Travis paused the DVD of the interview with Johnny Murphy.
There were a couple of moments in it that he hadn’t paid much attention to the first time around, and hadn’t placed any great emphasis on in the times he’d watched the footage since: the pauses between words or after sentences; Murphy’s head dropping, his fingers coming together; his eyes flicking between Travis and the camera. It was all tiny, possibly insignificant, stuff but Travis wrote down the time codes for all of them so he could easily refer back to them later. Once he was done, he turned back to the monitor, to the frozen image of Johnny Murphy.
Take a second look, the caller had said.
But a second look at what?
Travis opened his notebook again.
He’d been through the computer on day one to see if Murphy had a record, any markers in his history, but he’d been clean – not even so much as a parking ticket. His alibi for the night was backed up by cellphone records and security cameras: he’d dropped Louise at the fundraiser at 6 p.m., and GPS data showed him heading to the ER at NYU Langone in Brooklyn, as he’d stated. Travis pulled video from cameras at the hospital to make sure, and Murphy had appeared on film, at the entrance; that, in turn, coincided with a text received by Louise’s cellphone, from Murphy, a minute later, apologizing for ‘abandoning her’. Back in October – following the interview with him – it had been enough for Travis to dismiss him as a suspect.
But two months on, perhaps there were potential gaps.
The video that Travis had pulled of Murphy at the ER covered only a very brief time period – 9.29 p.m. to 9.51 p.m. – when he was visible at the entrance. Before that, the information was much less overt; in fact, Murphy’s cellphone appeared to have been switched off completely between the time he arrived at the hospital, at 7.01 p.m., and when he first appeared on camera at 9.29 p.m. Travis had spotted the anomaly shortly after the interview, and called Murphy about it, and Murphy had given a credible reason: he was in a hospital, in an environment where certain areas of the building, and certain equipment, might have been sensitive to the presence of a phone, and therefore he’d been encouraged to turn it off by hospital staff.
But what if that had been a lie?
What if he’d turned it off because he didn’t want to be traced – and that was because the two hours and twenty-eight minutes that his cell was off coincided with the last time anyone had seen Louise at the fundraiser? It coincided with the split-second glimpse of Louise that Travis had found on one of the cameras at the Royal Union Hotel too: she’d been in the bar at 9.01 p.m. Ten minutes later, her cell had died. Both of those fit into a timeline where Murphy could have headed back to the fundraiser. Those two hours and twenty-eight minutes would have given him more than enough time to drive from the hospital back to the hotel, then make it back to his friend Noella’s bedside in order to send the apology text to Louise. The question was why? Why do it that night, when his friend was sick? Why do it at all?
Travis still couldn’t answer any of those questions because Murphy still felt like an empty space. So the next step seemed obvious.
He had to speak to Johnny Murphy again.
Nick Tillman sat in the corner of a deli in Sunnyside, watching the time. On the table in front of him was a notebook. He’d filled most of its pages already.
He preferred paper to a phone because paper was easy to dispose of. Phones weren’t. They melted, they shattered, you could throw them into a river or bury them in the ground, but they still left a trace: a single text or the briefest of internet searches, and suddenly you were on a server somewhere, for ever. He hated that idea.
Sinking the rest of the coffee he’d ordered, he headed to the counter to pay. The woman at the register tried to engage him in small-talk, which he forced himself to take part in – in his experience, it was easier to remember someone who was rude to you than someone who was pleasant – then exited the deli, heading out into the snow.
There was a payphone a couple of blocks to the south.
The woman answered after four rings.
‘Travis is going around in circles,’ Tillman said.
She didn’t reply.
Responding to her silence, he said, ‘Is something up?’
‘Give me a second,’ she told him.
Another wait.
‘Okay,’ she said finally, coming back on. In the background Tillman thought he could hear a door closing. ‘I just had to wait for Axel to leave,’ she explained. ‘I don’t want him hearing this.’
Axel.
He was going to be a problem if they weren’t careful – but Tillman didn’t say that to her. For now, as always, he just kept quiet.
‘Nick, I’m looking at these things you sent over,’ she said. The sound of paper being leafed through. The tap of a keyboard. ‘What about Johnny?’
‘What about him?’
‘Is he really capable of this?’
Tillman looked up and down the block. ‘When it comes to beautiful women like Louise Mason,’ he said, ‘men are capable of anything.’
Snow flurries skirted across the windshield as Travis made his way south on the interstate. To his right, somewhere under the steel girders of the freeway, he saw the flash of lightbars, their colour painting nearby buildings, sirens screaming to a crescendo and fading again as they headed away from him.
All the way from the office, he’d been thinking about Louise Mason, trying to line up what he knew with what he suspected. Images of her blinked in his head, photos her parents had given him, footage of her he’d watched that her father had filmed at an anniversary dinner. Louise had made a toast to her parents, her words warm and witty. It had drawn Travis even closer to her. Mostly, though, when he thought of Louise, he thought of the terrible error he might have made in dismissing the man she’d been dating.
He got off at the exit for 86th Street and headed for Third Avenue. There, squeezed between a grocery store and a nail spa, was Bay Ridge Electronics.
The place where Johnny Murphy worked.
He found a space a block away. It was less than a week until Christmas Eve so lights and decorations blinked everywhere. It was almost the same amount of time until Travis retired: at 5 p.m. on 23 December he would walk out of the front entrance at One Police Plaza, straight across the road to a retirement party. And after it was done, he’d go home to the emptiness of his house and never return to the office.
To his desk. To his cases.
To Louise.
He upped his pace, walking faster, the city in deep freeze.
I’ve got five days, he thought. I’ve got five days to solve this.
When he got to the store, he paused, looking through the ice-speckled glass. There was a CLOSED sign up, but he could see someone moving around inside. Travis rapped on the door and, after a while, an Asian guy in his thirties approached.
‘We’re not open until ten,’ he mouthed.
Travis placed his shield against the glass.
The guy’s face changed – surprise, then confusion, then worry: why would the cops be calling so early? He unlocked the door and pulled it open.
‘Can I help you, Officer?’ he asked.
‘Detective. I’m looking for Johnny Murphy.’
The guy frowned.
‘I couldn’t get him on his cell or at home,’ Travis pressed. He smiled at the guy, reassuring him that there was nothing for him to worry about.
‘Johnny’s not here,’ the guy replied.
‘He didn’t turn up for work?’
‘No.’
‘Did he give a reason?’
‘No. I mean, he hasn’t been in work for seven weeks.’
It was Travis’s turn to frown. ‘Seven weeks? What are you talking about?’
‘I thought you people would have known.’
‘Known what?’
‘Him and his sister,’ the guy said. ‘They disappeared.’