by Tim Weaver
Rebekah said she did, but she was more drawn to something in Travis’s face, a kind of sadness that had lodged there after he’d mentioned the anonymous caller. She lowered her head slightly. ‘Are you okay, Frank?’
‘Yeah,’ he said, rubbing his chin. ‘I just got a question I need to figure out, and I don’t know if I really want the answer.’
‘We can talk about it, if you like.’
‘Thanks, kiddo,’ he replied, and smiled at her. ‘Maybe later.’
She nodded, not wanting to press him, but it was clear that it was to do with the anonymous call. Eventually they circled back to Bowners.
‘She’s running with the idea that Foley murdered Louise the night of the fundraiser,’ he told her, after she’d made them both some fresh coffee, ‘or at least shortly afterwards. It seems unlikely, given everything we know about him, that it was a deliberate, premeditated act. If he was that kind of killer, if it was in his make-up, I suspect you wouldn’t have walked away from him alive the morning after you …’ Travis trailed off. It was clear he knew how much it hurt Rebekah to recall what she’d done with Foley. ‘Anyway, that type of guy, single, attractive, successful, it’s very likely he had his fair share of women, maybe even believed he was irresistible to them. That would certainly explain Louise: she was going out with Johnny and she didn’t sleep around, but she was friendly, personable, and she was beautiful. Maybe Foley read the signals wrong, maybe he tried to force something that wasn’t there, maybe she didn’t like it, and then …’
Rebekah could fill in the rest.
But something didn’t make sense. ‘Thing is,’ Rebekah said, ‘he did try to kill me, or at least Lima did, presumably under the instructions of Hain and Foley. Maybe Foley wasn’t a killer – but he wanted me dead.’
Travis nodded.
‘So why did I have to die? Because I slept with the guy?’
He flipped back in his notebook. ‘We’ve found out that your friend Kirsty went to the same high school as Foley. They weren’t there at the same time because she was fifteen years younger than him, but he was part of some alumni tutoring programme and spent time there working with students. She got to know him originally through that, and then I’m told Kirsty and her husband became big socialites up and down the east coast and it just happened that they started to move in the same circles as Foley …’ He looked up at Rebekah.
She could see what he’d left unsaid.
That explains how you came to have sex with him.
‘In a way,’ Travis went on, ‘Kirsty’s kind of central to all of this, although unwittingly. She’d got to know Louise through the One Life, Second Chance foundation. Louise was a patron and Kirsty was on the board. She knew you through college and knew Foley through being at the same kinds of social functions down the years. And it was inevitable that she, Louise and Foley would all end up at the fundraiser together, as Retrigram is a big contributor to the foundation. The only person who wasn’t there that night was Johnny.’
He paused and Rebekah imagined they were both playing the same film in their heads: Noella not calling Johnny from the hospital, Johnny not having to leave Louise at the fundraiser, and then Foley not being able to get Louise alone.
‘Anyway,’ Travis continued, ‘rewind twelve days from the fundraiser to Saturday, September eleventh, and Kirsty comes back to New York for the weekend. You and your college pals go out and end up at the Zee Club. You said Kirsty suggested going there, and she confirmed as much to Bowners: she knows the owner of the club through some other charity thing. So that’s why she and you were there, and the reason Foley was there was because the Zee also happens to be close to the Retrigram offices, so it’s a regular hangout for their staff. Kirsty knows Foley, she introduces you both, then …’ He faded out again.
It still didn’t answer her original question, though. Why would Hain and Lima try to murder her just because she’d slept with Daniel Foley?
Travis was already talking again: ‘Maybe Foley offered to give Louise a ride home, came on to her, things got out of hand, and …’ He stopped. This was the culmination of a half-year search. These were the answers he’d always sought and yet a part of him didn’t want to face them. ‘That theory would fit the endgame: six months after he kills Louise, the same day he finds out you’re still alive, the guilt, the potential repercussions, it all gets too much for Foley, so he heads to the George Washington Bridge and jumps.’
In the living room, Kyra shouted a number in Spanish.
‘Yeah, but still, why did he try and have me killed, Frank?’
Travis glanced at his notebook, with a pained expression. ‘Hain and Lima were watching you. They were reading your emails and listening to your calls. It looks like the whole surveillance thing was a result of a conversation that Hain must have had with Foley after Louise died, maybe asking Foley if there were any other women in his past who might cause him trouble.’
‘And he said me?’
‘Correct.’
‘Why would I cause him trouble?’
She felt like she was stuck on repeat.
Travis let out an anguished sigh. ‘That’s what I was getting to,’ he said. ‘I don’t think they were worried about Foley himself being compromised. They were worried about how Foley’s actions – the murder of Louise, his sleeping around, then the night with you – compromised the next rung of the ladder.’
Rebekah frowned. ‘The next rung of the ladder?’
Travis nodded.
‘You mean the person above Foley?’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘The person Hain really works for.’
