Truth or Die Read online

  I leaned back in my chair, a metal hinge somewhere below the seat creaking its age. I must have had a dozen more questions for Lamont, each one trying to get me that much closer to being in the taxi with Claire, to knowing what had really happened.

  To knowing whether or not it truly was … fuckin’ random.

  But I wasn’t fooling anyone. Not Lamont, and especially not myself. All I was doing was procrastinating, trying hopelessly to avoid asking the one question I was truly dreading.

  I couldn’t avoid it any longer.

  CHAPTER 5

  “FOR THE record, you were never in here,” said Lamont, pausing at a closed door toward the back corner of the precinct house.

  I stared at him blankly as if I were some chronic sufferer of short-term memory loss. “In where?” I asked.

  He smirked. Then he opened the door.

  The windowless room I followed him into was only slightly bigger than claustrophobic. After closing the door behind us, Lamont introduced me to his partner, Detective Mike McGeary, who was at the helm of what looked like one of those video arcade games where you sit in a captain’s chair shooting at alien spaceships on a large screen. He was even holding what looked like a joystick.

  McGeary, square-jawed and bald, gave Lamont a sideways glance that all but screamed, What the hell is he doing in here?

  “Mr. Mann was a close acquaintance of the victim,” said Lamont. He added a slight emphasis on my last name, as if to jog his partner’s memory.

  McGeary studied me in the dim light of the room until he put my face and name together. Perhaps he was remembering the cover of the New York Post a couple of years back. An Honest Mann, read the headline.

  “Yeah, fine,” McGeary said finally.

  It wasn’t exactly a ringing endorsement, but it was enough to consider the issue of my being there resolved. I could stay. I could see the recording.

  I could watch, frame by frame, the murder of the woman I loved.

  Lamont hadn’t had to tell me there was a surveillance camera in the taxi. I’d known right away, given how he’d described the shooting over the phone, some of the details he had. There were little things no eyewitnesses could ever provide. Had there been any eyewitnesses, that is.

  Lamont removed his glasses, wearily pinching the bridge of his nose. No one ever truly gets used to the graveyard shift. “Any matches so far?” he asked his partner.

  McGeary shook his head.

  I glanced at the large monitor, which had shifted into screen saver mode, an NYPD logo floating about. Lamont, I could tell, was waiting for me to ask him about the space-age console, the reason I wasn’t supposed to be in the room. The machine obviously did a little more than just digital playback.

  But I didn’t ask. I already knew.

  I’m sure the thing had an official name, something ultra-high-tech sounding, but back when I was in the DA’s office I’d only ever heard it referred to by its nickname, CrackerJack. What it did was combine every known recognition software program into one giant cross-referencing “decoder” that was linked to practically every criminal database in the country, as well as those from twenty-three other countries, or basically all of our official allies in the “war on terror.”

  In short, given any image at any angle of any suspected terrorist, CrackerJack could source a litany of identifying characteristics, be it an exposed mole or tattoo; the exact measurements between the suspect’s eyes, ears, nose, and mouth; or even a piece of jewelry. Clothing, too. Apparently, for all the precautions terrorists take in their planning, it rarely occurs to them that wearing the same polyester shirt in London, Cairo, and Islamabad might be a bad idea.

  Of course, it didn’t take long for law enforcement in major cities—where CrackerJacks were heavily deployed by the Department of Homeland Security—to realize that these machines didn’t have to identify just terrorists. Anyone with a criminal record was fair game.

  So here was McGeary going through the recording sent over by the New York Taxi & Limousine Commission to see if any image of the shooter triggered a match. And here was me, having asked if I could watch it, too.

  “Mike, cue it up from the beginning, will you?” said Lamont.

  McGeary punched a button and then another until the screen lit up with the first frame, the taxi having pulled over to pick Claire up. The image was grainy, black-and-white, like on an old tube television with a set of rabbit ears. But what little I could see was still way too much.

