Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  She eyed him for a moment and a half-smile flittered at the corner of her lips. Travis thought it suited her. ‘You’re Travis, right?’

  He nodded. ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  He’d never worked with her directly but he’d heard she was smart and had a good memory for names. People said she was a hard-ass too. Some detectives, very quietly and out of earshot, called her ‘The Dyke’ because she was single, had never been seen with a partner at any NYPD functions, and – in their eyes – being a lesbian explained why she was always busting balls. Travis had no idea whether she was gay or not, but she was a woman in a majority male environment, so the nickname was entirely predictable. For his part, Travis preferred to listen to people he trusted: Amy Houser had been coming through the ranks at the 40th Precinct when McKenzie was already commanding officer there, and she’d told Travis that McKenzie was no-nonsense, but if you worked hard and did the right things, she didn’t care who you were, where you came from or what your story was, she’d always have your back.

  In the 40th, Houser told Travis they used to have a phrase: ‘The Mac Don’t Crack.’

  ‘I was sorry to hear you were leaving us, Detective Travis,’ McKenzie said, bringing him out of his thoughts.

  When his eyes met hers, he could see she meant it, and he could read between the lines to what she was actually telling him: he was taking retirement, not because he’d wanted to but because there was a new, younger, brass at NYPD’s summit, and Travis was seen as an expensive relic. McKenzie was saying she didn’t agree with it, and that it had been a decision taken above her pay grade.

  ‘I appreciate that, Chief.’

  The doors pinged open on the eighth.

  ‘Good hunting, Detective,’ McKenzie said.

  Travis headed along the corridor to the video suite, his thoughts back on his retirement and how he would spend his days after this. He’d thought about moving south a few times: a couple of his old NYPD buddies had migrated to the Carolinas, or he could have gone even further to Florida, where he didn’t know anyone but where winters were never like New York’s.

  But he’d done nothing about it.

  That was another thing Naomi always said about him, another reason she’d given for leaving: he lacked drive. He lacked the will to see ideas through, or to try new things. You’re scared, she used to shout at him. You’re scared about doing anything that isn’t this. She’d meant his job. She’d meant New York. But the truth was he was never scared. How could he be a cop – how could he look at a murder, at the terrible things one human being could do to another – if he frightened easily? No, he wasn’t scared: he’d just come to understand that he didn’t want to move to another state and start another life with Naomi. And after she’d left him, after the kids had both flown the nest, he didn’t want to do it alone either.

  He reached the video suite and, even though no one else was around, he pushed the door closed behind him so he wouldn’t be disturbed. After that, he rolled a chair to a small TV monitor in the corner, flipped open the case file, and fished out a DVD he kept in a sleeve at the front.

  From the moment video cameras had come in, every first interview that Travis had ever done he’d tried to record. There was no legal obligation to do so, and most cops didn’t bother hitting Record until the first formal interview, but – if the person agreed to it – Travis had done it. While the notes he made were extensive, you couldn’t see someone’s manner on a page: the way they reacted to new questions they couldn’t prepare for, their body language, their expression. Some of the other cops laughed at him, and not always behind his back; he’d heard them say it was because his memory was going, and without the videos he got confused about who was who in his cases. But he ignored it all. In moments like this, when you felt like you might have screwed up, the videos were invaluable. There was no ambiguity.

  They were perfectly preserved time capsules.

  He put the DVD into the tray.

  After Louise’s disappearance had been kicked up the chain to him, he’d gone out and interviewed anyone who might have come into contact with her on the night she vanished, and in the days preceding it. That included Johnny Murphy, her parents, friends, people she’d attended the charity fundraiser with, and staff at the hotel – the Royal Union in the East Village – where the event had taken place. The fundraiser was the last place she’d been seen, and the last image of her alive was the one Travis felt like he’d spent three months staring at: Louise, talking to an unidentified man in the hotel bar less than twenty minutes before she disappeared.

