The mess was huge. The way she worked, and the kinds of things she did for people, Andy was accustomed to jobs ending with a lot of covering up to do, a lot of threats, a lot of bargaining. She stood at the window of the hospital in Santa Barbara and watched the highway beyond, red and yellow lights on the 101, feeling tired and ready for the end of it. There was a breeze off the ocean, and the Cottage Hospital, being only three stories high, had windows in the maternity ward that could open, a designer figuring perhaps that the usual rule about postpartum depression and open windows didn’t have to apply here. There was an elegant red bougainvillea plant creeping along the edge of the building, and through its dark leaves Andy watched the window of room 302.
In the weeks that followed the fire at Borr Storage, she’d begun to pick at the deeply knotted and tangled last aspects of the Benjamin Haig case, resting up in a hotel under a fake name in Hoboken. She’d watched the news coverage of the attempted robbery of Borr Storage, of the deliberately ignited fire that had miraculously injured no one, of Newler’s mysterious murder by Jake in Metuchen and its connection to the events in Midtown. Andy watched anxiously for mentions of her mask’s name, or flashes of her visage, or signs that the police would need her assistance piecing together that Jake had murdered Luna and stolen Gabriel, or that Ben’s crew had murdered Ivan Willstone and possibly Titus Cliffen. If she could help it, Andy wanted to stay clear of the cleanup, so that there were no questions about what had happened to Newler. About who she was, and where she’d come from, and what dark ghosts lurched across the landscape of her past.
Petal by petal, the flower bloomed. Only one news report mentioned that police sought assistance from an unnamed woman seen by witnesses at the crime scene at Metuchen. Police worked backward through Jake’s phone’s map app, which led them to Luna’s body in the mangroves by the harbor. An arson expert employed by the FDNY admitted, after a week of intense police pressure, to giving a “gently manipulated” report on the fire that killed Titus Cliffen and three other fires on Matt’s request. As the days passed, and Andy remained glued to the TV and to her phone, she saw nothing about Andy Nearland and her employment with the Engine 99 crew. She could only think that some colleague of Newler’s had scrubbed clean his office and personal effects of his apparent use of a private undercover agent, probably in the hopes of maintaining Newler’s reputation and avoiding muddying the police case against the crew.
There was a feast of photographs available to the journalists covering the case—of Ben and the crew in their firefighting uniforms, of Titus in his memorial wall photograph, of Willstone in his NYPD uniform, of Newler in his gray suit. Then there was Luna wrapped around Ben on a beach trip somewhere, little Gabriel digging in the sand nearby. Search-and-recover crews setting up a crime scene at the shoreline in Jersey. Cadaver dogs. A body bag. Then there was the lawyer, Ichh, being led from his office in cuffs. Andy watched their faces flashing on the screen, all of them, as the media and the public tried to piece together what the hell had happened. It hurt to see Ben’s picture, because he was invariably smiling, and the starkness of that against her memory of him dying in her arms burned inside her. She’d wondered, as those last seconds of Benjamin Haig’s life flickered and fell away, whether she should tell him all of it. About the sheer depth of Luna’s deception. But she hadn’t. She’d spared him that. And she wondered if she was sparing herself, as day fell into day, from the last truth she didn’t have about the firemen and their deeds. Whether the Ben that she had known and held and laughed with, the man who had been so desperate to find the family he’d always wanted, was a cold-blooded killer.
She knew one man who could tell her.
Now and then, Andy had seen Matt’s picture beside the iconic blue-sky photograph of the Towers with their trails of black smoke. It seemed that his story as ringleader of the entire mess had been the one the press wanted to tell the least.
Andy knew the search for Matt and Donna was going to be fruitless. While the NYPD, the FBI, and a string of other agencies were doing all the right things, and Matt’s uniformed FDNY picture featured prominently on the FBI’s most-wanted list, Andy stopped believing they really wanted to find out where he was when she realized no one knew where he had been. That, to her, was clear enough. It was obvious, due to the simple fact of where Ben Haig had kept his stash. With Ben so consumed, like Jake and Engo, with what Matt thought and how Matt felt, it seemed sensible enough that Ben hid his stash in a place that gave him pain and sadness because Matt had told him to. It was a good idea. Because that place, the apartment where he’d been born, was the last place anybody expected Ben to go.
Andy only had to apply the same philosophy to Matt to find out where the chief had been.
It had taken some of her classic finessing and manipulation to convince the security team at One World Trade Center to allow her to look at some of their security footage. But in the end, she was given a space in the sleek office walled in by black glass, just down the hall from the ticketing office of the 9/11 Memorial Museum. Someone even brought her a coffee. She sat and clicked and dragged and punched in numbers, and eventually she was able to find footage of a tall, thickly built man in a black ball cap striding down the breezy, tree-lined walkway between the memorial fountains. The footage was recorded forty minutes after Matt had disappeared from the site of the Cristobel’s restaurant bombing. Andy watched the figure access the foyer of the offices inside One World Trade with a swipe card, ride the elevators to the forty-first floor, and walk down the hall to an empty office suite. She watched him return from the suite, some four minutes later, carrying two weighty duffel bags.
