She was an hour early, and she traversed the neighbor’s darkened yard to get to the back gate of Newler’s property. When she announced her presence by tapping on the glass of the doors opening onto the deck, Newler glanced up from where he was perched on a kitchen stool and gave her a resigned kind of look. Like he was disappointed she didn’t trust him enough to turn up anywhere or any way that he expected her to anymore. He came out onto the deck and gestured to a seat at the huge oak table, but she stood by the pillar instead.
“When he arrives, I want these lights off.” Andy pointed skyward, to the lights in the awning that covered the entertaining area and the beginnings of the lush gardens beyond. “He’ll sit there. I’ll sit here.”
“Why?”
“So I’m in silhouette.”
“He’s just a homicide ghoul from Midtown,” Newler tried to say. But Andy held up a hand. They waited, Andy tapping on her phone, Newler smoking by the edge of the lawn, the tension shimmering across the thick summer air between them. The rain had broken the heat briefly during the day, but it was creeping back, flowering in sweat on her ribs and the back of her neck. In the garden, things sang and cried. Crickets, frogs, night birds.
Ben had called twice during the day. She’d texted him back that she was busy, with a winky smiley face in keeping with the game, but there was no stupid little yellow cartoon face for what she was feeling then as a text came through from him.
Important re: Luna.
She eased breath between her clenched teeth, turned the phone off, watched Newler go inside and greet Detective Nick Ryang from Seventeenth Precinct Robbery/Homicide. At the instruction on where to sit, the guy rolled his eyes. He was the typical working homicide cop. Baggy eyes, sagging belly, chewed nails, and a chip on his shoulder about being made to accommodate a younger woman. Andy sat in the shadow of the interior lights and pulled her ball cap low.
“I don’t like smoke’n’mirrors bullshit,” Ryang said.
“We’re not gonna keep you long, Detective.” Newler sat at the head of the table. “My associate just has a couple of questions about the shooting that aren’t covered in the paperwork.”
“I’d also like a full run-through of the investigation,” Andy added. “In your words.”
“And I’m just supposed to sit here and do that on face value?” Ryang squinted at Andy’s silhouette. “How do I know this isn’t a setup for some adorable IA surprise party? I put my best guys on this, and I don’t need them all tied up for the next year and a half giving depositions.”
“I’m not from IA,” Andy said. “And you know that, because if you genuinely thought that was what you were walking into, you’d never have agreed to come here tonight. All this bluster is about making sure Newler knows that you’re pissed, and you’re inconvenienced, and he owes you a favor for this. So tell him that you know that, Tony.” Andy flicked her hand at Newler.
Newler nodded. “I know.”
“Happy?” Andy leaned back in her chair. Ryang sighed and cracked his knuckles, smoothed the tabletop with his palms like he was really weighing it all up and not just sulking.
When he finally got to it, he told her the story. Of the enormous penthouse apartment on Lexington Avenue in Kips Bay, two blocks east of the Flatiron Building and above a Book Bonanza store, with a private elevator opening into the foyer off the formal dining. The “Singaporean gangster asshole” who was never there, who hadn’t wanted to answer questions about what was in the safe or let police search the apartment after the theft was discovered. Andy sat and listened to the tale about the off-duty police officer, Ivan Willstone, who’d been leaving a karate class one block over in Midtown, and who’d been found in the side street behind Book Bonanza with a double tap in the chest and his gym bag emptied on the concrete beside him. All Ryang and his team had been able to ascertain in the first twenty-four hours was that two shots rang out in the side street at around 11 P.M., and those in the surrounding apartments had been too busy, or tired, or anti-police, to call it in until 1 A.M. when somebody got a case of the guilts.
Officer Willstone’s body had been discovered twenty yards down the street from his car, in the direction heading away from the karate school. With his belongings strewn on the ground, and his wallet and phone missing, it was assumed he had made it to his car, then been beckoned farther along the narrow, pedestrian-only section of the street and mugged.
“Officer Willstone fell between two dumpsters that were attached to a construction site when he was hit,” Ryang said. “So anybody who heard the shots and got off their lazy ass long enough to glance out the window wouldn’t have seen anything anyway.”
