End of Secrets Page 8

  The bartender was a woman in her late twenties dressed in a collared maroon shirt under a black vest. She was shaking a martini as the lights of the Upper West Side twinkled through liquor bottles displayed on ledges behind her. She approached Kera within seconds, smiling professionally as she peeled a cocktail napkin from a stack and laid it on the bar. Service happened fast around here.

  “Want to see a cocktail menu?” the bartender asked.

  Kera said she would. When the woman stepped away to retrieve it, Kera opened a copy of the Post, which she’d bought in the hotel’s lobby.

  After leaving her voice mail for Parker in the cab, she realized she’d rushed out too quickly and had to call Jones to ask him to look up a few things. Running data-intensive HawkEye queries on her tablet generated reports that were classified and were therefore not accessible on the device outside Hawk’s secure offices. She wanted to know if there were any patterns in the time of day or day of the week that the four subjects had visited the Empire Hotel. The answer was yes: mostly early evening, almost always on weekdays, usually Friday. She also wanted to know specifically when Rowena Pete had been at the hotel. As a minor celebrity, she would be the most conspicuous in the minds of any of the staff that worked at the hotel bar. Jones told her that the singer had made two appearances in recent months. Kera copied all this down in cryptic shorthand and thanked him.

  “Great view,” Kera said, glancing out the window when the bartender returned. She’d left the tabloid in front of her open to a prominent headline over three photographS: LAST KNOWN PICTURES OF ROWENA PETE. The bartender nodded politely, neither closed off from nor inviting conversation. “How long have you worked here?”

  “A year, I guess.”

  “I mean this as a compliment. You look like the kind of person who isn’t just a bartender. What else do you do?”

  This question earned Kera a cautious glance, followed by a slight smile. “I’m an actor . . . sometimes. Tonight I’m a bartender. What can I get you?”

  “I’ll have a chardonnay.”

  The bartender headed for a rack of wineglasses. There were two cameras on the ceiling behind the bar, one in the corner overlooking the seating area, and there had been one in the elevator on her way up. They were all part of the hotel’s private, closed-circuit surveillance system, off-limits to HawkEye without a warrant.

  The bartender returned with a glass of wine, and Kera looked up from the article to thank her. She caught the bartender glancing at the photographs. This was her opening.

  “Bizarre, isn’t it?” Kera said. “I always wanted to see her in concert.”

  “I saw her a couple of times. It was a really great show. And—” She hesitated, as if deliberating whether it was appropriate to divulge what she had been about to say. Kera kept her eyes on the photographs, feigning nonchalance. “She’s been in here before. Just a few weeks ago, actually.”

  “Oh, yeah? That’s cool.” Kera had learned from Jones that Rowena Pete used her credit card at this bar on a Tuesday evening exactly twenty-four days earlier. “Was she nice in person?”

  “Yeah, totally.” She grinned. “Well, I didn’t really talk to her, but she wasn’t rude or anything.”

  Kera leaned in, affecting mock shame for wanting to gossip. “Who was she here with?”

  The bartender flicked her eyes to meet Kera’s briefly, and then she looked away. “No one important,” she said. Perhaps the bartender was just afraid of getting in trouble with management for discussing clientele, but Kera’s instinct told her that the question had struck a deeper nerve.

  The bartender made a show of glancing down the bar, where stools were starting to fill and a few pairs of eyes were trained her way, pleading for drinks. “I gotta get to these people. Let me know if you need anything else.”

  Kera finished the last of her wine and paid in cash. Ten bucks for a glass of chard. A waste of money, but maybe not a waste of time. The bartender’s name was on the receipt. Erica. This Erica knew more about whomever Rowena Pete had met with at the bar, and there was something overriding her human instinct to gossip about it.

