He’d been in a few fights in his life, that much had been clear long before Andy ever met Benjamin Haig, when all he was to her was an outline of a person, a bare sketch. Child Protective Services records showed that every time they removed Ben from his parents and placed him in a group or family home with other boys, the placement didn’t last. The kid fought. The care workers, and probably a handful of well-meaning defense lawyers, had managed to keep Ben’s criminal record clean until he was twenty-one. But then came the litany of bumped-down and pled-down assaults, batteries, angry scraps. Always in bars. The booze weakened the chains that locked up the animals inside Ben. The assaults stopped a week before Ben filed for custody of his younger brother, Kenny.
Andy did the screaming, crying girlfriend dance, struggling and twisting in the door guy’s arms. But what she was really doing in the alleyway beside the bar in East Orange was carefully watching a skilled combatant fight for his life. Ben let himself be led into the dark behind the dumpsters with his hands up and his palms out, one biceps in Ed’s hand and the other in the biggest thug’s death grip. He made like he was still hoping to talk his way out of it all, and the strategy earned him the first swing. Ben smashed an elbow into the giant’s nose and shoved him against the bricks, turned and donkey-kicked Ed Denero in the stomach, folded him in half. Then Ed locked him up in a tight grapple, and the giant recovered too quickly, and Ben was in a headlock, long seconds passing while Ed pounded his ribs. They picked him up and dumped him on the wet concrete like trash. He balled up against the kicks, waited, struck out again at just the right moment, sent the giant’s knee sideways at a sickening angle and then rolled and popped up onto his feet, his tread light, fists up. Ed tried for a wild haymaker and Ben broke his nose. Except he made the mistake of coming in too close to deliver a shot to the ribs, and Ed came out of nowhere with a broken bottle scooped off the alleyway floor.
Mistakes and triumphs. Grunts and cries. Ben fought dirty; gouged eyes, used the glass, the walls, the concrete, the edge of the dumpster. Ed gave up and the guy who was holding Andy went in, but by now he’d watched Ben in action and was half-hearted and nervy about it, took a few swings and seemed to bend with relief to Andy’s screaming that she was gonna call the cops.
When it was all over, Ben was sitting against the wall catching his breath and bleeding from a big gash in his forehead, and Andy was watching Ed and the door guy try to heave the semiconscious giant into a car across the street. She wasn’t ready for the cold, dark fury in Ben’s eyes when she came over. She offered a hand and he ignored it, turned and spat blood on the ground.
“Oh come on.” She sat down beside him in the muck and blood and glass on the alleyway floor. “What did you want me to do? Go to Edgar’s shop? ‘Hi, I’m Ben’s new girlfriend and I have a few questions, if you don’t mind.’”
“Fuck off, Andy,” Ben said.
“You saw that reaction. Edgar Denero could well have ignored the two of us just now. If he and his cartel buddies had had anything to do with Luna’s disappearance, it would have been a relief to see you moving on with someone else.”
“So you used me as bait?” Ben asked.
“Luna and Gabe are missing, Ben,” Andy said. “I need to use my time wisely. This was the fastest way to see if I needed to focus any of my time on Ed Denero and his crew. I knew he had a share in this place.” She gestured to the bar. “And that he’d be here tonight. So I ran a little experiment.”
Ben didn’t answer. He was holding his ribs, which were probably cracked. Andy reached over, and the gesture made her freeze. They were alone. There was no acting now. Yet she’d found herself reaching out to put a hand on his arm. He hadn’t noticed, was trying to get to his feet. The blood was running down his neck and into his T-shirt.
“Luna needed a gun, just two weeks before she went missing,” Andy said. She followed Ben to the mouth of the alley. “Come on. Let’s go home. We need to search the apartment again, and see if she managed to get one. See if it’s there.”
Ben turned to her, the pink neon sign outside the bar making the blood on his face a whimsical, heavy purple.
“Andy,” Ben said. “Fuck. Off.”
She decided to walk for a while before getting a cab, took some ugly road away from the bar, trading in the stink of gas stations and a twenty-four-hour KFC for the bright lights and the directness back toward home. Andy wasn’t afraid of walking in the dark, but she wanted to drift into her own thoughts rather than having to keep alert for anyone who might dare to bother her. She was thinking about what might drive Luna Denero to try to acquire a gun. She was the mother of a small, handsy, curious child. And she had a big, capable, and apparently doting fireman in her household, a man who was familiar with protective violence. A gun in the house had apparently seemed unnecessary to Luna, at least to protect from danger coming from outside that house. What had changed her mind? Had something happened? Indeed, was Edgar Denero’s idea that the gun had been to protect Luna from something inside the house, from Haig himself, valid?
Andy walked in the soapy, rainbow-streaked soup drizzling down the driveway of a car wash. Branch Brook Park spread its arms slowly before her as she approached. She decided she would stop on the edge of the park and get a cab to the street where Luna had vanished.
Haig had done a good job narrowing down the CCTV footage of Luna traveling along Washington Avenue in Dayton, heading for her ex’s mother’s house to drop Gabriel off. Haig had gone door-to-door along Washington, noting down the names and statements of every shopkeeper, cabdriver, homeless person, and bystander he spoke to, what they had to say about the night Luna went missing, what they saw. No one had anything useful. They hadn’t noticed the car, the woman, the kid, anything out of the ordinary. Luna’s car had entered Washington Avenue and gone by a liquor store at 7:12 that night, was captured briefly on the storefront’s CCTV. She would presumably have driven by a row of cafés and boutique clothing stores, a Best Western hotel, an apartment block. But her car had then failed to appear on the CCTV Ben had managed to track down at the end of Washington Ave., where it met Hansel. That whole intersection was covered by a camera fitted at the front of a furniture store. Luna’s car went into Washington, and it never appeared to leave.
