Last Night

by Karen Ellis

They start walking.

  “Tell Marco you’re consulting on a case.” Lex knows from experience that Elsa has her supervisory agent, Marco Coutts, pretty much wrapped around her finger.

  “Not if the kids are eighteen or over, I’m not.”

  “Yeah, well, Ruby was two days shy of eighteen when you consulted on that one, and two days older than eighteen when we found her, and the only thing that changed in the interim, besides becoming a legal adult, was that she was—” He stops abruptly. Elsa’s knuckles gripping the strap of her bag have gone white. He shouldn’t have reminded her.

  They walk in silence the rest of the way, a heavy silence, his recollection having thrust them back to Ruby Haverstock and those terrifying days last summer before they found her. He will never forget the tangle of unreliable narratives spun by that group of teenagers, Ruby’s friends, whose lies cost more time than the investigation could afford.

  They arrive at a wide brownstone with ceiling-to-floor windows and scrolled iron railings leading up the stoop. Lex rings the bell.

  As they wait, Elsa says, “Welcome to Brownstone Brooklyn.” Her tone is tweaked with sarcasm.

  “You live here too,” he points out.

  “I live seven blocks away and there isn’t a single house this fancy on my street.”

  “Tale of two cities,” he agrees, but just to placate her. He’s been to her building, and while it isn’t fancy, it’s pretty nice.

  A slim Asian woman dressed all in black opens the door—or part Asian, Lex self-corrects, given her blue eyes and the flame-colored hair swept into a ponytail. She has her ID at the ready so that he can see exactly who she is without having to be told.

  “Detective Lex Cole,” he greets her. “I got a call from Sergeant Boyd.”

  “We seem to have an overlap in a couple cases,” Detective Saki Finley says.

  “I heard. This is Special Agent Myers, FBI CARD unit—child abduction. We happened to be together when I got the call.”

  “It’s not an official consult,” Elsa clarifies, “since I understand your subject is eighteen and that’s—”

  “The cutoff,” Saki says. “Yes, I know.”

  Lex and Elsa follow the detective inside. She leads them into a modern living room, white and brass and dark wood, a penetrating aroma of coffee. A portly gray-haired man and a gaunt blonde woman share a long couch with their daughter. Three full mugs on the low glass table, one black, two milky. The girl looks worn out, and her feet, Lex notices, are filthy despite a perfect pedicure. In contrast to her dirty feet, her white T-shirt is pristine, her tight jeans cuffed neatly at the ankles. The parents sit erect, as if in hypervigilant preparation for another shoe to drop, while the daughter has herself draped partly over both of them. An interesting triad that suggests a volatile, unbalanced dynamic.

  Lex smiles, hoping to put the family at ease, and introduces himself and Elsa.

  “Nik Dreyfus.” The father stands with his hand already extended. “This is my wife, Mags, and our daughter, Glynnie. Glynnie’s been through a nightmare, and her friend—” He glances at the girl.

  “Crisp,” Glynnie says.

  Saki interjects, “His full name is Titus Crespo. He goes by Crisp.”

  Lex nods. “I’m aware.”

  The girl pitches forward. “He’s in trouble. He needs help. You have to help him.”

  “I want to help him,” Lex assures her. “But you’ll need to tell us everything that happened and everything you know, as calmly and slowly as you can.”

  “I already told her.” Glynnie looks at Saki.

  Lex says, “Would you mind, please, telling me again?”

  He sits opposite the couch in one of two matching leather chairs. Elsa sits in the other one. They put on their patient listening faces, though Lex has a strange feeling he can’t quite isolate. This teenage girl has an outsize confidence that’s already raising an alarm.

  Glynnie talks. She talks and talks, spewing what sound like hyperbolized details of last night’s adventure or trauma, depending on which part she’s telling. How she and her friend Crisp wandered into Red Hook “for no particular reason.” How she withdrew cash to eat at a “restaurant that doesn’t do plastic,” though they never made it to the restaurant. How they “got lost and ended up in the projects” before they realized where they were. How the rest “happened fast” when “two scary dudes” ambushed them and made them go inside. How “Dante, the head dude, had a shitload of guns, it was so crazy.” How she “tried to use my cash to buy a gun just as a way to get out of there and it almost worked but then he changed his mind, I don’t know why.” How she managed to escape while her captors were sleeping but her friend, Crisp, didn’t.

