Unsolved Page 6

  There is a mix of ages, but it leans to the younger side, congressional staffers and campaign consultants and youthful journalists who publish mostly online. I spot a U.S. senator in a corner booth, an older white man whom I’ve seen on the news shows, holding court for a throng of admiring staffers, disproportionately female and attractive. Everyone here is ambitious, everyone is hungry, and most of them are ruthless.

  Shaindy Eckstein is standing with a group of men and women nursing a colorful drink, but I pretend not to notice her. I finally get the attention of the bartender and order a white wine.

  I check my watch. I have about twenty minutes, tops, before I have to leave and go to Books’s house for our Friday-night date.

  The noise around me is oddly comforting. I spend so much of my time alone with statistics and computers, where I’m safe, so being outside, walking through a grocery store or traveling to work or just running errands, is hard for me sometimes, probably harder than I like to admit, that feeling of being exposed. So you’d think a bar like this would be even worse, but for some reason I feel safer in a crowd of strangers in an enclosed area.

  “Hey, you.” I turn at these words and see Shaindy standing there, casually dressed in a black blouse and jeans, her eyeglasses perched on her head holding back her long gray hair.

  “Hey yourself.” I get off the barstool and give her a hug. Shaindy is the only reporter I’ve ever liked. When I was taken to the hospital a year ago, she just happened to be there. She was in the right place at the right time to break the story if she chose to do so. It fell right into her lap. “Graham Catcher Rushed to Hospital for Overdose,” or some attention-grabbing headline like that. She could have thrown in some suggestion of a suicide attempt to make it even juicier. The whole thing with Graham was still pretty hot back then. It would have been the easiest story she’d ever written. But she didn’t write it. She let it go when Books and I asked her to leave it alone. She didn’t request anything in return either, like most journalists would, like that reporter in New Orleans just did. She just dropped the whole thing.

  “You look good,” she says now, appraising me. I doubt that, but I’ve learned how to deal with the scars, how to wear my hair and clothes to conceal most of them.

  “Blowing off some steam?” I ask.

  She smirks. “This is work. I get more done here than I do in a full day at the office.”

  That’s probably true of the politicians too, all of them cutting deals over glasses of Scotch.

  “I’ve enjoyed reading your stuff on Citizen David,” I say.

  She has a twinkle in her eye and the hint of a grin that she goes to some lengths to suppress when she asks, “Have you, now?”

  “You have an excellent source, it seems.”

  “I do. I do.” She takes a sip from her glass. “The source has been very helpful.”

  Nice how she put that, not even revealing the gender, no he or she.

  “And if I could say one thing to my source,” she says, “I would tell that person this: I will never disclose a source’s identity. I’ll go to prison first.”

  I nod.

  “My source has nothing to worry about,” she adds. “That’s a promise. And you know I keep my promises.”

  “I do know that.” I sip my wine, a nice chardonnay with a hint of pear.

  Shaindy leans into me. “On an absolutely, completely different topic, having nothing whatsoever to do with what we just discussed”—her expression deadpan—“do you have anything you’d like to tell me, Emmy?”

  I can’t help but smile. “Are you suggesting that I’m your source?”

  She puts a hand over her heart. “I don’t know who my source is. I only get text messages from a burner phone. So I have no way of knowing my source’s identity.”

  She says this like I already know this information.

  “And I won’t try to guess,” she says. “But like I said, even if I knew her—or his—name, I would never tell a soul.”

  “Good to know, Shaindy,” I say.

  Clearly, Shaindy thinks I’m her source. That’s not surprising. She’s wondering why I would go to the trouble of texting her anonymously instead of just talking to her face to face. After all, she’s already proven that I can trust her.

  But she won’t ask, and she won’t tell.

  And neither will I.

  She winks at me. “Well,” she says, “I’ll just keep checking my phone.”

  20

  THE MAN who sometimes calls himself Charlie leans back against the seat of his wheelchair in his custom van, his earbuds in, one hand clutching the cell phone, the other arm hanging lazily over the steering wheel.

