A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  Ma’am. The honorific ripples through her uncomfortably. She sometimes can’t fathom that she actually grew up, or understand how or even why. Or that in a matter of months she’s going to be a forty-one-year-old orphan.

  The elevator doors whine open and discharge her into the musty fourth-floor hallway, a series of closed doors concealing what sounds like raucous ghosts: unseen voices, electronic bleeps and hums, the crisp slap of something shutting. The door marked 403 with an old white-on-black imprinted Formica sign swings open onto a Sunday morning that could just as well be a Monday or Tuesday or Any-Day morning of law enforcement in the city that never sleeps. A dozen or so investigators work at their desks, alone or in pairs, competing to be heard over a familiar incessant din. Elsa immediately feels at home.

  Across the room, at a desk bare except for a chipped black mug and an outdated desktop computer with a flickering screen, a youngish man in scuffed cowboy boots unfurls himself from his chair and waves her over. His russet hair cropped at the jaw strikes her as uncoplike verging on adolescent, but she decides on the spot, as she crosses the room, that anyone who veers from the norms in a profession defined by them must have confidence for a reason. He reminds her of a famous actor, she can’t think of which one; not classically handsome but a good smile and charm enough to mask whatever might be lacking.

  She extends her hand and he clasps it with both of his. His skin is dry, soothing.

  “Special Agent Myers, I’m really grateful you came.” His two front teeth have a noticeable gap, and he has an accent she didn’t register over the phone. Eastern European, maybe Russian. Probably a subtlety in how his mouth forms words, the kind of visual cue that makes it so important to meet a person face-to-face. He hasn’t shaved since at least yesterday.

  “Elsa.” She pulls away her hand, sloughs the heavy bag off her shoulder, and sets it on a chair.

  “Lex. Can I get you some coffee? Tea?”

  “Coffee would be great. Milk, no sugar. I’ll get unloaded so we can go right to work.”

  By the time he returns with another chipped black mug—evidently the signature matched set of the Forest Hills precinct—her laptop is open and ready, tapped into the FBI’s secure network she can access anywhere she goes.

  “Wow, that’s dedication.” He sets her coffee on the desk and pulls up his chair.

  “We can’t afford to waste time, not when it’s a kid.”

  “No, I mean that you bring your own laptop,” he clarifies.

  “Actually, it’s not mine, personally. We’re mobile units so they deck us out—we’ve got to be able to work anywhere. Only thing that doesn’t travel in my bag is—” She crosses her legs and swings out an ankle to flash her Glock 22 pistol. “This never leaves my body.”

  A half smile lifts the right side of Lex’s mouth as he slides a hand to his hip and pushes back his sports jacket to reveal his weapon.

  Elsa grins. “No one, but no one, knows how to strike up a friendship like a pair of cops.”

  His laugh escapes in a loud bubble of sound that causes others to stop and look. He ignores the attention and sits down beside her.

  “So”—she clicks a New Case tab and a screen segmented with blank fields pops open—“let’s get all the details sorted out first.”

  “You know the basics,” he says. “Ruby Haverstock, seventeen, eleventh grade. Public high school, academically solid, socially active but not a queen bee or anything like that.”

  “Home life?”

  “Stable, from what I can tell. She’s an only child. I spent a bit of time with her parents yesterday, Peter and Ginnie Haverstock, and they’re worried out of their minds. Told me everything they know, even gave me Ruby’s journal and laptop. No red flags—”

  “That they know of.”

  He tilts his head. “Cynical, are we?”

  “Experienced. Go on.”

  “She works at a café called Queens Beans, has the after-school-to-evening shift three times a week. Worked her full shift on Friday, then zippo. But”—he pulls his chair so close that she picks up a scent of astringent soap, the no-nonsense kind that cleans fast and doesn’t cost much—“just before her shift ended, two things happened that concern me. One, she turns off the security camera. Two, she buzzes someone in.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s the thing—no one I’ve talked to can figure it out. And once her shift ends? A few minutes after she buzzes whoever in? Her phone, her credit card…she stops using them…no activity of any kind since eight twenty-three p.m. on Friday. Her CDR suddenly goes flat.”

