That evening, after Travis had washed up the dinner plates and Gaby was busy FaceTiming a friend in Chicago, he sat at the living-room table with the ten cold cases Houser had given him. They were all murders.
With the temporary user ID that Houser had organized, he grabbed his laptop and logged into the NCIC, and found all ten replicated in the system. Most of what was in the physical files broadly mirrored what was on the computer, but some of the digital versions lacked the fine detail of the paper notes he had to hand. That wasn’t unusual. Over the years, he’d worked alongside lots of cops who’d treated the physical file as a Bible, the absolute authority on a case, and the NCIC version as a simple box-checking exercise. Travis had always tried to do both well, but there was little doubt that there was a heartbeat to the paper records, a clarity, that the computer could never duplicate.
‘You okay, Dad?’ Gaby was in the doorway behind him.
‘Yeah, I’m good, honey.’
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just looking at some of the stuff Amy gave me today.’ He glanced at the TV remote in her hand. ‘You watching something?’
‘The Thing is on at nine.’
‘Oh, man. A literal stone-cold classic.’
‘“There’s something wrong with Blair.”’
Travis laughed. When the kids still lived at home, he’d carved out a corner of his home life entirely for the three of them by watching classic horror movies with Mark and Gaby. Naomi had never shown much interest in cinema, and that had been fine with Travis: when she was out, or even sometimes when she wasn’t, he’d curl up on the couch, his son and daughter either side of him, and watch films like The Thing. Even now the kids would talk about it: a couple of nights before Naomi’s funeral, the three of them had been talking about Stephen King novels, and it soon turned into a Misery The Shining and Carrie movie marathon that had gone on until 3 a.m.
‘Shall I make some popcorn?’ Gaby asked.
‘Oh, you bet. I’ll be through in a second.’
Travis turned back to his laptop, closing the NCIC login page, and going to a folder marked ‘Montauk’ on his desktop. He’d created it an hour earlier, after Amy Houser had come through for him yet again. Three or four years ago she’d worked a case – a rape and murder – with a detective from Suffolk County PD, but he’d only remembered it because she’d mentioned it at the first lunch they’d shared, four weeks after he retired. As soon as she’d started talking about working with the cop out on Long Island, Travis had thought about Johnny and Rebekah Murphy. So, before he’d left Police Plaza, after Houser had handed him the ten files he now had spread out in front of him, he’d asked her if she’d be prepared to call in a favour on his behalf with the detective at SCPD.
‘Why?’ Houser had asked.
‘I need some video.’
She’d eyed him suspiciously.
‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘It won’t affect what I’m doing for you.’
‘So what’s the case?’ But almost as soon as she asked, the answer had come to her. ‘Wait, are you still trying to work that thing with the artist?’
‘It probably won’t lead anywhere.’
‘But it might?’
Travis shrugged. ‘It might.’
Her eyes had stayed on him for a moment, a conflict playing out behind them. ‘I gotta ask, Frank. You’re not going to screw this up for me, are you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d never do that.’
‘Because I just took you up there to Walker, to McKenzie, and vouched for you. You know they’ll have me on traffic duty if anything blows back.’
‘It won’t. You have my word.’
And he’d meant it, and that had been enough for Houser.
Travis refocused on his laptop. In the folder marked ‘Montauk’ there were two files. The first was labelled ‘10/30/21 a.m.’ and, when Travis double-clicked on it, it opened onto a shot of Montauk harbour: the parking lot, a ticket office fringed with a green awning, a jetty extending out into the water, and a boat with CROW LINE printed on the side.
The video started at 7 a.m., an hour before the ferry left for Crow Island and, for the most part, the parking lot was empty. Putting the speed up to 2x, and then 4x, Travis watched the image: he could see the ferry’s ramp, its interior big enough to take between twenty and twenty-five vehicles, depending on their size; he could see crew members milling around; and, at the edges of the shot, he could just about make out some cars waiting to get on.
At 7.30 p.m., he switched back to normal speed, pulled in his notebook and flicked through to a page, somewhere near the back, where he’d written the cell-tower ping locations for Johnny Murphy and his sister. They mapped a trail all the way along the Expressway to Montauk, then out to Crow Island.
Onscreen, the ferry started to load.
There weren’t many vehicles going out, because 30 October was the last day of the season, which made it even easier to spot the one he wanted.
A Jeep Cherokee.
Using another temporary login that Houser had set up for him, so he could gain access to DMV records, he double-checked the licence plate, making sure the Cherokee was definitely the same one that was registered to Rebekah Murphy. It was. Her DMV entry listed her by her married name, Russo, but he knew – from talking to her friend Noella – that she’d switched back to her maiden name after splitting from her husband. The Jeep disappeared into the bowels of the ferry, and then, just before 8 a.m., the ramp was raised. Pretty soon, the ferry was chugging out of Montauk.
The video ended.
He opened the second, marked ‘10/30/21 p.m.’ The timecode said it was 7.30 p.m. After a couple of minutes the ferry started its slow emergence from the darkness, forming like a monster from the sea bed. Just before 8 p.m., it began manoeuvring into its slot at the same jetty.
Travis slowed the video right down.
The ramp dropped, revealing all the cars and vehicles that had come back to the mainland for winter. He watched them emerge, guided out by one of the crew, and each time one appeared Travis would take a note of the licence plate. More had come back than had gone out: the last ferry of the season would have returned people who’d been staying on the island.
But there was no Jeep Cherokee.
This was what he’d spent his retirement thinking about, the hunch slowly forming at the back of his mind: Johnny Murphy and his sister had never come back. It was why the BOLO he’d put out had never got any hits in Connecticut. It meant, if they actually went to Stamford, it was in another car – but, more likely, they’d never left the island at all.
It was just their phones that had.
It was a set-up, an attempt to throw the cops off the scent, and have someone like Travis looking in totally the wrong direction.
And, for a long time, it had worked.
His blood hummed into life as he minimized the video and returned to his browser. He went back to the DMV records and inputted the licence plates for all of the vehicles he’d seen come off the ferry on 30 October. Every time he brought up a new person, he returned to the video to compare and contrast the photograph on the driver’s licence with as much of the driver’s face as was visible on the video. It was slow work.
After a few minutes, Gaby came through from the living room, TV remote in her hands. ‘Are you coming to watch the movie, Dad?’
‘Definitely. Just give me five more minutes, sweetheart, okay?’
The interior of some cars was clearer than others, but most he could see some of, certainly enough to match the driver to the DMV version of them with a fair degree of accuracy.
But there was one that didn’t fit.
It was a white Chevy Traverse. The DMV said the vehicle belonged to a Karl Stelzik, but Stelzik was grey-haired and in his sixties; the man on the video, driving Stelzik’s car, was younger – late thirties, black hair, bright eyes.
Travis switched browser windows.
Logging into the NYPD database, he put in a search for Stelzik to see if there had been any flags against his name – a record, an arrest, anything.
He found something else instead.
Stelzik was missing too.