The smell, already strong, enveloped them the second the door slid upward—rot, decomposition, meatiness, human waste. The policemen had their guns drawn, Laney’s hand jerking to her hip as well, even though her gun was locked in her gun safe at home.
“Step back,” Ed said, but she was as if bewitched, her feet carrying her forward into the fetid darkness.
The young policeman grabbed her arm and pulled, and she looked up at him with wide, bewildered eyes.
“Ma’am, you need to stay back.” He held her firmly, shielding her view of the gaping doorway with his bulky body.
“What the heck?” said the manager, craning his neck to look around them.
“Were you familiar with Mr. Blue?” the young cop asked the manager.
“Who’s Mr. Blue?” he answered.
They all peered into the garage, Ed’s guarded steps echoing inside. Two men in the medical examiner’s white jumpsuits walked in, carrying their equipment.
“What is the name of the person who rented this apartment?” asked the young cop.
The manager chewed his lip. “Not Mr. Blue.” He drew out his phone and poked at it. “Owen Hopper,” he said. “Looks like he moved in about three months ago.”
He squinted at the cop, then asked, meekly, “What’s going on?”
Just then Boswell, looking haggard and grim, stepped over the threshold and into the colorless daylight.
“Looks to be a male. Maybe five foot nine. Hard to tell by now, but that would be my guess.”
He nodded to the young cop to release Laney. Boswell stared at her dirt-and-slush-encrusted shoes, placed his hand on her shoulder.
“We’ll find him,” he said, and she knew of course that he meant Alfie.
She cleared her throat, pressed her fist against her pursed mouth, waited for her heartbeat to slow.
Then she said, “I know this person.”
All three men turned toward her with varying degrees of wariness and curiosity.
“The body?” asked Boswell, sharp.
Laney shook her head. “I mean I know Hopper. He was a CI.” She glanced at the manager. “Confidential informant. I worked him on an organized crime case in Brooklyn.”
The wind carried the sound of sirens nearing—a strangely ragged effect as the gusts buffeted the wails. To Laney it seemed the sounds were surging out of her past. She couldn’t remember ever hearing sirens in Sylvan before today.
“Laney,” said Ed, “I’d like for you to go to the station. Can you do that? I think there’s a lot you haven’t told us.”
When she made no move toward her car, he exchanged glances with the young cop. “Officer Ryan can drive you if you’d like,” he said.
“What? No, no, I don’t need anybody to drive me.” She shifted her feet. “May I go inside?”
She would have been surprised if he’d said yes. The garage was now a crime scene, as was the rest of the house, and she had no protective clothing, no training in forensics. Plus, as she had to keep reminding herself, she was a civilian. Furthermore, a civilian connected to the crime scene.
Ed shook his head. “You know that’s not possible right now,” he said.
She couldn’t move, couldn’t walk away from that dark opening, the gruesome odor beckoning her. She placed her hand on Ed’s forearm, Kendra’s personality surging forth, taking over. Make a personal connection. Make it hard for the other person to say no. “Will you take pictures of the body and show me? And of the upstairs? Anything will do.” It was an unorthodox request, but not, strictly speaking, an unreasonable one.
Ed stared at her raw-skinned hand on his sleeve, then looked at her. The bags under his eyes seemed bluer, as if he’d been punched days ago and had barely healed. He pressed his lips together, then stepped carefully back inside. She listened for his footsteps, the soft rustle of his jacket against his gun and radio, then the creak of the inside door and his ascension to the rest of the house.
From where she stood, she could see the remains clearly, the medics taking meticulous pictures, measuring. The body lay prone on the cement, a chunk of its skull crushed inward. From the level of skeletonization, she thought it had ceased being someone at least two months ago, probably much longer. She hadn’t known she wanted the body to be someone else’s until she realized it wasn’t Hopper and an utterly unexpected relief flooded through her. Hopper had been seen alive two days ago and therefore could not be the liquefied mass of bone and blackened skin stinking up the garage.
