by A. C. Fuller
“You know how it is on these big murders. NYPD, Feds. Lotta jostling going on behind the scenes. Max, no one is talking yet.”
Her phone vibrated. She had a notification from Twitter, a direct message from one of her most reliable sources. “Finally!”
Herr walked around to look over her shoulder. “What?”
“Note from a source. Hold on.”
@Lebron_GOAT23: .50-caliber from the rooftop you mentioned. No suspects.
She couldn’t repress the grin that broke out across her face. The anonymous account belonged to Joey Mazzalano, a lieutenant who, despite being a serial sexual harasser and all-around scumbag, had never led her astray. His confirmation that the weapon was a .50-caliber rifle confirmed Warren’s suspicion.
“What?” Herr demanded.
“I fed the rooftop thing from Horowitz to my guy and it checked out.”
“A rooftop or that specific rooftop?”
“Specific. Plus, he confirmed it was a fifty-cal, which I heard from someone else. No suspects.”
“Okay, but so what? I mean, go ahead and tweet it, drop an update on the piece from last night, but that’s not enough for a full story.”
“I might have something else.”
“What?”
“Too soon to say, but…” She trailed off. She wasn’t yet ready to tell him about Robert Warren.
“Cole, what?”
She hurried from his office, already scanning notes on her phone from her story on Warren. She knew he lived in the Meatpacking District, but couldn’t recall the exact address. Minutes later, she was in an Uber headed for his apartment.
12
“We aren’t getting back together.”
Warren sat at the cracked formica table in his kitchen, but felt like he was floating outside himself, watching his life from above. He called his estranged wife exactly once a month, and for the forty-ninth month in a row, she’d had the same answer.
He put the call on speakerphone, then muted it as she continued. “I just can’t trust you, Rob. I don’t blame you, but I have to think about Marina.”
While she spoke, he pressed his hands to his cheeks and blew out through his mouth violently. He’d read online that breathing this way would calm him down in stressful situations. It wasn’t working this time.
“…I can’t imagine what you’ve been through, Rob. And now the story. Marina’s not old enough to understand it yet, but the Internet is forever. One day she’s gonna see it and...”
He unmuted the call. “They’re gonna clear me, Sarah.”
“Even so, you know how papers are. They run the story on the front page, A1, then they bury the retraction on C29.”
“Please, just let me see her. I know I’m not where you need me yet, but I’ve been sober a long time.” He glanced past the heavy bag at the bottle on top of his fridge. “Blood pressure is down to…”
“Down to what?”
He considered lying, but decided against it. “160 over 100.”
Sarah sighed. “Are you taking care of yourself? Do you still do that thing where you press your cheeks and blow out air?”
“Sometimes, not usually. I tell ya, I’m mostly better now.”
“What did Marina used to call it?”
“When daddy became a tea kettle.”
She laughed. “That’s right. Look, Rob, I’m proud you’re sober. I really am.” Her voice was quieter, but also firmer. “And I don’t blame you. That stuff with your mom’s brother. Your leg. You’ve got good reasons to be messed up. But that doesn’t mean I can let you around Marina. Your apartment is…well…limited, and now you’re on leave.”
Warren looked beyond his living room through the open door into his bedroom. He could see the corner of the extra-long twin he slept on under a tangle of unmade blankets and sheets. No bed frame, no box spring, just a bare mattress on the floor. Sarah was right. It was no place for his daughter. “Paid leave, and I haven’t missed a payment. They won’t cut my pay unless I’m found guilty, and that’s not gonna happen.”
“What if it does?”
“I could always move back in with you and Marina.”
His wife sighed, and he knew he shouldn’t have said that. He tapped “mute,” sprang from the chair, and threw a series of jabs at the heavy bag.
“Be serious, Rob, and put yourself in my shoes. You could lose your apartment, what little there is of it. If I was with a man like you...”
“Who?” he shouted.
“…You wouldn’t want Marina around him.”
He breathed a sigh of relief, realizing the phone was still on mute. She hadn’t heard.
He unmuted the line. “Are you seeing anyone?” he asked as calmly as possible.
“Not that it’s any of your business, but no, nothing serious.”
Nothing serious meant she was sleeping with someone. Again, he saw himself from above. This wasn’t how his life was supposed to go.
When he’d been honorably discharged from the Marines after losing the lower portion of his right leg, he’d come home a hero. Sarah had gotten pregnant soon after and he’d applied to the NYPD. His life was back on track. The PTSD really got cooking soon after Marina was born. More and more, he’d found himself on edge, though he couldn’t have told anyone why. The merest threat provoked a violent overreaction and afterward, shame. Shame that he’d scared his wife, that he’d terrified his daughter. It was like his internal software was corrupted, and he just couldn’t march straight, no matter how hard he tried. So he drank, and that mellowed the anxiety, if only temporarily. It blunted his anger, too. But then he needed coke to keep him functioning through the blurry haze of the booze, and that aggravated his temper.
Those days were all in the past—the separation had woken him up—but the thought of Sarah with another man made the Remy Martin look better than it had in months. He didn’t know which he wanted more, to drink it or bash it over the head of Sarah’s new lover.