“So when did you learn about the safe robbery?” Andy asked.
“Eight days after we found Willstone’s body in the street,” Ryang said. “The homeowner, the Singaporean guy, flew in on business from Geylang. Apparently he’s in the country once every couple of months, keeps the penthouse apartment as a bolt-hole for business and a fuck pad, but it goes empty in between. He says he arrived and discovered the safe missing, and while he was asking his neighbors if they’d seen or heard anything, he learned about the shooting in the street. Heard it was on the same night. Wondered if the two were related.”
“Okay,” Andy said.
“I call bullshit on that, personally,” Ryang said. “The apartment was wired up with more cameras and sensors than a modern prison. He would have known he was being robbed the moment someone entered his apartment. But what do you know? He says all his tech blinked out about a half hour before Willstone’s shooting. Nothing was caught on film.”
“If nothing was caught on film, how does this guy know the robbery was the same night as the shooting, and not the night after, for example?”
“Exactly.” Ryang shrugged.
Andy thought about Ben Haig crawling under the jewelry store on West Thirty-Fifth Street, accessing the subsurface electrical exchange, implanting his security-obliterating bug. Haig hadn’t told Andy that’s how the crew had blinked out the security at the jewelry store. But a glance at the amount of tech magazines Haig had on his bookshelves, and a quick tour of the maps of disused subway tunnels under the jewelry store and the fabric store, had set Andy’s imagination wandering.
She looked at the detective across from her, measured him. “So you’re assuming whoever stole the safe took it down to the street behind the Book Bonanza. Willstone approached them while they were loading it up,” Andy said. “But you have no witnesses. No other footage.”
Ryang scoffed. “I don’t need either. It’s a pretty solid assumption.”
Andy didn’t comment.
“If we’d known the safe had been stolen that same night, I would have gone down a completely different avenue of investigation.” Ryang was stabbing the tabletop with his finger now, his eyes searching the darkness beneath Andy’s ball cap. “As it is, I had my guys looking for muggers, or for someone who would have wanted to target Willstone personally. I turned this man’s life upside down looking for suspects. His wife’s, too. There’s stuff about the Willstones’ world that I wouldn’t have had to dredge up if I’d known he just got unlucky stumbling into a robbery in progress.”
“What kind of stuff?” Newler asked.
“Oh, you know, the regular shit.” Ryang ran his hand through his hair. “Affairs. Debts. Kinks.”
They all fell silent. The night creatures chorused on.
“Tell me about the Hurst tool,” Andy said.
Ryang sat back. “It took a forensic nerd to tell us that’s what it was. All we could see from the crime scene, when we finally got access to the apartment, was that the safe had been lifted right off the spot it was bolted to. To us, it looked like someone had wheeled in a crane and picked the thing up off its housing.”
“What do you mean?”
“This safe was bolted to a concrete slab.” Ryang made a circle with his thumb and index finger. “Bolts this round, solid steel, drilled down about four inches. The Jaws of Life—the Hurst tool, whatever the fuck you want to call it—it doesn’t only cut. It also spreads. Someone jammed the teeth of the device in between the bottom of the safe and the concrete slab. The gap was about a half inch wide. They turned the machine on and spread the gap until the safe popped right off the concrete, bolts and all. The forensics lady was able to tell us it was a Hurst tool from the shape of the cracks in the concrete.”
Andy leaned her chin on her palm.
“We were thinking firefighters,” Ryang said. “I know that’s crazy. But we looked into it anyway, and everybody came up clean. I really liked that theory. I mean there was even a fire in the building six months earlier. Kitchen fire, two floors below. Whole-building evac. Two teams of firefighters. One covering Kips Bay, one in support. About twelve guys total. I wondered if, you know, maybe while they were putting out the fire the team took a stroll around, got into the guy’s apartment. Noticed the safe. Decided to come back.”
“So you looked closely at the crews who responded to the fire?”
“Yeah, and they’re all stand-up guys.” Ryang shrugged. “One’s a 9/11 first responder, for chrissakes.”
Andy said nothing.
“Also, the hose jockeys, they have this thing called a thermal lance,” Ryang said. “Cuts through steel like butter, would have had the safe off the slab before you could say ‘Abracadabra!’ So why would they have used the Jaws of Life, if they had one of those they could use instead?”