  Kera rode the elevator down to street level and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. She glanced around until she made the two surveillance cameras—both operated by the NYPD—that had captured the subjects entering and leaving. One was across Columbus Avenue above the Lincoln Center taxi stand. The other was attached to the hotel itself, mounted on the corner of the building nearest Broadway. She called Jones on her way to the subway and told him about her conversation with the bartender. “Whatever this girl knows, she’s holding it close to her chest.”

  “You coming back to the office?”

  “Nope. Don’t wait up for me.”

  Jones was silent on the line for a moment. “You’re going to scout the other location, aren’t you?”

  She smiled. There was no point in lying. “I want to get a look at what the surveillance cameras couldn’t see.”

  “Wait until tomorrow when there’s daylight.”

  “Are you worried about me, J. D. Jones?”

  He hesitated. “You’re not authorized to work in the field. Gabby was clear about that, Kera.”

  “Your concern is noted.”

  “The subjects were out there months ago. Even if we knew what to look for—and we don’t—it’s probably gone.”

  “I’m just doing my homework. I won’t sleep if I don’t check it out.” She’d reached the stairs to the 1 train. “Speaking of sleep, do you ever go home, Jones?”

  “Home is boring compared to what I get to do all day in this room.”

  She noticed a security camera across Broadway, mounted on a little arm jutting out from the corner of the Time Warner Center. The lens was directed at the plaza where she was standing.

  “Jones?”

  “Yeah?”

  She paused. “Never mind. We’ll talk tomorrow.”

  “Be safe,” he said, but she was already descending the stairs toward the screech of a breaking train.

  Boredom turned out to be a bigger obstacle than safety. The industrial blocks by the West Side Highway were deserted. She spotted a few homeless people, a few intoxicated revelers who had stumbled west from the Meatpacking District, and a night jogger coming off the bike path that ran along the Hudson. She took a few pictures of the empty streets and then walked east until she could flag down a cab to take her home.

  NINE

  The following Tuesday, the rooms of their apartment were filling with first light as Kera tiptoed from bed to bathroom to kitchen, a dance just delicate enough to keep Parker from waking. She skipped her morning run, swearing it would be the only time this week. It was counterintuitive that she ran more when she was engrossed in a case, but it had proven to be so. Her body seemed to crave the morning exertion. Today, though, she was on a mission to beat Jones to the office, just once, and the run was sacrificed.

  When she pushed through the Control Room doors a few minutes before seven, there he was at his workstation, every screen around him lit as if he were a stockbroker hours into the trading day. He was exactly as she’d left him the night before, except he was wearing a different T-shirt.

  “Have a look at this,” Jones said by way of a greeting.

  “What time do you get here every day? I’ve never seen your workstation empty.”

  “Missing people don’t find themselves,” he said, not looking up.

  “Is that what gets you out of bed?” She’d meant it as harmless ribbing, but Jones fell into a tense silence. She realized she didn’t know anything about him other than what she’d gleaned from their interactions in this room.

  The moment expired when, without looking up at her, he said, “I think I found something.” Except for a HawkEye map of the city on his center monitor, all his screens were filled with images of murals and sculptures. “I’ve been looking for additional cases of missing people who fit the profile of our ATLANTIS subjects. I haven’t found any of those
yet, but every time I run a new query, I stumble across these.”

  He leaned back to let her get a look at all the monitors. She recognized the colorful billboard mural and the odd sculpture bolted to the pavement at the center of a city intersection. She’d seen him looking at those before. But now, in addition to those, there were other murals, sculptures, and even video projections. She counted nine of them total.

  “What are they?”

  “They’re the work of an anonymous street artist called It.”

  “It?”

  “That’s right. Ever heard of him? Or her?”

  Kera shook her head. “Him or her?”

  “No one seems to know. There’s quite a bit of chatter about it online.” He moved one of the images aside and pulled up a list of articles and blog posts about the artist.

  “What’s the connection to the ATLANTIS case?”

