by Tim Weaver
It didn’t have bolts, but it had a steel frame.
That made it likely to be reinforced but she took a step back anyway, then focused her attention on the area just below the keyhole. I always aimed for the deadbolt or the knob, her father would tell them. And I kept my foot flat to the door on impact. That’s important, unless you want to be going to the ER. Flat foot, deadbolt. She took a breath and kicked out.
Nothing happened.
You’ve got to kick the door in the direction it swings.
She looked at the door. No way did it swing out, not with the steel frame built around it. She readied herself and kicked again.
Pain speared up her leg.
‘Shit,’ she muttered, rubbing her calf.
She thought about shoulder-barging it.
But then she remembered, Never shoulder-barge. Never try to breach a door with anything other than your foot. There was a cop I knew who tried to use the side of his body to bust open a door and he couldn’t move his neck for four weeks. There’s a reason we used a Stinger. Her dad had told them that the Stinger was a thirty-five-pound, thirty-inch battering ram.
Rebekah returned to the car and got the jack.
She grabbed the wrench too.
It was time to switch her attention to the door at the back of the hostel. Neither the jack nor the wrench was ideal – she guessed a crowbar would have been the easiest way to lever off a padlock – but she’d have to make do.
There’s no skill in this, she thought. It’s just brute force.
She smashed the jack down as hard as she could against the padlock. It rattled for a moment, then came to rest, unimpressed.
She gripped the jack even tighter, fingers blanched with the effort, and crashed it down a second time. This time, the padlock pinged, swinging inside the ring of the metal plate to which it was secured, and then – like a metronome slowing – it was still again.
Rebekah looked at the metal plate. It was hinged: once the padlock had been removed, the half of the plate that was on the door just folded back against the wall. As simple as that, she thought bitterly.
Unless she could smash a window.
On the ground floor, there were three windows, then a set of rusting metal stairs that went up to a fire exit on the first floor, where there were three more. All of the windows had thin metal bars. Rebekah wondered why – they were miles from anywhere, and even when the hostel was open, hardly anyone was on the island – but then, from the ocean, came a huge boom. She glanced out at the water as a wave crashed onto the shore. It looked tormented already, and while the wind was only light, discarded junk was being whipped up and scattered: nets, fishing lines, plywood, styrofoam cups. In a bad storm, that would be replaced by masonry, roof tiles and chunks of rock, and the glass would be as effective as paper at shielding the hostel’s interior. The bars were just damage control.
Again, Rebekah’s thoughts spiralled back to what it might be like here in the winter. What if another hurricane hit?
What if she was still on the island when it did?
She clasped the jack with both hands, refocusing her attention on the padlock.
Come on, you can do it.
She crashed the jack against it. When it didn’t break, she did it again, and again, and again. She paused, shoulders heaving like a piston, her heart stomping beneath her ribs, out of breath, hot. She started to forget why she was even trying to get inside the hostel. She wasn’t going to sleep here because, when a rescue came, it would be from the mainland, and that meant she needed to be at the store, close to Helena. She needed to see the boats when they arrived at the harbour. So why was she here?
I need supplies. I need clothes. I need blankets. She tightened her grip on the jack again.
I need to get this door open.
She started again, the pain in her hands worse than ever. It was all along her arms too. Her jaw was clenched so tightly that her teeth throbbed. She kept going, even as she slowed and the blows became less forceful, even as the jack started to slip from her grasp, and her hair was blown across her face by the wind.
But, just as she was about to give up, her luck changed.
The padlock made another soft ping.
This time, it dropped to the ground.
Travis
‘Hi, guys, I’m Louise Mason.’
Headphones on, and with the noise from the squad room reduced to a low, featureless hum, Frank Travis watched as the woman smiled at the camera. His cellphone screen was small but her smile didn’t get lost: it was big, vivid, genuine, and as she introduced herself, she buttoned up her paint-spattered white overalls and tied her hair into a bun. Once she was done, she smiled into the camera again and said, ‘This is my studio.’