  He is not, in reality, listening to music or talking on the phone. It is a device to throw off suspicion should someone passing by on the sidewalk happen to glance at the curb and see him inside the vehicle or, God forbid, should a police officer approach. He can simply put a cheerful smile on his face and begin speaking and moving his hands expressively, and he will appear to be talking to someone about something innocuous, not staking out a private residence.

  What’s interesting is that his speaking on the phone or wearing a smile does not indicate that he is not dangerous or a threat. Why would someone with bad intentions sneer or scowl at people as they pass him, thereby telegraphing those intentions?

  But people see what they want to see. They don’t want to see a threat on their quiet little street, and thus they’re willing to accept almost any verbal or nonverbal cue—a carefree expression, some forced laughter—that reinforces their preconceived bias.

  Harrison Bookman lives on a tree-lined street of brick homes and SUVs; his neighbors are people who walk their dogs and go for early-morning runs and fuck their spouses once a week and worry about retirement and college tuition, not about where their next meal will come from. Bookman’s address is unlisted, befitting a former FBI agent, but it wasn’t hard to find his town house. It was a simple matter of following him home from his bookstore.

  Charlie’s senses go on high alert when a car pulls into Bookman’s driveway. He does a double take at the woman who gets out of the car. Had he not been anticipating her, hoping for her, he would not have recognized this tall, thin woman who locks her Jeep by remote and heads toward Bookman’s front door.

  Her hair is longer than it was in the photos they ran a year ago. Different length, different style, different color. He recalls lighter-colored hair pulled back, not ink-black hair running past her shoulders, bangs covering her forehead.

  It is a subtle change, and it has a practical value, he recognizes. The bangs, her blouse with the high neckline, almost touching her cheek, blue jeans instead of shorts despite the heat. She is covering the scars.

  “You want to hide, but you know you can’t,” he whispers.

  And she’s doing a decent job of hiding the limp too, although it’s there if you look for it.

  “You are scared and bruised and scarred,” he says. “But you adapted and overcame. You keep fighting. You keep doing your job.”

  She primps a bit as she walks, her fingers swiping at her bangs.

  “He won’t care about the scars, Emmy. If he is half the man he should be, your scars won’t matter at all. Your scars…are what make you beautiful.”

  He sucks in a breath. Feels pressure in his chest. Jealousy and envy are not emotions that find him easily. The jealous man is the man too weak to reach for what he wants, who occupies his time with longing and regret instead of action. A moment of envy is a moment wasted.

  The thinking man has no affections. Only a heart of stone.

  Hate, anger, love, sadness—all are irrelevant. All are distractions. Happiness is too; at least, how most people define the word. Happiness is not an emotion to be felt every day, a selfish indulgence to be hoarded and constantly relished. Happiness is the ultimate goal, and it comes not from egotistical pleasure but from knowing that one has achieved one’s aim.

  “I do not love you or hate
you,” he says to Emmy as she reaches the front door of Bookman’s town house. “I do not like you or dislike you. You are an impediment, nothing more.”

  He says these words so he will believe them.

  The door opens, and Emmy enters the town house.

  Charlie hits a button on his dashboard. The back door to the customized van slides open, and the hydraulic ramp unfolds and drops down to the pavement.

  Charlie removes the earbuds but keeps his cell phone in his hand. He grabs the bag of toiletries off the floor and navigates the wheelchair down the ramp. He could use the remote but chooses to manually move the wheelchair instead. He rolls up a driveway two doors down from Bookman and moves along the sidewalk until he reaches the back of Emmy’s Jeep.

  He looks at his cell phone as if it were ringing, then raises it to his ear as if he were answering, making sure the bag of toiletries falls from his lap onto the pavement in the process. Oops.