  “I didn’t see it at first either. That’s why I kept dismissing these every time they popped up. But then I saw this.” He tapped on a link to a Village Voice article titled WHO IS IT? “I’ll spare you the artsy bullshit. What caught my attention is that nobody knows who the artist is. I don’t mean that the artist keeps him- or herself anonymous, you know, as some sort of gimmick. I mean that there is no earthly evidence that this person exists, other than these works of street art that seem to just appear. At least, that’s what this article claims. Obviously, that didn’t sit well with me. I don’t believe in ghosts, and that’s because I believe in cameras. I take it kind of personal when HawkEye can’t ID someone.”

  “You used HawkEye to look for the artist?”

  “Yes. And it turned up nothing. There’s no trace of this person,” he said, as though hating each of the words as they came out of his mouth.

  “Except for the art itself,” Kera said, admiring it. “You think this artist might be connected to the others?”

  “That’s what I was thinking. But the timeline doesn’t fit. The first person we know of to go missing disappeared eleven months ago. The first piece of art like this appeared a year and a half ago.” He pointed to the billboard mural.

  “Are you sure it’s the same person creating all of these?”

  “I’m not sure of anything. But look at them and you tell me.”

  He was right. The nine works of art were nothing alike in medium or size, but they did possess an unmistakable singularity, a bold and fearless quality that went beyond what most graffiti artists did to texture the city. This case had challenged Kera’s instincts almost constantly, but on this account they felt solid: the nine installations had been created by a single mind.

  “It,” she said, shaking her head.

  Kera left Jones in the Control Room and went back to her office, where she stood for a few minutes studying the note cards on the wall. They’d been hanging there for a few days, and now when she looked at them, she realized that they had become too familiar. She’d originally arranged them chronologically by date of disappearance, and that perspective had gone stale. She needed to look at them in a different way. She took down all the cards and thought about ways to reorder them. She started with age—Rowena Pete, at twenty-eight, was the youngest; Cole Emerson was the oldest at thirty-four. But what did that tell her? Next she thought about the ways they had disappeared. All could have been described as staged suicides, though Emerson, the filmmaker, and Shea, the novelist, could have been categorized as boating accidents. But she didn’t think there was anything accidental about any of their disappearances.

  The last criteria she’d written onto the cards referred to the subjects’ occupations or otherwise notable hobbies. This was the one area where there was a clear separation: three artists and a lawyer.

  TEN

  The law offices of Milton & Booth sat in a cozy five-room suite on the seventh floor of an aging building on lower Broadway. Most of the walls were obscured by file cabinets, bookshelves, and other relics of the declining printed-word era. Any free wall space was jammed with framed plaques and law school diplomas.

  When Kera was led by a secretary into the corner office, Raymond Booth was behind his cherrywood desk, frowning at the file his paralegal had created for their appointment. Booth was a presence, a human backstop of broad shoulders topped off with a head that seemed a scale or two larger than the rest. The temples of his eyeglasses disappeared into bushy gray hair on their reach for his ears.

  “I understand you made an appointment with me, Ms. Mersal, but I don’t see any of your paperwork. No matter, we can address that later.” He was kind, almost jovial. “What can I do for you?”

  Kera introduced herself as a journalist from the Global Report. Booth glanced again at the file, understanding now why it was empty. This did not dampen the warmth of his smile.

  “Unless you’re here for legal advice, I’m afraid I won’t be of much help to you. I don’t talk to the press about my clients. I’m sure you understand.”

  “I’m not here about any of your clients. I wanted to ask you a few questions about Caroline Mullen.”

  “Caroline,” Booth said. His sadness was real, even touching, though appropriate for a colleague. “You’re doing a story about her?”

  “Perhaps. She was an associate here?”

  “That’s right.”

  “What was she like?”

  “She was first-rate,” he said without hesitation. “We lucked out with her. She was a class above us, I’m not ashamed to say. We never get associates of her caliber.”

  “What did she do around here?”

