Missing Pieces

by Tim Weaver

  He smiled, trying to lift the moment, and a clumsy, inelegant silence settled between them. They just looked at each other, unsure what else to say.

  ‘Well, I think I’d better be going, Daniel,’ Rebekah said.

  ‘You remember the movie Beverly Hills Cop?’

  She frowned, thrown by the change of direction.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, holding up a hand, ‘there’s a point to this. What I mean is, that film, it was huge when I was at high school in the eighties. I was a teenager, and I thought I was so cool, and what was even cooler was that, not only could my friends and I quote all the best lines Eddie Murphy had, I actually shared the same surname as the character he played.’

  She still didn’t get it. So what?

  He saw her confusion and shook his head in apology. ‘Sorry. What I was just trying to say, very inelegantly, was that my name’s Daniel Foley if, down the line, things get … less complicated.’

  He was saying he liked her.

  And he wanted to get to know her.

  She looked at him, how handsome he was, how polite and awkward he could be, how self-deprecating and apologetic, and she felt a momentary buzz.

  There was something about him she liked too.

  But then she shook the whole idea from her head. Her life was already a mess. This would just make it worse. She needed things to calm, not escalate.

  ‘Okay,’ she said.

  ‘Okay,’ he repeated, seemingly relieved she hadn’t balked and run for the door. He smiled again: it was a nice smile. ‘Well, you know where I live now.’

  She nodded.

  ‘And you know my name.’

  ‘I do,’ she said. ‘Mr Daniel Foley.’

  ‘Axel Foley,’ he responded.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That was the name of Eddie Murphy’s character in Beverly Hills Cop,’ he said, ‘so that’s what everyone started calling me. It’s what friends call me.’

  Rebekah just nodded again.

  ‘I’m not Daniel to most people,’ he said. ‘I’m Axel.’

  The Back Seat

  Six months ago

  The parking garage was quiet.

  That was one piece of good luck.

  Hain exited the elevator and started looking for the Lexus. He found it quickly, its hood longer than the cars either side of it, the front end nosing out, like an animal breaking from cover. He checked around him again, making sure that no one else was on this level, then hurried down the angle of the ramp. As he walked, he started going over the back story he’d already invented for the man called Stewart Laurence Hain. His time as Nick Tillman was done. That ID was finished. It had been finished the second Axel called him and told him what had happened. Tillman, however careful he’d been, was a trail that could eventually lead back to this moment. Hain wasn’t. Hain was brand new, an alias that was a complete dead end.

  The front seat of the Lexus came into view.

  Axel was on the driver’s side, his hands on the wheel, shirt unbuttoned at the top and black tie removed. Their eyes met through the windshield.

  Under Hain’s gaze, Axel shrivelled.

  Hain picked up the pace, his attention switching to the rest of the garage, searching for signs of people exiting the elevator, arriving, on phones, smoking in corners. He was still in the clear. When he got within sight of the Lexus, Axel buzzed down the window, but Hain didn’t wait: he yanked the driver’s side door open.

  ‘Get out,’ he hissed.

  ‘Thanks for coming –’

  ‘Get the fuck out.’

  Axel did exactly as he was asked.

  ‘Button up your shirt and put on your tie.’

  As Axel followed his instructions, Hain took yet another look around the garage. ‘Did anyone see you down here?’

  Axel shook his head. ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Positive.’

  Hain glanced inside the Lexus.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Axel asked.

  ‘Lower your voice.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he repeated, a whisper this time.

  ‘You’re not going to do anything.’

  Axel frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

  Hain ripped his eyes away from the Lexus, then turned to Axel, his face burning with rage. He wanted to break this prick in half, choke him, beat him. Instead, he took a breath, and said, ‘I mean, you’re not going to do anything. You’re going to go upstairs and act like nothing ever happened.’

  They stared at each other.

  Hain frowned. ‘What? That’s a stretch for you?’

  ‘No, I just …’

  ‘You just what?’

