“You know who this is,” the gunman said. “I think I know what she means to you.” His digital voice paused to linger on the silence. “She will die at midnight after this one dies.” He pointed his pistol at the girl, whose head was swaying side to side in the throes of agony. It was evident that she was losing blood. Her face paled to the color of bone. “But her death”— he placed his hand on May’s shoulder—“will be slower. So much slower. But there is no need to worry. There is still time. You can stop this. Or you can watch them die. It is very simple: your penance or your punishment. The choice is yours.” The gunman leaned forward, hand covering the camera lens.
The video ended, a black screen that seemed to taunt the waiting bends of their bodies to dip in even closer for whatever surprises it held in its circuitry. Tillman finally picked her phone back up in her fingertips, a gentle touch, as though it might reach back and bite her.
Jeremiah’s phone again rang. He silenced it.
“That’s Paulina,” Tillman said to Jeremiah, her voice even but laced with urgency. “The hostage he shot. She’s Penny’s daughter.”
Jeremiah folded his arms. “I know who the other one is.”
“Miss May,” Wren said so softly she barely heard her herself. She was speaking into herself for herself, and maybe she wasn’t even speaking at all, only feeling her lips glide past each other like tectonic plates beneath the pressure of a thousand separate thoughts left unthought. Wren had spoken to Miss May just a day before, and now here she was with a gun pointed at her head. Strangely, this did not surprise Wren, who was beginning to suspect she was chaos incarnate—introduce her into a closed system and watch order disintegrate.
“How do you know Miss May?” Jeremiah asked her.
“Who the hell is Miss May?” Tillman interjected.
Jeremiah’s phone rang again and this time he answered it. He stepped backward into the kitchen.
“Yeah, I just saw it,” he said numbly into the phone. He held a finger against his other ear to block out the noise of this noiseless room. “Are you serious?” he asked into the phone. He listened, mouth parted, and he looked to Tillman with an expression Wren couldn’t decrypt even if she tried. Tillman nodded back at him in response to whatever question he had posed without uttering a sound. “No, I’m not at the station,” Jeremiah said into the phone. “It’s a long story. I’m going to give you an address. Get here as soon as you possibly can.”
He put his phone back in his pocket and crossed his arms, craning his head to the ceiling. “That was Marcus Waters,” he announced to no one in particular. “He saw the video. He’s pretty shaken up. Said he and his friend spoke with Miss May just an hour ago. He thinks the gunman followed them to her apartment. Said he can’t get ahold of his friend, either.”
“So the gunman took the friend, too?” Tillman asked.
Jeremiah shrugged. “This is fucking unreal.”
Wren felt her voice rise like bile, possessing the same putrid taste as it passed over her tongue, “I want to go back to the station.”
No one said anything.
“I can’t be here,” she continued. “I want to go back. I can’t help you. I wish I could, but I can’t. I shouldn’t be here. I’ve done enough to make this all worse.”
Tillman squatted down in front of her. “We don’t have time for you to work through whatever the hell it is you’re dealing with right now,” Tillman said sternly, allowing the words to burn in Wren’s ears for a few uninterrupted seconds. “Because, unfortunately, it’s too late for you to skip out on us. You’re all we have right now. You saw that video. He’s using those innocent people for some deranged purpose. And this man, he’s used you, too. You fell into his trap. But that doesn’t make you a victim, so stop acting like one. You gave him what he wanted, but you have a chance to make up for that. So get your shit together, stop feeling sorry for yourself, and figure out a way to find him. You can use my laptop. Do what you need to do, download what you need to download.”
“There’s nothing I can do. I’ll only make it worse.”
“Pathetic,” Tillman spat, straightening up.
“Stop,” Jeremiah said.
“Don’t you tell me to stop!” Tillman shouted over her shoulder at Jeremiah. “You put your entire career in jeopardy for this girl and she’s just going to give up like this? That man just shot Paulina. He’s going to kill her and then he’s going to kill someone else and then he’ll kill someone else after that. He’s not going to stop.”