  He pretends to speak for a moment while looking with distress at the spilled contents of his bag. He puts the phone in his lap and reaches down for the bottle of shampoo on the sidewalk. He pretends that he can’t quite reach it. He cups his right hand under the fender of Emmy’s Jeep to pull himself forward.

  And to plant the GPS device.

  He completes the charade for anyone who might be watching, picking up the toiletries and then continuing to wheel himself down the sidewalk. He will do a lap around the block and return to his van and drive away.

  He doesn’t have any idea how long it will be before Emmy returns home. She may stay with Bookman, her fiancé, for a few hours or the evening or even the weekend. But eventually, she will return home.

  Sooner or later, Charlie will know where Emmy lives.

  21

  BOOKS OPENS the door for me wearing a button-down shirt pulled loose from his jeans and loafers with no socks. His hair is still wet from a shower, and I catch the scent of soap and musky aftershave.

  My heart does gymnastics as he pulls me close and presses his lips against mine with urgency. I feel everything else drift away; serial killers and murdered cops and domestic terrorists and leaks of confidential information recede into fog as we make out like teenagers in the foyer of his town house. Everything safer and happier and…better. Just better.

  We get only as far as his living room, pawing at each other, unbuttoning clothes and yanking off shirts, panting like animals, before he lays me down gently on the carpet. His muscular arms tremble as he hovers over me, his face inches from mine, then enters me with a sharp moan.

  Hello, Friday night.

  We almost never see each other during the week. Books, trying to keep his struggling bookstore afloat, has trimmed down staff to the point that he is the only full-time employee, handling the counter and the inventory and the accounting and the marketing, working sixteen-hour days. And I’m my usual obsessive, workaholic self.

  He grits his teeth and arches his back and, with one final thrust, lets out a violent grunt, looking down at me with that intense, pained expression, wet hair falling into his face. Then he releases a breath, his expression easing.

  “Wow,” he says after a few seconds. “I’ve missed the hell out of you.”

  My breathing evens out as he lowers himself onto me. I touch his smooth cheek. His smell and his warmth are all I need right now, all I want. I close my eyes and pretend it’s going to stay like this.

  I pretend that I really am good for him, that we really will get married.

  He starts to pull away but I hold him tight. “Just…stay here a minute,” I say, opening my eyes.

  He smiles that gentle Books smile, kisses me softly.

  “I love you, Agent Bookman,” I whisper. “You know that, right?”

  If he is surprised at the question, he doesn’t show it. “You’re not just using me for my body?” He slides off of me and props himself up on his elbow. “You okay?” he asks.

  “I am now,” I say. “I am here.”

  “You can always be here,” he says. I can’t see my own expression, of course, but I can see his as he reads mine. It’s like the needle screeching off the turntable, and the passion and intimacy disappear as we return to our regularly scheduled program, My Fiancée Is a Freak, starring Harrison Bookman as a handsome, brilliant, well-adjusted man drawn to a neurotic woman. “What, I’m not supposed to say that? You can be here. I want you here. I want us to live together.”

  I run my fingers gently down his cheek. “I know,” I say, which is not much of an answer. “I’m working on it.”

  The disappointment, frustration, all over his face. We’ve been through this; I’ve pushed away the idea of moving in together before, and he’s reacted negatively before. But something is different this time—his fuse is a little shorter.

  “You have to work on it. I see.”

  “Books—”

  “How was New Orleans?” he snaps, his eyes ablaze, as if that’s some kind of comeback, as if that has anything to do with what we’re discussing.

  “It was…fine.” I look away. I do not like lying to Books. It’s one thing not to volunteer information about what I’m doing in my spare time. It’s another thing altogether to flat-out lie. A relationship is constructed slowly, like a house, and every lie is a stone pulled loose from the foundation.

  And it’s not the only lie I’ve told him.

  Books abruptly gets to his feet and collects his shirt and jeans. “I’ll get us some wine,” he says.

  “Hey,” I call to him, but he’s already disappeared into the kitchen.

