She rapped on the wheel, tried to steady her breathing, but the air couldn’t get down deep enough, couldn’t reach that bottom quarter of her lungs. Her head spun. She tugged the rearview mirror and looked at her own eyes. Come on. Come on. What was it?
The money. Jake had bitten Luna for money. Probably the three grand she extracted from her 401(k) account two weeks before she went missing. But what did that mean? Did that mean he was the one walking with her in the lobby of the Best Western? Andy couldn’t see the link.
She turned the new knowledge over in her mind, tried to find the source of her turmoil within it. The idea that Luna had loaned Jake money to cover his debts in itself didn’t justify this level of unrest, this almost sickness inside her. Did it? Indeed, if Luna had given him that money, he was unlikely to come to her again for another loan shortly after; say, the night Luna went missing. And she was unlikely to have been so frustrated that he’d not repaid it after only two weeks that she might have asked for a meeting at the Best Western. It was clear that Ben didn’t know about the loan, or he’d have mentioned that when Andy revealed it to him. So what was it? What had brought to life that spider now creeping along the surface of Andy’s skull, its pointed little feet picking holds in the rock face of her scalp?
She put aside the knowledge of the loan. Tried to calm herself. But she couldn’t. The creeping was still there, the knowledge that something was wrong. She closed her eyes and remembered Jake standing there, staring at the ground. Shell-shocked into stillness. By something. By what? His eyes had been on the cigarette in the puddle. The fire in its tip rapidly cooling.
Heat and cooling. Thermal imaging. The camera. Cameras.
Andy snapped upward in her seat. She gripped the button camera at her chest, wrestled it from the buttonhole. She held it in her palm, squeezed it. It was warm. Warm from the heat of her body. But was it exactly as warm as her body? Was it hotter? Was it cooler? Or had it taken on her temperature? Had the thermal imaging camera that Jake had been looking through been able to pick out her button camera’s slightly different temperature against the fabric of the shirt, the press of her breasts against that fabric? Had Jake seen her camera?
Did he know?
Andy threw the camera on the seat beside her and ripped her phone from her pocket. She pulled up the tracking app.
At the barbecue at Matt’s, she’d had about a minute and a half to slip the GPS tracker into a tiny tear in the fabric marrying the outer shell of Jake’s motorcycle helmet to the interior, forcing the nickel-sized object deep behind the sculpted foam with her pinky finger. There hadn’t been time to sew the hole shut, stealing a moment as she was while the rest of the crew relaxed in Matt’s backyard. As she tapped into Jake’s section of the app now, she saw that her risk had paid off. Jake’s little blue bubble was traveling rapidly away from Midtown, down Sixth Avenue toward the Holland Tunnel.
In the minute she’d sat numbly in the car, had Jake called and warned the others? Were they all fleeing now to their stashes? With trembling fingers, Andy pulled up Matt’s and Engo’s little blue bubbles. They were heading in separate directions, slowly. Matt stopped in traffic up on Fifty-Seventh, Engo traveling at a crawl over on Fifth.
It was Jake who was peeling off toward Jersey, driving at dangerous speeds.
Andy started the car and yanked the wheel and screeched into the street. With one hand, she dialed Ben. He didn’t answer. She gave it a minute, weaving in and out of the gentle evening traffic, screaming through crosswalks. She dialed again. Nothing. In the West Village she burned toward crowds, pedestrians leaping out of her way, the bumper of the car bashing a wheeled suitcase right out of a guy’s hand, spewing its contents across twenty feet of roadway.
“Jesus, Ben, pick-up-pick-up-pick-up!”
She dialed. The phone bleeped, changed displays, and suddenly Newler and Ben seemed to be in competition on the screen, the contact icons jostling, too many buttons and options. Andy flung the phone onto the seat and drove. Bullying, tailgating, and swerving her way forward, she made it into clear space. She was surging onto the empty road, flooring it into the icy endlessness of the tunnel ahead.
With one hand, she grabbed the phone and dialed Newler back.
“I’m made,” she said before he could speak. “Jake Valentine. I’m trailing him now toward Jersey.”
“You—”
“Shut up and listen,” Andy said. “I need you and your guys to get set up on Matt Roderick and Englemann Fiss. I don’t know if Jake’s going to warn them. He doesn’t seem to have so far, but he might, and they’ll split.”
“Dahlia,” Newler said.
“Don’t fucking call me that!”
“If your cover is blown, I need to be with you,” he said. “If Valentine is the one who’s made you, then he’s the most dangerous guy right now. I can’t worry about the others. I have to be there with you so you don’t try to take him down on your own.”
