She stood in the shadows of the apartment complex entryway two buildings down and across the street from where Ben was going. Andy leaned against the bricks, watched as Ben instructed his cabdriver to take him on two full laps of the block before he dropped him off. He didn’t see her standing there on the corner of that anonymous street in North Ironbound. There was too much active camouflage on offer. Andy was a still figure in a restless landscape of people; drug peddlers waiting on the steps of the apartments next door, one of them idly dribbling a basketball while another handed a hit to an itchy man in a jumpsuit. The drug deals here were open-handed, relaxed, almost friendly, because there were spotters at either end of the street and half the cops in town were on the take anyway. There was an assembly outside the bodega on the corner waiting for hamburger patties to fry on the grill just inside the window cluttered with sales paraphernalia, and kids played near the cab Ben got out of, oblivious or resigned to the fact that they might get popped any minute by a rival gang coming for the dealers across the way. The local church, Andy guessed, would be crammed with candles lit for baby-faced collateral. The sad fact was that drugs brought more money into this neighborhood than the government ever did, so the kids played and the parents lit candles and the dealers bounced their basketballs off the bricks.
When he thought the coast was clear, Ben disappeared inside, using a key to get through the iron-barred foyer door. Andy started after him, but her phone rang in her pocket. She pulled it out, her muscles already twitching.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember that case we had in Littleton?”
Andy shrank back into the shadows of the doorway. A woman with a toddler on her hip and a cigarette in her mouth had come into the foyer to check her mail. She gave Andy a look up and down through the grimy glass.
“Littleton,” Newler repeated. “The Harris and Klebold devotee who moved into town. You remember? We played her neighbors. Kept an eye on her, trying to figure out if she was planning to stage another—”
“This isn’t a good time to play Memory Lane with me, Tony,” Andy said. “In fact, it’s never a good time.”
“We hadn’t been partners long,” Newler carried on. “I took the case for us because it was a slow boil. Unlikely to turn into anything. Just a couple of weeks of babysitting a psycho who couldn’t walk the walk. We were overkill, because the local FBI agents were new and nervy. You eased into that role so uncertainly, Dahlia. You were always gripping my hand too hard. One time, you threw yourself at me in our yard just as she was pulling into her driveway. You wanted her to see us kiss.”
“Tony—”
“I don’t think it was nerves at the idea that you had to play someone who was in a ‘couple’ for the first time,” he said. “I think you were nervous about kissing me. Leaning into me. Letting me hold you. Because you wanted me, even then. Even that early after we’d met.”
Andy gripped the phone.
“Do you remember what it feels like to be held by me?” he asked.
“Don’t call me again, Tony.”
“I can tell when you’re scared, you know,” he said. It was like she hadn’t spoken at all. “You’re scared now.”
Andy glanced out into the street, hung the phone up before Newler could tell her she was scared of this case and his involvement in it and what it might mean for the two of them. Following her heart. Going backward. Admitting she was wrong. Admitting she’d overreacted about Margaret Beauregard in Pierre Part, that she’d thrown away everything he’d been offering her at the time—a husband, a family, a safe and secure job—over some baby-killing hick she barely knew. Andy could hear Newler like she hadn’t hung up on him. Like his lips were against her ear, saying that the offer she’d thrown away was still there.
It would always be there.
It was okay to come in now from the dark, cold sea.
She was so achingly close to safe harbor.
Andy’s stomach was churning. She crossed the street, took the keys she’d had duplicated from Ben’s set while he slept one night and found the one to the barred door. She let herself into the foyer, and then into apartment number 2.
When she entered, he came into the hall, his eyes wide. His face relaxed as he recognized her, but an ugliness was there. The sneer. The sigh. He went back into the living room, slumped into a plastic lawn chair, the only piece of furniture in the room.
“How?” He put his hands out. “How? I checked for a tail. I left my phone and my wallet at the apartment. I hailed a cab, paid cash.”
“How do you think?”
Ben patted down his clothes, feeling for a tracker.
“It’s in your shoe,” Andy said. Ben reached down and pulled off his shoes, checked the sole of each. Still couldn’t find it. “In the tongue. The left one.”
Ben felt the tongue of the shoe. The tracker was expertly sewn into it. She watched him running his fingers over the invisible seam. “Unbelievable.”
“Look, if I had to guess where your stash was without being able to put a tracker on you, I’d still have guessed it was here.” Andy looked at the bare walls of the apartment where Ben’s mother had been living when he was born. “You have this same instinct with Luna’s apartment. Own it. Protect it. Keep it preserved. Find a way to change it. This is not just an apartment for you, and neither is Luna’s. They’re moments.”
“You know what the head shrinks charge for this kind of—what do they call it? Psychoanalysis?” He smiled. “Lucky me. I get it for free.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You ever played a shrink?” he asked. “Or are you talking from personal experience? Do you own the place where it all went wrong for you?”