The line did a quick double-beep. Call waiting from a 917 area code—a New York City number that wasn’t in his contacts. He was happy to have an excuse to focus on something other than his almost-ex-wife. “I gotta go. Work’s calling on the other line.”
He accepted the new call without waiting for Sarah’s reply. “Hello?”
“Officer Warren, it’s Jane Cole. How about we give this another shot?”
“Okay, but I don’t see how—”
“Rob, I’m willing to talk about a retraction.”
This caught him by surprise, but he didn’t buy it. Journalists always had an angle. “Why?”
“I’d really like to talk in person, Rob.”
“Why?”
“I’m standing outside your apartment. Buzz me in.”
This stopped him. Since the breakup, he’d lived in four different apartments. His new place was a three-hundred square foot sublet, and he was pretty sure there was no official record of his new address anywhere other than with the department. “How do you know where I live?”
“Your wife.”
The thought of a journalist talking to his wife made his head feel like it was expanding outward. “You think I’m letting you into my apartment after what you wrote? Please.”
“Then come down.”
He wanted to say no, but she’d said the magic word. Retraction. It was the one thing that might give him his life back.
13
“How’d you know about the rifle?” Cole blasted him with the question as soon as Warren walked out of his apartment building.
“Don’t you journalists have any shame?” he fired back.
She was used to this. The conflict between police and journalists went back centuries. Maybe it was the timing, maybe it was something else, but this time it felt more personal.
They walked in silence for half a block, Warren shooting angry looks every few steps. Though he limped, his long strides carried him quickly. Cole also walked with purpose, like she was late for something important, so she kept up. They tu
rned west and headed toward the Hudson River, the sun at their backs casting a sharp light on the sidewalk before them.
She was willing to hear him out on the story she’d written, but first she wanted an answer. “Here’s the deal—”
“No. Listen. You said you’d talk retraction. I wouldn’t have come down otherwise, and today is really not the day to—”
“You approached me, Rob. At the Met. You have something you want to say. I was as surprised as anyone that you decided to say it to me, but…” Suddenly, the brick buildings on either side of her seemed to close in. She let out a long sigh. Her mind became a field of gray static. “Oh, what’s the damn point?”
Warren stopped a pace ahead, blinking in the harsh winter light.
Without thinking, Cole stopped as well, lost in her internal space. She’d been on this street before. Some club opening, or maybe a friend’s birthday party. The details didn’t matter. She’d danced with Matt in one of these red brick buildings. The memory had come like a flash, but it was too painful. The static was a reprieve.
Warren eyed her skeptically. “What’s wrong with you? Sugar crash? If you avoided empty carbs you’d—”
“It’s not a sugar crash. Has it ever occurred to you how stupid this little dance is? Cops versus journalists. Journalists versus cops. I mean, we’re standing on a vaguely spherical ball of rock, a few dozen elements temporarily pressed into shape, spinning through space around the sun. Two insignificant mumbling sacks of meat, arguing over scraps of information, kept alive temporarily by a literal ball of fire. Makes me not give a shit about you breaking some guy’s face, or whoever the hell shot Raj Ambani. And it makes me not give a damn about your paleo-keto-whatever-the-fuck diet that might prolong my existence on this shitstrewn rock for a few more years but would absolutely deny me the shred of comfort I get from a vanilla latte. Or two.”
She thought she saw Warren smile, but he turned quickly and kept walking. She followed.
“That’s BS,” he said. “The kind of existentialist crap rich white ladies say when they don’t want to be held accountable for their actions.”
This jolted her back into the moment. She didn’t like the accusation. “You have proof the dust up was anything other than what I wrote?”
“Strictly speaking, no. But I can get proof that will make you understand what happened.”
“Did you bash a suspect’s face into the grate and break his nose?”
He said nothing.
“Off the record, Rob, just you and me, I swear.”
“Yeah, I did, but—”
“Then my story was accurate.”
“And circumstances don’t matter? Facts out of context are as bad—shit, they’re worse than lies. Why don’t reporters—”
“I called you for comment on the story. If you wanted to share circumstances or make your case, you had your chance.” Jane pushed forward, and the static kept the implications of Warren’s argument out of her head. Barely.
He scoffed. “Like you would have listened.”
“How about this?” She pointed at him. “You tell me how you knew about the rifle. Tell me what you already know you want to tell me, and”—she pointed back at herself—“I promise I’ll look at any proof you have, and make my boss look at it. If it’s real. I’ll personally make sure we run a retraction if—but only if—you convince me.”
They walked in silence for a minute. Finally, Warren stopped and reached for her hand to shake. “Deal.”
“Deal.”
His dark eyes met hers as they shook. He looked like he was trying to decide if he could trust her. “I swear, Rob. Convince me, and I’ll get the piece retracted.” She leaned away and took in his impressive frame. “You’re a strong guy, Rob. You hate feeling powerless. It infuriates you that I have this power, but I do.” He opened his mouth, but nothing came out. “Now that we have a deal, answer the question. How’d you know about the gun?”
Without hesitation, he said, “I watched the killer buy it.”
14
She grabbed his arm. “You what? Start from the beginning.”
