Ben walked into his apartment, turned the corner sharply, and went right to the fridge in the bright kitchen full of hanging plants. He stood drinking a cold beer in the open doorway, staring at nothing, a good thirty seconds passing before he came to himself and thought to get a bottle for her. He brought it over to the table with an awkwardness that was painful to watch.
“Okay, so you’re my girlfriend.” Ben collapsed into the chair across from Andy. “What now?”
Andy couldn’t count how many times over the last fifteen years she’d sat in the apartments and houses of hapless men like this, watching them struggle for purchase while her plan unfolded around them. Ben was wandering in a darkened wood full of land mines, only her hand guiding him along. Men didn’t like to be guided.
“Now you tell me everything you know about Luna Denero and her son Gabriel,” Andy said. She sipped her beer.
“Look. I’m so tired right now.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m so confused, and so tired.”
“Forget that,” she said. “Your crew is supposed to believe we’re banging each other’s brains out tonight. Tomorrow morning, you go in for your shift looking like the walking dead, or you’ll blow our story.”
“Right.” Ben gave his cheeks a slap. “Okay. I get it.”
He got up and walked across the stylish but small apartment, slipped a black spiral notebook out from a bookshelf crammed with pretty pottery, overwatered succulents, and paperbacks. He smacked the notebook on the table in front of her. “This is everything I have.”
“I’ve read it.”
Ben stared at her.
“I broke in here a week ago, while you were on duty. I came across your notebook in the first hour.” She gestured to it. “You’ve recorded all your efforts to find Luna and Gabriel in your atrocious handwriting, both before and after you tried to get police to take the case seriously. It’s all there. The CCTV footage you dug up. The people you spoke to. What they said.”
He kept staring. So she threw him a bone.
“It’s not bad.”
“Who the hell are you?”
“We need to get deeper.”
“No, wait, back up.” Ben sat and pushed his beer aside, tapped the notebook. “You read this? You broke in here? You went through our things?”
“Ben,” Andy said, “I needed to know that you hadn’t done it.”
His tight features loosened. He looked baffled. There was blood in his hairline from trying to drag Matt Roderick away from the kid who’d said those numbers at the bar. Andy pictured the brawl in the steamy street. “I didn’t do it.”
“Sure. I believe that now,” Andy said. “But I needed to see for myself.”
“Why?”
“Because what you’re sacrificing to find Luna and Gabriel wasn’t enough to convince me.”
“It wasn’t?” Ben scoffed. There was no humor in it. “I’m going to go to jail. I’ll be a snitch. Do you have any idea what that’s like?”
“Assuming that you are talking about high-level burglaries, with full cooperation and good behavior, I’ll be surprised if you see a decade on the inside, Ben. Different story if you’d killed Luna and Gabriel. You’d be looking at life without parole. And for the killing of a small child? You wouldn’t last twenty-four hours before another inmate took you out. Not in a New York prison.”
Ben was silent. Watchful.
“Why would I do that? Why would I burn my crew just so I could try to get away with something like that?”
“Because it happens. Because trying to get away with it is easier than running. I’ve seen men throw in their own family members to avoid prison or life on the lam,” Andy said. “I’ve seen men walk the streets, participate in searches, hand out thousands of flyers in the hopes of finding wives and children they know for a fact are rotting in shallow graves in lonely oil fields.”
He winced. “So you came here to look at our lives. Rummage around in our stuff. See if I was capable of doing that.”
“Yes.”
“And what were you looking for, exactly?”
“Broken doorknobs. Holes in the walls. Scary drawings hidden in the mess in Gabriel’s bedroom. Evidence that the kid kept a hiding place.” She shrugged. “Business cards from women’s shelters tucked away in Luna’s makeup cases.”
He stared at his beer.
“Instead, I found love notes,” Andy said. “Saved up in her underwear drawer. Mostly from you to her. Goodbyes while she slept and you went out on night shift. I found Gabriel’s hairs behind your headboard. Too curly and fine to be yours or Luna’s. You must have let the kid crawl in there when he had nightmares.”
Ben shifted in his chair, rubbed his brow so he could hide his eyes.
“I also searched your own apartment in West Harlem, the one you sublet.” Andy drank from her beer, stared into it. “Even though you’ve got a tenant there. I’m thorough.”
“So I’m off the hook, then?” he asked.
“You’ve kept this place like a time capsule. Like you truly believe they’ll walk in the door any minute.”
“It’s still possible,” Ben said. His words hung in the air, thin and unconvincing. When he spoke again his voice was thick. “I just want to find my fam—”
Andy kept her face neutral.
“My girlfriend and her boy.”
“So help me do my job.”
“But I don’t know if I can do what you’re asking.” Ben put his hands out, offering up his wide and callused palms. “I’m not an actor. What we did in that bar tonight? That was me half drunk and making it up as I went. The guys are going to see through us, okay? They know me. They know when I’m acting weird.”
“They’ll put it off to nerves about the new relationship,” Andy said. “And you’ll back it up by telling them how nervous you are about the new relationship.”
She pulled a slip of paper from her back pocket and pushed it across the table toward him. “This is our text script for the next few days. It’s only a couple of days’ worth, just to get you started. Establish a tone.”
He looked at the paper. Dates, times, little messages. Him and her. The first message would come from him to her later that morning. He’d just woken up. She was gone. He wanted to know if she got home safe. If maybe he could see her again.
“Do not get creative,” Andy said. “Text those words. At those times. Nothing else.”
“This is crazy. How do you know how to do all this stuff?”
“Practice.”
“What if I slip up?”
“You won’t slip up,” Andy said.
“How do you know?”
“I’m guiding you.”
He sat back. Dropped his hands to his lap.
“It’s time,” Andy said. “Tell me about them. Everything you know. Until the moment they went missing.”