“Oh, that’s long gone,” Andy said, stiffening through the shiver passing through her. “So what do you want to do first? Show me the money or tell me what the hell you’ve been doing for two days?”
“Me?” he scoffed. “What the hell have you been doing for two days? I’ve needed to tell you shit. Important shit. They’re on to you, Andy.”
“How so?”
“It’s Engo.” Ben’s eyes were narrow, examining her. “He’s got some sudden hard-on for you. Did you call him? Did you go see him?”
“What’s he saying?”
“He’s picking you apart. What you did here. What you said there. Jake and Matt are starting to listen to him.”
“It’s fine. I’m keeping an eye on it. You don’t need to worry about that.” She went and sat on the carpet beside his lawn chair and took out her phone.
“What do you mean?”
“I want to run some things by you that I’ve dug up.” Andy swiped through images in her photos app.
“How are you keeping an eye on it, Andy?”
“I’ve been trawling through bank accounts,” she kept on. “That’s where I’ve been. I have a contact who’s good with this sort of stuff, but he’s hard to get ahold of. He’s finally pulled through. This has been lock-yourself-up-with-snacks-type work. Just reading screens. Couple of things I spotted. Matt, first. Tell me what you think.”
“I’m asking you questions and you’re ignoring me.”
“Get used to it.”
“Jesus.”
“Three days after Luna and Gabriel went missing”—she zeroed in on a picture of a list of purchases—“Matt goes and buys a set of children’s clothes.”
“Matt’s got like twenty-five kids.” Ben hardly glanced at the photo, slumped in the chair. “I don’t know if you noticed. He knocks up anything that comes within spitting distance. If I was you, I’d go get a test. You’ve ridden in the same engine.”
“Yeah, well, I was able to run the receipt number against the store’s records. The clothes were size four to five.”
Ben stared at the floor. There was the faint smell of vomit in the air, not quite disguised by the new carpet and the basic paint job. Andy imagined when the breeze was right, the vomit smell inside had to compete with the outside smell of the nearby waste-management site.
“Donna’s pregnant,” Andy went on. “But aside from that, isn’t Matt’s youngest kid ten years old?”
“Yeah.”
“So?”
“I don’t know.” Ben shook his head, his stare fixed. “Were they boys’ or girls’ clothes?”
“I couldn’t get that much.”
Ben thought. “Okay. So Matt and Luna they … They were together. They met at the hotel. He killed her. Maybe she said she was gonna tell me or … or Donna about what was going on. He killed her, and he couldn’t kill Gabe so he … He kept Gabe instead. Didn’t have enough clothes for him…”
“Do you see Matt cheating with Luna?” Andy asked. “Is that something you can imagine?”
Ben looked at the bars on the windows beyond the lace curtains. “No.”
“The guy’s got more wives than fingers. Surely he cheats.”
“I’ve never seen it.” Ben shrugged. “And he’s had offers. We’ve been in bars and the women know we’re FD. They’re crawling all over us. None of his wives left him for cheating. Him and Mary broke up because they got married too young. Imogen, he was with her when 9/11 happened so she caught the brunt of that. Christine, he called it off because she was cheating.”
“There’s a first time for everything.”
“Where would he keep Gabriel? How would he hide something like that from Donna?”
“I don’t know.”
“What else have you got?”
“Two weeks before they went missing”—Andy swiped through her phone, more screenshots of bank accounts—“Luna withdrew three thousand dollars from her bank account.”
“What?”
“The initial detective, Simmley, he ran Luna’s bank accounts,” Andy said. “But he probably missed this. She didn’t withdraw it from her everyday checking. She pulled it from her 401(k).”
Ben licked his teeth. Looked harder at this screen grab than he had the one from Matt’s account. “It was to pay for the gun, maybe. The one she tried to get her brother-in-law to source.”
“Maybe. There weren’t any big bills around that time? No big purchases?”
“No.”
They sat in silence for a while, looking at the figures.
“I have something, too,” he said.
“Okay.”
“Luna’s passport isn’t at the apartment. And I got CCTV of her walking with someone in the hotel lobby.”
“Her passport is there,” Andy said. “It’s in the filing cabi—”
“It was. But it’s not anymore.” He looked at her. “So you saw it in the filing cabinet? When you searched the apartment, just before you met me. When you broke in and did your little recon mission.”
“Yes.”
“So, I’m not crazy. It was there.”
“Someone’s taken it, or moved it, since I saw it,” Andy said. “Who’s been inside your apartment since we met? Who had access?”
“A bunch of people have been through there.” Ben shook his head, sat with the phone on his knee, playing the vision for himself again and again. “Jake. Engo maybe, just to pick me up. That was the day before I met you, I think. My brother Kenny. But I mean, he just came into the kitchen. I had eyes on him the whole time.”