He tugged his arm free and they continued, turning south on 10th Avenue. “I was on the list for promotion. Detective.” He frowned. “I mean, before you took a wrecking ball to my future.” His eyes flashed, but he didn’t look directly at her. “Because I was on the list, I got invited to a special program where I shadowed teams in each department for a day. Look under the hood, gain perspective. About four months ago I did a day with counter-terrorism. Specifically, JTTF. Even more specifically, a two-man unit focused on narco-terrorism and dark web communications.”
Cole knew the dark web was a subset of the Deep Web, essentially a secret internet where people bought and sold drugs, hacking software, counterfeit money, and more. But she had no idea where he was going with this. “Okay.”
“This unit was a Revenge of the Nerds type thing. I don’t know how either of them passed their physicals. The one guy’s gut popped out in folds from the bottom of his shirt. Other dude looked like he weighed a hundred thirty pounds soaking wet. And he was my height. But they were smart. Spent their days monitoring postings online. Dark web. Shady stuff.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Sales of explosives, passports, safe houses. When they came across kiddie porn or big drug stuff without a terrorism connection, they’d refer it out. One guy monitored public postings. Another did something, I don’t know what exactly, but he tried to gain access to TorChats. They weren’t supposed to be looking for Arab names, but, c’mon.”
“What’s TorChat?”
“It’s basically a decentralized secure chatroom on the dark web. Good place to monitor the conversations of criminals.”
“Okay.”
“So they’re showing me what they do all day and I get hooked into a thread about guns. Now, I’m a gun guy. Tom Clancy could take notes from me, okay? I’m on this thread and a dude is looking for nine fifty-cal rifles, top of the line and customized with a certain type of suppressor. Suppressors are legal, but he wanted something extra. And, of course, he was looking for weapons that were untraceable. The way these things work is you post anonymously, then you can choose to move into a private TorChat with someone to make the deal. Just so happened that I watched this particular deal go down. Nine weapons. Got the sense the buyer was an amateur, at least when it came to his demeanor. He said too much. Didn’t say what they were for, but he mentioned NBC’s favorite liberal billionaire.”
“Ambani?”
“Dude is a regular on their stations. Was a regular. Political commentary on MSNBC, hosted Saturday Night Live. Hell, he was a guest judge on The Voice. Being a good-looking celebrity billionaire genius is a pretty good gig if you can get it.”
Cole laughed. “What happened with the chat? I mean, what did you do?”
“They couldn’t get a trace on the IP address, and it was clear the dude wasn’t going to blow up the GW Bridge or anything. They referred it out.”
“To who?”
Warren pondered this. “FBI, maybe. Don’t know for sure. Wasn’t their area, and anyway, a dude trying to buy nine untraceable guns didn’t seem to faze them. They saw worse a hundred times a day. I didn’t make much of it. The internet is full of political nuts talking about their plots to kill people. And not just the dark web. You can find that stuff on social media or Reddit. Right out in the open. When Ambani went down, though…”
Cole stopped. “Wait. You said he was looking to buy nine of the same weapon?”
“I know what you’re thinking, and I’m already there.”
“If you saw it, surely the Revenge of the Nerds JTTF dudes did, too. They’d be following up, right?”
“Like I said, they referred it out. To them, it was one of a dozen deals they saw that day.” Warren shook his head. “But damn, I hope someone is looking into it. Thanks to you, I’m not gonna know. I’m radioactive. No one will talk to me.”
“So you’
re talking to me?”
“Right.”
“I have an idea, but I’m cold. Can we go to your place?” He looked at the ground. “Rob, look at me. C’mon. Your apartment’s a dump, I get it.”
He looked up slowly and she smiled. “I sleep at my sort-of boyfriend’s house half the time just so I don’t have to clean my apartment. I may not have washed a dish in three years.”
He smiled back. “No judgments either way, then. But I should warn you, I don’t have any sugar or empty carbs in the place. Lean meats, fresh vegetables, and supplements only. You sure you’ll feel safe?”
“Yeah. I think I can fast for a few hours.”
15
“Jane Cole.” He whispered her name through a mouthful of bologna as he stared at the image on his screen.
Jefferson perked up at the sound of his master’s voice.
“Jane Cole.”
Jefferson breathed heavily as he walked slowly across the room to stand next to the old man. The old man ignored him.
He’d read every article about the shooting, but the one with the image of a pretty reporter had grabbed his interest. The picture appeared as a thumbnail above the online version of her story, next to her Twitter handle and email address at The New York Sun. Shoulder-length black hair, blue eyes, creamy skin.
Like the others, Cole’s story had exactly what he expected. He assumed she’d filled it with information about Ambani because the police hadn’t leaked anything about suspects. This didn’t mean they didn’t have anything, but the New York City press was ravenous, and not a single rumor about a suspect had appeared yet.
He reached for his dog’s head and pet it softly. “They don't know we did it.”
He re-read a paragraph near the bottom.
According to a local resident, who declined to be named, the fatal shot came from the roof of a limestone townhouse across the street from the Met. “Kind of a shallow pop,” he said, “not a huge bang.” He added, “I was by my window. Heard the shot, looked out, saw a panicked crowd.