Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  Sinking the rest of the coffee he’d ordered, he headed to the counter to pay. The woman at the register tried to engage him in small-talk, which he forced himself to take part in – in his experience, it was easier to remember someone who was rude to you than someone who was pleasant – then exited the deli, heading out into the snow.

  There was a payphone a couple of blocks to the south.

  The woman answered after four rings.

  ‘Travis is going around in circles,’ Tillman said.

  She didn’t reply.

  Responding to her silence, he said, ‘Is something up?’

  ‘Give me a second,’ she told him.

  Another wait.

  ‘Okay,’ she said finally, coming back on. In the background Tillman thought he could hear a door closing. ‘I just had to wait for Axel to leave,’ she explained. ‘I don’t want him hearing this.’

  Axel.

  He was going to be a problem if they weren’t careful – but Tillman didn’t say that to her. For now, as always, he just kept quiet.

  ‘Nick, I’m looking at these things you sent over,’ she said. The sound of paper being leafed through. The tap of a keyboard. ‘What about Johnny?’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Is he really capable of this?’

  Tillman looked up and down the block. ‘When it comes to beautiful women like Louise Mason,’ he said, ‘men are capable of anything.’

  Snow flurries skirted across the windshield as Travis made his way south on the interstate. To his right, somewhere under the steel girders of the freeway, he saw the flash of lightbars, their colour painting nearby buildings, sirens screaming to a crescendo and fading again as they headed away from him.

  All the way from the office, he’d been thinking about Louise Mason, trying to line up what he knew with what he suspected. Images of her blinked in his head, photos her parents had given him, footage of her he’d watched that her father had filmed at an anniversary dinner. Louise had made a toast to her parents, her words warm and witty. It had drawn Travis even closer to her. Mostly, though, when he thought of Louise, he thought of the terrible error he might have made in dismissing the man she’d been dating.

  He got off at the exit for 86th Street and headed for Third Avenue. There, squeezed between a grocery store and a nail spa, was Bay Ridge Electronics.

  The place where Johnny Murphy worked.

  He found a space a block away. It was less than a week until Christmas Eve so lights and decorations blinked everywhere. It was almost the same amount of time until Travis retired: at 5 p.m. on 23 December he would walk out of the front entrance at One Police Plaza, straight across the road to a retirement party. And after it was done, he’d go home to the emptiness of his house and never return to the office.

  To his desk. To his cases.

  To Louise.

  He upped his pace, walking faster, the city in deep freeze.

  I’ve got five days, he thought. I’ve got five days to solve this.

  When he got to the store, he paused, looking through the ice-speckled glass. There was a CLOSED sign up, but he could see someone moving around inside. Travis rapped on the door and, after a while, an Asian guy in his thirties approached.

  ‘We’re not open until ten,’ he mouthed.

  Travis placed his shield against the glass.

  The guy’s face changed – surprise, then confusion, then worry: why would the cops be calling so early? He unlocked the door and pulled it open.

  ‘Can I help you, Officer?’ he asked.

  ‘Detective. I’m looking for Johnny Murphy.’

  The guy frowned.

  ‘I couldn’t get him on his cell or at home,’ Travis pressed. He smiled at the guy, reassuring him that there was nothing for him to worry about.

  ‘Johnny’s not here,’ the guy replied.

  ‘He didn’t turn up for work?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did he give a reason?’

  ‘No. I mean, he hasn’t been in work for seven weeks.’

  It was Travis’s turn to frown. ‘Seven weeks? What are you talking about?’

  ‘I thought you people would have known.’

  ‘Known what?’

  ‘Him and his sister,’ the guy said. ‘They disappeared.’

  5

  * * *

  THE STORM

  Before

  Blackness gradually gave way to a vague grey light.

  When the muscles of her face moved, they felt starched, and Rebekah realized it was because her blood had congealed and dried. The wound was above her jawline, close to her ear; every time it throbbed, it sent a spear of pain across her nose and forehead, and into her neck and shoulders.

  She tried to blink.

  That didn’t work either.

  She could smell the blood, taste it, but mostly it was in her eyes. When she tried to open them, she couldn’t: the blood had acted as an adhesive, binding her lashes together.

  Finally, she wrenched them open, and as she saw where she was, she remembered falling, the ground giving way beneath her, her last desperate attempt to cling to something as she tumbled. The whole thing was over in seconds, but that had only disguised the distance she’d come. This gully was deeper than the one in which they’d found Stelzik, the sides much steeper, almost vertical. If she’d been descending on foot, she would have had to do it leaning back, with a hand pressed behind her, or on her ass.

  And then she thought of something else.

  Why was she still alive?

  Where was the man who’d tried to kill her?

  Rebekah froze as she pictured him, his green eyes, as she remembered what he’d done to Stelzik, to Roxie, how he’d tried to march her and Johnny up to the spot in the tree roots to kill them. And then, as her head filled with an image of her brother, she panicked. Where was he? Had the man gone after him?

  Was Johnny dead?

  The idea sent a tremor through her throat.