Andy had then simply followed the trail from there. She discovered the financial identity and accounts Matt had used to rent the empty office space at One World Trade, then backtracked to see whether that identity was connected to the rent or purchase of any other properties. There were closed and emptied accounts, routed and rerouted deposits, creditors and debtors that led to completely fictionalized people. In the end, she was able to follow the trail somewhere else she didn’t expect. Not to some distant beach in Barbados, or into the Alaskan wilds, where she believed the rest of the world was searching half-heartedly for Matt. When she hunted him down, she hunted him to sunny Santa Barbara.
Andy put her hands in her pockets and watched the window of Matt and Donna’s room in the wing perpendicular to the one where she was standing, waiting for him to come into view again. In the week she’d watched Matt and Donna, or Rick and Sally as they were calling themselves, she’d seen the big man at many windows—at the little house in San Roque that they rented, or the driver’s-side window of his truck going suburb-to-suburb as a concreting contractor. Always he was framed there, weary-eyed and anxious, checking, she supposed, for someone like her. Donna having the baby, and the child being by all accounts a perfectly formed, plump, and cheerful infant, only the night before, hadn’t eased the tight visage of the man who stepped up to the window now. Andy saw Matt rest his big knuckles on the window frame, watching the distant highway as she herself had done, thousands of lives filtering in and out of the beachside paradise. The marine layer was creeping in, and the red and yellow lights were taking on a smoky, romantic blurriness. Andy watched Matt’s eyes drop to the parking lot of the hospital, and fix on her car. It was the missing plates, the rental sticker that did it. She knew they would. Matt stiffened, turned, and disappeared from the window.
She pursued him at a walk, first waiting for him to pass by her door, his heavy boots the only sounds in the otherwise quiet private hospital. She slipped out of the room and followed, was surprised to see him stop at the door to the fire stairs. His pace had been one of determination. The rawness and urgency of the flight response, the need to get as far away from Donna and the baby as he could, so that any danger—angry officers and agents with their guns and their knowledge of his history of violence—would be drawn away. But as she watched, Matt paused there, his hand on the door lever, staring at it. Andy saw a flash of the man Matt had been once: younger, dressed in bunker gear, an unconscious woman slung over his shoulder, that same hand on the door of a different stairwell. The one on the forty-first floor of the North Tower. He’d been fleeing then, too. Andy had a gun on her hip, but she didn’t reach for it. She didn’t call out to let him know she was there. She just waited, and watched, as Matt slowly took his hand down from the door.
He turned around and saw her standing there in the empty hall. Andy watched as the initial surprise on his face was replaced by a deep, deep relief. It was a loosening, and flushing with warmth, an overcoming of who he appeared to be that Andy knew was much deeper than the knowledge that he didn’t have to run anymore. It was a relief that his time to pay a debt he’d wanted to pay for twenty-three years had finally come. He left the door shut, walked back toward Andy, and took a chair against the wall by the vending machine.
She went and sat beside him, and a silence enveloped them, him thinking whatever he was thinking, her noticing that the intense and radiating menace she’d felt in his proximity from the moment she had met him was gone. Long seconds passed. There was no hurry. Andy knew in her heart what was coming: that Matt would tell her and the investigators she eventually escorted him to everything they needed to know about Titus, and Willstone, and the robberies. He would be an open book. He had that way about him now. Andy felt heartsick at what the next few hours would hold, at having to know the truth about Ben, before she dropped Matt at a police station and watched him walk in and hand himself over. There was a needing to know thrumming inside her. There was also a needing to protect herself from it all.
But of course, there was comfort in knowing that the pain wouldn’t last. It would be gone when she put on her next mask.
“Boy or girl?” she asked Matt eventually.
“Boy.” Matt smiled.
They sat there together, the vending machine humming, the hospital quiet with sleeping patients and whispering nurses. Andy already knew what she was going to say to him. Had been thinking about it for a long time. When she started in, she couldn’t look at him. The words came tumbling out, her eyes fixed on the dark linoleum at her feet.
“I know you haven’t been to the memorial museum,” she said. “I can’t imagine you going there. But in one of the exhibits, they have a big phrase on the wall. ‘No day shall erase you from the memory of time.’”
She waited. Matt said nothing.
“I know you don’t believe that,” Andy said. “You believe the opposite. You believe that day, it erased you. Whoever you were before you walked out that door and abandoned your crew, that man, that good man, was gone.”
Still, he was quiet.
“What I’m saying is”—Andy finally looked at him—“if that’s what you really believe, then you have to believe that it can happen again. That this day, or any day, can erase you. A single day can obliterate the badness in you.”
Matt smiled at her, his big arms folded and the warm relief still playing about his eyes. “Andy,” he said.
“Yes?”
“Just shut up and take me to jail, would you?”