“Who has keys to Luna’s apartment?” Andy asked. “Who might have been there while you were out?”
Ben shook his head again, rubbed his stubble. “I don’t know.”
They sat in silence, shadows of the evening passing over the bare room around them. Andy watched the edge of the light walking across the unused carpet fibers, imagined it was the same light that had played over the furniture that was here when Ben was an infant, in the days before he was first removed from his parents’ care. Andy knew it was time for her to make Ben show her his stash, so she could photograph it, and him, a stick to add to the pyre Newler would be building for him. But when she looked at Ben’s face, she didn’t see the remorseless criminal that he was. The liar, and cheat, and endangerer of innocent lives that he had become. She saw instead a wounded and confused man, swiping the footage back over and over, watching it play out, trying to find within it some clue as to what had happened to his imaginary family. And it seemed as though all the humiliation and justice that might have swirled around that moment—the moment she photographed his secret treasure trove of stolen cash—was already playing out here before her. It would have been cruel to double down on it. Ben chewed his nails, and Andy leaned over to view the screen in his hands.
“This is it? The footage?”
“Yeah.” He turned the screen so she could see. She could smell his body, close as she was. Ben had showered after a day of fires. She recognized his cologne. Andy watched the footage a couple of times. The feet walking side by side.
“Those are her shoes.” Ben pointed at the screen. Andy could see his finger gently trembling. “I recognize them. They’re the ones she always wore to work. They got messed up with clay.”
“She might have been carrying him,” Andy said. She nodded at the phone. The footage. “Gabriel. I know what you’re thinking, Ben. She left the house with Gabe. So where is he? But Luna could have been carrying Gabe on her hip. She still did that sometimes, right?”
“Why was she meeting someone at the hotel?” Ben asked. “With or without Gabe. Who was she meeting, and why didn’t she tell me about it?”
“Same reason she didn’t tell you about the gun, or the money. Is there any other footage?”
“Of course not!” he barked. “That would be too easy. The parking lot has no cameras at all. The lobby has this camera and two others. Luna and this person, whoever he is, come up out of the elevator and manage to walk right into a blind spot. I can’t tell where they go from here.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “That way is reception. That way, the first-floor rooms. That way, the restaurant.”
“She’s not on the booking list at the restaurant?”
“No. She didn’t get a room, either. At least not under her name.” The meanness had come into Ben’s face again. “There are no names that I recognize on the guest list for that night or any of the nights around it.”
Andy thought. She was startled when Ben threw his phone at the corner of the room. It smacked off the wall and bounced on the carpet.
“Why wouldn’t they have put cameras in the goddamn parking lot?” Ben’s face was in his hands now. “For the love of Christ, if they just had cameras in the parking lot, we’d have everything!”
“Ben.” She put a hand on his leg. “You can’t lose hope, here.”
“We’re not going to find them.” He shook his head. “I mean, look at this. They’ve managed to thread a perfect fucking path through the camera grid without being seen.”
“An almost perfect path.”
“It’s me,” Ben said. “I don’t deserve to know what happened to them. That’s my punishment for … for everything. Whatever happened to them, and the rest of my life not knowing what that thing was.”
He looked around the apartment. She knew what he was seeing. The wretchedness of his childhood here. The playing out of what the universe had apparently decided he deserved, even before he left the womb. The poverty. The danger. The unwantedness of Benjamin Haig. Andy could almost read his thoughts, about how foolish it had been to think he could have a family of his own, live out his dreams of providing a safe and secure environment for a boy. To heal, day by day, as he did for that boy what had not been done for him.
“The cameras didn’t see them,” Andy said carefully. “And it wasn’t because of you, and what you deserve. Okay? It was because hotel cameras don’t work that way.”
“What do you mean?”
“They’re usually pointed at the staff,” she said. “Sticky-fingered waiters and clumsy cleaners are what most concerns hotel managers, not the guests. In my experience, anyway. Hotel patrons don’t tend to steal anything because their name is on the room, and they’re usually so busy having a good time that they’re not taking notice of what there is to take. It’s the bartender who works all night for peanuts that you need to watch. The one who has to count in and bag up the money for the bosses every night.”
“How do you know that?”
“I ran a hotel for a few months. Place in Boston. Trying to catch a lady-killer.”
Andy watched Ben. He’d seemed not to take in the Boston thing, the reasoning, and she was sure he didn’t believe what she’d said about what he deserved. He was gripping his scalp, his elbows on his knees, eyes on the floor.
So Andy said, “You can dance, huh.”
It wasn’t a question. But he raised his head anyway.
“What?”
“Luna was Latina,” Andy reasoned. “She spent more than five minutes with your ass. So you must be able to dance.”
Ben raised an eyebrow.
“We need to blow off some steam.”