  The interview on the DVD had taken place in Murphy’s house in Bay Ridge, on 81st Street. He’d told Travis he and his sister had been left the property by their father, but that his sister lived in a place in Windsor Terrace. That had all checked out. In fact, everything had checked out. But that was the thing about this guy. Maybe it was all just a little too perfect.

  Onscreen, an image of Murphy appeared.

  He was just staring into space.

  ‘Okay, Mr Murphy,’ Travis heard himself saying off camera, and still Murphy didn’t look at him. ‘I need you to tell me about Louise Mason.’

  Before

  Back at the Cherokee, Rebekah used up the remainder of what was left in a first-aid kit she kept in the trunk. The bites on Stelzik’s arm were nasty, though not as deep or as severe as they might have been, and it was impossible to check for infection without the proper equipment. Whatever happened, the search for Stelzik’s dog would have to be truncated: Rebekah thought it unlikely that Roxie had rabies, despite her aggression, but in the forest there were skunks, bats and raccoons, all of which carried the virus, so she couldn’t write it off entirely. It was possible Stelzik was infected – and that made him a ticking time bomb.

  He’d need a shot, and quickly.

  All the way through the dressing of his arm, he kept offering to go and find Roxie, telling Rebekah it wasn’t her fault the dog had escaped, but she knew it would be quicker if she and Johnny went alone. Stelzik was still shaken, so after he’d opened his Chevy, turned the ignition on and fired up the heaters, they left him there to warm up and headed back along the same path.

  ‘He’d better give you a damn good interview,’ Rebekah said.

  ‘Do you think he’s got rabies?’

  They entered the top of the dig site, the grass at the bottom of the excavation still tainted red from where Stelzik had bled. ‘I don’t think so,’ she responded.

  ‘So what was wrong with the dog?’

  Rebekah looked around them. ‘Maybe she was scared.’

  ‘Of what?’

  Once they’d got beyond the dig site and were back inside the forest, the light seemed almost subdued, the brightness of the day piercing the canopy in just a couple of places, lancing through it in thin arrows of light. It gave their surroundings an uncharted feel that Rebekah wasn’t certain she liked.

  ‘What was the dog scared of?’ Johnny asked again.

  She glanced at her brother. He was looking at her differently now, his face shadowed by the trees, his expression one that she couldn’t quite interpret.

  ‘I don’t know, Johnny,’ she replied, and then a compulsion to call Noella hit her: she needed to know the girls were okay, as irrational as that seemed to be. ‘Have you got any reception?’

  ‘One bar.’

  ‘That’s more than I’ve got,’ she said, and looked past the treeline into the depths of the forest. As Johnny handed her his phone, she kept her eyes on the interior, searching for the dog, while she dialled Noe’s number.

  ‘This is Noella. Leave a message.’

  Voicemail.

  Rebekah felt herself sag. This whole trip has been an absolute shitfest.

  ‘Noe, I, uh …’ She stopped. ‘Give me a call when you get this, okay?’ Rebekah’s thumb hovered above the End Call button. Everything’s fine. You can hang up now. But she didn’t. She said, ‘I need you to call me on Johnny’s phone.’ She waited, as if some part
of her were expecting Noella to answer. ‘I just want to …’ She cleared her throat. ‘I’ll speak to you later, then.’

  She hung up, searching the trees again.

  Johnny had gone ahead of her.

  ‘Let’s get this over with,’ she said to him.

  But this time her brother didn’t respond.

  He just led her deeper into the forest.

  4

  * * *

  ROOTS

  Before

  Rebekah saved the lives of a lot of people, but she always remembered Ramón.

  His full name was Ramón Alejandro Cortez. He’d just turned nineteen, was dark-eyed and handsome, and in the States on a soccer scholarship. When the hospital staff had been through his pockets in the hours after he’d arrived at the ER, they’d found a Costa Rican driver’s licence and a phone packed with photos of his family. A mother, a father, brothers, sisters. Ramón was in most of them, his eyes bright, with a smile full of white teeth. Rebekah was always reluctant to read too much into pictures, because mostly they were lies – false smiles, staged appearances, people bunching together unnaturally – but there was something genuine about Ramón’s. She often thought it was because his family portraits were reminiscent of her own, the ones of her father, her brothers and her. There was just a truth in them, a legitimacy, something unexplainable but there, that – even before the split – Rebekah had never been able to find in the pictures of her and Gareth.