  It was exactly as Lamont had described it. The shooter smashes the driver’s side window, beating the driver senseless with the butt of his gun. He’s wearing a dark turtleneck and a ski mask with holes for the eyes, nose, and mouth. His gloves are tight, like those Isotoners that O. J. Simpson pretended didn’t fit.

  So far, Claire is barely visible. Not once can I see her face. Then I do.

  It’s right after the shooter snatches the driver’s money bag. He swings his gun, aiming it at Claire in the backseat. She jolts. There’s no Plexiglas divider. There’s nothing but air.

  Presumably, he says something to her, but the back of his head is toward the camera. Claire offers up her purse. He takes it and she says something. I was never any good at reading lips.

  He should be leaving. Running away. Instead, he swings out and around, opening the rear door. He’s out of frame for no more than three seconds. Then all I see is his outstretched arm. And the fear in her eyes.

  He fires two shots at point-blank range. Did he panic? Not enough to flee right away. Quickly, he riffles through her pockets, and then tears off her earrings, followed by her watch, the Rolex Milgauss I gave her for her thirtieth birthday. He dumps everything in her purse and takes off.

  “Wait a minute,” I said suddenly. “Go back a little bit.”

  CHAPTER 6

  LAMONT AND McGeary both turned to me, their eyes asking if I was crazy. You want to watch her being murdered a second time?

  No, I didn’t. Not a chance.

  Watching it the first time made me so nauseous I thought I’d throw up right there on the floor. I wanted that recording erased, deleted, destroyed for all eternity not two seconds after it was used to catch the goddamn son of a bitch who’d done this.

  Then I wanted a long, dark alley in the dead of night where he and I could have a little time alone together. Yeah. That’s what I wanted.

  But I thought I saw something.

  Up until that moment, I hadn’t known what I was looking for in the recording, if anything. If Claire had been standing next to me, she, with her love of landmark Supreme Court cases, would’ve described it as the definition of pornography according to Justice Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v. Ohio.

  I know it when I see it.

  She’d always admired the simplicity of that. Not everything that’s true has to be proven, she used to say.

  “Where to?” asked McGeary, his hand hovering over a knob that could rewind frame by frame, if need be.

  “Just after he beats the driver,” I said.

  He nodded. “Say when.”

  I watched the sped-up images, everything happening in reverse. If only I could reverse it all for real. I was waiting for the part when the gun was turned on Claire. A few moments before that, actually.

  “Stop,” I said. “Right there.”

  McGeary hit Play again and I leaned in, my eyes glued to the screen. Meanwhile, I could feel Lamont’s eyes glued to my profile, as if he could somehow better see what I was looking for by watching me.

  “What is it?” he eventually asked.

  I stepped back, shaking my head as if disappointed. “Nothing,” I said. “It wasn’t anything.”

  Because that’s exactly what Claire would’ve wanted me to say. A little white lie for the greater good, she would’ve called it.

  She was always a quick thinker, right up until the end.

  CHAPTER 7

  NO WAY in hell did I feel like taking a taxi home.

  In fact, I didn’t feel l
ike going home at all. In my mind, I’d already put my apartment on the market, packed up all my belongings, and moved to another neighborhood, maybe even out of Manhattan altogether. Claire was the city to me. Bright. Vibrant.

  Alive.

  And now she wasn’t.

  I passed a bar, looking through the window at the smattering of “patrons,” to put it politely, who were still drinking at three in the morning. I could see an empty stool and it was calling my name. More like shouting it, really.

  Don’t, I told myself. When you sober up, she’ll still be gone.

  I kept walking in the direction of my apartment, but with every step it became clear where I truly wanted to go. It was wherever Claire had been going.

  Who was she meeting?

  Suddenly, I was channeling Oliver Stone, somehow trying to link her murder to the story she’d been chasing. But that was crazy. I saw her murder in black and white. It was a robbery. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and as much as that was a cliché, so, too, was her death. She’d be the first to admit it.