  ‘I just don’t know what to say to everyone.’

  Hain gave Axel a long, withering look. ‘Are you shitting me?’

  ‘No, I –’

  ‘You’re the biggest fucking liar I ever met in my life. You lie to people all the time. It’s what you do. It’s who you are. So think of this as just another piece of ass and I’m sure you’ll be able to come up with something credible.’

  ‘Okay,’ Axel muttered again, belittled.

  ‘People need to believe everything is normal. You need to go up there and be Axel, or Daniel, or whatever the fuck you’re calling yourself tonight.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So look normal.’

  Axel straightened his clothes. His hair.

  ‘If you’re not convincing,’ Hain said, ‘you screw us both.’

  Axel didn’t respond.

  Hain took a step closer. ‘You understand?’

  Axel nodded.

  Hain grabbed hold of his neck. ‘You don’t look like you’re listening to me.’ He was speaking through his teeth, spitting the words into Axel’s face. ‘I’m not going down for this, you hear me?’

  Axel tried to nod again but couldn’t move his head.

  ‘You hear me?’

  ‘I hear you,’ he wheezed.

  Hain held him there for a moment, against the car, digging his nails into Axel’s throat. And then, finally, he released his grip and stepped away.

  He looked inside the Lexus again.

  Louise Mason’s dead eyes stared back.

  8

  * * *

  FREEDOM

  69

  In the late evening of Friday, 1 April, six months after the disappearance of Louise Mason, and twelve hours after Frank Travis took a ferry across to Crow Island and found out that Rebekah was still alive, a body was found in Fort Washington Park, beneath the George Washington Bridge. The victim – a white male, in his mid-fifties – had apparently committed suicide, scaling the barrier at the edge of the bridge, then jumping two hundred feet to his death.

  The man’s name was Daniel Foley.

  Axel, to his friends.

  He was unmarried, his parents had died when he was in his twenties, he had no siblings and appeared not to have been in a relationship with anyone at the time of his death. But Foley wasn’t a recluse. In fact, the opposite. Within hours, detectives at the 33rd Precinct were able very quickly to paint a picture of who he was, not least via Foley’s colleagues at Retrigram, the social-media giant, where he’d worked for two decades in publicity and had been a hugely popular member of staff. He was called ‘kind’, and ‘generous’, with a ‘fantastic sense of humour’, and despite fairly modest academic qualifications – a business degree from Staten Island College, which he’d completed in his mid-twenties after originally dropping out of high school – they said he was very often the smartest guy in the room. Almost universally, the people who’d known Daniel ‘Axel’ Foley, from school friends he’d kept in touch with, to the people at Retrigram, described feeling shocked at the news. One said, ‘If I was asked to name a person less likely to commit suicide, I couldn’t think of one. Axel was never anxious, never despondent; he didn’t have low self-esteem, he was never tearful, didn’t lack energy. He hadn’t lost weight, he never talked about his sleep being disturbed
… I mean, all the things I know about depression, he didn’t suffer from. I can’t think of one reason why he’d jump.’

  Yet he had.

  So, the next day, the cops at the 33rd started pursuing the idea that Foley might have been pushed. If it was a murder, it might better explain why he’d done something so apparently out of character, so drastic.

  But they couldn’t find any evidence of anyone having shadowed Foley to the suicide spot.

  Traffic cameras around the bridge showed him walking west on 178th Street, and taking the south walk on Haven Avenue, a spiral of concrete that corkscrewed around to the eight-lane upper level. From there, he went most of the way to the first suspension tower. In the minutes afterwards, no other pedestrians exited the same way as Foley had gone in, and none went west to New Jersey, so no one was on the bridge with him at the time. When detectives rolled on footage from the rest of the night, using three cameras at three separate points, all they found were new angles on the same thing: Daniel Foley leaping to his death.

  It was one hundred per cent a suicide.

  They just didn’t understand why he’d done it.

