PROLOGUE
It was late September, the kind of morning that turns orange when you close your eyes, weather so sweet everyone on the sidewalk gulps fresh air like kids drinking soda. I got off the subway at Woodhaven Boulevard eager for my share, but as I made my way up the avenue it wasn’t the incandescent day I saw but weeds pushing up through the cracks in the sidewalk, ugly blotches where spilled coffee defaced the pavement. In spite of its flaws, Queens was drenched in autumn beauty.
It all looked cheerless to me.
My plan was to tolerate him. I figured it was the best I could do. Like my walk to 1 Lefrak City Plaza, though, the man I came to meet was confounding. With his sky-blue shirt and recent trim, his neck still ruddy from the clippers, he looked the part, yet the socks peeking out from the cuffs of his pants were patterned in spectacled kittens, and he smelled like he’d been cooking with sage though it was 10:00 a.m. on a Tuesday. When we made our introductions his tone oozed pity like I knew it would, but his folksy accent—Rhode Island or Mass was my guess—softened the blow.
“So,” Dr. Carson Gates said as we took our seats. He folded his hands. “You’re here. That’s good.”
“Is it?” My own hands were clasped in an impenetrable ball. It was the only way I could keep them from twitching.
“I bet there are a dozen places you’d rather be. The DMV. A dentist’s office, needle hovering above your gums.” He shivered, not just for effect. “But you came. So yeah, it’s a good start.”
It’s a requirement, I thought, indignant, but I didn’t hate this guy with the clear eyes and wacky socks. For what it was worth, the delicate fern on his desk appeared to be thriving. Go through the motions, I told myself. Give him what he wants and you can go home. At the same time, I felt like my head was filled with bees. Talking was easy, except when it wasn’t.
“You don’t think I can help,” said Carson. “No, it’s okay—I get that a lot. I want you to know something, though.” He leaned in, studying me. “I won’t give up on you, Shana. You can do this. Start at the beginning. Just take it slow.”
The beginning. Where was that, exactly? Nowhere I wanted to take a stranger, even if he did smell nice. But maybe I could go back partway, just far enough to make him happy. Back to a limestone building on East Fifth Street, and a day that grabbed me by the throat and still hasn’t let go.
* * *
—
I was shoulder-deep in a fatal hit-and-run when my NCO supervisor called me into his office and told me to brace myself. Change of plans, he said. This has you written all over it, Shana. I figured he was talking about my investigative method—upending people like stones in a garden to find what’s lurking underneath is kind of my thing—but that wasn’t it. They needed me, and me alone, in a way I could never have imagined.
The guys from the Seventh Precinct were investigating a series of murders below Houston. Another body had turned up, this time in the East Village—my domain. They knew some things about their suspect already, and it was their latest intel that made the sergeant yank me from my desk and send me down to Pitt Street, where the case was laid out like a map on a table: in the span of four months, three murders, all women. Becca Wolkwitz. Lanie Miner, Jess Lowenthal. There was no evidence of abusive relationships, no history of drugs or run-ins with bad crowds to explain why they’d been plucked from the street and turned into statistics. The only common thread was all three women used the same dating app, and all had dated a man named Blake Bram.
Bram’s profile picture, I explained to Carson Gates, showed a Caucasian male in his midthirties with dark hair and blue eyes. Hair dye, colored contact lenses, and photo filters were a given; it’s witness-based composite sketches, not manipulated photos, that tend to get us our guy. Still, something about his picture tugged at my gut. His face evoked a memory, dog-eared and soft from use but long ago misplaced. I’d seen Bram before, but couldn’t say where.
The guy’s bio claimed he liked airport novels and Bill Murray movies. More lies. Historical data from the app’s administrators told us he updated his profile often, no doubt trying various combinations to see what stuck. There was just one constant among the write-ups, a line of text present every time. Blake Bram was from a town called Swanton, Vermont.
“Swanton. Sounds pretty as a picture, right?” I said as Carson listened with parted lips. “Back in the sixties, the Queen of England gifted Swanton with a pair of Royal Swans, and swans still swim in the town’s Village Green Park. To the west, you’ll find Lake Champlain; to the north, Canada. The 2010 census put the population of Swanton at 6,427. I know this because Swanton is where I grew up.”
There it was. It took an embarrassingly long time for me to go on. “When I heard the killer claimed to be from my hometown, I understood why the sergeant asked me to drop everything for this case. There was a two-week time span between the disappearances, and no reason to think Bram’s spree was done. We were roughly the same age, he and I, and six thousand people wasn’t a lot.”
Carson waited, cupping the back of his baby-smooth neck with both hands.
“They were hoping I could ID the guy,” I went on. “Surely you know him, they said.”
What I didn’t tell Carson, or anyone else, is that they were right.
ONE
Thirteen months later
Murder,” I repeated, the word clumsy on my tongue. The last time I spoke it, I was in another world.
Tim rocked his office chair, testing the bounce on springs sticky with dust, and raised his empty coffee mug. “Murder on an island,” he said. “If it didn’t make me a heartless creep, I’d call this your lucky day, Shane.”
It was a nickname I hated, but I was still trying to reconcile Tim’s news with the water coursing down the window behind him, so I let it slide. Shane! Tim said my first day on the job. Don’t tell me you’ve never seen Shane! Old western movie? Gunfighter with a mysterious past? Get it? I didn’t, hated westerns with their drama and dust, but Tim was convinced it was funny.
That morning, no one was laughing. Tim took the transfer call from dispatch while I was putting a second pot on to brew, listening to the thunder rattle the panes and expecting nothing more from the Saturday than dry skin from the electric heat. As much as I wished the call was a joke, too—Tim needling “the new guy” or a prank by some bored townies—I knew it wasn’t, for three reasons. The first was Tim’s face. He had cartoonish eyebrows, so wide and straight they might have been drawn with a Sharpie. I’m not saying I’m perfect. Most people, when they look at me, see only my scar. But I wondered if in spite of Tim’s athletic build, perps saw him as a hapless clown with no sway. As I watched him ask the routine questions on the phone and scribble notes on a lined yellow pad, Tim’s face got hard as stone. It was an entirely new look on him. At least, it was new to me.