If Alfie had gone with Hopper, as Jordan said, and this body had been Hopper’s, with Alfie still missing, the last connection she had to her son would be gone. At least this way, Hopper alive, she could assume Alfie was with him. Further than this, she refused to think.
Her phone pinged with a set of photographs from Ed.
She didn’t think anything he chose to show her would be worse than knowing her son willingly associated with a (probable) murderer and (convicted) drug dealer, but her stomach shriveled with despair anyway. Even in the poorest neighborhoods, she’d rarely seen rooms this squalid and desolate. Floors scuffed and filthy under layers of tracked-in, crusty mud, burn marks on the half-collapsed couch, beer cans, empty bottles, candy wrappers, crumpled chips packets, rolling papers, a lighter trapped inside a milk crate, and, unexpectedly, a turntable on top of the milk crate all painted an unsettling picture. Had Alfie and Jordan really been here? Spent time here? With this man? With a corpse’s stench permeating the house?
“You didn’t know your son was coming here?” asked the young policeman.
She glared at him. “How old are you?” she asked.
He stiffened. “Twenty-three.”
“Okay, well, if and when you procreate and produce a teenager, you can ask me that question again.”
His features hardened, and he narrowed his eyes. She didn’t care. What did it matter what he, what anybody, thought of her mothering skills?
Four more pictures pinged into her phone, her gut shrinking further at the sight of the scrunched blankets in a corner (no bed, no lamp, not even an errant shoe). The closet gaped where Ed had opened it, nothing but hangers and a pile of clothes underneath.
A photo showed garments spread on the grimy floor—two long-sleeved shirts, a sweatshirt, a pair of jeans, one sock, three pairs of boxer shorts.
Any of this Alfie’s? Ed texted.
No, she replied.
Other than the corpse, the townhouse was empty, and this offered faint relief. Hopper was not one to play games. If he’d wanted—she shrank from the words stabbing her mind—if he’d wanted Alfie destroyed, he would have done it. Would have made it obvious, a hit.
She felt hungry for the first time that day. She had detective work to do. I need to go home, she texted. There was a Notes app full of passwords and codes on her phone, and here she was wasting time.
Boswell stepped out the front door, said. “All right. Go home. Get some coffee. Officer Ryan will make sure you make it there okay. I’ll be over as soon as I’m done here. We need to talk.”
She was already pulling into her driveway before she realized the patrol car had tailed her the entire way, then parked behind her and blocked her in. So be it. Based on previous experience, she had anywhere from three to eight hours before Boswell would be freed from the crime scene.
She slipped out of her ruined pumps, her feet blue-cold, and ran the shower. A long day awaited. She needed to stay healthy, she needed to be warm, she needed her strength. The hot shower restored some alertness, enough so she wondered if she’d been on the cusp of hypothermia—what with her light jacket and ice in her hair. After, in Alfie’s room, she pilfered his dresser for thermal underwear, wool socks, and a black cable-knit wool sweater that had been Theo’s, then shrank and got passed down to Alfie, and now fitted her perfectly. Over all this, she wrapped Alfie’s bathrobe, then put the coffee on.
Her patrolling life was not so far back that she could leave a rookie cop sitting thirsty and hungry in her driv
eway, so she brought him a thermos of coffee and a bologna sandwich in a brown paper bag.
“You’re welcome to wait inside,” she said.
“Oh, I’m good,” he said with a smile. If his orders were to watch her and the house, then that’s what he’d do, and good for him. She respected a good work ethic.
“Any news on who the body is?” she asked as she passed the food to him through the window. She’d added two chocolate chip cookies to the bag out of habit. She always gave Alfie a treat with his lunch.
“Nothing definite.” Ryan grinned and wrapped his hands around the thermos. “Thank you, ma’am. This is very generous.”
She patted him on the shoulder. “Well, can you let me know as soon as you can?” He wouldn’t, of course. Not until Boswell interviewed her again. But there was comfort in pretense.
“You got it.” He started his lunch with the cookie.
CHAPTER
23
AS OFFICER RYAN ate the last of the sandwich and retrieved his phone, Laney texted Holly.