  Slowly, she raised a hand, her muscles stiff, then tried to shift the rest of her body. Pain on her left side, in her skull, her neck, right the way down the centre of her chest. After a couple of failed attempts, she managed to sit up and tried to move her legs back and forth. She was looking for sprains, fractures, breaks. Miraculously, the only injury was on her face. She touched a couple of fingers to the wound.

  It felt bad.

  Skin was flapping like paper, and as she moved again, trying to get onto her knees, she felt a trail of fresh blood break free from the cut and trace the outline of her cheekbone. Out here, in the middle of a forest, and especially because of how she’d fallen, there was a good chance the cut was dirty, filled with debris. She needed to get it cleaned and dressed.

  Using a nearby tree as an anchor, she hauled herself up. Bones creaked. She paused, checking her pants for her phone. Shit. No phone – but she still had the keys to the Cherokee in her pocket.

  As she started to look around, at the floor of the gully, at the scrub and vines and swathes of thick brush, she remembered why she didn’t have her cell: it had spilled out of her pants as she fell; all her loose change had gone too. The phone was still at the crown of the slope somewhere.

  Slowly, she headed up there on her hands and knees.

  She felt a hundred years old and heavy as concrete. Her hands became filthy, coated in mud, and leaves, and chips of ice. She wiped more blood away with her sleeve as she got to the top, still breathless after the climb, and started scanning the area for her cell. Eventually, she found the place at which she’d gone down the slope into the gully, the ground disturbed, her footprint visible. Close by, loose change was dotted like jewels.

  But there was no cellphone.

  He must have taken it.

  She looked around the forest, suddenly worried that this was all part of the game, that the man might still be somewhere close by, watching, but she couldn’t see him. So why had he left her alive?

  Picking up her change, she scanned her surroun
dings again. The trail she’d broken away from, the trail she and Johnny had been following back to the dig site, was just about visible through the trees. It looked quiet. The whole place looked quiet: in the time she’d been out, the wind had died right down and the weather had changed. There was no blue sky now, just an infinite grey ceiling of cloud. And it was even colder than before, the air raw. In desperation, she began searching for her phone again, not just so she might be able to make a call, but to find out the time.

  She had no idea how long she’d been out.

  A minute? Five? Longer?

  I need to find Johnny.

  She got back onto the trail and tried to pick up her pace. She wanted to run, but what if the man heard or saw her? Under the canopy of trees, inside the section she’d last seen Johnny pass into, she realized how cold she was. Her coat and hoodie were both wet from the ground, muddied from the leaves. She could still feel blood and dried saliva on her face. She wiped at her cheek with her sleeve, smearing blood across her lips, and – briefly – thought of calling out for Johnny. But she stopped herself, thinking of the man once again. If he was close by, he’d instantly know that she’d made it out of the gully.

  She headed back in the direction of the car.

  It took her twenty minutes to get to the Cherokee, with no sign of the man or Johnny on the way. Where are you, John? Please don’t be dead.

  I can’t handle this on my own.

  Then she noticed that Stelzik’s Chevy was gone.

  Had the man taken it?

  Or Johnny?

  She looked around her, and as she did, she caught sight of herself in the windshield. She took a step closer to the glass. Blood covered one side of her face, an eruption of it from a hole-like injury next to her ear. The cut looked worse than it had felt when she’d been poking around with her fingers – blacker, deeper – and when she tried to wipe blood away from her cheek, most of it had dried solid. When she used a little saliva, all it did was spread. The whole area was like an explosion of red dye.

  Leaning further in towards the glass, she turned her head to get a better view of the injury and something occurred to her.

  Her mind spun back to the moments before she’d tumbled into the gully: one of the bullets had passed so close to her face, it was like she’d felt the air move. It was what had knocked her off balance and triggered the fall.

  As she’d descended into the gully, she’d injured herself.

  She’d smashed her head on something.

  And then she’d hit the ground and she’d bled across her face, and she’d lain there – with that side of her head showing – absolutely and perfectly still.

  She’d been that way because she was unconscious.

  But if the man had come to the edge of the gully, if he’d looked down and seen her lying there – and especially when he’d seen all the blood, and the shape and appearance of the wound next to Rebekah’s ear – it would have looked like something else: a kill. Instantly, he would have switched his attention to going after Johnny because he’d have believed that the reason Rebekah fell, the reason she ended up in the gully, was him.

  That was why the man wasn’t here.

  That was why Rebekah was still breathing.

  He thought he’d shot her in the head.

  41

  Rebekah returned to the second hostel, armed with tools. She’d managed to find a claw hammer and an old chisel to use as levers on the door.

  The day was bright, the sun out, but two weeks into December, the temperature had dropped like a stone: as she stood outside the hostel, Roxie beside her, panting impatiently, all she could see in front of her was her breath.

  Wood splintered as she attempted to rock the hammer back and forth, the claw wedged into the space between the door and the frame. She could feel how rotten the edges were, damp and soft, and it didn’t take much effort to break off small chunks of the door at its edges. The more difficult part was the area around the lock: it had been treated and repaired at some point.

