“James Harrison?”
“Yes. Can I help you?”
“I’m Detective Stockton Barnes, and this is Investigator Amelia Crenshaw Haines. We’re so sorry for your loss. We just drove up from New York, following up on a few things.”
It’s all true, though he doesn’t show his badge. Nor does the man ask for it before opening the door and inviting them into a wallpapered foyer with a Christmas garland trailing up the wooden staircase and a shrub-like red poinsettia at its base. In adjoining rooms, a television is tuned to a children’s show, adult voices chatter, dishes clatter, a sink tap runs. The air is fragrant with bacon.
“The family’s all still here,” Harrison says. “They came for the holidays, and . . . well, they stayed, now that Alma and Brandy are . . .”
“We understand, and we apologize for interrupting,” Barnes tells him. “I know you’ve already spoken with detectives, but if we could just ask some additional questions . . . we’re following up a couple of leads.”
“Anything I can do to help.”
“Thank you. I understand you were expecting the victims here for a family party.”
“That’s right. When they didn’t show, we sent a cousin and her husband over to check on them, and they found . . .” He sighs, head bowed.
“Are they here today, by chance?”
“Kendra and Jeremy? No, they live in New York.”
“Jimmy?” a female voice calls from the other room. “Who’s here?”
“NYPD!” he calls back.
Though Barnes never said that, specifically, he doesn’t correct the assumption that they’re part of the homicide team. Uncomfortable, Amelia looks at the floor, spots a couple of stray plastic Lego blocks, and feels even worse.
A woman appears in the doorway, attractive and sharp-eyed, drying her hands on a dish towel. James introduces her as his wife, Regina, and their visitors as New York detectives.
“I’m actually . . . an investigator,” Amelia clarifies.
Barnes tenses beside her, but the Harrisons nod. It makes no difference to them.
Anyway, Amelia reminds herself, she and Barnes are here to help these people—and maybe, yes, themselves in the process. It’s not as if she’s never bent the rules on a client-related quest—even broken a few to wheedle her way into private or sealed records.
Barnes takes out a notebook. “And how are you related to the victims, Mr. and Mrs. Harrison?”
“Alma is—uh, was my niece,” James says, and his wife pats his shoulder.
Barnes asks him about his past, and he proudly tells them that his mother wanted her children to get good educations and build careers. He’d studied accounting at CUNY; his sister pursued law enforcement at John Jay.
“Now you’re an accountant. Is your sister a police officer?”
“She didn’t finish school, but she married a cop, and her son Hiram’s a lawyer,” he adds proudly.
Barnes asks if they’re here today, probably thinking that they’ll know criminal case procedures and will likely ask to see their credentials. But James says his sister, now widowed, lives in Florida and his nephew is tied up on a case in New York, where he practices.
A little boy comes into the room, calling Regina “Grammy” and showing her a picture he colored.
“Who all is here?” Barnes asks James as his wife admires her grandson’s artwork.
He writes down the names as the Harrisons mention them—their daughter and her fiancé; their son, daughter-in-law, and their three children; Regina’s brother and nephew; Jimmy’s sister . . .
“Not the one in Florida? With the lawyer son? Hiram, you said?”
“Right. Hiram Trimble.”
Barnes frowns as if that rings a bell, and he jots it down. “He would have been Alma’s cousin?”
“Right. But he doesn’t practice criminal law,” he adds, as if that might be why Barnes is asking.
Why is he asking, Amelia wonders, when he’d been asking about the guests who are currently in the house.
He looks up from his pad. “And Alma’s parents are . . .”
“My brother and sister-in-law. They died years ago.”
“Any siblings?”
“Only one, but she passed away back in . . . when was it, Regina—’90, or ’92?”
“What’s that?” she asks, still crouched on the floor beside her grandson. She looks up at them as though she’d lost track of the conversation, but Amelia has been keeping an eye on her, and she’s been following it.
“What year did Charisse die?”
Upper East Side
Gypsy awakens alone in the suite, the top of her skull gripped in a crown of pain. It’s the kind of headache that doesn’t abate with food, coffee, water, a hot shower, fresh air; the kind of headache that has struck before, and never stopped her. She doesn’t allow herself to wallow in pain any more than she’d wallow in self-pity or grief.
Standing at the curb trying to hail a cab as the traffic flies past her, close enough to touch, makes her think of Carol-Ann Ellis. She seldom has, in all the years since she left New York, and it isn’t a memory she welcomes, so she heads for the IRT subway at West Seventy-Second Street.
On the median that separates Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, the street-level station is just as she remembers it, with wrought iron pillars and windows. The system map, too, remains intact. But the turnstile slots for tokens have given way to card readers.
A man sees her pondering the ticket machine, mistakes her for a tourist, and helps her buy a MetroCard. Then he offers to show her around the city later and hands her his business card. The type is bold and large enough for her to see that he works for a hedge fund.
She turns away, pitches the card into a trash can right there in front of him, and descends the steps to the tracks. She thinks of Perry. He, too, had worked for a hedge fund, had also been clean-cut, worn custom-made suits, and carried a briefcase. But Perry drove his Mercedes to his lower Manhattan office every day. He wouldn’t have dreamed of setting a Ferragamo wing tip on the subway back then. But the Perry who’d since lived in Cuba for twenty-nine years had done many things that would have made his younger self shudder.
Gypsy marveled at the well-lit platforms, electronic signs predicting arrivals to the minute, and sleek, graffiti-free train that whisked her to Fulton Street in eighteen minutes.
The financial district is more crowded than it had been in her day, and not just with Wall Street types. Midtown offices in various industries have moved downtown over the last fifteen years, bringing hordes of commuters and endless construction. Chain stores, hotels, and restaurants now line the maze of narrow streets.
Her first stop is a drugstore, where she buys a plastic rain poncho, small folding umbrella, ibuprofen, a bottle of water, and—an afterthought, because she can’t read the label—a pair of readers. The recommended dose is two capsules. She downs four.
Next stop: 195 Broadway, the building where Perry’s hedge fund career had unfolded. She steps into the cavernous lobby, planning to visit the floor where he’d worked. But the elevator banks now lie beyond a security desk, and the guards won’t let her through.
Back out on the street, she heads for the site where the twin towers had begun their fateful climb to the sky in 1968. She remembers thinking then that stone and steel were indestructible compared to the world that came crashing down in that tumultuous year of war and racial tension, assassinations . . . murder.