Where r u? she typed.
Shoprite, Holly typed back. R u ok?
I need a favor, Laney answered.
As long as I’m home by 3:30 for the school bus, Holly typed.
Twenty minutes later Laney, in furry boots and parka, slipped out her back door and wound her way through the three backyards separating her house from Holly’s. She’d left the lights and the television on. If Officer Ryan or Ed Boswell decided to pay her a visit within the next three to four hours, they’d be disappointed, but she’d take her chances.
Holly handed her a foil-wrapped gourmet chocolate as soon as she pulled out of her driveway. “There are few woes in the world chocolate can’t soothe,” her friend said, “or at least give you the strength to deal with.” She drove away from their street, Officer Ryan, and shortly, Sylvan.
“Laney?”
“Yeah?”
“Now can you tell me why there’s a cop watching your house?”
Laney turned up the heat and curled into herself, drew her knees against her chest. “Jordan Rogers told me he saw Alfie get into a man’s car.”
“What?” Holly snuck a glance at Laney, then turned back to the road. The Tappan Zee Bridge unspooled under them, swaying against the cold gusts.
“I know the man.”
“What?” Louder this time.
“I got his address from Jordan, called Ed, and we went there.” The edges of the Hudson River had iced over, and the water flowed black and slick between the shores. How scared would Holly be if she knew the truth? “The apartment was empty.”
In the ensuing silence Holly leaned forward, her body tensing, her eyebrows knitting. She shot another look at Laney. “So why is there a cop watching your house?”
“The apartment was empty, but there was a dead body in the garage.”
“Jesus!” Holly would have stomped on the brakes and pulled over if that had been an option, Laney was sure of it, but they were in the middle of the Thruway and going near seventy. “What the hell is going on? And you tell me the whole thing. I’m getting tired of peeling you like an onion.”
Laney placed the chocolate on the dashboard and wrapped her arms around her knees. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” she asked. Nobody smoked anymore, Laney included, but damn if she couldn’t use some nicotine right now.
Holly glared at her, then switched lanes at the GPS’s prompt.
“You’re right,” Laney said. She hadn’t spoken of Owen Hopper, of that time, in so long she didn’t know where to start. The beginning wouldn’t work, since the beginning would lead her to the middle, and she couldn’t talk about that. And she definitely couldn’t talk about how it had all ended.
“Before I left the force, I worked an organized crime case. This man, Owen Hopper, was arrested.” The only one out of the whole gang the city tried and sent away. “He served three years and was released a couple months ago.” No one waiting for him and nothing left to lose. “And then he moved up to Sylvan.”
Holly turned onto Riverdale’s exit. “What are you saying, Laney? That he moved to Sylvan because … what? Because of you? He was following you?”
Laney nodded. Another reason to love Holly. She made everything easy. Even difficult disclosures. “I think so, yes,” she said. “I think he’s been talking to Alfie the whole time, and this week he took him away.” She wished her voice hadn’t broken on the last word, but it did. She cleared her throat. “He chatted up my son and stole him. But not before killing someone with a blunt object to the back of the skull and leaving that someone to rot in his garage.” She put her feet down and rolled her shoulders. She couldn’t afford fear; she couldn’t afford to be small or weak.
They drove in concentrated silence as Holly looked for parking. After a minute she said, “Oh, honey.”
“So. This apartment we’re going to, it belongs to an ex-colleague of mine. He gave me access codes for restricted databases, but I can only use them from his laptop and through the VPN the job set up for him.”
“Gibberish, gibberish, gibberish job. What are you looking for?”
Laney shrugged. “I’ll know it when I see it.” They climbed out and faced each other across the car. “Nobody goes through the modern world without leaving a trace. With the right tools, I’d say many, many traces. I’m going to see what I can find on this man.”
“Honey?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re still avoiding my question. Why did we just escape from a policeman guarding your house?”
“I can’t get into the databases from my computer.”
“Laney?”
“Yeah?”
“Still not answering the question.”