She was thirty-five, had a small star tattoo at the nape of her neck, and bright pink hair. On the driver’s licence Travis had pulled from the system, it had been black or dark brown but, in the time between the licence being issued and the video being shot, she’d dyed it. Somehow the hair colour suited her. He imagined, in life, most things had suited Louise.
She was standing in a vast loft space and, as she spoke, she gestured to a wall full of paintings. Mostly, they were hanging from wires that, in turn, were connected to the ceiling, but a few were still displayed on huge easels. It was the sort of art that Travis didn’t get, or even pretend to, but he’d read up about Louise’s work, her career, exhibitions and installations, and he knew plenty of people got it just fine: only three weeks before she disappeared, she’d sold a painting entitled ‘A Broad View from the Carpet’ for $458,000.
Travis watched as Louise discussed the work she had in her studio, and talked about a new installation she’d designed at MoMA PS1. The opening had been delayed for two months after she went missing, but in the end her family told the museum that Louise would have wanted it to go ahead, so Travis had taken a trip out to Long Island City to see it. It was absolutely packed, the reports about Louise’s disappearance helping to massage the crowds, the whole thing like some coarse, ghoulish wake. Travis didn’t enjoy the crowds, and he didn’t much enjoy the art either, but it was a useful way to talk to her friends and extended family.
Not that it had got him anywhere.
He took off the headphones and the noise and hustle of the squad room snapped back in. Next to him, on the wall, were two photographs of Louise, one with pink hair, one – a little older, the image more faded, the corners creased – where her hair was something close to its natural colour. The pink had become part of her brand, but in between public appearances, or when she wasn’t on YouTube, her family said she tended to dye it brown or black.
It had been that colour the night she’d vanished.
Alongside the photographs of her was another, this one on a Xeroxed Missing poster. He looked at the image, then at the information listed below it. ‘Louise Mason. Description: female, white, 35 years of age, 5’ 8, 130 pounds, slim build, black/dark brown hair, brown eyes. Last seen on 09/23/2021.’ Under that was Travis’s direct line at the Missing Persons Squad. He’d put the poster together two weeks after Louise had vanished, when the search had been kicked up the chain from the 9th Precinct. Until then, and despite her family’s protestations, uniforms in the East Village had been wavering between believing she’d deliberately left town, or it being some kind of publicity stunt for her new show. It had taken one conversation with her family for Travis to know that neither of those things was true. She was an only child, she and her parents were close, and there was just no way she’d ever go quiet on them for such a long time without warning them first.
What was harder to say was why, of all the cases he’d had in the past six months, he found this one the hardest to shake. Maybe it was the total lack of decent leads. She’d gone to a fundraiser at a hotel in the East Village on 23 September at 6 p.m., and Travis had a single crappy image from later in the evening, taken from a surveillance camera in an adjacent room, of her talking to – or possibly talking to – an unid
entified male in the hotel bar. At almost exactly the same time the camera recorded the image, her cellphone had pinged a tower a block from the hotel. That had been at 9 p.m.
At 9.10 p.m., her cell went completely dead.
He’d gone to the hotel and spoken to the people who worked there, had been down the list of fundraiser attendees and picked up the phone to every single one of them. No one remembered seeing Louise leave that night. He’d returned to the hotel and requisitioned more footage from its cameras, but coverage wasn’t as comprehensive as he needed, and the cameras that were there failed to capture any images of Louise exiting the building. So all Travis really had was a rinsed-out image of her in the hotel bar that night, in the fifteen minutes before she’d vanished. And even then it was pretty far from a slam-dunk: he wasn’t even one hundred per cent certain it was Louise. She’d had dark hair that night, not pink, which made it harder to be absolutely sure. Plus, all he could see of her was a forehead and browline.