  Lex and Elsa both take it in. He notes the way Saki also listens closely, without expression, to a story she’s heard once before.

  “Thanks,” Lex says. “That’s helpful. So, the reason I’m here right now is this: Last night I had a visit from Crisp’s mother at the station house out in Coney Island. She was worried because she hadn’t seen or heard from him since earlier yesterday, and he’d had some problems, which—”

  Glynnie interrupts. “He got arrested on Wednesday for, like, riding his bike on the sidewalk after a cop told him to ride his bike on the sidewalk. Totally bogus.”

  “He told you about that?” Lex asks.

  “Yeah, when he came over last night.”

  Mags asks, “To the house?”

  “I saw him when he was locked up,” Glynnie clarifies. “On Wednesday afternoon. That’s the reason he came over. He was in that basketball cage thingy on top of the jail and I was on our roof. He saw me first. We shouted to each other. That’s why he came over last night—so I wouldn’t think he was some kind of criminal. He wanted to explain.”

  “Wait a minute.” Nik Dreyfus faces his daughter, jowly with concern. “Are you telling me that you had a conversation with someone in that basketball pen on top of the jail?”

  “Not someone—Crisp. I already knew him. We hung out last winter with some other friends.”

  The parents trade a sharp glance, shocked that so few degrees of separation could come between their daughter and a presumed criminal locked up in the House.

  Seeing their reaction, Glynnie tells them, “Mom, Dad—Crisp is a good guy. He’s going to Princeton. He was supposed to be valedictorian at Stuyvesant before that asshole cop arrested him for bullshit.” Then, to the investigators, she offers, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Lex is used to the insults some people hurl at cops just for breathing. He picks up a loose thread of last night’s story. “Here’s the thing I don’t understand: Crisp’s mom called me to say she heard from him this morning—he told her not to worry, said he was with friends.”

  “This morning?” Glynnie seems surprised.

  “He texted her—early, about five a.m.”

  “That’s strange,” Glynnie says. “They took our phones at, like, one o’clock or something.”

  Lex makes a mental note of the discrepancy in time, and asks, “Who took your phones? The man you called Dante?”

  “No, this other dude, Rodrigo—he had our phones, but Dante told him to take them. And then he stuck them in this silver bag thing.”

  “A Faraday bag.” Lex glances at Saki. The men sound like professionals.

  Glynnie asks, “A what?”

  “Did you get your phone back?” Lex asks.

  “No. I got out of there the second I had a chance.”

  “How did you come upon these guys, Dante and Rodrigo, in the first place?”

  “I told you.”

  “Tell me again.”

  “We were just walking. You know, around Red Hook. And we accidentally kind of just wandered into this place. It was dark. We couldn’t really see.”

  “Her phone last pinged at the Red Hook Houses at twelve fifty-one,” Saki confirms. “After that, the signal was lost. I’m wondering if the girl—”

  The mother interrupts in
a chilly tone: “Her name is Glynnie.”

  “Excuse me, ma’am.” Saki tries again. “I’m wondering if Glynnie can point us at the exact building and apartment. The complex comprises dozens of identical buildings in which there are a total of two thousand, eight hundred and seventy-eight apartments. Interference at the Houses makes it difficult to triangulate a cell signal with any precision. I’ve found that before.”

  Lex’s jaw nearly drops, listening to that. The Dreyfus parents spent some time with Saki Finley before he and Elsa arrived, so they’ve presumably already been exposed to what now crystallizes for him: the detective is…unusual. Luckily, he tends to like unusual people: he finds their differences intriguing. He glances at Elsa and wonders what she’s thinking, but she’s too good at holding her poker face to offer any hints.

  Lex asks Glynnie, “Can you remember the building number they took you to?”