  “Imagine that,” I could hear her saying. “A victim of violent crime in New York City. How original.”

  Still, I’d become fixated on wanting to know where she’d been heading when she left my apartment. A two-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink would probably call that sublimated grief, while the four-hundred-dollar-an-hour shrink would probably counter with sublimated anger. I was sticking with overwhelming curiosity.

  I put myself in her shoes, mentally tracing her steps through the lobby of my building and out to the sidewalk. As soon as I pictured her raising her arm for a taxi¸ it occurred to me. The driver. He at least knew the address. For sure, Claire gave it to him when he picked her up.

  Almost on cue, a taxi slowed down next to me at the curb, the driver wondering if I needed a ride. That was a common occurrence late at night when supply far outweighed demand.

  As I shook him off, I began thinking of what else Claire’s driver might remember when Lamont interviewed him. Tough to say after the beating he took. Maybe the shooter had said something that would key his identity, or at least thin out the suspects. Did he speak with any kind of accent?

  Or maybe the driver had seen something that wasn’t visible to that surveillance camera. Eye color? An odd-shaped mole? A chipped tooth?

  Unfortunately, the list of possibilities didn’t go on and on. The ski mask, turtleneck, and gloves made sure of that. Clearly, the bastard knew that practically every taxi in the city was its own little recording studio. So much for cameras being a deterrent.

  As the old expression goes, show me a ten-foot wall and I’ll show you an eleven-foot ladder.

  The twenty blocks separating me from my apartment were a daze. I was on autopilot, one foot in front of the other. Only at the sound of the keys as I dropped them on my kitchen counter did I snap out of it, realizing I was actually home.

  Fully dressed, I fell into my bed, shoes and all. I didn’t even bother turning off the lights. But my eyes were closed for only a few seconds before they popped open. Damn. All it took was one breath, one exchange of the air around me, and I was lying there feeling more alone than I ever had in my entire life.

  The sheets still smelled of her.

  I sat up, looking over at the other side of the bed … the pillow. I could still make out the impression of Claire’s head. That was the word, wasn’t it? Impression. Hers was everywhere, most of all on me.

  I was about to make a beeline to my guest room, which, if anything, would smell of dust or staleness or whatever other odor is given off by a room that’s rarely, if ever, used. I didn’t care. So long as it wasn’t her.

  Suddenly, though, I froze. Something had caught my eye. It was the yellow legal pad on the end of the bed, the one Claire had used when she took the phone call. She’d ripped off the top sheet she’d written on.

  But the one beneath it …

  CHAPTER 8

  I ALL but lunged for the pad, gripping it beyond tight while staring at the indentations she’d left behind.

  Another impression.

  I could make out a letter here, a letter there. An S followed by something, followed by a B. Or was that a 6?

  I flipped on the nearby lamp for more light, angling the pad every which way, trying to decipher the ever-so-slight grooves in the paper. It could’ve been a name, but all my money was on it being an address. It was where Claire was going. It had to be. But I still couldn’t make it out.

  I thought for a few seconds, racking my brain. Before I knew it, I was dashing across my living room and into my office, grabbing a pencil, followed by a piece of paper from my printer tray. This could work, I thought.

  Laying the paper over the pad, I began gently making a rubbing, like people do with tombstones and other memorials. But the printer paper was too thick. I needed something thinner. I knew exactly where to find it, too.

  It was an invitation I’d just received to a legal aid benefit being held at the New York Public Library. Pretty hard to miss the irony, given that Claire would have been my plus-one.

  The invitation itself was on a thick stock, but all I could see in my head was what had been inserted to protect the embossed type: a piece of vellum as thin as tracing paper. Perfect.

  I riffled through my pile of mail, finding the invite and the vellum. Laying it on the legal pad, I again began gently rubbing the pencil back and forth. Like magic, the letters started to appear before my eyes. Letters and numbers.

  It was an address, all right. Downtown on the West Side. She’d also written 1701 below it. Was that an apartment number?