  Please let there be food in here.

  She renewed her attack on the door, Roxie moving in half-circles at her legs, as desperate to get inside as Rebekah was. She could feel herself sweating, hot under her clothing, but any moisture that formed on exposed skin instantly felt like ice. After a while, she shrugged off her coat, but then a glacial wind cut in off the water, and she was no longer sure if she was hot or cold. It felt like a fever.

  Roxie started to scratch at the door.

  ‘Out of the way, Rox,’ Rebekah said, frustrated.

  She kept going but, after a few minutes, the door remained intact, and she’d made precisely no headway on the lock plate.

  ‘How the hell are we going to get in?’

  And then an idea came to her.

  Returning to the Cherokee, Roxie trailing in her wake, she reversed the car onto the grass at the front of the hostel, all the way to the door. Getting out again, she opened the tailgate and grabbed some rope from the trunk. She managed to push it through a tiny welded loop on the door’s lock plate, then knotted the other end to the Jeep’s tow hitch.

  With Roxie on the back seat, obviously sensing something was about to happen, Rebekah put the car into Drive and began inching forward. It took a few seconds for her to feel the resistance kick in.

  Once the rope was at its full extension, she gently touched the gas.

  The grass was wet under the tyres and, for a moment, they spun as the car went nowhere. She kept the same amount of pressure on, her eyes flicking to her mirrors to see if anything had changed. Roxie didn’t know where to look: at Rebekah or at the rear windshield, her head pinging back and forth.

  ‘Come on,’ Rebekah said softly.

  The wheels spun again.

  ‘Come on.’

  Roxie barked.

  ‘Come on, you stupid bloody –’

  She heard the ping above the sound of the engine, and then – a second later – something crashed against the back of the car. For a moment, she didn’t know if her plan had worked, or if the tow hitch had simply broken off.

  She got out.

  On the ground, below the Cherokee, was the metal plate, as well as a fresh, ugly scar – carved out of the fender – where the plate had struck it.

  Rebekah didn’t care.

  She hurried over to the door. Screws hung loose, no longer attached to the plate, and the door handle had broken into two pieces. More wood had cleaved away as well.

  The door was open.

  Rebekah let Roxie explore while she hurried straight for the kitchen. As she passed the bedrooms, she could see they were exactly the same design as the ones in the other hostel – plain and undecorated, blankets on the beds.

  In the kitchen, she started opening cupboards.

  She felt an instant wave of relief at seeing the cans there, knowing – even from a quick glance – that they now had enough for at least another six weeks, maybe a couple of months, if she continued to ration what they ate. She grabbed ravioli, tuna, corned beef, more clam chowder, and a lot of beans: refried and pinto, chilli, beans with pork and with chicken franks. She’d never have eaten any of this stuff if she’d still been at home – but right now the cans meant survival.

  Roxie started barking. It sounded like she was upstairs somewhere. ‘Rox?’ she called. ‘What’s up?’

  More barking.

  Rebekah headed to the first floor and found Roxie in the last room on the left.

  She stopped in the doorway.

  In the middle, Roxie was doing circles. She was worked up, confused, and it was obvious why: she could smell someone in here.

  Someone she’d loved.

  This was the room Stelzik had stayed in.

  Rebekah dropped to a crouch, trying to reach out to Roxie. ‘It’s all right, Rox,’ she said softly, ‘it’s okay,’ but even as she said the words, her mind had skipped ahead to what she might find in Stelzik’s room.

  Maybe a clue as to why he was killed. />
  Maybe the reason they’d tried to do the same to her.

  Before

  Rebekah stared into the window of the Cherokee, at the image of her head injury, at the wound that looked like a bullet hole, then noticed something else, on the other side of the car.

  The window on the opposite side wasn’t there.

  It had been smashed.

  She’d totally missed it, the shock of seeing her reflection overpowering everything else, but as she hurried around the front of the Jeep, she looked in through the passenger window and found glass all over the seat.

  Something was missing from inside too.

  The dashcam.

  It had been stuck to the windshield, without ever being switched on, but now all that remained of it was a vague circle on the glass. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d run it. Gareth had bought it in the weeks before the split, telling her everyone was using them, that in the event of an accident it would save a ton of hassle with their insurers. He’d framed it like an insult, a comment on her driving, but in those final days and weeks, she hadn’t had the energy to fight him on every tiny thing. Now it had been taken, and she had no idea why.

  Why would someone smash a window to get at it?

  She slid in at the wheel and fired up the Jeep. The moment it rumbled into life, she looked at the clock on the centre console: 14:58. She’d lost track of time, didn’t even know when she and Johnny had entered the forest, so she had no idea how far behind Johnny she was, or if Johnny had left at all. She looked out through the dust and mud, speckled on the windshield, into the tangle of trees, and worried that trying to go for help was the wrong move. What if Johnny was still in there somewhere? What if he was injured? What if he was dead?

  She focused on the thing that mattered: finding him. And she could only find him with help. The forest was far too big for her to cover by herself, its trails too difficult to understand. She needed local knowledge.