“I’M SORRY,” HUNTER SAID TO JENNA WHEN HIS PHONE RANG on her nightstand. It was close to midnight. He swiped and said, “Hey.”
“Sorry it’s so late. Hope I’m not interrupting anything,” Brennan said. “I’m just getting crushed at work. This is the first chance I’ve had to take a breath and call you back.”
“I get it. It’s fine. You headed home?”
“Still in the office.”
“Bummer. Be careful going home, okay?”
“Of course. So you called me?”
Jenna rolled off the bed, and his T-shirt rode up her thigh until the curve of her ass peeked out from underneath.
“Hunter?” Brennan asked.
“Yeah, sorry. Lost track of my thoughts for a second.” Jenna looked over her shoulder and winked at him as she walked to the bathroom. Hunter winked back and said to Brennan, “McCann called me back.”
“What did he say?”
“He said that he didn’t know about Mark’s story. He wouldn’t have done that. But it sounded like something Bauman might do. And McCarthy. McCann does not like that guy.”
“So the only two guys who can confirm that the hotel had Mark in the register are dead or won’t talk to us?”
“I went back through my scans of the police files. There’s a note in there. It said, ‘Lexington Hotel confirmed left at 11:00 p.m.’ I didn’t know what it meant when I first went through.”
“Bottom of a page, right? I remember seeing that, too.” Brennan sighed. Hunter raised his eyebrows. Her memory was uncanny. “So it wasn’t Mark or Cathy.”
“Which means,” Hunter said, “it was Dad or whoever left the handprint.”
“And we know Cathy was seeing Mark, so whoever left the print wasn’t some boyfriend. Assuming we believe her.”
“I think we can. She ended up with Mark. At least for a while.” “You think Cathy would know how to hire a hitman?” Brennan asked.
“No.”
A sigh. “Anything on that waitress you were trying to track down?” “No,” Hunter said. “But I’ll keep trying. Maybe it will get us something.”
Silence. He imagined Brennan in her office, pacing.
“Bren?”
“Fuck.” She exhaled deeply, then continued, “We’ve excluded two more suspects but not Dad. Which means it increases the likelihood it was him.”
Hunter didn’t say anything. He had been waiting his whole life for this moment, that he was the one who had been right, to validate the choices he’d made to change his name, to leave New York, to do something different than his father.
“I still don’t think it was him,” Brennan said.
“Okay.” His relief surprised him.
“I gotta get back to work. I don’t see much else we can do.”
“Let’s talk tomorrow.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Good—” The line went dead as she hung up before she finished speaking.
Hunter set his phone on the nightstand. Jenna crawled back into the bed.
“Everything okay?”
Hunter shook his head. Jenna slung one leg over his, so she was straddling his lap.
“Anything I can do?”
“I don’t think so. Thanks, though. I appreciate it.”
Hunter stroked her bare thigh. It had been a long time since he’d had a regular girlfriend. They still avoided using any labels with each other, but that was what she was. They hadn’t said they were exclusive, but he’d passed up opportunities since he’d met her. He thought about saying something. He inhaled. He would sound silly, telling her how he felt, and he was sure she’d make fun of him, but he trusted her to be kind.
“Hey, so I have news,” she said, dropping her hand over his. “I got into a graduate program. Iowa.”
“Hey! That’s great!” He hated the relief he felt. “I didn’t know you applied.”
“I didn’t want to say anything. In case I didn’t get in.”
He sat up so he could embrace her and consciously ignored how well she fit in his arms. He let her go and sank back against the headboard.
“I need to let them know soon. If I’m going to go.”
“Of course you’re going. It’s like, what, the best writer’s program in the country?”
Jenna shrugged. “It’s two years. I really like New York pizza.” “Jenna.”
“Yeah, I know. Still,” she said as she fiddled with the hem of the T-shirt, “there are other variables.”
Don’t make her spell it out, he thought. He took her hands. “You should go.”
