Hide in Place

by Emilya Naymark

  SHE OPENED HER eyes to feeble early-morning light only to wish that black absence absorb her again. But something was different today. She shifted under the bedclothes, felt the clammy wrinkles of her slacks and blouse.

  The house was warm. She smelled coffee. She trundled down the stairs and peeked into the kitchen. That answered the question of whether the power lines had been fixed. Holly must have checked the thermostat and preset the coffeemaker before she left last night. It was just after six thirty AM.

  Laney looked for her phone, found it in her jacket pocket, typed, How do you even know how to set that coffeepot? I could never figure it out!

  She poured a cup and sipped, carrying it with her to her room, where she sat on the bed, back against the wall, her hands wrapped around the warmed ceramic. A while later, her phone pinged.

  For shame! I bought that for you two years ago! You’re telling me you never programmed it?

  Laney typed, Thank you.

  Holly: Eat some breakfast. I checked and you have bread. Make some toast. Life is better with toast.

  Laney: Maybe.

  Holly: I get it. But you can’t help anything if you’ve starved yourself to death, right? I know you have eggs too. Eggs and toast. Now go get a shower.

  Laney grinned at her screen.

  Holly: Every problem has a solution. Then she added a thinking emoji.

  That was Laney’s line. She always thought anything could be dealt with. Anything. She had honed this philosophy in a game of what-ifs she and Theo used to play.

  He’d initiated the game early in their relationship. What would you do if your house burned down? What if you were traveling in another country and someone planted drugs on you and you got arrested? What if someone hacked your bank account and stole your identity? What if you got a terminal illness? And if the solution was out of your hands, you could always take yourself out of the equation. Suicide was an abstract, the occasional final move.

  The grimness of the game was the point, a way to exorcise anxieties. He was unfailingly calm afterward. They never touched on the real problems—what if your career tanks because you’re spending all your time taking care of a small, demanding child? What if you don’t love your wife anymore? What if you don’t love your son anymore? What if you want out of your marriage? Your life?

  And now Laney asked herself the question she’d been afraid to face for five days: What if Alfie is dead?

  The answer was clear, clean, easy. She had her off-duty revolver, had filled out forms and made sure to qualify every year so she could continue carrying it. She hadn’t though—hadn’t carried it, not until now. But she knew it was oiled, ready, strapped into its holster inside her gun safe. She imagined coming home after Alfie’s funeral (this was important; there couldn’t be any doubt of his death) and removing the revolver from the holster. Lying down on her bed.

  Incredibly, this macabre fantasy steadied her. She had never considered suicide, not ever, not even when Theo left, not through the trouble afterward. But the idea that she wouldn’t have to suffer, wouldn’t have to go on eating, walking, talking, working, all the time knowing her son had been killed because of something she’d done or failed to do, soothed her.

  After she scrubbed yesterday’s sweat and fear from her pores and hair, she dressed in her own clothes, not Alfie’s, not Kendra’s—jeans and a green turtleneck, a fitted oatmeal cardigan.

  Then she went to the kitchen to fry up some eggs and toast.

  CHAPTER

  45

  AFTER SHE ATE and washed her plate, she cleared the kitchen table, opened her laptop, and retrieved the spreadsheet she’d been analyzing the day before.

  On a piece of loose leaf, she began jotting notes.

  Owen Hopper was released from Groveland Correctional Facility in upstate New York four months ago.

  According to what Mike told her, by the time he was released, he had the names of the two cops who raided his apartment and their addresses, plus the knowledge that Kendra was an undercover. It wasn’t clear if he knew her real name at that point.

  Two months ago, he confronted Viktor Orlov and (probably) murdered him by smashing in his head. She didn’t know if Orlov gave her up, but she was certain Hopper knew her real name and address by the time he decided to transplant himself to the Hudson Valley.

  Sometime shortly afterward, Hopper drove to Sylvan with Orlov’s body in his car, rented a one-bedroom apartment in Mountain View, and dumped the body in the garage.