“I need to step outside,” Wren said, her vision going dark. She felt a cold sweat dripping down her forehead.
“No, what you need to do is figure something out,” Tillman said.
“Stop it,” Jeremiah said, stepping between Tillman and Wren. “Come here, Wren. I’ll help you outside. Get some air.” He gripped her shoulder and guided her to the fire escape. He steadied her as she rolled over the window ledge. He began to follow after her, but she stopped him.
“I want to be alone.”
“Listen, Wren—”
“I just want to be alone,” she said, crying. “Please.”
36 BLUSTERY
THERE WERE STARS OUT. The sorts of stars that don’t blink, twinkle, or shine, but simply stare with dead-eyed focus from galaxies away. Wren considered it a rarity in Chicago to be reminded of the world beyond this one. And seeing it now, she couldn’t help but feel that it was no coincidence that she was here on this fire escape beneath these stars on this night. In fact, she had given up on coincidence, because it was no coincidence that the FBI showed up to her apartment and arrested Parker. It was no coincidence that the gunman made another video, and then another after she tried to intervene. It was no coincidence that Parker betrayed her. It was no coincidence that the gunman shot the hostage Wren had been looking for. It was no coincidence that it was Miss May’s face that ultimately passed across that small screen. It was no coincidence that Wren was realizing all of this while watching satellites drift across the velvet-black sky.
Stare long enough, watch them collide and burn to earth.
She heaved over the iron railing. Below, the pavement waited patiently sixty feet beneath the fire escape. Concrete jaws wide open. She imagined the sensation of impact, the brute fission of bone and muscle tissue. It would be so easy. So impossibly easy.
The window slipped open behind her.
“No,” she moaned. “I can’t help you.”
“That’s fine.” An unfamiliar voice. “I’m not looking for anyone to help me.”
Wren turned to see a man crawling slowly from the window in an awkward sprawl of khaki pants, a collared shirt. He wore a leather bag over his shoulder that bounced as he gently lowered himself from the windowsill. His messy gray hair shifted in the breeze.
“Stars are out,” he said. “I’ll be damned.” He tucked his hands into his pockets. “My wife would have called this a blustery night,” he said, leaning against the railing next to her. “It’s a ridiculous word, blustery. Sort of nonsensical. But it’s about right, isn’t it? She read more books in a month than I ever read in my entire lifetime. So she called some nights blustery and she called other nights placid. Words that really have no place in the language.”
“Who are you?” Wren asked.
“Sorry, my name is Marcus Waters.” He looked over at her. His face was tired, eyes at half-mast. But he smiled and the gesture seemed to breathe life back into him.
“You wrote that book about the Kingfisher?”
“Unfortunately, yes. And what’s your name?”
“Wren.”
“Wren,” he repeated. “Well, Wren, they tell me you’re a Liber-teen.” He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the window. “Assuming that’s true, can I tell you something if you promise to keep it between us?”
She nodded.
“I received an email yesterday from a Liber-teen. I don’t know who it was, and I didn’t ask. I won’t share with you the contents of the email out of respect fo
r whoever sent it. I’ll just say it was incredibly illuminating, and I intend to act on the information I received from this person. I’m not entirely sure what that will look like just yet, but I’m going to do something. I have to.”
“Why?” Wren asked.
A car passed slowly down through the alley below them, the drowsy headlights passing over the narrow brick walls.
Marcus cleared his throat while he watched the car turn in to the street. “The person who sent it asked me to do what I thought was best, and what I think is best is to act on the information. Right some wrongs, if you will. I consider it an ethical imperative.”
“I don’t think you’re using that term correctly.”
Marcus laughed. She wanted to call it genuine, but she wasn’t sure what that word meant anymore. “I blame my stepfather. He was a philosophy professor, so sometimes I use his vocabulary, even though I have no idea what half of it means. I’m pretentious through osmosis. That’s what my wife used to say, at least.” He smiled at some unspoken memory, and then it faded. “I’ve been thinking about her a lot tonight. She died three years ago almost to the day. It was a brain aneurism.”