  Ramón had been levered out of a car wreck on the Long Island Expressway. His French friend, also in New York on the same scholarship programme, was driving too fast, hit a patch of ice and lost control of his Toyota. Eyewitnesses said it spun three times and flipped onto its roof, rolling into the path of a truck that braked – but not quickly enough. Ramón’s friend was crushed in the impact, killing him instantly, and Ramón’s girlfriend – who was travelling in the back, without a seatbelt on – suffered severe head injuries. She made it as far as the ER but died an hour later.

  Ramón arrived with a broken hip, broken ribs, a punctured lung, and a right leg severed at the knee. Rebekah had spent her fellowship in the OR looking at a parade of lurid trauma injuries, and nothing had been done to Ramón’s body that she hadn’t seen a hundred times over. Fast cars, and kids too young to handle them, tended to deliver a steady diet of lost limbs, snapped bones and deformity.

  But it wasn’t Ramón’s injuries that stuck with her.

  A few days after he arrived at the hospital, he woke up for the first time, wrapped in bandages and wired up. He looked out into the room, blood vessels thick in his eyes, and tried to say something. In the time he’d been out, his mother and father had travelled up from Costa Rica, and – at his bedside – they began speaking in Spanish, his mother thanking God he was awake, his father clutching Ramón’s hand, tears gathering in his eyes. When Ramón tried to speak again, his father used his other hand to touch his son’s arm gently, reassuring him they were both there.

  But it wasn’t them Ramón was talking to.

  His eyes blinked, then found Rebekah, the woman in a white coat on the edge of the room, watching the Cortez family, clipboard to her chest.

  ‘Foot?’ he said.

  It was clear he could feel something the moment he awoke: a sense of loss, of forfeiture. And then he saw the reality for himself, halfway down the bed, his toes, his ankle, his shin, his calf, everything below the knee – gone.

  There were ways for him to become mobile again, artificial limbs that would allow him to disguise the truth in a pair of pants if that was how he felt. He would still be able to walk, run and get around, drive, sail, climb. He could even play soccer again. He’d be able to kick a ball around the yard with his kids.

  Yet his physical loss was really the smallest part of what had happened to him. That was what Rebekah learned that day, what she came to learn over and over. That was why she always remembered Ramón, because it was the first time she ever saw it play out in front of her, as a person, not as words on a page in a psychology textbook. He was a sweet kid who, in the days after, would talk to Rebekah and the nurses, always quietly, politely, in heavily accented English, thanking them for looking after him and asking them how they were.

  But whatever ambitions he’d held before the car crash, whatever he’d allowed himself to dream of, was just debris now: fans, money, playing in gigantic European stadiums that rose from the ground like floodlit coliseums.

  She remembered Ramón, not because his was a young life reduced to rubble but because, after he asked about his foot, it was the first time anyone had looked at her with the expression she came to know so well. The one that said, You think you saved my life by doing this. You think this is better for me.

  You should have let me die.

  I’d be better off dead.

  33

  The day after she’d tried, and failed, to escape back to the mainland using two entirely different boats, Rebekah thought of Ramón for the first time in months and especially the expression on his face. She hadn’t seen her daughters for five weeks. No rescue had come, or was coming. Every way off the island – whether she radioed for help, set a fire, or tried to row one hundred and one miles – carried an immense risk. It carried the risk not just of failure but of any brief success being cut down when Hain and Lima found out she was alive. Would it have been easier if, like Johnny, she’d never made it out of the forest?

  She pictured Ramón, his expression. Could death be any worse than this purgatory?