  Twelve days ago, Owen Hopper somehow managed to induce Harry Burroughs to inject himself with a lethal dose of heroin. Or, more likely, Hopper did the injection.

  Five days ago, Alfie got into Owen Hopper’s car.

  She had to stop there. Stand. Pour another cup of coffee. The eggs and toast briefly threatened a return visit, then subsided. She sat back down and gripped her pen.

  She went through the entire spreadsheet again and red-highlighted anybody with the last name Hopper. Then pink for anybody with his wife’s maiden name, Gulyansky.

  After a half hour she paused, her mouse hovering over a Jane Hopper. She searched for that name in the sheet, found three separate entries. About ten years ago a Jane Hopper had lived at the same Brooklyn address as Owen, though in a different apartment. Four years ago she was no longer listed at that address but rather in the Bronx. Now Jane Hopper lived upstate in Narrowsburg. Laney brought up Google Maps. Narrowsburg was about an hour and a half north of Sylvan. Maybe two hours in bad weather.

  She then switched to the sheet listing automobile registrations and violations, realizing she’d seen this name already. There. Nine months ago, a traffic violation near Dansville for Jane Hopper. Another search in Google. Dansville was about ten miles from Groveland Correctional Facility.

  Fifteen minutes later she had strapped her holster around her waist, the familiar heaviness of the gun pressing into her hip, crammed her feet into her boots, and lifted her jacket off its hook.

  Ten minutes after that she kicked her car tires in frustration.

  The temperature had dropped close to zero overnight, and though it was in the twenties now, her car doors were frozen shut. Her key wouldn’t even turn inside the locks. She ran back into the house, grabbed a lighter from the junk drawer, and held her key in the spluttering flame. After this treatment it turned, but the doors still wouldn’t open. Up until this moment a smidge of hope had fluttered within her. Or at least a smidge of resolution. She had her first useful piece of information in days, and she was going to drive to Narrowsburg and pay good old Jane Hopper a visit. An unthreatening, composed visit. That’s all. But she couldn’t even get that going.

  She spun on her heel and marched down the hill to Holly’s house, knocked, and only then realized it was Sunday, and therefore Holly’s day to be elbow-deep in trays of sausage and peppers for fifty.

  When no one answered, she climbed down the steps and wondered if holding the lighter to her car doors would open them, melt them, or explode the car.

  “Laney? Are you okay? What happened?”

  She turned to see Holly, in black yoga pants and pink sweater, poking her head around her half-open doorway.

  “Sorry! I forgot it was Sunday! I was just wondering if you had any deicer for cars.”

  Holly stepped onto her porch and squinted toward Laney’s car.

  “Doors frozen?”

  “Yeah.” Laney looked around the empty driveway. “Where is everyone? Are you actually alone?” Holly’s house was so rarely empty that Laney wondered if something bad had happened, then experienced a brief pang of guilt for being so inattentive.

  “Come inside, won’t you? It’s freezing.”

  Laney hesitated, but her car doors were not going to unfreeze on their own. Her friend’s house was uncommonly quiet.

  Holly hurried to the back and closed a door, her face rosy and furtive, then rooted in a kitchen drawer before retrieving a slim deicing stick.

  “Here,” she said. “Hopefully
it still works.” She peered at Laney. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “Yeah. Yes. Why are you alone?”

  Holly pianoed her fingers over her throat. “Oh, it’s Oliver’s grandmother’s birthday. She’s like ninety. Or a hundred. I can’t remember. I packed him and the kids off with my peppermint chocolate cake and, erm … you know.” She giggled. “I said I was sick.” Her eyes shifted to the floor.

  Laney glanced at that closed door, then stopped herself. She just couldn’t. She’d pry the real answer out of Holly some other time. After Alfie came home. In one piece. Alive.

  “Okay, well. Thanks for the …” She held up the deicer.

  “Wait, where are you going?”

  Good question. She could lie. Say she needed to run to the grocery store for more coffee. But (and this was yet one more thing she missed about Harry) she really wanted someone to bounce ideas off. “So, you know all that information I downloaded from the computer in Riverdale? I think I may have found a connection to Hopper. Like, I think I found where someone lives who used to live with him and then visited him in jail. And it’s not that far from here.” She cleared her throat. “Relatively speaking.”