  But then, twenty-four hours on from Foley’s death, late on 2 April, a cop from Suffolk County PD named Bowners changed the direction of the case when she met with detectives at the 33rd Precinct and told them she might have something – or, more specifically, someone.

  Her name was Rebekah.

  70

  Later, Travis told Rebekah everything about Daniel Foley, about the search for answers in his suicide, but for a while that night – after she’d IDed Foley in the picture from the hotel – Rebekah had been left to her own thoughts.

  Travis and Bowners had exited the general store, and she’d remained behind with Roxie, stroking her, confused, hurt and embarrassed by having to recount the night she’d slept with Foley.

  The man responsible for Louise Mason going missing.

  Maybe the man responsible for all of this.

  In her time on the island, even as she’d pinned the name Daniel to the corridors of the hostel, she’d never seriously entertained the idea that all of this was to do with him, partly because other theories – and other suspects – seemed more compelling. Anonymous sex with a stranger seemed so low down the list of motives for wanting a person dead, it barely even registered, and it still didn’t make total sense, even now. It had been a one-night stand. There was no mystery to it. Foley had lied to her about being in a relationship, but people did that all the time. It was just that the lie was normally about not being in a relationship.

  On the drive back to New York, Travis attempted to help her make sense of things, but it was hard because he didn’t yet have a full picture himself, and the closer they got to home, the more panicked Rebekah felt. She was desperately tired, she was physically and emotionally bruised, but mostly she was unexpectedly fearful about seeing her girls. She’d lost so much weight, had a big new scar on her face, and her hair was shorter than it had been at any point since they were born. What if they didn’t recognize her when she walked through the door? What if they wanted to be with Gareth, not her?

  By the time they exited the interstate in Brooklyn, she could hardly think straight. Roxie was moving around on the back seat, pressing her nose to the glass as the city whipped past, uncertain where they were or where they would end up. Beside Rebekah, Travis didn’t say anything for a while, and then started trying to reassure her: ‘It’s going to be okay, kiddo, I promise.’

  They pulled up at the brownstone.

  There was a uniformed cop outside.

  Rebekah looked at the living-room windows, saw the curtains twitch, and then Noella peered out. Their eyes met. The second Noe started waving excitedly, Rebekah welled up. Travis put a hand on her arm and then Noe was hurrying out of the front door. A second later, Gareth followed, Chloe in his arms, half asleep. And then, finally, hesitant and using her dad’s leg for cover, Kyra appeared. Through the glass, Rebekah heard her say, ‘Look, Daddy, there’s a doggie in the car,’ and she pointed to Roxie.

  The cop moved aside as he saw what was about to happen, nodding at Rebekah as she got out. Rebekah wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the sweater that Bowners and Suffolk County PD had issued her, and then Noe broke from the group, sprinting towards her.

  She launched into a hug. ‘Never do that again,’ she said, into the side of Rebekah’s face, Rebekah hugging back hard. When she broke off and looked at the house again, Gareth and the girls had come all the way down the steps, Chloe now fully asleep on her father’s shoulder.

  Gareth smiled apologetically. ‘Sorry. I tried to keep her up.’

  He leaned in and hugged her and, as he did, Rebekah put her mouth against the top of Chloe’s head, her nose, her cheek, breathing in her daughter. She kissed her – over and over again – and touched a hand gently to Chloe’s face. Her daughter’s skin felt so soft and Rebekah’s fingers were so marked now, so bruised and damaged, that she worried she might hurt Chloe somehow. But she kept on sleeping soundly.

  ‘Hello, Mommy.’

  Rebekah looked down at Kyra. She’d been gently encouraged to come forward by Gareth, had maybe even been told what to say. Rebekah dropped to her knees on the sidewalk, so that she was on the same level as Ky. She’d grown so much in five months.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. Do you remember me?’

  She nodded once.

  ‘You haven’t forgotten your mummy?’

