperation and stood up from the couch, picking up Wally’s cell phone herself before Wally could stop her. She clicked on the next number from the list.
“I’m sorry,” came the reply over the speakerphone. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
“See?” Wally said. “It’s all gone cold.”
Ignoring her, Ella persisted and went through the list—all with the same result. Even Ella looked like she might be ready to give up when she dialed one more time and got a new response. It was the outgoing voicemail message of an actual, active phone line, delivered in a loud, laughing, festive voice, the sounds of music and partying in the background.
“Hey! It’s January! I’m too busy crushing Manhattan to answer the phone right now, so leave me a message, bitches!”
22.
WALLY, JAKE, AND ELLA LOOKED AT EACH OTHER
in stunned silence.
Ella handed Wally the phone, and Wally checked out the text message from Paige Jackson again. There it was: the cell number of her January—party girl and volleyball jock. And it had been dialed six times over the previous two weeks by the very person who had been hunting Wally.
Wally felt lightheaded. She realized she’d been holding her breath since the message had played. She exhaled and gave herself a moment to calm down from the adrenaline rush she was experiencing. She clicked on the number again. And again came the rapid key tones of a phone number being dialed. Again, the connection was made.
“Hey! It’s January! I’m too busy crushing Manhattan to answer the phone right now, so leave me a message, bitches!”
“I knew there was something wrong with her,” Ella growled, revealing an attack-dog side that her friends had only been exposed to on rare occasions. Ella rushed to the apartment door, her eyes on fire.
Wally and Jake jumped up after her.
“Ella, stop!” Wally yelled, but Ella was already rushing down the main staircase.
Confronting January directly wouldn’t necessarily be the best option—it might even be the worst—but by the time they caught up with Ella, she was already at the end of the hallway one floor below, banging on January and Bea’s apartment door.
“Open up, January!” Ella hollered.
There was no answer. “We have to get in,” Ella said, determined. Wally shrugged—there was no stopping Ella, and part of her needed to know more just as badly as Ella did.
Jake hurried upstairs and returned with a knife from Wally’s kitchen, and from there it took him less than thirty seconds to throw the cheap door lock open. The three of them entered the apartment quietly, closing the door behind them.
“Wow,” Jake commented, stunned. “They’re pigs.” Coming from Jake, this said something.
January and Bea’s cramped living space was half full of cheap furniture—off-the-curb cheap—and everywhere were piles of dirty laundry and half-eaten fast-food containers. The place reeked of spoiled food and dirty gym clothes. An overflowing cardboard box full of empty wine and beer and vodka bottles graced one corner.
Wally realized that she had never seen more of the apartment than a quick peek through the door on their way out at night, and now she wondered if they had been too embarrassed to invite her in.
“They have no money,” Wally said. Both had been trying hard to save money for college, and the wages they earned at the coffee shop were meager.
“But they’re out every night, Wally,” said Ella.
“New York can be a friendly city for pretty young girls in heels,” Wally answered, remembering when she’d thought the same thing at Cielo only a few nights ago.
It was a one-bedroom apartment, and January and Bea’s possessions were so intermingled that it was impossible to tell who slept in the bedroom and who took the sofa bed. The sofa was still open, covered by wrinkled sheets and a pile of laundry (clean or dirty?) that included many pairs of lacy, expensive underwear—who had paid for those? One wall was tacked full of family photographs—one family fair-skinned Irish and the other Hispanic—plus newspaper clippings from January’s championship high-school volleyball career. One clipping included a color photo of January spiking a ball over the net, her red ponytail flopping forward from the force of her swing and a look of fierce determination on her face.
“I don’t get it,” Jake said. “Yeah, it’s a sty, but so are half the pads of people around our age. Nothing here says they’re anything more than two girls working hard and living cheap and partying their guts out. This is New York.”
“That’s because you—like all men—see a pretty face and assume the girl behind it is an angel,” said Ella.
There was a beat-up Ikea desk in the corner with an open laptop resting on it, but when Wally flicked the touch pad a password prompt came up. She could take the laptop and have it hacked, and as she pondered the risk of it she noticed a cardboard file box under the desk. She opened it up and found exactly what she’d expected: piles of utility bills, pay stubs from the coffee shop down at the corner, plus assorted other boring paperwork.
There was a collection of monthly bank statements amid the bundle, unopened and addressed to January. Wally opened the most recent one—it had been mailed just a few days ago—and tore it open. In the transaction list for January’s debit account, Wally found a series of deposits going back one month, all wired from the same account. The deposit amounts ranged from two hundred dollars to five hundred dollars, all in even dollar amounts.
The sight of this evidence—if that’s what it was—finally stirred Wally to feel rage welling up inside of her. Up to that point, she hadn’t wanted to believe that her new friends had turned on her—or that maybe they’d been enemies all along. Wally felt like a fool for even considering an innocent explanation for January getting phone calls from one of the gunmen.
“These deposits for the last month add up to nearly two thousand dollars,” Wally said as she flashed the document for Ella and Jake to see. “She sure as hell doesn’t make that at the coffee shop.”
“What do we do?” Ella asked, her voice serious.
Wally thought it through. “We’ll take the bank statement but leave everything else. For now, the girls are the only link to Alabama and the others. If they know we’re on to them, they could take off—and then I’m screwed.”
Jake and Ella didn’t disagree. The three of them left the apartment as they’d found it—trashed—with the laptop untouched, and took only the recent bank statement with them when they closed the door behind them.
As soon as the three of them returned to Wally’s apartment, she logged on to the Ursula Society’s database, Jake and Ella peering over her shoulder. The Society subscribed to the same in-depth credit-analysis services that most banks and loan companies used, so they could track basic financial records pretty easily.
Using the account numbers from the payments that had been made to January’s account over the previous two weeks, they traced the payments to a simple checking account in Tampa, held in the name of someone called Norton Freud Queely.
“W
ow,” said Jake. “Some name. If he’d gone to my high school, my friends and I would have made his life hell. Just sayin’.”
“Well,” Wally said, “I don’t think this Norton was ever bullied.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because he doesn’t exist.” Wally had started running down the particulars associated with the account, and immediately found that the home mailing address given to set up the account—in Tarpon Springs, Florida—did not exist at all. The Social Security number given actually did belong to someone named Norton Freud Queely, but he had passed away in Philadelphia two years earlier.
“It’s a bogus account,” Ella said.
“The money in it was real enough,” said Wally, “but completely untraceable. It looks like the account was set up just to deal with January, because the only action on it is the payments to her.”
“Shit,” said Ella. “There’s gotta be something else. . . . ”
“Hold on,” Jake said—he sat down next to Wally and switched to a different browser. He typed the name Norton Freud Queely into the search box.
“But it’s not him,” Ella objected. “The actual guy is two years dead.”
“He isn’t the one who opened the checking account,” Jake said, still running through his Google search as he spoke, “but you can’t tell me that the name is random. Who thinks up Norton Freud Queely?”
On the laptop screen, results for the keywords Norton Freud Queely, in that order, were nonexistent. The drop-down window in the Google toolbar, however, asked, “Did you mean N. F. Queely?”
“Maybe I did,” Jake answered.
He clicked on the name and a whole bunch of hits showed up, almost all of them listed in the category “News.” N. F. Queely had been an investigative reporter for a weekly independent newspaper called the Philadelphia Metro. The most recent story that included Queely’s name hadn’t been written by him, but about him: two years ago, Queely had been abducted in front of witnesses outside a gay bar in the downtown area called “the Gayborhood.” He had been missing for several days when his decomposing body was found in a local park, having been beaten savagely.
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