Last Night

by Karen Ellis

  He barks, “Why do you have all this crap on every table, Mags? Every single surface has something on it! And the pillows—everywhere.” He swipes a pillow off the couch. “It’s like a minefield. What are you trying to prove?”

  “‘Crap’?” Mags says. “‘Prove’?”

  Saki interrupts. “I’d like to take a look at what she had on last night. If you don’t mind.”

  Mags wheels around to glare at the detective. “Why?”

  “With the two investigations intersecting now, we’re gathering anything we think might—”

  “I just want my daughter,” Mags snaps. “I want her home, in the house, not on the stoop. Go ahead—take her dirty clothes if you want them. Burn them, for all I care. Take whatever you want. Here: Do you want this?” She carries the framed photo over to Saki, an angry jitter in her step. “Go on, take it. Why not? It’s all shot to hell anyway, isn’t it? Isn’t it?”

  “Oh, Mags,” Nik moans, finally settled safely into an armchair. “Leave the woman alone. Go ahead, Detective Finley,” he slurs, “go on up to Glynnie’s rooms, up on the third floor. Take whatever you need. Everything’s replaceable except what really matters. Right, Mags? Right?”

  “Are you blaming me?” Mags turns to him. “Is it my fault that Glynnie can’t bear to be in this house? Is it my fault that she has the kinds of friends that know gun dealers? Are you serious, Nik?”

  “She probably wanted a gun to kill you,” Nik mutters.

  Saki decides that this is a good moment to go upstairs and do her job. As she mounts the staircase, the couple’s fight escalates.

  “That’s insane! Why would she want to kill me? She loves me. We’re very close!”

  “Oh, Mags, get off your horse.”

  “My horse?”

  “Your high-and-mighty horse!”

  The second-floor hallway is carpeted, with three doors, each closed. One door is decorated with decals of chess pieces—the son’s door, Saki assumes. Poor kid.

  She proceeds to the top of the house, where Glynnie has a suite of two rooms—a bedroom and a sitting room—joined by a spacious bathroom that’s tiled floor to ceiling in dove-gray marble. An open tube of toothpaste oozes a blue-green snake over the edge of the sink. Wadded tissues on the floor surround an empty garbage can. A bad smell from the unflushed toilet propels Saki to hurry out and shut the door behind her.

  The bedroom’s red walls are plastered with photographs cut from magazines. Mags mentioned that the housekeeper was in yesterday, hence the perfectly made bed and overall sense of order. Otherwise, judging by the state of the bathroom after Glynnie’s brief visit home, the bedroom would also be a wreck. Saki looks around for sloughed-off clothes but finds nothing.

  A door with a hook from which several handbags and scarves dangle suggests that it might be a closet. Saki opens it and finds herself face-to-face with a room sizable enough to be a bedroom in its own right, a walk-in closet so stuffed and piled with clothes that walking in isn’t an option. Right there, at the edge of a heap of clothes, are the torn jeans and striped T-shirt Glynnie was wearing in the bank footage. Saki holds up the shirt to the ceiling LED and sees a reddish mist hazing the left shoulder that she didn’t notice in the video. She checks the pockets, hoping to find something, anything, but comes up empty-handed. She unfolds one of the evidence bags she brought along and puts the clothes inside.

  She glances around the bedroom—neat, clean, dusted—looking for something that might still have an intact fingerprint. On top of the dresser is a jewelry tree strung haphazardly with necklaces and dripping with unmatched earrings, a lone pearl that looks real, a ring with a stone dazzling enough to be an actual diamond tossed at the base of the tree. The gleaming dresser and nightstand smell like furniture polish, so they won’t be any help; better, anyway, to find something she can take with her.

  Holding her nose, Saki passes through the bathroom and into the sitting room, on her way plucking a nest-like hairbrush from the edge of the sink and dropping it into another evidence bag.