  I have to tell him. I have to tell him that I’m hunting another serial killer. I know everything he’s going to say, every objection he’s going to raise, the knock-down, drag-out argument we’re going to have, but I’m going to tell him anyway. I have to.

  This weekend, I promise myself. I’ll tell him this weekend.

  22

  SUNDAY MORNING, rain is falling…

  Books can’t get the song out of his head as he looks out the window dotted with long raindrops at the gray sky. Ordinarily, there are few things Books enjoys more than lazy, damp Sundays curled up in bed with Emmy, reading the paper and sipping coffee and feeling the warmth of Emmy under the covers.

  Not so much this Sunday.

  He’s removed the wet plastic sleeve from the Sunday Post, and there are a few thick stains of wetness on the front page but nothing that obscures this headline:

  Citizen David Targeting NYC?

  Once again written by Shaindy Eckstein.

  Books reaches into the back of the kitchen cabinet and removes the burner phone he was given by Director Moriarty. It has been turned off and stashed away all weekend. He couldn’t risk Emmy seeing it, much less reading anything that might be on it.

  Knowing that he is hiding something from her burns his throat like harsh medicine. He reminds himself that he’s trying to protect her, trying to ensure a fair investigation.

  No, he thinks, it’s not that. His own guilt is a diversion, focusing him on his role in all of this. The problem is the why, the reason there’s an investigation in the first place. The problem is that the Bureau has turned its considerable resources on Emmy, that she has a target planted on her back.

  That he is losing her. That she is losing herself, jumping from the airplane and refusing to pull the cord for the parachute.

  He listens for any sound of Emmy moving upstairs but hears nothing. It’s only six thirty in the morning. Emmy usually sleeps well past this time. She sleeps hard and long on the weekends. She comes to him on Friday nights beaten and exhausted. It’s not hard to imagine why—she works endless hours and gets almost no sleep during the week. Even though she has assured him—lied to him—that this isn’t the case anymore, that she has scaled back.

  He powers up the burner phone. The screen comes to life. The first new text message is time-stamped Friday at 5:25 p.m.

  She just met with SE at Deadline, quick conversation and left.

  Boo
ks feels a slow burn through his chest. She must have come straight from that meeting with Shaindy Eckstein to his house. He’d thought he’d tasted wine on her mouth when he first kissed her, but he was too busy ripping off her clothes to think much of it.

  Friday, happy hour, she meets with Shaindy. Sunday morning, Shaindy is revealing the Bureau’s thoughts on Citizen David’s plans.

  He pictures agents following Emmy, clicking photo after incriminating photo of her whispering to a Washington Post reporter in a popular, crowded bar.

  His heart asks him, Why would she do this in plain sight of hundreds of onlookers? His brain answers, It’s the perfect place, lost in a crowd, a brief stolen moment that could easily be passed off as a quick hello, small talk.

  “Oh, Emmy,” he whispers, “please don’t let it be true.”

  The second new text message is from this morning, less than an hour ago:

  We’re going to have to act on this.

  Followed by a link. Books clicks on it. It’s an article from the Times-Picayune.

  FBI Links Local Death to Serial-Killer Spree

  The article notes that FBI analyst Emmy Dockery, known for her hunt and capture of the notorious serial killer Graham, was dispatched to New Orleans to investigate the seemingly accidental death of Nora Connolley.

  She talked to a reporter when she was down there? Books wonders. If so, he doubts it was by choice. She was probably accosted, a reporter with a camera and recorder following her doggedly.

  But it doesn’t matter. Her secret—one of them—is out now. Books can’t pretend not to know. The Bureau won’t be able to feign ignorance. Something will break as a result.

  He finds himself constructing a scenario that would solve all of this: Emmy is kicked out of the Bureau over this new serial-killer search of hers, thus depriving her of access to the Citizen David investigation. There are no more leaks. The people at the Bureau will think, She’s gone and the leaks have stopped, but the proof of her leaking isn’t conclusive, so maybe we’ll just leave it at that and be glad it’s over.