A Message
Two days before getting the ferry out to Crow Island, Travis had to go back to Police Plaza for a meeting with Amy Houser about the cold cases she’d given him. He’d found it hard to concentrate on anything except Louise Mason and the Murphys since watching the surveillance video from Montauk harbour, but over the course of six days he’d tried to make some headway on Houser’s cases. When he arrived, she was already waiting in the foyer.
‘How you doing, Trav?’
‘All good, Lieutenant Houser,’ he said, although that wasn’t the truth: he was feeling unnerved. He hadn’t slept properly for almost a week, and could see the missed hours in his face.
‘You look tired,’ Houser said. ‘You been up working these all night?’
‘You know me, Ames. No half-measures.’
She took him to a meeting room where they went through the files, one by one. At the end, they decided that there were two with the potential for re-examination.
Afterwards, Houser led Travis back to the Cold Case Squad.
Captain Walker looked up as they entered. She was in a small office in the corner, the blinds up so she could see all the way across the floor. As soon as she spotted Travis, she got up from her desk and wandered over to him.
‘Mr Travis,’ she said.
He noted the use of ‘Mr’, not ‘Detective’, even though it was technically correct: he wouldn’t have minded, but she made it sound like a putdown.
‘Captain,’ he replied.
Walker just stood there as Houser started going through the drawers of the filing cabinets, pulling out new folders for Travis to work on. Walker was making him uncomfortable, but either didn’t know it or didn’t care. When he glanced at her, he thought she looked stressed too: her hair, a striking red, had begun escaping from a bun; her skin was sallow.
‘What part of England are you from?’ Travis asked.
She frowned. It was possible she wasn’t capable of polite conversation. More likely, she was wondering what she lost by telling him. She struck him as the type of person who didn’t like to share details of her private life, which was part of the reason that Travis did it. For some reason, the ‘Mr’ had annoyed him, as well as her standing there and watching him, as if he were unwelcome and untrustworthy, and had to be monitored.
‘I’m not,’ she said eventually.
‘Oh, I thou
ght someone said you were English –’
‘Well, whoever told you that was wrong.’
Houser slammed one of the cabinets closed and brought back a bunch more files.
Just as she put them on her desk, Walker said, ‘Well, it was good to see you again, Mr Travis. I’ll catch up with Amy later and see what you’ve brought us.’ She framed that last part like an insult, headed back to her office, closed the door and dropped the blinds.
‘I didn’t know human beings could maintain a body temperature of absolute zero,’ Travis muttered to Houser, who burst out laughing. They both looked to the office again, just in case Walker was watching.
‘I’ll admit,’ Houser said, ‘she takes a while to warm up.’
‘So do glaciers.’
Houser tapped the files. ‘I’ve got a couple more to add to this pile,’ she said, ‘but one of the detectives down on Major Crimes worked both of them back in the day, so I asked him to take a quick look at the paperwork for me yesterday – kind of a refresh-the-memory thing – to see if he recalled anything that didn’t make it onto the page. It’s a long shot, but you never know. If you wait here, I’ll just go grab the cases.’
‘Sure.’
Houser headed off to the elevators again.
As he waited for her, Travis brought the stack of files towards him and started leafing through the one on the top. It was a murder from March 1999: a cab driver, shot and killed inside his taxi at 5 a.m. as he waited under the elevated tracks on Brighton Beach Avenue. The more pages he turned, though, the more his thoughts began to drift and, pretty soon, all Travis could think about was the ferry in two days’ time: what he’d seen on the security cameras, and what he was likely to find when he got to the island.
What if it was just more questions?
The phone on Houser’s desk started ringing.
It was external.
He glanced at it, presuming that one of the other members of the squad would pick up. But when it still went unanswered, he looked out and saw that they were all on calls themselves.
He picked up. ‘Cold Case Squad.’
‘Is Houser around?’
A male voice.
‘She’s not at her desk at the moment. Can I take a message?’
‘Who’s this?’
‘Uh, my name’s Frank Travis.’
There was a long pause. Travis couldn’t hear anything on the line at all: no hint of background noise, no people, no traffic, nothing.
Then the man spoke again: ‘Travis?’
He frowned. His name had been said in a way that made it sound like the caller might know him. Travis tried to work out if he’d heard the man’s voice before somewhere. ‘Yeah, that’s me,’ he said. ‘I’m Travis. Who’s this?’
The line went dead.
It was only a split second later – as he took the phone away from his ear and stared at the handset – that a prickle of dread crawled across his scalp.
Travis did know him.
He had heard the voice.
It was the same man who’d called his line the previous December, in the last days of Travis’s search for Louise Mason. It was the man who’d left the tip about taking a second look at Johnny Murphy. And as he realized that, Travis realized something else: the common factor that connected both of the calls.
The person who’d taken the message in December.
The person whose phone had rung now.
Amy Houser.
72
‘There’s someone else involved in this?’