  “You’re kidding.” Holly stared at the deicer. “You’re not doing this alone, are you? Are you going to tell Ed?”

  “Tell him what? It’s not a bad hunch, but it could be nothing. And even if this Jane person is a sister or an aunt or even his mother, it doesn’t mean that’s where he is right now.”

  Holly followed her outside. She said, “But you’re driving up there?”

  “Might as well. Sitting here doing nothing is eating my brain away.”

  Holly touched her forearm. “Give me ten minutes. I could use a field trip.”

  Laney frowned. “You can’t come with me.”

  “Why?”

  “One, you’re home, erm … relaxing … on your own for a change. Two, it’s three hours round trip! Maybe for nothing. And three, if it’s something, there’s a murdering, kidnapping felon on the other end.”

  Holly grinned. “Well, I’ve been missing some excitement in my life lately. Thinking about time to spice things up.”

  A week earlier Laney would have balked at taking a civilian (she simply couldn’t stop thinking of herself as something other than that) outlaw hunting, but now she couldn’t muster the authority to make anybody do anything they didn’t want to. Also, she realized she was happy to have Holly along. Might have walked to her house for this exact purpose.

  “Bring a thermos,” Laney said. “It’s a long drive.”

  About twenty miles in, the car warm and quiet, Laney’s phone chirped. She rooted for it in her pants pocket, drew it out, and handed it to Holly.

  “Who’s it from?” she asked. She hated looking at phones while driving, had seen too many crashes with drivers’ hands wrapped around them as they were hefted into an ambulance.

  Holly peered at the screen, smirked, then looked at Laney. “Who’s Cunty Burroughs?”

  Laney grabbed the phone and glanced at it, handed it back to Holly. “It’s Cynthia. Can you read her text to me? Passcode is 587231.”

  Holly quirked her mouth. “You know you can have the phone read it to you, right? You just have to set it up.”

  Laney rolled her eyes. “Just read it to me, will you?”

  Holly held the phone close to her face and squinted. “She says, ‘Harry was a lying bastard. Be careful.’ The phone chirped again. “She just sent an attachment. Should I open?”

  Laney nodded.

  “It’s a bunch of messages. A ton of them.”

  Laney pulled over onto the shoulder, flicked on the hazards, and took her phone back. The reception here was terrible, but with some cursing and maneuvering, she was able to scroll through the emails Cynthia had forwarded.

  “Fuck,” she whispered, flipping through message after message. She took ten minutes to skim the lot, then put it down. She’d have to read them in detail later.

  “Are you going to tell me?” Holly asked. She’d plugged her phone into the car’s charger and had spent her time flipping and tapping through her own messages while Laney read hers.

  “Fucking Harry,” Laney said.

  CHAPTER

  46

  SHE DIDN’T KNOW why she was so shocked. No, not shocked. Devastated at how much more twisted the truth was than she suspected.

  “One of my ex-partners worked for the mob,” Laney said. She might as well tell Holly everything at this point. Her head drooped against the car seat, eyes half-closed. “The Russian mob. I didn’t know.” Except of course she had. Toward the end. It had been so obvious after that raid. “I didn’t know then. He was the one who arrested Hopper.”

  “Are you serious? That’s nuts!” Holly’s eyes widened.

  “So, about a year ago, he was indicted on all kinds of charges—racketeering, drugs, I don’t even know them all.” Yes, she did. But the list’s scope exhausted her. “He was arrested and then suspended. Six months ago there was a trial.”

  She rubbed her eyes. Internal Affairs had wanted her to testify, but she told them she knew nothing, saw nothing, couldn’t help them, and eventually they decided not to waste time with her. At least in their eyes, she was clean. How she looked to herself was another story.

  “He was found guilty. His sentencing hearing was supposed to be sometime in the fall but kept being pushed back.”

  “Oh my God. You never said anything. I think I remember this case in the news. I never thought that was anything to do with you!”