The cell records he pulled for Louise showed no calls or texts from numbers she didn’t have listed in her address book, and the only people she’d been in contact with in the hours prior to going missing were friends and relatives Travis had already visited, talked to and crossed off the list. For a while, the lead with the biggest potential seemed to be the guy Louise had started to date a few weeks before her disappearance, and who’d gone to the fundraiser with her that night – but even he’d long since proved worthless. He confirmed to Travis that he’d accompanied her to the fundraiser, but had had to leave when one of his close friends was rushed to the ER. Cell records and GPS data confirmed his story, as well as video from the cameras at the hospital, and a geo-located text he sent to Louise to apologize proved he was still there at 9.31 p.m. By then, twenty minutes had passed since Louise’s phone had gone dead.
So maybe, when all of that was taken into consideration, it wasn’t so surprising that Travis couldn’t let go. This was a search he rarely conducted any more. Louise wasn’t some teenage runaway. She didn’t have dementia.
She was a genuine unanswered question.
He pushed out from his desk and, joints stiff, right knee creaking, wandered over to the kitchen. There was a machine in the corner that did passable coffee, and as he waited for it to pour, he checked his phone. He’d missed a call while he was watching the video. It was from his ex-wife, Naomi. She’d sent him a follow-up text, then left him a voicemail.
Travis didn’t bother reading the text.
He didn’t listen to the voicemail either.
Instead, he stared out of the nearest window. It was an oppressive day in mid-December, snow scattering against the glass as a wind rolled in off the East River. The cold played hell with his hips and knees, all screwed up after years of being taken down on the football field. Since his shoulder op, he’d also had to put up with constant pain along his collar bone.
‘What’s up, Trav?’
Travis looked up to see Amy Houser approaching. She was a smartly dressed cop in her late thirties, with whom Travis had been paired during her first couple of years in the Missing Persons Squad. She’d been a good partner: quiet, respectful, always asking questions, always wanting to learn. They had got drunk one night at a bar near the fish market, and she’d ended up telling Travis all about the father she’d never known. He’d sat quietly and listened. He and Naomi had brought up two kids, their son Mark and their daughter Gabrielle, and Travis had loved both of them with everything he had, so it didn’t take a shrink to see through to the subtext: Houser had never had that and, in some small way, Travis had become a surrogate.
‘How you doing, Ames?’ he said.
‘You still on that machine swill, even at the end?’
‘It’s not the end yet.’ He raised the coffee cup to her. ‘Salute.’
She laughed as he drank the coffee, the way he smacked his lips as if to tell her it was delicious, then said, ‘How you feeling about the big day?’
‘I haven’t given it much thought,’ he lied.
‘Sure.’ She didn’t believe him. ‘You celebrating big-style?’
‘Is celebrating retirement a thing?’
‘You know it is. Especially when you’re only forty-five.’
He smiled. ‘Your maths ain’t up to shit, Houser.’
‘What – you’re not forty-five?’
‘You’re only about fifteen years out.’
‘You don’t look a day over sixty, Trav.’ She winked at him.
‘Until then,’ he said, ‘I still got work coming out my ass.’
‘Anything in particular?’
‘People keep going missing. What can I say?’ But Houser knew he was talking about Louise Mason. They’d discussed her a couple of weeks after she first vanished, and again as they ran into each other in the corridors of One Police Plaza once Houser had got a promotion to Major Crimes. Travis barely had a week left on the force and Louise Mason was the only long-term case that was still unsolved.
‘I saw you looking at one of her paintings the other day,’ Houser said, gesturing towards his work station. ‘Some abstract thing I didn’t get.’
‘It’s all abstract things I don’t get, Ames.’
‘That one was different. It’s why I didn’t come over and talk to you. You were right in the zone there, Frank, like you’d seen something in it.’
He knew straight away which picture she was talking about. It was called ‘Sole’ and was the only one of Louise’s he really, genuinely understood: a silhouette of a figure looking out from the top of a hill, with the rest of the world gathered in the valley below, apparently unaware of him.
Maybe that was the answer.
Maybe that was why he couldn’t let her go.
Because she’d painted his retirement.