Because a thermal lance would have been messier, Andy thought, remembering her training. And louder.
“So I dropped that idea,” Ryang went on. “Turns out you can get a Hurst tool just about anywhere. Body shops use them, and so do junkyard salvagers and demolition guys. EMTs, too. Most of the big ships down on the Hudson carry a set to cut anchor chains with, in case of a snag. There was also the construction zone two doors down, the one that had littered the side street with dumpsters and equipment. I couldn’t get a solid answer about whether they had one or not. None of the guys working on that site spoke English. You can buy a Hurst tool on eBay, for chrissakes. It was a dead end.”
Andy gave Newler a wave, went to the edge of the deck, and stood looking at the garden as Newler saw Detective Ryang out. Her thoughts had her so tangled that she was standing staring at the lawn when he arrived back beside her, though she’d intended to slip away. The gold garden lights hit angles in his face that reminded her of the evening they’d met. The alleyway behind the homeless shelter.
“You need to get Ben Haig on tape confessing to this,” Newler said. “Then you need to get him to discuss it with his crew. Get that on tape.”
“Sure, I’ll have it on your desk Monday morning,” Andy quipped. Newler gave that awful elongated sigh. “Haig won’t budge on the robberies until I make headway on Denero and her son. That’s my priority right now.”
“It shouldn’t be.”
“Well, it is.” Andy put her hands in her pockets so he wouldn’t see her clench her fists. “It’s possible Luna and the boy are alive and in danger. Ivan Willstone is dead. I can’t help him right now.”
“But you can help yourself.” Newler stepped off the deck and came in front of her, stood on the grass. He was at her eye level now. “This can’t really be your long-term plan, can it? Wandering around the countryside, picking up cash jobs?”
“My long-term plan doesn’t concern you.”
“There’s a way you can keep doing this.” Newler’s eyes wandered her face. “You like the smoke-and-mirrors games. The acting. The puzzle-solving. I get that. But you can do it safely. With a team. With a security net. I know the kind of stuff you’ve been doing out there, and it’s only a matter of time before one of these private clients shorts you, or kills you, or gets you killed, and there won’t be a damn thing anybody can do about it. You’re gonna get too old for this one day.” He laughed. “Don’t you see that?”
“Is that your long-term plan, Tony?” Andy asked. “Loop me back in? Get me sanctioned, on the books as an FBI consultant. Give me an office and a team. I’ll face the commute on the way home. Try audiobooks to keep my mind busy. I’ll cook you dinner, have it ready before—”
“Oh come on.”
“—you get home. You can fuck me in the ass once a year, on your birthday.”
The meanness had come into his eyes. He worked his jaw softly, chewing on his rage.
“It’s exactly what you were offering me back in Pierre Part,” Andy said. “Ten fucking years ago. I haven’t changed my mind, Tony. Just being around you is a living hell. I wouldn’t last a week in the pretty little cage you’re trying to put me in.”
She turned and walked to the end of the porch and found the stepping stones in the grass that led to the back gate. When she glanced around at him, she expected to see that rage still burning. But he looked like a sad, deflated old man, the empty house with all its lights on sprawling behind his bulky silhouette.
“If you’re patient,” she said, “I can give you Officer Willstone. Maybe Titus Cliffen. Maybe Luna and Gabriel Denero, too. You’ll have multimillion-dollar solves in your name, some of them going back a decade. A crew with this much blood on their hands, and one of them a 9/11 veteran? You’ll make international headlines, Tony.”
His eyes glittered in the dark.
“But if you do what you did in Pierre Part, you’ll lose it all,” Andy said.
Newler was silent. He tried to turn away.
“Don’t you dare turn your back on me,” she snarled. “I need to hear you say it. You’re going to stop following me. Stop shadowing me. Stop thinking about me, and the stupid little fantasy life we were never going to live together. You’re going to be a professional and treat this job like any other. Say it.”
Still, Newler didn’t speak.
“You have to let me go, Tony.”
She turned and walked into the dark before she could decide whether her words had landed, whether they’d changed something in him. Because she was just too afraid of what it would mean if they hadn’t.