  “I wasn’t really paying attention to that,” she says.

  “What about the apartment? Would you remember the number or letter?”

  “Well, it was the fourth floor. The elevator didn’t work so we had to walk up.”

  “That’s something,” Lex says to Saki.

  “Possibly,” she responds, “but elevator failure is common in the projects. The statistics aren’t good, unfortunately.”

  “In that case,” Lex says, “you’re right. Glynnie will have to show us. Could you do it if we showed you a picture?”

  “Maybe.”

  Elsa produces her laptop from her bag, opens Google Satellite, and zeroes in on an aerial view of the Red Hook Houses.

  After a few minutes of turning the view, of expansions and contractions, Glynnie sighs. “I’m not sure. It was really dark. And I was scared.”

  Lex asks, “Would you be able to lead us to the building if we took you back in person?”

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t know if that’s such a—” Mags begins.

  Glynnie cuts her off. “I’m eighteen. I say yes.”

  “If one of you wants to come along,” Lex offers.

  Mags immediately volunteers. “I’ll go.”

  “Maybe I should,” Nik counters.

  “Why? Because you’re the man? If you were such a man—”

  “Mom! Dad! Neither of you are coming. I’ll be with all of them.” She gestures sweepingly at the three law enforcement agents.

  To stop himself from reacting to the family’s histrionics, Lex stands up and walks into the front hall. Elsa and Saki follow.

  Keeping his voice low, he asks his colleagues, “What do you think?”

  “Hard to tell,” Elsa answers. “She’s throwing a lot of words at it and she seems sure of herself. But something isn’t sitting right.”

  “I know what you mean,” Lex agrees.

  Saki tells them, “She left something out of her story both times I’ve heard it.”

  “What’s that?” Lex asks.

  “A boy, a second boy, younger than Crisp Crespo. He appears briefly on the bank footage, but when I asked her about him she maintained she doesn’t know who I’m talking about.”

  “Keep asking her,” Elsa advises. She hoists her bag onto her shoulder. “Listen, I’ve got to get going, but if you need me later, just shout. I’m happy to consult unofficially. And don’t let her off the hook about the other boy. My best piece of advice: When you’re looking for a teenager, think like one.”

  Lex follows her onto the stoop. “Thanks. I’ll call you soon, get you over for that drink.”

  “Looking forward to it.” She smiles. “Keep the faith.”

  Unsure if she means about the case or Adam or both, he says, “I’ll try.”

  Rejoining Saki in the foyer, Lex dials Katya Spielman. She answers quickly and he gives her the news—just the basics about another high-school kid claiming that Crisp could be in a little bit of trouble, but not the whos or wheres.

  “How can that be?” Katya asks. “I just got another text from him.”

  “You did?”

  “He said he’ll be home later.”

  “Would you forward that to me, please?”

  “Hold on.”

  It comes through in seconds, time-stamped 8:06 am:

  This is Crisp borrowing someone’s phone. Home later. I love you.

  Lex asks Katya, “Whose phone did he borrow?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Send me that number too.” It could be someone else sending the texts on Crisp’s behalf, and not necessarily to help him. But he doesn’t want to worry the mother with that unless he can confirm it.

  Lex immediately forwards the number to a tech at ITB and requests that a source identification be added to Crisp’s case files as soon as possible, with the addendum “Possible missing teenager.”

  He tells Katya, “Listen, this whole thing isn’t very clear at the moment, but we’re going to follow up on what the girl is saying.”

  “What if she’s making it up?”

  “Could be, but we’re giving her the benefit of the doubt, for now.”

  “I’ve never heard of her. How can she be his friend?”

  “Teenagers…” Lex’s phone vibrates. He taps open his case management app and a quick read shows him that Crisp’s second text to his mother came from a dummy number already associated in the system with one Dante Green, a convicted felon out on parole. Glynnie referred to the gun dealer as Dante. Lex decides not to share this information with Katya. Not yet. Too much is still unclear.

  Katya asks, “What do I do now? How can I just go to work? I can’t.”