  ‘What’s that?’ Kyra pointed a tiny finger at the scar on the side of Rebekah’s face. ‘Were you in a fight?’

  ‘No,’ Rebekah said. ‘I just had an accident.’

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘Not any more.’

  Her daughter’s eyes went to the car.

  ‘Is that your doggie?’ she asked.

  ‘No. I’m just looking after her.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Roxie.’

  Kyra started to giggle. ‘That’s a funny name.’

  ‘She’s a funny dog.’

  And then they looked at each other again, and Rebekah said to Kyra, ‘You’ll never know how much I missed you.’

  And she brought her daughter into her arms and she didn’t let go.

  71

  The reason for Daniel Foley’s suicide became apparent once Rebekah had IDed him. Bowners, who was soon jointly working the case with detectives from New York, handed the two security-camera shots from the hotel to the NYPD lab in Queens. Using facial-recognition software, technicians were able to prove that the man Rebekah had identified, and the man who was talking to Louise in the bar, were the same person. To make sure, techs then used a photo of Daniel Foley, provided by his colleagues at Retrigram, to compare with the man in the hotel bar. It was a match.

  Foley was the person talking to Louise.

  Rebekah found out all of that from Travis, who in turn had been given the information by Bowners. He asked Rebekah to keep it between them, because he knew Bowners wouldn’t approve, but it was clear Travis was struggling in the same way, shackled to unanswered questions. It was one of the reasons why, thirty-six hours after arriving back in Brooklyn – her second day at home – he returned to see her once again.

  Roxie greeted him at the door, barking and pawing at him, and as he bent and played with her, Rebekah realized, for the first time, that she was going to keep the dog. There was no question now. Roxie belonged here. She’d take care of the paperwork once this was over.

  Whenever that is.

  Earlier, sitting at the windows watching the sun rise, she’d had the wistful idea that she just had to accept her freedom for it to be true. Now it seemed obvious she was kidding herself.

  Until Hain was caught, she was confined to the house.

  Rebekah set the girls up in the living room with a couple of episodes of Dora the Explorer, then she and Travis moved through to the kitchen.

  ‘Is there any news on the email Gareth sent Stelzik?’ she asked, keeping her vo
ice down, even though Gareth was at work and she doubted either of the girls could hear. She just needed to know.

  ‘I asked Bowners and she says one of their technicians traced it to an IP address in California.’

  Rebekah frowned. ‘California?’

  ‘The IP address belongs to a –’ he checked his notebook ‘–VPN. You know what that is? I didn’t until last night. It’s a Virtual Private Network. So, basically a wall that shields your real location and your IP address.’

  ‘So we don’t know if it was Gareth or not?’

  ‘Do you think it’s likely he would use a VPN?’

  She thought about it: it was possible, but it suggested a level of caution and forethought that he’d failed to show when he’d dropped his phone in the car and left her access to his ‘Willard Hodges’ emails.

  It wasn’t Gareth, it was someone else.

  She felt an intense flood of relief that she and the girls weren’t unsafe in the house with Gareth, that she did know him, that her ex-husband was still the same man she’d left behind, for better or worse. She looked at Travis and, not for the first time, felt drawn to him: it was like, even after a short time together, they understood each other, without having to say a word.

  Travis didn’t think Gareth had sent the email either.

  But there was still the question of why the message had been sent to Stelzik in the first place.

  ‘If we’re to assume Hain and Lima had access to your emails and phone activity,’ Travis said, ‘I think it’s fair to assume they had access to Gareth’s as well, including the email address he was using for his affair. My guess, though we’ll have to wait on confirmation of this, is that they sent that email to muddy the waters. In a way, it’s clever because it’s the type of lead that looks big, that will have you wasting days and weeks trying to chase it down, and by the time you realize it’s a dead end, you’ve given them the time they needed to patch up leaks elsewhere. It’s a tactic Hain’s employed before. You remember I told you about that anonymous call I got, telling me to look at your brother again?’