  “Nearly everything. We’re a small firm, as you can see. She wore more hats than anyone, and if she complained, she did it the right way—behind my back.”

  “You specialize in estate law?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which means what?”

  “Families today are as unique as ever. We help couples, married and otherwise, structure their investments, their property, their taxes and wills so that they can grow and protect their wealth over the course of their lives and beyond.”

  “Do you remember what Caroline was working on when she disappeared?”

  “I remember exactly what it was because as soon as she was gone, it nearly ruined us trying to pick up all her casework.”

  Kera waited, hoping that he would elaborate, but he didn’t. “Can you give me an idea of what that casework involved?”

  “I really can’t get into any details that involve our clients.”

  “I understand. But, generally, what was her role?”

  “Like any associate, Caroline drafted and filed documents with the courts and the state. But she picked things up faster than most. It wasn’t long before she was handling all the due diligence for new clients. She was extremely good at it.”

  Kera nodded. “She was good at her work. Do you think she enjoyed it?”

  “Well, I wasn’t close to her. I was just her boss—” he said, launching into the safe, automatic answer. But then he stopped himself on second thought. “Actually, yes, I’m confident she did like it. She had a passion for the law that can’t be faked. It certainly can’t be taught.”

  “A passion?” Kera said. “What do you mean by that?”

  Booth’s eyes narrowed as he searched for the words. “Caroline was . . . idealistic.” Kera wrote that word down. “She was young, of course. And most young people are idealistic. But this was more than that. Fresh lawyers with her intelligence and Ivy League pedigree head straight to the big firms. Corporate finance, M-and-A, big-time employment law. But not Caroline. Her curiosity about the law was more grounded than that. She was interested in people and what they wanted to get out of life. I’ve seen a lot of associates come through here. Very few make an impact like she did. Especially in the short time before her passing.”

  “Before she went missing, you mean.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry. It’s been long enough that, well, I guess I’d forgotten that they hadn’t recovered her body.”

  “But you belie
ve she’s dead?”

  Kera could see the answer within the internal struggle that was all over his face. “I see,” he said softly. “That’s why you’re here.”

  “Do you have doubts about what happened to her?”

  Booth shrugged. “The cops say they found her bike on the George Washington Bridge.”

  “Yes,” Kera said. “And do you think she jumped?”

  Booth hesitated. “I don’t. No. Not Caroline. But what does it matter what I think? She’s certainly gone. If all the evidence points to her jumping, well, at some point that reality must be faced.”

  Kera nodded. “Mr. Booth, can I ask you a professional question? For your legal opinion, that is.”

  “I’ll give you one freebie. After that I’ll have to bill you. Talking to reporters is not what keeps the lights on around here.”

  “I understand. What I’m wondering is whether someone like Caroline, being an expert in estate law, would know the sorts of things one would want to get in order if they planned to fake their own death.”

  The Control Room was never empty, but after business hours it settled into a productive peace. Rarely anymore were there overnight teams tracking real-time surveillance targets on the other side of the world. J. D. Jones looked around the room and pondered this, not for the first time. It was half past nine, and he was sitting at the center of his semicircle workstation, surrounded 180 degrees by eleven large LED screens. The monitors ran off a computer linked to Hawk’s network, which had access to hundreds of public and private surveillance networks around the globe. During the first year that Hawk had been up and running, it was common to have one of the Mideast task forces working into the small hours. Two, sometimes three times a week, a group of men and women spent a night in the pit monitoring some action in Syria or Iran where it was daylight, local time. But not lately. Lately he’d seen less and less surveillance from overseas. It made him uncomfortable.

  Jones loved the ambiance of a room lit by LED screens. He’d never watched much television growing up and watched almost none now, but he would have bet there weren’t a hundred people in history who had spent more time than he had in front of screens. Television was for passive audiences; computers were for builders. Even when he was just watching his screens, like he was now, it was an interactive experience.