“I’m sorry,” Wren said reflexively.
“Thank you. But the thing about a brain aneurism is that it’s not something you feel coming. There’s no visible or physiological or whatever sort of symptoms. It just sneaks up on you. So when she died, she died in her sleep. Peacefully, or so I was assured. But let me tell you something I’ve never told anyone, if that’s OK with you?”
Wren shrugged. “All right.”
“In the weeks leading up to the night that she died, I could sense something was wrong. I mean it, Wren. I could sense it. Have you ever just sensed something is wrong even though you can’t name it? It’s just there and you get used to it?”
“I’m not sure I know what you mean,” Wren said, although she knew exactly what he meant—to stare into the face of a lie until it became familiar, to sleep next to the same lie night after night.
“This may sound ridiculous,” Marcus continued, “but she had started using words I’d never heard her use before. Maybe that doesn’t seem like much to you, but when you’re married for forty years, you notice these things. These little, tiny changes in a person you know better than you know yourself. For example, she began to recite these strange sorts of platitudes. We’d be watching Jeopardy! and if I shouted out the wrong answer, she might say something like, ‘Is what it is.’ Just these strange things she never would have said before. Things like that.”
“Tautologies?”
“You would have loved my stepfather.” Marcus smiled. “Anyway, after my wife passed, I wondered if these words she used were symptoms of her condition. Maybe they were warnings that I chose to ignore, because I didn’t want to see them. I even called a friend of mine who’s a doctor after my wife passed. I asked him if the words might have been indicators. He told me I was just grieving, told me I was still in the denial stage of things. But still I wonder to this day. I wonder if I’d said something, then maybe she would have gone to our doctor and maybe he would have run a few tests and caught it before it was too late.”
“I really doubt that would have happened.”
“Me, too.” He nodded. “But that doesn’t stop me from wondering, and I wonder every day, Wren.”
Marcus looked over the edge of the fire escape with a childlike precocity, feeling his weight shift over the six open stories beneath him. He reminded Wren of someone whom, in some other context and in some other world altogether, she would have liked to have spoken to for longer about almost anything at all. He had an easiness to his speech, an intellectual slant to his pauses, and a care to his words that she found immensely comforting. But more importantly, he seemed present. He was here, fully. For the first time since she’d been taken to the precinct, Wren didn’t feel alone.
“I know what you’re implying,” she said. “But I don’t want anything to do with all of this anymore. I only make it worse. I don’t want anything to do with it.” She paused, lowering her voice. “I’m chaos.”
To her surprise, Marcus laughed. “Chaos? That seems harsh.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It’s not harsh enough. Everyone keeps telling me to do what I think is best, and I do it. Everything I’ve done I did to make things better, but it only fucked everything up even more.”
“I see.” Marcus hummed, low and long. “Well, let me assure you of this one thing: I’m not going to tell you to do what you think is best. Frankly, I think that’s a bad idea and even worse advice.”
“Why?”
“Well, speaking from experience, what you think is for the best at any given moment is rarely for the best. Because when you think that you’re doing what is for the best, you’re assuming a future you don’t know. And that’s a fool’s game, Wren. I can tell you that.” He straightened up, cast a glance back at the window, and then turned back to her. “No, see, what I’m hoping you do is to go inside that room and try to save someone’s life. Maybe it’s for the best, maybe it isn’t. But it needs to be done.”
“There’s nothing I can do even if I wanted to.”
“What if I gave you some names of the hostages?”
“It’s not enough.” She shook her head.
“Then what would be enough?”
“If I had phone numbers, I could try some things, but—”
“I can do that.”
“It probably won’t work, though,” she said.
“Forgive me, Wren, but it doesn’t really matter.” He bowed his head, shifted his step. “There are people who will die tonight if you don’t try to do something. I know one of them. Her name is Miss May, and she is in real danger.”
“You know her?” Wren asked.