She looked back up at him, her eyes dark in the shadows cast by her lamp.
“This is an incredible opportunity,” he said. She blinked and tilted her head back to avoid giving her tears the mass they would need to spill. “You’re smart. Hilarious. Beautiful. I’ve never met anyone who makes me feel the way you do. But you need to do this.”
“You’re not making this easy.”
Hunter smiled. “Fine. Chances are I’ll leave on assignment before the summer is over. I’ll be overseas most of the time and preoccupied by work. Ask anyone who’s ever dated me. When I come back, I’ll be even worse because I don’t want to be here dealing with my family’s bullshit and the guilt that you may have turned down a life-changing program on the hope that I’m someone who can actually function in a relationship. You should avoid that at all costs.”
The corner of her mouth curled into a wry smile. “Boy, you misread that.”
“Further evidence that I’m unsuitable.”
“Tell me that you might stay. That we can decide in August, or whenever I have to move, whether we can make New York to Iowa work for two years. Tell me you’re open to that.”
“If I tell you that, you’ll send in the acceptance papers?”
Jenna nodded. “But you have to mean it.” Her eyes didn’t leave his face.
Hunter looked away at a wrinkle in the sheets. “I want to say yes. But I’m…We’ll break each other’s hearts. Better now than months of each of us assessing, judging, worrying about where things will end up.”
“Even if none of this ever happened, we’d be doing that.”
Hunter didn’t respond.
“You’re scared,” she said. “That you’ll get hurt.”
“I’m already hurt.”
“Then you’re a coward.”
“Better you know that now.”
#
Hunter couldn’t sleep after he left Jenna’s place. She was right. He was a coward. But knowing that didn’t mean he could do anything about it.
He hated how empty his apartment was. Since finding the bullet at his place, he’d insisted that Jenna not come over. And although she didn’t leave so much as a toothbrush there, next to how little he had, when she was around, the whole place felt like it had been waiting for her, her clothes on the floor, the sound of her moving around, the scent of her.
He sat up in the bed. Three a.m. Too late to try to find a bar, especially on a weeknight. He checked the latch on his door again. Then he popped his laptop open.
Over the past few weeks, he’d gone through all the databases he had access to through work, calling old phone lines for any Nicki Berger who was older than forty years old, which was too young, but then again, maybe she was a runaway all those years ago who lied about her age to get a job. There were all manner of reasons he couldn’t find her. If she’d married or changed her name for some reason. A phone line or records in someone else’s name. If she’d died. Moved to France.
Well, nothing to help him sleep like a brute force search on the internet. For what felt like the hundredth time, he typed out search terms using “Frontier” and variations of “Nichole” or “Nicki” and “New York” and scrolled through hits on search engines and social media. He knew he was probably covering ground he’d already covered, but he didn’t feel like checking his notes or adding to them. He wanted to waste the time.
When he looked up, it was 5:00 a.m. He’d tried to shut his eyes once an hour before, laptop open on the bed next to him, but the moment the conversation with Jenna began to replay in his mind, he sat up and went back to scrolling.
He almost scrolled past it.
It was a photo on Facebook, buried among the multitude of posts about birthdays, date nights, and anniversaries, pictures of food, candlelit tables, and smiling faces. It was a scan of an old Kodak print, or maybe a digital photo of one—Hunter’s eyes were too bleary to tell. In the snapshot, three servers stood in front of the small bar holding wineglasses and beers with a pretty blond woman in jeans and a sweater and an older man in a suit. Hunter wasn’t a fashion historian, but the cut and fit of everyone’s clothes felt at least two decades old. The text accompanying the photo read: “Nicki Klein Berger returns to visit her old stomping grounds and friends at Frontier after her honeymoon. RIP Ed.” The post was nearly a decade old, but clicking on Nicki’s name brought Hunter to her profile page. Her most recent post was a photo of Central Park taken the week before.