Travis nodded. ‘Someone with much more to lose.’ He paused, a flutter in his face, like a shadow shifting. ‘Foley’s crime had the potential to expose this person, to compromise them – perhaps professionally – and so did the night you spent with Foley. We know why Foley killing Louise would be a problem for this person – a murder is a problem for anyone with something to lose – we just have to figure out why you were such a danger as well. We have to figure out if any other women Foley slept with were targeted in the same way as you. I mean, Foley wasn’t married, he had no girlfriend that we know about, so it shouldn’t have mattered who he shared a bed with. But it did. It mattered so much that Lima tried to kill you. So there’s really three questions here. Why does it matter who Daniel Foley slept with? What makes those women dangerous to the person Hain works for? And who is the person he works for?’
Again, there was something in Travis’s face, a kind of residual pain laced to the end of that last question, and this time it was so much like looking at her father, at the expression of grief he’d held in the weeks after Mike died, that Rebekah could read Travis like a book. She leaned across the table slightly, closer to him, and said, ‘Frank, do you know who this person is?’
He looked up at her and a smile twitched at the corner of his lips. ‘Cops I used to work with, they called me the “Sphinx” in interviews because I was so good at not showing emotion. Not any more, I guess.’
‘So you do know who this person is?’
‘I have a suspicion.’
‘Who?’
His face creased into a grimace. ‘Would you mind if I didn’t talk about that for now? I know it’s a deeply unsatisfying answer, but I need to make sure that I’m right before I start throwing accusations around.’ He glanced through the door, into the living room, watching the girls. ‘If I’m right about this, though … well, it’ll break my heart.’
Rebekah tried to work out who Travis might be talking about. Someone he knew? Someone he’d worked with?
Could it be a cop?
Eventually, he pulled his notebook towards him and, turning a couple of pages, slowly began to gather pace again. ‘On Foley’s Facebook page, someone on Bowners’ team found a photograph of him, with some pals, at a restaurant. There’s a guy in the background. They think it might be Hain.’
Travis reached into the breast pocket of his shirt.
It was a printout of a photo. Foley was in the foreground, along with five men and three women. There were even more faces behind them, including one obscured slightly by the darkness of the restaurant.
He’d been circled in red pen.
‘It’s not clear if he’s there with the group,’ Travis said, tapping a finger to the face of the man, ‘or whether he just happened to be in the shot, but he doesn’t seem to be keen on having his photograph taken either way. That would be exactly the type of behaviour you’d expect from a man who uses an alias, even when he thinks he’s alone. Bowners has her team calling all of the people in the picture here to see if any of them can ID Hain.’
‘That definitely looks like him,’ Rebekah said quietly, remembering the man on the island, his face, the feel of his hands on her throat.
‘I think so too,’ said Travis.
The only difference was that both times she’d seen him in the flesh Hain had had a shaved head and no facial hair. In the picture with Foley, he had the beginnings of a beard and a thick mop of hair.
‘I strongly suspect that Foley and Hain knew each other,’ Travis said, ‘otherwise this picture is the most outrageous coincidence in the history of policing. And if we’re to assume that Hain is the type of guy you bring in to clear up a mess, it’s likely he helped Foley make things go away after Louise was murdered. As for you and Johnny, I think it’s a pretty safe bet now to suggest that you were the primary objective. They decided to target Johnny simply because you and he were together on the island that day, and maybe also because he’d been around Louise on the night she was killed, had spoken to her, texted her. He was a link to her. To put it crudely, it was a kind of two-for-one. If Johnny was going to be somewhere remote like Crow Island, and especially if you two were going to be there together, it was too good a chance to turn down. If you hadn’t gone together …’ He stopped.
Things might have turned out differently.
‘You’re saying I got Johnny killed.’
‘That’s not what I’m saying.’
‘If I hadn’t gone with hi
m –’
‘No,’ Travis said, more forcefully than Rebekah was expecting. ‘None of this is your fault. How could you possibly have known?’ He eyed her, making sure she wasn’t going to break on him, then, very slowly, picked up where he’d left off. ‘Hain is the type of guy who’ll like to plan. He wants things running like clockwork. What happened with Louise was the opposite. And when things get disordered like that, you start to feel the pressure. That’s why he rushed into the Crow Island plan to kill you. It’s why he made that anonymous call to me about Johnny. It’s why I believe he sent that email from Gareth’s account to Stelzik. With no pressure, you can see what desperate ideas those are. With pressure, even smart thinkers like Hain screw up. Whatever his reasons for not being there personally the day Lima tried to kill you, whatever his reasons for not doing it himself, as soon as Lima messed up, Hain was in panic mode.’ His eyes went to the Facebook photo. ‘Sadly, Lima had no known associates with the name “Hain”. Maybe we’ll have more luck with these people.’
From the next room, Kyra began singing ‘I’m The Map’ from Dora, then tried to get a reluctant Roxie to dance with her. Rebekah watched Travis as he gazed at the girls. There was a distance to his expression that Rebekah had never seen before, as if he was recalling something from his past, something that had shaken loose on hearing Kyra. In that moment, Rebekah realized she’d never asked Travis if he had kids of his own, but it seemed impossible that he didn’t. The more she looked at him, the more she recognized the expression flowering on his face: he was caught in a memory, a flicker from history, where his own kids were this age.