  I turned on my laptop, grabbing my keys and throwing on a baseball cap while waiting for it to power up. Quickly, I Googled the address.

  The first result was the only one I needed to see. This wasn’t someone’s home. Claire had been heading to the Lucinda Hotel, room 1701.

  Now I was, too.

  CHAPTER 9

  AN INTERRUPTION.

  That was what Owen Lewis was waiting for in room 1701 of the Lucinda Hotel. The tiny camera, no bigger than a lipstick cylinder, was taped to the exit sign above the entrance to the stairwell, wirelessly transmitting to his laptop the same image of the long, empty hallway outside his door. It was monotony in black and white. A continuous loop of stillness and silence, over and over. Uninterrupted.

  For anyone else, it would’ve been the most boring movie of the century. To Owen, it was easily the scariest. Especially how it might end.

  She said she’d be here in twenty minutes. That was hours ago. Did they get to her? Am I next?

  He’d thought about leaving town, but it was already so late. There were no buses, trains, or planes he could catch at this hour, and he knew you had to be twenty-five to rent a car. His driver’s license couldn’t get him a beer, let alone a Buick.

  All in all, the only real option was a taxi, but that didn’t feel like a good idea, for some reason. Just his gut instinct.

  No, he would wait it out until morning, stick with his plan.

  It was a good plan, extremely well thought out, with the highest attention to every detail. Of course, when you’re sporting an IQ that approaches the boiling point of water, anticipation is your stock in trade. You see the future before others do. You live it, too.

  “The Boy Genius!” declared his hometown paper back in Amherst, New Hampshire, in a front-page story when Owen was only four. By then, he had memorized the periodic table, could read and write in three languages, and was doing complex algebra. The photo accompanying the article showed him shaking hands with Steve Jobs at a “Pioneers of Tomorrow” conference at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

  For an entire year after that, Owen wore only a black mock turtleneck everywhere he went.

  Elementary school was finished at age six, junior high at eight, and then high school when he was eleven. At fourteen, he was the youngest ever to graduate from Cal Berkeley, earning summa cum laude and salutatorian honors. He would’
ve been valedictorian if it hadn’t been for a B+ in comparative Russian literature. Even geniuses have their blind spots.

  Next up were combined MD and PhD degrees from Harvard Medical School and MIT at age seventeen, after which Owen spent nearly two years at Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, aka the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, studying what had become his true passion: artificial neural networks.

  That was when the two men first approached him, one night as he was leaving the library. They were Americans.

  “How would you like to help save the world?” one asked.

  Owen laughed, not taking him seriously at first. “Only if I get to wear a cape,” he said.

  A predilection for sarcasm commensurate with sapience, read the extensive psych profile of Owen that the two men had already seen.

  “No, I’m afraid there’s no cape or even a skintight suit,” said the other man. “However, you will get to be a part of the digital age’s equivalent of the Manhattan Project.”

  Owen liked the sound of that. Loved it, to be more precise. It was his chance to make history. And who doesn’t want to do that?

  But that was then.

  Now, less than a year later, here he was hiding out in a cramped hotel room—in Manhattan, no less—hoping against hope that he’d live to see another sunrise.

  Turned out, Owen Lewis had the one problem he never thought he’d have. Not in a million years. Or certainly, at least, not before his twenty-first birthday.

  It was why they wanted to kill him, the Boy Genius.

  He knew too much.

  CHAPTER 10

  WITHOUT ONCE taking his eyes off his scuffed-up laptop and the live feed from the hallway, Owen bit off another triangle of the twelve-dollar Toblerone from his minibar and dialed Claire Parker’s cell for a third time. And for the third time the call went straight to voice mail.

  Something was wrong. He just didn’t know what. There were a few plausible explanations as to why she hadn’t shown up at his room, ranging from the relatively harmless to the absolute worst-case scenario. He could speculate all he wanted, but that was all it would be. Speculation. The important thing now was whether or not she was the only one who knew his location.