  The sitting room must have been where Glynnie spent part of her brief visit home this morning, when she wasn’t downstairs with her parents. A stylish couch and coffee table face a wall-hung television surrounded by built-in bookcases. The walnut floor and orange couch are the only swaths of deep color; everything else is white or beige, which reads more Mags than Glynnie. The shelves, though, are all unfinished girl: packed with a hodgepodge of stuffed animals, books, video game players, bottles of nail polish, a balled-up throw blanket. Maybe the cleaning woman doesn’t bother trying to tame that wall; maybe she was forbidden to try.

  On the low coffee table an iPad lies open beside a mug with a tea bag suspended in half a cup of murky liquid. Saki puts the iPad into a third evidence bag. After braving the bathroom again to pour the remaining tea into the sink and throw the tea bag into the garbage can, where it collapses alone and wet at the bottom, she also bags the mug.

  On her way out, Saki pauses on the second floor to knock on the brother’s door.

  A small voice answers, “Come in.”

  She cracks open the door just enough to poke in her head and say, “Just wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

  Aidan sits at a desk that floats in the middle of the room, facing the door, like an executive’s situated in the power position. Sky blue walls and tidily hung posters of movies—Star Wars, Back to the Future, The Truman Show—create a sense of sanctuary. A chessboard is set up in the center of the desk, an algebra textbook pushed to the side. Aidan appears to be playing a game with himself.

  “Who are you?” he asks.

  “I told you. I’m Saki.”

  “I don’t understand what’s going on, and I don’t know if I want to. I hate half days.”

  She closes the door softly behind her and makes her way downstairs.

  Mags and Nik are now pressed together into the armchair, holding each other, weeping.

  Saki detours to the kitchen, finds herself a large plastic garbage bag in which to carry her collection of evidence bags, and steals out the front door.

  21

  Sitting at his borrowed desk, Lex clicks Play and watches a jerky rendition of last night begin to unfold. The collation of public and private security footage, stitched together chronologically by a DAS tech, offers a visual quilt of unaligned sequences of varied quality—some color, some black-and-white, some grainy, some sharp.

  Glynnie and Crisp walking into Red Hook via the Union Street bridge, she wearing a set of wireless Beats and he with earbuds and wires running to his back pocket. Turning south along Van Brunt until Fairway, then disappearing from view. Later, reappearing with the boy—the boy now wearing the Beats—and moving in a zigzag that leads them to IKEA. More shots of them along the route to Fairway when again they drop off for a while. Eventually, they reemerge to visit the bank and then make their way to the housing project.

  Nearly an hour later, the boy emerges alone. The Beats hang around his neck at a cockeyed angle. He hurries along the same Fairway-bound route to Van Brunt before disappearing.

  At 5:56 a.m., Glynnie comes racing out of the projects as if she’s on fire.

  Crisp isn’t seen again for nearly an hour, when he walks out of the central mall of the Houses, pulling a very large suitcase on wheels. From the way he’s straining, the case looks heavy. A stone sinks in Lex’s stomach—the loaded gun, the bloodied floor. But Crisp is not inside that suitcase; that’s the good news. Two men appear, walking together at some distance behind him.

  Lex freezes on a frame showing the two men relatively clearly: one in a red make america great again cap, the other in a leather jacket. Lex halves the screen and pulls up the most recent mug shot of Dante Green. The man in the red cap—that’s Green.

  Green and the other man follow Crisp all the way to Columbia Street. They continue straight along the mouth of the Gowanus Canal where it feeds into the bay. Like fraying fabric, the video clips are pulled apart by wider gaps of ti
me and finally end near a fenced area packed with shipping containers.

  Forty-seven minutes later, the three reemerge on Columbia Street and retrace their path in the direction of the Houses. This time, though, the unknown man is hauling the case and it appears to be less of a burden. And now, Crisp walks between them, shoulders drooping.

  On Lorraine Street, a commercial strip with shops just opening for the day, the clips bind more closely together. Green peels ahead to greet a woman who emerges from a hair salon; she slaps him, they talk briefly and appear to part amicably. She returns to the salon. The three continue walking and come to a stop at a nursery school where a bus is unloading small children. Then, quickly, things start to happen.

  Crisp bolts.