  By now, Kyra and Chloe, Noella, Gareth, any friends who’d heard about Rebekah and Johnny leaving home on 30 October and never returning, would have assumed they were gone for good. All of those people, including her daughters – perhaps, especially her daughters, given their age – would have begun to move on, maybe so slowly it was hardly visible, but each day Rebekah wasn’t there was another day on the road to recovery. They were moving forward, but she was stuck: she was five weeks into a twenty-two-week prison sentence, she’d already run out of food, and even if, by some miracle, she made it to the last day of March, twenty-four hours later two men would be boarding a ferry to come back for her. How long before they realized she was still alive? And then what? Would she fight them?

  The idea was laughable. She knew nothing about outsmarting killers; she couldn’t even fire a gun. So what was the point in trying to endure if, at the end of twenty-two weeks, she was dead within hours of the island reopening? Better not to give her killers that satisfaction. Better to end it before it got worse.

  Better to be dead now.

  For two days, she barely moved from her mattress. Another low hit her, like the world had fallen in: she hardly ate any of the little food she had left, she just slept, her recurring dream returning on the second night. It was so vivid, it was like the island had ceased to exist: she passed from the corridor into the apartment, looking at the skewed 7 on the door, and when the carpet began to move beneath her feet, when its fibres began to crawl up her ankles, she could feel everything, every physical sensation, every touch, every smell.

  I think you should stay, Rebekah.

  When she woke, sweating, heart pounding, it was a relief, but the relief didn’t last long. She stared into the semi-lit store, at its half-empty shelves, full of crap that was neither going to help her survive nor help her escape, and her spirits plummeted even further.

  Yet at no point did she seriously think she was capable of ending it all. She thought about the ways in which it could be done – a knife to the wrist, smashing a window in the lantern room of the lighthouse and leaping out – but she didn’t ever feel she had the guts to follow through on it. And somewhere, just below the surface, there was the reason why: her daughters.

  If there was a chance – however distant it seemed now – that she would get to see them again, to hold them, go home to them, she had to go on.

  A day later a storm passed through, a blast of thunder and rain that felt like the end of the world, and after t
hat, the leak in the roof got so bad, part of the ceiling fell away, landing on the floor of the store in a dull thump.

  The temperature, already sub-zero, dropped even further.

  I need to find somewhere else, Rebekah thought.

  She looked at her map and saw a few areas along the north coast – old trails she hadn’t explored – then got dressed and headed out in the Cherokee.

  She needed to fill the car up too.

  She’d planned to head west, around the Loop, and start at the north-western end of the coast, but instead she went the other way, so she could go past the gas station.

  It was a decision that seemed so insignificant at the time.

  But it was one that changed everything.

  34

  Rebekah watched the numbers on the pump spiral upwards. She had no idea what reserves were left and, in truth, hated having to think about it. Perhaps the only thing she’d found any enjoyment in on the island was her ability to travel around. It gave her purpose and a minor sense of freedom. She’d almost forgotten what real freedom was like – the ability to go anywhere, the comfort of absolute safety, the chance to be with the people you loved whenever you wanted – but the car was a modest taste of it, and she’d cherished it.

  As she filled the Cherokee, her eyes fell upon the mud-spattered Ford Explorer, raised on bricks, at the side of the forecourt office. She’d found it the first time she’d come here, half disguised by rampant vines and grass, and every time she returned, she’d try to imagine who it might have belonged to. Some days, she even found herself building an entire back story.

  Because the mud was as thick as paint on the tyres – the windshield dusty, the licence plate unreadable under grime – she told herself the owner had lived somewhere there were no paved roads. She’d wiped a patch clean on the driver’s side window one day and had looked inside: crushed soda cans on the floor, chip packets and sandwich wrappings. There was an empty duffel bag too, and on the zip there was a keyring with a photograph: it was of a good-looking man in his forties with a woman of about the same age in some mountains somewhere. There was no sign of any kids, in the keyring or anywhere else, so Rebekah had decided the owner hadn’t been able to have them. In her head, she’d named him Steve, because he looked vaguely like a doctor with the same name she used to know.