Marcus nodded, gripping the railing and turning his head to the stars overhead. “She’s where she is now because of me. It’s my fault, Wren. I think the gunman followed me to her apartment. I suspected it, but I didn’t want to believe it. I should have said something or did something. But I didn’t. And I’m almost certain that another friend of mine—his name is Peter—has been taken, as well. It’s my fault that they are in that position. I don’t want to live with the guilt of Miss May and Peter’s death. I can’t. I have enough of that already.”
“Then why don’t you tell the police their names and phone numbers? They have an entire FBI cyber unit right now.”
“I don’t know you, Wren,” Marcus said, looking at her, “but I like to think I have decent intuition about people. I can tell that you are a brilliant young woman, but you’re also fundamentally kind. You care. You have a conscience.” He paused, tangling his fingers together as he turned his head to track a satellite passing far, far above them. “What I’m saying is that I trust you. And that’s more than I can say for the police right now.”
There were sirens emanating out from somewhere, somewhere far or somewhere near, it was always impossible to tell. They sifted through the air like material presences, something she could reach out and touch if they passed her by.
“How did you know her?” Wren asked. “Miss May?”
“She was a…” And then he paused in the thought and began to laugh, a low sound that struggled from his throat, painfully aware of its own misplacement in this moment. “Miss May was an acquaintance, I guess. A sort of friend of a friend. You would like her if you met her. One of those people you don’t ever forget. And she could sure use your help right about now, Wren.”
37 JANUARY 1984
GREGORY STETSON LOVED CHICAGO more than he loved life itself. And all things considered, he loved life very much. Mindy, his wife, walked alongside him. Wind combing through her half-blond hair, wearing on her round face an expression that captured, somehow, the grim atmosphere of this particular morning.
And he realized on this bone-cold morning—after parking the Buick on 55th and opening his wife’s door for her, the two of them seamlessly joining the massive march across
Lake Shore Drive—why and how he could love a city so dearly. It was because this city loved itself. So much so, you felt it with every frozen step. Chicago loved its skyline’s cut-and-rise into the thick veil of clouds and smog. It loved the bitter winter wind that ran like icy blood through its concrete veins, washing over old and young and immigrant and drunk and gum-chewing street performer and beat cop and drugged-out singer and lonely artist and student and lawyer and the holy forgotten.
And so many of them here and now. Gathered. A silent tribe en route to a funeral.
Across Lake Shore Drive, Promontory Point ebbed out against Lake Michigan, itself a tundra of ice-capped waves frozen in their crests. There were already thousands gathered, by Stetson’s estimation. And the crowd continued to pack into the snowy lawn, overflowing out into the streets. Everyone wore black. They did not speak. A silence so thick you could taste it, a shared reverence for something greater than themselves that they had lost. But also, just maybe, a shared joy at having known greatness, however temporarily. And every mourner stood stock-still with subzero wind lapping at their stoic faces, each frozen breath released like funeral incense.
It was the sort of moment you remember as an event of history even as it unfurled around you.
A priest took the stage first and gave a brief prayer. Police Chief Gonzalez followed, looking as nervous as Stetson had ever seen him. He gave a very brief eulogy, or at least something resembling a eulogy. He artfully avoided openly praising the Kingfisher while also citing the crime-rate statistics, which were at an all-time low. It began to feel more like a press conference than a funeral invocation. When the mayor finally took the stage, he read from innocuous notes he held in his gloved hands. But a few minutes into his planned remarks, he dropped his notes to his side, and soon he was speaking directly to the crowd, his words fixed to each of the thousands of faces before him.
“Heroes rise when they are needed. And that’s really what I came here to say. I know there are some who would take issue with me even suggesting the possibility that he was a hero. They would be quick to point out the fact that the Kingfisher was a vigilante, thereby a criminal. They would argue that the Kingfisher was no greater than those whom he targeted. But to those people, I say this: Look around you. Look around you at a city gathered and marvel at the sight. Because I am. I am marveling.”
The Reign of the Kingfisher Page 33