“You are not overwatch on this, Tony.” Andy choked the steering wheel. She was driving so fast, drivers were honking at her out of sheer shock as she roared past. “I am making the decisions here. And I just assigned you and your team to Matt and Engo.”
“You assigned me?”
“Do not let them get away. I’ve sunk too much into this.”
“Where’s Ben?” Newler asked. There was a coldness in his voice that made sweat break out on the back of her neck.
“I don’t know. He’s not answering.”
Silence on the line.
“Why is Ben the only guy you’re not ‘assigning’ me to right now, Dahlia?”
She heard it in his voice. The thing that had been there that night in Pierre Part. The dark, jealous beast that twisted inside Newler, that conjured up fantasies about her slithering in the sheets, laughing, with Margaret Beauregard. Only the creature inside Newler wasn’t wrong this time. Andy felt her stomach plunge as she remembered the two of them, the curtains open, his fingers in her hair and her lips on his neck.
“I don’t know where Ben is,” Andy said carefully. “I don’t have a tracker for him.”
“Is that true?”
Andy tried to breathe. She was traveling at lightning speed, one hand on the wheel, half her mind tangled up in trying to save Ben’s life. Because that was what she was doing now, she knew. Trying to convince Tony that she didn’t love the firefighter she’d been sharing a bed with. Because it was her love for Margaret Beauregard that got the woman killed.
“Do what I tell you, Tony. For God’s sake,” Andy pleaded. “Get up on Matt and Engo.”
She hung up and dialed Ben. He didn’t answer. Andy thought back to the last words they had spoken, tinged with sadness, with hopelessness.
What good is a promise from you? I have no idea who you are!
All along, she knew, she’d given Ben hope. Hope that she’d find his girlfriend and her child. Hope that they’d still be alive. Hope that, as the days ticked down to the Borr Storage job, her priority had been the beautiful mother and her angelic child. His family, the family he’d always dreamed of. But as the clues ratcheted up, and their meanings leaned deeper and deeper into the inevitable, Ben had been losing hope. Andy wiped tears from her eyes, the lights of the cars ahead of her shimmering dangerously in her vision. Oh, God. She hadn’t seen it. Hadn’t heard it in the timbre of his voice. The hopelessness that he’d be left with anything, anything, at the end of all this. Anything beyond a total lack of answers, and a jail cell.
As much as she could feel the knowing inside Jake, she could feel the detachment in Ben now. The unanswered calls were unlike so many unanswered calls she’d made to him before. They seemed impossible, now. Like the number didn’t belong to anything. Never had, in the first place.
Jake was slowing. She’d followed him mindlessly, expecting him to head, for some reason, where she’d been going endlessly for days—to Luna and Ben’s apartment in Dayton. But he’d turned south, pulled off the New Jersey Turnpike, and stopped behind a brightly lit office block for a company dealing with cargo ships on the harbor. Andy could see them: the huge red ocean liners waiting beneath the cranes for the daylight to come, their smoky sodium lights blocking out the view of Manhattan beyond. There were woods here. Marshes riddled with creeks winding inward from the bay. The smell of the rancid gases produced by the mangroves themselves competed with the trash dumped here—rotting drywall offcuts, old couches, and bags of unwanted clothes soaked and resoaked by the tide. They made spongy, black-molded, and barnacle-encrusted hotels for crabs and maggots and aquatic insect life.
She spotted Jake’s bike by the side of a gravel road, flicked her headlights off, and pulled over. Taking her gun from the passenger seat, she stuffed her phone in her pocket and got out. A wave of night noise hit her. The hum of the city sliced through by the song of crickets. A boat horn sounded somewhere, two short blasts. Andy followed the line of soft grass at the top of the embankment leading down to the water. She was twenty yards or more from it when Jake appeared, climbing up from the darkness of the mangroves. He got onto the bike, pulled his helmet on, and kicked it to life. Andy shrank down behind a bush as he sped away, not slowing as he passed her parked car.
She stood in the cold air, torn as to whether to run back to her car and continue pursuit or to go to the spot where Jake had entered the mangroves. Working on instinct alone, she jogged to the place where his motorcycle boots had left deep impressions in the sandy mud.
Andy took her phone out, hit the flashlight, and shone it down the embankment. She could see that Jake’s footprints only went two or three feet into the mud. Beyond them, the mangroves seemed uniform at first glance. Crab holes. Ripples and slivers of foam from the long-gone tide. Andy was about to turn away when she saw something that made the hairs along her arms stand on end.
About ten feet out into the mangroves, a patch of earth was bare of the little shoots and roots that stood up everywhere else, an army of tiny soldiers casting long and wavering shadows. The bald patch in the mangroves was oval in shape. Four feet long. Three feet wide. No roots or shoots grew there.
Or those that had grown there had been recently shoveled away.