  In the chaos, Green and the man are unable to chase him.

  Green shoots his gun at Crisp, and misses.

  The children scramble into their school building.

  The two men stand on the sidewalk in heated discussion. Then, in a deflation of energy, they turn in the opposite direction.

  Here, the footage bifurcates into two tracks the tech has marked A and B. Lex watches A first.

  Crisp runs through the streets, not slowing down until he reaches Conover Street. Then he vanishes.

  Lex leans back in his chair and stares at the white ceiling, mapped with water marks he never noticed before, and thinks. Someone was either injured or, more likely, killed in the gun dealer’s apartment. The body could have been packed into that suitcase and possibly disposed of somewhere along the bay shore, somewhere Green and the other man knew would be remote enough to avoid ready detection. Crisp might have been enlisted to help in the effort, and if he did so, it presumably wasn’t voluntary; the footage demonstrates that in his impulsive escape. But who was in that suitcase? And who pulled the trigger on that Baby Browning, discharging a single bullet?

  He glances at his barely eaten turkey sandwich, but hunger eludes him. His mind flits to Adam, who still hasn’t called or texted. Lex shakes his head and rubs his eyes and feels his achy calf and craves relief and forces his attention back to the screen and the ballast of work.

  The B footage shows Dante and the other man moving in the direction of the projects. They pause as Dante makes a call, or tries to; he becomes frustrated, waves the phone at his friend as if to show that something is wrong with it. They talk, continue walking, hail the first taxi that comes their way. Lex pauses the footage and tries to get a read on the license plate but it’s obscured by a car driving close behind.

  Thinking that he’s now seen all the footage, Lex is surprised to discover two new tracks to watch: C and D.

  The C footage shows Glynnie, at 6:09 a.m., running erratically, constantly checking behind her. Security cameras capture her through Hamilton Avenue, where she disappears in the direction of residential Carroll Gardens. Shortly thereafter, she’s known to have arrived by taxi at her family’s brownstone.

  The D footage picks up the boy hurrying through the dark along Van Brunt, but only briefly. He passes Fairway and disappears. Hours later, at 7:25 a.m., he reappears with a backpack slung over his shoulders like any other kid on his way to school. He walks along Van Brunt until he turns onto Richards Street and disappears.

  Lex looks back over the first run of footage to see if he can find any clear shots of the boy’s face, but in every single frame in which he appears he’s either turned or too blurry. Then Lex reviews the D tape and discovers one almost-clear shot of the boy just before he turns off Van Brunt Street, but it captures only a side angle, not enough to really show him.

  Lex remembers something from a colleague’s recent case in which a partial face was digitally enhanced to construct what the rest of the face would look like. That image was then run through a facial recognition database. No match was made, but the prospect was intriguing.

  He gets on the phone with DAS and is forwarded twice before landing Carlotta Sanchez, a tech who specializes in facial recognition. She sounds busy, but after hearing him out she promises to kick his request to the top.

  “I’ll let you know if there’s enough to work with,” she tells Lex. “Don’t get your hopes up.”

  He sends Carlotta a video still of the boy. In moments, he hears back via text: I’ll give it a try.

  When he looks up, Saki is returning with a large plastic bag full of something heaved over her shoulder.

  “How’d it go?” he asks.

  “The Dreyfus parents could use a marriage counselor. And the father was already blasted at, what, twelve thirty in the afternoon?”

  Lex is aware of how shocking that would be to someone who’s never lived with a full-on alcoholic, as he did as a young child. He asks, “Is Nik Dreyfus a nasty drunk?”

  “Not to me. But to his wife, yes. And then she turned around and let it all out on me.” She drops the bag beside her desk. “There might be blood spatter on the shirt Glynnie wore last night.”

  “I didn’t notice it in the footage.”

  “It’s a fine mist, just in one spot. I need to get this over to the lab but I thought I’d run in here for my salad. I’m so hungry I feel like I’m going to faint. It’s in the fridge, right?”

  “You could have picked up something else,” he says, marveling at the odd choice to return to the station first. “Gone straight to the lab.”