“Are you sure you’re not the detective?”
“I’m certainly detecting a lot of bull right now.”
They crossed the street and walked up the paved front path to the building’s brick facade. In the foyer, Laney searched for the super’s buzzer, pressed it. “Look, I told Ed Boswell I knew Hopper. As far as Ed is concerned, I’m now involved in my own child’s disappearance. I know the probable kidnapper. Or maybe he thinks Alfie went with him freely, but I’m responsible somehow. Either way, he needs to question me, and he’s making sure I stay put.” She leaned against the shellacked wall, crossed her arms. “But, as you’ve pointed out before, Ed is a nice guy and he knows me. He doesn’t want to stress me by bringing me into the station for questioning.” If it had been her case, she would have been gentle with the parent as well. Even Harry, shit-colored glasses firmly in place, always started with the presumption that parents did not kidnap, maim, torture, or dismember their own children.
Holly dug in her handbag and reapplied lipstick, her mouth a skeptic crease.
After the super peered at Laney’s driver’s license, gave her Mike Stegner’s key, and disappeared back into the dank depths of his apartment, Laney met Holly’s stare. “Yes?”
“I’m still detecting plenty of bull,” Holly said.
Laney put her arms around her friend and squeezed. “It’s all I’ve got,” she whispered into Holly’s lavender jacket.
Once in the apartment, Laney started the coffeemaker and rummaged for milk and sugar. She figured Mike wouldn’t mind. More than that, he owed her. She’d kept her mouth shut for years, even under pressure.
They settled in his living room, a warm mug before each, his laptop on and connected. Holly blew the steam away, watched as Laney signed in, and said, “You know, you’re right about Ed. He knows what he’s doing.” She sipped her sweet, milky coffee. “You shouldn’t keep this to yourself.”
But Laney could never tell Ed she was hunting for Owen Hopper on her own. Because if she told him, he’d ask questions, and those were questions she swore she’d never answer. Not with the truth, anyway.
For the next two hours, Laney rooted through Accurint, CLEAR, FINDER—databases she’d used countless times on the job. She scrolled through Owen Hopp
er’s residency records first. He’d moved around frequently in his twenties, had addresses all over the tristate area. In 2001 he settled in Brooklyn with an Oksana Hopper, which was where he lived until Harry arrested him. Laney noted everyone who lived in every residence listed, starting with when Owen moved in and extending for a year after. Being a good detective meant paying attention to details, but first the details needed gathering.
A third coffee saw her through researching all the car registrations under Hopper’s name, and then registrations of everyone who had come into contact with him.
She paused, her fingers hovering over the keys. There was one thing she didn’t need to see, had been ignoring her heart’s clamoring to see because she already knew the basics. The details were not important. Except that they were. Her hands, steady until now, shook as she brought up the case of Otto Hopper, Owen’s son. After a moment, she closed the file, stood, and went into the bathroom, where she splashed cold water on her eyes, blew her nose, smoothed her hair, and did her best to put the boy’s ravaged face out of mind.
She came back to the living room subdued but determined to finish her research. By two o’clock, she had a spreadsheet hundreds of rows long—a decent start. She was about to search through FINDER again, to check if Hopper had been misbehaving in other municipalities, when the laptop froze and a message popped up from IT.
Hello Mike, the message read, what are you doing back? Didn’t you put your papers in already?
Laney’s heart thumped hard against her ribs, and she slammed the lid down without thinking. Crap!
Holly, who’d been reading on her phone, jumped at the noise. “What just happened?” she asked.
Laney licked her suddenly very dry lips. She had to deal with this. She opened the lid, and thank God Mike was as paranoid as she’d hoped. He had placed a strip of masking tape over the laptop’s camera.
The IT message window continued its vigil over her spreadsheet. She began logging out and closing everything. Hey, Dinh, she typed, looking at the signature in the message. Yeah, on my way out today bro. Had to do some last-minute checks for—What the hell was Mike’s new boss’s name? She tried desperately to remember. Failed. —the boss.
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