She met him at the door of the little bare apartment she’d rented. He got no more than a glance into the place—the labeled boxes of thrift-store stuff were still there, and the mattress was still in the middle of the floor. Then she was in his arms, and he was shoving her hard into the wall right by the door, pinning her hips with his, ramming his tongue into her mouth. She gripped his ass and tugged him into her, groaned into his ear, and Ben could smell she’d showered but the aroma of the woods and the Hudson remained on her, the musty portable, the sweat and blood, not just on her skin but in her hair, in her breath. Maybe it was just memory. Ben pulled Andy’s shirt up over her breasts, tore it off over her head. They stumbled and fell into the first room, landed on the mattress. Ben forced her over onto her stomach and worked his fly open while she ripped at hers. Their anger was meeting there on the sheets; hers at the near miss out at the abandoned property, him at the rest of it; all of it. Ben tugged her jeans and panties down just low enough and shoved himself inside her, used a handful of her ponytail as one handle, one of her ass cheeks as another, and rode her until he finished, fast, before either of them could change their minds.
Unzipping. Unclipping. Unpeeling. Pulling the layers away. She lay under him and ran her fingers up his cracked ribs, piano keys of pain, flipped his T-shirt up off his head while he worked himself inside her, slower this time, deeper. They kicked their jeans off. He’d seen her body already, but she was revealing a new and different kind of nakedness to him now. Her whispers. Her cries. The way the cords moved in her neck as she twisted away, came for him, seemed to fight it. She wrapped her arms and legs around him, and he fell beside her, and they slept for a while there, tangled.
In the shower, he stood behind her, following the slithers of her hair with his fingertips. His mind tried to wander into dangerous territory. Luna. The men. The abandoned construction site. What Andy, or whoever she was, believed about what happened out there; whether he’d been about to give her up. To tell his crew everything. He kept scooping the thoughts back, shoving them under his desire, trying to blast them out with urgent wonderings about her; about whether he wanted to pin her up against the shower wall now or push her down onto her knees. She made the decision for him. Ben put his hand on the wall under the showerhead and cradled her head against his crotch and sighed.
They woke at the same time, randomly, his breath against the back of her neck quickening, her foot twitching against his shin. The city was humming. Blue light on the walls. Two heads on the same pillow. He slipped a hand around her pelvis, pulled her tight against him. They lay silently, both toying with the idea of further sleep.
Until he said, “How did you do that?”
She turned her face against the pillow. He noticed a scar hidden in her hairline, jagged as fork lightning.
“I recorded them all,” she said. “It only took a day. I sat with a couple of actors and ran them through the lines. You can find actors who will do that kind of cash work on the notice boards at arts colleges, usually. But I found these guys on Craigslist.”
“Wh…” He struggled for words. “I don’t understand.”
She turned and reached up above her pillow, onto the floor at the top of the mattress. She unlocked the phone and handed it to him.
“Pick someone.”
Ben chose a name and dialed. He showed her the name on the screen. Theo.
“Hello?” the voice on the phone said. “Andy?”
“This is where I say ‘It’s me, listen,’” Andy said, her voice still hoarse from sleep.
“What’s going on? I haven’t heard from you in so long, man,” the cheerful voice of “Theo” said. “Somebody told me you moved out to New York!”
“This is where I say ‘I need your help, tell me where we first met, blah blah blah,’” Andy rolled a hand. “All that stuff.”
“What do you mean—”
Ben hung up the call.
“So they’re all recordings?” He scrolled the hundreds of names, made them whizz by, an unreadable blur. “All of them?”
“It’s not as hard as you’d think. You just hook the phone numbers up. You can buy phone numbers in bulk on the internet.” Andy stifled a yawn. “That’s how the robo-scammers do it. Then I just recorded one-sided conversations with the actors and saved them as the voicemail for each phone number. When we dialed ‘Theo’ just now we weren’t getting a live line. We were getting voicemail. Same as when Matt was dialing the numbers in the portable. None of the phone numbers are attached to real people.”
“Jesus.”
“I just memorized the conversation I would have with each character. Who that character was to Andy Nearland. Melanie, the girl I went to high school with. Bruno, the friend of my dad’s. Theo, a guy I met in the academy in San Diego.”
“This is…” Ben couldn’t speak. “Where did you learn to do this?”
“Newler taught me this one. We had a job out in Palm Springs where we needed him to appear to be this very successful businessman. We dummied up calls to businesses and played them back in front of his target.”
“Andy.”
“What?”
“This isn’t…”
She looked at him. He shook his head, the words catching in his throat.
“It’s not normal.”
She laughed. The mattress shook.
“No I mean, it’s … it’s sick,” Ben said. He leaned on an elbow, watched her eyes. “This isn’t just a job for you, is it. Normal people don’t sit for days and days recording fake phone calls and writing fake text messages back and forth between … between people who don’t exist … for a job.”
“No,” she agreed. The laughter was gone. “It’s not just a job for me.”
They stared at each other. Ben got that eerie feeling, the same he’d experienced in the cab from Kips Bay, that he was lying beside a very dangerous woman. Someone far beyond what he’d bargained for when he went looking for the help of a cop. A woman unconstrained by cop rules or cop practices. He supposed that was the point of her. She could do what she wanted, whether it was ethical or practical or not. The dark possibilities shook him, stirred something deep down in his core. He couldn’t see what had happened to her to make her like this. It didn’t play against the darkness of her pupils, and it wasn’t written in the jagged scars on her skin. But he was beginning to hazard a guess that whatever it was, it was very very bad.
“What did he see?” Ben asked.
“Who?”
“Matt.” He watched her carefully. “After the phone calls. The phone calls, they were a good strategy. But he found something on the phone afterward that made him kind of smirk. He called Engo over to see.”
“Do we have to do this?” Andy rubbed her brow.
“Whatever he saw, it was the final nail in the coffin for him. He was convinced, after that.”
“I’m tired, Ben.”
“I’ve seen that look on Engo before, Andy.”
“I fucked a guy.” Andy let her hand slap down on the blanket. “Is that what you want to hear? After that first night, when I made you show your body to me in the bathroom at your place. I went out, I trawled a couple of bars, I found a guy who looked like you. I fucked him and I filmed it on my phone. Made sure his head wasn’t in the shot. It’s sitting there in my photo app, if you want to watch it, but you did just get the real thing.”
“Oh my God.”
“I did it for the case, Ben. Matt and Engo, they’ve got to know a cop wouldn’t sleep with a mark just to get a case solved.”
“But you would!”
“I would do anything!” she snapped at him. Her eyes were wild now, fierce. “And yes. You’re right, Ben. It’s sick. I’m sick. Once I get into a role, I’m there. I’m in the case. I would do anything, and give anything, to get it solved. Because this isn’t just a job for me. It’s my safe place.”
She eased a long, unsteady breath, and the exhilaration of watching it happen shot through him. This was her. The real her, on the edge of screaming, or sobbing, he didn’t know what. She was talking to him from deep down underneath her mask.
“If I ever look outside the case I’m in, even for a moment, I’ll have to go back to being me. The real me,” Andy said. “And I can’t do that.”
Ben grabbed her shoulders. “Who the hell are you?”
Andy wiped a tear from her eye, threw him and the blanket off herself.
“I’m the woman who’s going to put you in jail,” she said.
He knelt on the bed. Against the windows and the blue night he couldn’t see her face anymore, and the shape of her was ghoulish, murky, seeming to shift right in front of him. Changeling.
“I’m going to find them first, Ben,” she said. “I promise.”
“What good is a promise from you?” he laughed. “I have no idea who you are!”