  “But my lunch was already ordered. It would be a waste.”

  “True.” He wonders how anyone could function with such rigidly systematic thinking—unless it’s some kind of mysterious strength he can’t yet fathom.

  Saki retrieves her salad, picks up the heavy bag, and says, “Be back soon.”

  “Actually,” he suggests, “since you’re here, let’s see if someone else can take it to the lab. I want to show you something.”

  “Who?” she asks. “Who would take it for me? Haven’t you noticed the way people are with me here?”

  He lets that slide because, yes, he has noticed the way her coworkers tend to avoid her and he doesn’t want to rub it in. He glances around the squad room and spots the perfect candidate.

  “Hey, Dinardo,” he calls across the floor.

  Jack Dinardo’s head snaps up from its prone position gazing at his monitor. “Lex Cole—didn’t see you here. You back?”

  “Just for now. Got a minute?”

  The habitually under-occupied detective has no choice but to agree to run the errand. He even throws in a smile for Saki before lifting the bag and carrying it out the door.

  Lex explains what he’s going to show her, letting her know to expect several strands of video so that she won’t interrupt with questions. He wants to get through it quickly so they can decide where to take this. The only thing that’s clear right now is that these aren’t just errant teenagers; those kids are on the run from something.

  Saki pulls a chair up to his desk and uses her teeth to rip open the utensil packet the deli threw in with her salad. She pops open the plastic clamshell and digs in as the first section of video begins to play.

  While she’s on the C footage, Lex’s phone vibrates with a case file alert: three new reports.

  The first one tells him about the phones found in Dante Green’s apartment: the iPhone is registered to a family plan under the name of Margaret O’Leary-Dreyfus; the LG flip is a prepaid burner. Throughout the night the signals for both phones pinged along a similar route followed by Crisp, Glynnie, and the boy on the security footage. Katya Spielman said that her son used a Galaxy, so the burner, presumably, belongs to the boy. Lex can think of several reasons, all disturbing, that a kid as young as that boy would want, or need, a disposable phone.

  Lex is about to share that with Saki when she looks up from the monitor and preempts him: “Another thing I can’t get off my mind, besides the boy, is that something looked crusted under Glynnie’s fingernails. I noticed it at the house this morning. Did you see?”

  “I noticed her nails looked dirty.”

  “Maybe, but it might have been th
icker than regular dirt, more like something almost congealed.”

  “You’re thinking blood?”

  “I’m thinking maybe blood, could be blood. I’m thinking I’d like to find out.”

  He nods: Yes, of course. Peeved with himself for not thinking of that first.

  Lex opens the second new file and reads the update aloud to Saki: “A signal from Crisp’s phone is holding steady in Red Hook, somewhere on Lorraine Street—around where he was on the footage, with Green and the other man, right before he cut loose.” Lex also fills her in on the phones belonging to Glynnie and, possibly, probably, the unidentified boy.

  “And,” he opens the third report, “it looks like Green’s phone finally came alive…on Governors Island.” He reads a string of screenshots of texts presumably directed at Crisp.

  you got my phone motherfucker

  give it back or u dead motherfucker

  ima gonna find u motherfucker

  yo po son u dead

  motherfucker

  answer motherfucker

  we comin for u GUVNER

  Lex stands abruptly. “Their phones got switched.”

  Think like a teenager.

  If he was in Crisp’s shoes, at that age, he would have done the same thing: get out of there as fast as he could; go anywhere, as long as he got away.

  Half an hour later, Lex is bracing himself against the railing of a police response boat as it hurtles toward Governors Island. Standing on the bow, water spraying, a visceral memory of surfing two days earlier returns so unexpectedly he almost weeps.

  His own mother leaving him through an apartment door. Three years later, dying.

  His second mother also dying.

  The certainty of loss.

  Adam standing there, saying, “You got it—I’m out.”

  The words hit Lex now as if he’s hearing them for the first time.

  Wind pushes against him as he holds steady, facing shoreward, watching Governors Island grow closer as his heart hurls away.

  PART FOUR