‘That case is – what? – almost three months old now?’ Houser asked, bringing him out of his thoughts. ‘You getting rusty in your old age, Trav?’
He smiled at her because he knew she didn’t mean it.
‘You want to talk about it?’ Houser prompted.
‘It’s fine,’ Travis said, taking another mouthful of coffee. ‘I’m sort of burned out thinking about it. Maybe I need to let go of her for a while.’
Houser eyed him.
He smiled. ‘Something on your mind, Detective?’
‘You’re just gonna let go of her.’
She didn’t need to say anything else.
Because, deep down, both of them knew the truth.
Travis never let go of anyone.
At the same time as Frank Travis was saying goodbye to Amy Houser and walking back to his desk carrying a lukewarm cup of machine coffee, a mile and a half away Nick Tillman was standing at the top of the stairs leading down to the 8th Street subway station, with a burner phone in his hand.
He was calling a number he knew by heart.
He listened to it ring, his eyes constantly moving, watching all the time for faces he recognized.
A click. ‘Hello?’
‘It’s me,’ Tillman said.
A pause on the line. Snow swirled and changed direction as the wind picked up. He took a step back, using a doorway as cover from the weather.
‘Anything to report?’ a woman’s voice said.
‘Same as before.’
‘No change?’
‘Nothing.’
Another long pause.
‘This Travis guy, is he going to be a problem?’
Tillman shook his head. ‘He’s out in a week.’ He checked up and down the street, then the people coming up the subway steps, ensuring no one could hear what he was going to say next: ‘But, don’t worry, just in case, I’m going to make absolutely sure he knows where to look.’
‘Good,’ the woman said simply.
She hung up.
Before
Rebekah took Gareth’s phone to a place in Dyker Heights to get it unlocked, pretending she’d forgotten her code. They told her they could do it, but there was a good chance it
would reset entirely, and because of the age of the model, everything would be wiped. ‘Are you happy to take that chance?’ the guy asked her.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘One hundred per cent,’ Rebekah assured him, then took the girls to an ice-cream parlour on 13th Avenue, where she bought Kyra a milkshake and, as Chloe slept in the stroller, listened to her gabbling about a book she’d had read to her at daycare.
Forty-five minutes later, she returned to the store.
‘I’ve managed to save some emails,’ the guy told her, ‘but, as I warned you, a lot of the other stuff has been wiped with the reset. This type of cellphone, nothing’s backed up to the Cloud, because it doesn’t have that feature – but there’s a quirk where the email app sometimes retains random messages.’
She took the phone from him. ‘Random messages?’
‘A mix. You’ve got emails going back two years, but there are also some that are only a few weeks old. Individual email chains will have been disrupted during the reset, so you might have an email you sent, but not the reply you got. That sort of thing. Like I say, the model’s old and that means it’s got some weird, sometimes unpredictable functionality.’
Once she’d worked out where the Email icon was, she slumped: only eleven messages had made it beyond the reset and, at first glance, none appeared to be of any immediate interest. Her eyes switched to the address for the account, [email protected], then to the name alongside it.
Willard Hodges.
Who the hell was that?
She thanked the guy and headed home. As soon as she got through the door, she set the girls up in the living room with some toys, then retreated to the kitchen and started going through the cell. Most of the emails seemed to be marketing messages: loyalty programmes for clothing stores in the city that Rebekah had never heard of; an email about conference facilities at a vineyard upstate; another from a ticket company with availability for Giants games; confirmation of a sign-up to a porn site. She looked at the porn sign-up: that certainly wasn’t beyond Gareth, but the rest seemed less likely. His company paid for a corporate suite at the Giants stadium, and he went to a ton of games every year with clients, so why would he bother trying to source his own tickets? He didn’t drink wine either, so the vineyard seemed like a write-off, and the clothes stores were all high end, not the type of places he would normally shop. That didn’t mean it wasn’t him – he could be using an alias – but Rebekah’s certainty had started to fade.