  Laney shrugged. “Yeah, well, not something I like to think about.” She looked at Holly. “After he was found guilty, all his cases were suspect. All the evidence he had been responsible for was now tainted. That included the case with Owen Hopper. In fact, it was the Hopper case that got Internal Affairs curious in the first place, and that was the one they investigated. They found Harry had planted all the evidence in Hopper’s apartment. They proved it.”

  “But why? Didn’t you say Hopper was just an informant?”

  Laney sat up straighter, buckled her seat belt, and switched gears. Time to get driving.

  “Looks like the mobster we were going after paid Harry to frame Hopper. For everything. That way the investigation against him would end.” She pulled onto the highway, then glanced at Holly. “Hopper is not innocent, but he wasn’t guilty of all the things Harry pinned on him. So, because so much of the evidence was now unusable, they let him out.”

  “Jesus.”

  “The first thing he did was find the mob boss, because that’s who issued the order to frame him. Hopper must have known that all along. By the time he smashed a hammer into the guy’s head, he also knew I was one of the people who put him away. He definitely knew who I was, my name, and my address. The second thing he did was move up here and start a relationship with my son. And the third thing he did was somehow corner Harry while he was waiting for his sentencing hearing and kill him.”

  They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then Holly said, “I can’t believe this.”

  It felt cold in the car, an underground kind of cold. Laney’s fingers and toes ached. She turned up the heat.

  The messages Cynthia sent her went back five years—Harry and Orlov mostly, sent between Harry’s Gmail and a VK account, the Russian version of Facebook. Harry had been on his payroll at least that long, tipping him off whenever there was to be a raid or a concentrated series of buy-and-busts. The messages hinted at things that hadn’t even come up at trial, things that would have sent Harry to prison for a few lifetimes. Orlov had fed him information about rival gangs and he’d raided them, stole cash, drugs, then sold the drugs to Orlov. He’d tinned Orlov’s guys out of arrests, fixed parking tickets, worked a bizarre upside-down security for Orlov’s men when they burglarized warehouses and businesses. There were hints at homicides in those messages, at least two. She searched for Hopper’s name and found three email exchanges detailing his frame-up. Three emails. Enough to
destroy two families and at least one life.

  She searched for herself within that mass of messages, found dozens of references, and then had to stop reading. Harry had used her real name from the very beginning. There had never been a time during her months of buying from Orlov’s men that they hadn’t known who she really was. Apparently, the only people who had been in the dark about her role were Owen Hopper and her.

  She shook her head. He hadn’t even bothered to disguise his own name properly in his communications. He’d been so sure of everyone else’s stupidity. At their blindness.

  Well, he’d been right about her stupidity. Her blindness.

  Harry. Her friend. What was it? Did he really need the extra money so bad? The job didn’t pay great, not as much as the suburban police departments, but Harry had been nearing twenty years as a second-grade detective when he was arrested. With the kind of overtime he did, he was making plenty, three or four times the national average yearly salary. Was it the power? The idea that he could do anything he wanted to anyone he wanted? What else did she not know about people? Her naïveté plagued her. In the end, she was the reason Alfie was who-knows-where in hell-knows-what trouble. All because of her misplaced loyalty, her silence about her suspicions, her inability to think badly of people she loved.

  She had loved Harry, in her own way. Not like she’d loved Theo, nothing like that. But more than once she had found herself fantasizing that if she’d worked with her dad, he would have been like Harry—smart, larger than life. Safe. Of all things, that’s how she’d felt around Harry.

  She could never trust her own feelings again.

  The sky had darkened as they drove, turned a wolfish color, and now a thick, swirly snow was beating against the windshield. She didn’t want to cry, felt that if she did allow herself the weakness, she’d be useless for the rest of the day.

  But her nose grew stuffy with moisture anyway; her eyes watered, her throat hurt. She wiped at her face and told herself to buck up because if she could take her son being gone, she could take her ex–best friend being a liar and a criminal. She could take him being dead. She could take knowing she’d been so mistaken about him. She could.