  “Stay put,” Lex urges. “I’ll keep in close touch with you. The minute I—” know something, he’s about to say when she cuts him off.

  “Where are you now?”

  “At the girl’s house. A detective from the local precinct is here and—”

  “What precinct?”

  “The Eighty-Fourth. But—”

  “I’m coming.”

  “Listen, Katya, please just—”

  “Isn’t that where he’d be taken if you find him?”

  “Yes,” Lex says. If he’s lucky and doesn’t have to be brought straight to a hospital. Or the morgue.

  She repeats, “I’m coming.”

  “Fine,” he relents. “Check in with the public information officer; every station has one. We’ll tell them to take good care of you.”

  After the call, Lex turns to Saki. “Looks like we might have some trouble—this guy Dante has a record. I want to see if any other texts or calls went out from his number in the last few hours. Which one of us requests the trap and trace warrant? My kid, your precinct.”

  Her eyes pause in calculation. She tells him, “I’ll take care of it. But if I were you, I’d ask for one on the boy’s number too—your precinct, this time.”

  Lex lifts his phone. “Doing it right now.”

  They drive over to the Red Hook Houses, Glynnie Dreyfus slumped in the backseat like a kid on a field trip.

  Think like a teenager, Elsa told him.

  Lex remembers back to when he was a teenager and the worst moment, the cruelest of days: when he lost Yelena. Beloved Yelena—his father’s first wife, his brother David’s mother, the woman who took him in after he landed alone in New York City at the age of eight. Losing her to cancer when he was fourteen staggered him more than anything before or since, with the exception of the news, three years earlier, that his real mother had died. He was a teenager when Yelena, his second mother, died—what did he think? He tries to remember and what comes back to him isn’t thoughts but a series of irrational actions he couldn’t explain now if he tried.

  He ran out of the apartment, ran through traffic on the West Side Highway, ran to the edge of land, and jumped fully clothed into the Hudson River. Not to kill himself—that didn’t even occur to him—but because Yelena had always said you couldn’t swim in the “filthy Hudson” and now that she was gone he could, so he wanted to test the breach of the first open
boundary that sprang to mind.

  Then, soaking wet, stinking of something bad from the river, he walked into a gay bar on Eleventh Avenue and ordered a vodka neat, his dead father’s drink, which he didn’t like and didn’t finish and didn’t pay for. They hadn’t carded him but they wanted their money and the bouncer chased him down the street until he slipped into a dark narrow alley between buildings on Thirty-Second Street.

  He climbed the first fire escape he saw, rattling the iron steps up all four stories, and lost himself in an aerie of connected rooftops. He didn’t think about anything, not even Yelena. He knocked over a laundry rack, sent socks and boxers and pants and T-shirts onto the tar, picked up the clothes and stuffed them into an uncovered chimney, kicked a hole in an exhaust duct, peed over the edge, and heard someone scream below.

  He clattered down a fire escape several buildings east, knocking on windows all the way down, drawing shouts, curses, threats. The cops picked him up as soon as he descended to the sidewalk.

  The charges were disorderly conduct, destruction of property, underage drinking, and theft of services and goods.

  The booking officer took down his name and address and asked his age.

  “Fourteen.”

  “Fourteen.” The officer shook his head. “Why’d you do all that?”

  Because I’m all out of mothers now, is what he thought, but not what he said. What he said was, “Because I felt like it.” The exact same rationale he used five years later as an older teenager, in college, when he drove a needle into his arm: because his prescription had run out, this was cheaper anyway, and he felt like it.

  Think like a teenager, Elsa told him. Translation: Don’t think at all. Act and react. Think later.

  15

  Last Night

  What the fuck, son?” Dante yanks Crisp back from the door.

  Answers ping around Crisp’s brain but there isn’t one good enough. He almost apologizes for his friend’s escape, then stops himself. He stands there, rigid, gaze fixed on the refrigerator, trying not to think about all those guns, that dead body in the tub.

  The stairwell door yawns open and falls shut. Footsteps in the dark hallway and Rodrigo is back, breathless—alone.