Haig was convinced, it seemed, from the amount of notebook space he’d devoted to Washington and what had happened to Luna’s car, that this was where the incident that stole her and her son out of his world occurred. It made sense. Luna drove into the street. Never drove back out. Andy hadn’t told the man so, but she knew things weren’t as cut-and-dried as all that. There were plenty of variables, because CCTV cameras weren’t magical windows to the absolute truth. They were operated by humans, and humans made mistakes. They wired them wrong, angled them wrong, entered their setup data wrong, rendering time and date stamps obsolete. And, sure, it looked like it was Luna’s car slowly rolling through the channel of parked cars on either side of the road on one-way Washington that fateful night. It made sense for her to have been there at that time. But it was possible the car wasn’t hers, just an identical one belonging to someone else. The plate wasn’t visible in the video, and coincidences happened.
Andy was going to go there anyway, walk the street herself, take a measure of the place.
Then her phone rang in her pocket.
“You see the report?” Newler said in greeting.
Andy bit back a string of vitriol. It took her a minute. “How did you get this number?”
“The jewelry-store owner’s reported nine hundred k in losses. There were uncut diamonds in the safe, which account for about half of it,” Newler said. “Those guys are smart, you know. They took a bunch of shit they’re never going to bother moving. The watches and the engraved pieces, all the traceable stuff. Makes it look like amateurs hit the store and got lucky with the safe being left open or whatever.”
“Newler,” Andy said. “I asked you a question.”
“And I don’t have time for dumbass questions, Andy, or whatever it is at the moment.” He gave a soft chuckle. “You think I can’t get your number?”
“Have you thought about what’ll happen if one of them gets ahold of this phone?” Andy’s teeth ached. “You are jeopardizing my safety.”
“You don’t seem to be getting it,” Newler said. “I have to stay on top of you. Because I know what you’re like. You’ll puddle around in this thing with the crew looking for the bodies of some woman and her kid, when there are—there are real goods on the table here.”
“Real ‘goods’?”
“I’ve looked into this whole thing now. I think that I can tie Matt Roderick’s crew to some of the biggest hits in New York City in the last ten years.” She could hear the excitement reverberating in his voice. “I’ve got my researchers on it. We’ve got about five major, major heists that we’re looking closely at. There were fires or evacuation-level emergencies in and around these premises in the months before they were robbed. Some of them, Matt’s crew responded. Some of them, they’re not on the books, but they may have been offering support. ‘Second due,’ they call it. And all that? That’s beyond the murder of the cop, Andy.”
“‘The cop’?”
“Willner.”
“It’s Willstone, you fucking psychopath.” Andy tried to breathe, tried to rein in the fury. “You sound like a kid listing off what you want for Christmas. You’re so excited about what this case could do for you, you can’t see that there are human lives involved in it; one of them mine.”
“Don’t try to sell me a sob story on it,” Newler said. “I know you. The real you.”
Andy said nothing.
“These guys have stolen from powerful families, okay? Politically connected families. You love these kinds of cases, where everything and anything is at stake.”
Andy had entered the park. She was walking in the blackness between streetlamps shrouded in foliage. Green and gold, black water moving soundlessly beneath a concrete bridge.
“You’re thinking about it, aren’t you? The power. The possibilities.”
“No,” Andy responded.
“You tell me you’re on this case because of the people, the kid, the human lives,” Newler said. “But I’ve always been able to read the writing on the wall with you. I got your message loud and clear when you chose your mask.”
“What?”
“‘Nearland,’” he said. “Andy Nearland. Near. Land. You’re trying to come home. You’ve been out in the cold, black, windy sea and you’re finally near to land, and you want to come in. It’s okay to say that to me. I’m not going to throw up everything we’ve been through. You can come home.”
She had to laugh out loud at that one. “Jesus, Tony. Listen to yourself.”
“Tell me I’m wrong.”
She lifted her face to the night, gave an angry laugh. “Right now, I’m trying to tell myself not to walk away from this case,” she said. “Because I really want to find Luna and her son. But I also really want to fuck you and your political aspirations and your dreams of me coming home, Tony. I want to leave you standing there with nothing but your shriveled little balls to put on a plate when these powerful people come to dinner.”
The silence on the line was deep, suffocating. For a second she held the phone and her own breath and braced for his rage.
“You could have had all this,” Newler said. “I offered it to you. You turned it down so you could play cops and robbers with the lowest forms of life you could find. I don’t get it, you know that? I just don’t get it. I don’t fucking get it!”
His screaming made the line crackle. She pulled the phone away from her ear, reconnected with the night. A homeless guy on a thin, rusty racing bike was approaching, rolling across the bridge. The bike was saddled on either side with grayed fabric bags stuffed with belongings. The basket on the handlebars, also stuffed with items, was adorned with a cardboard sign. GOD BLESS. Andy listened to the radio blasting from the basket as he approached and passed. The beat rising, cresting, falling away. Kesha’s “Blow.”
“I’m going to save you,” Newler was saying when she raised the phone again. He’d taken control of himself, just barely. “I’m going to stop you punishing yourself like this and bring you back, if it takes everything that I have in me, Da—”
“Don’t!”
Andy stopped. She was shaking all over suddenly, a shudder that didn’t end.
“You don’t get to call me that name,” she spat.
In the background of the call, she heard Kesha’s “Blow.”
She turned, looked back into the woods on the other side of the bridge, toward where the cyclist had disappeared. Streetlamps, pockets of gold light in the blackness. Nothing moved.