  “That’s worrisome,” Elsa agrees, “but with teenagers, you never know.” It used to be that you could count on call-detail records to be at least somewhat revealing, but lately, ever since new apps started offering ways for people to fly under the radar, Elsa has sometimes encountered a surprising void. “I have a teenage niece and all her friends are big users of self-destruct messaging apps—they send each other texts and photos that go away, poof, once they’re opened.”

  “My warrant list had some—Snapchat, Kik, maybe another one.” He turns to his computer and looks. “Yik Yak. Nothing back from any of them yet.”

  “Not surprised. Some of them are privacy evangelists; they don’t care as much about predators using their apps as a hunting ground as they do about their users’ confidentiality.”

  “I get that. It’s a mixed bag—but what good are secrets if you’re dead?”

  “Exactly.” Elsa picks up her phone to text Marco. “I’ll ask my supervisor to add a few more apps to the list and kick them all up the ladder. Sometimes we can get a warrant expedited when it’s a—”

  “Kid,” Lex jumps in. Good, she thinks, this one learns fast. She might not have to babysit him all day.

  Marco replies: I’m on it.

  Elsa notices the time on her phone: almost noon. She’d hoped to get back to Sleepy Hollow by late afternoon, evening at the latest. “Show me the security footage from Queens Beans.”

  Lex leans back to dig into his front pocket—his jeans, she notices, are on the tight side and look worn at the knees—and pulls out a thumb drive. He’s about to plug it into his desktop when she stops him.

  “Mine, please. So I can download it.”

  “Sure.” He slots the drive into the side of Elsa’s laptop and scrolls down a week’s worth of files. “It’s a small shop with a drive-through window, about half a block off Queens Boulevard, at the back of a lot where there isn’t much visibility.” He clicks open the file for Friday night.

  There is Ruby, wearing a backward-turned baseball cap over her long dark hair, moving gracefully around the small area, making coffee drinks, smiling at customers, rolling her eyes into the camera when a woman takes a long time fishing money out of her wallet. Ruby is pretty without being cute. No makeup. A stack of bracelets that jangle every time she moves. Whenever the café is quiet, she consults her phone, scrolling expertly with her thumb, holding it with both hands when she texts, and smiling from time to time at messages she receives. The second she hears the bell, she slides her phone into her pocket and turns to the customer. Then someone speaks to her from off to the side, perhaps someone who’s arrived on foot. Her expression fogs with something hard to read: irritation, alarm. She reaches under the counter and the tape suddenly stops. Panic curls through Elsa’s stomach: That’s it, the moment something happened that shouldn’t have happened. The moment Ruby slipped, or was taken, out of sight.

  Elsa asks, “Where’s the exterior footage? Maybe we can see who it was.”

  “No cameras outside,” Lex says.

  “Seriously?”

  “Guess they were more worried about employees stealing from the till than about who might drive up.”

  “Huh.” Elsa doesn’t like it.

  “I’ve gone over and over the timeline with the parents,” Lex says. “I talked to all four teachers she had classes with on Friday. I talked to the guy, Steve, who she relieved at Queens Beans at
the start of her shift. I’d really like to talk to her best friend, Allie—kid’s not calling me back.”

  “You tried texting her? My niece only responds to texts.”

  “Yes, but here’s the thing—the Haverstocks said they’ve talked to Allie and she hasn’t seen or spoken to or heard from Ruby at all since Friday, when she stopped into the café for a quick visit.”

  “Did you try showing up at her house?”

  “Should I?”

  “Definitely. Other friends?”

  “I called about seven kids her parents identified, and no one saw her after school on Friday. Still trying to reach her former boyfriend, Charlie, but he hasn’t returned my calls either. Or my texts.”

  “How long did they date?”

  “Five, six months.”

  “Ended when?”

  “A few weeks ago.”

  She looks at him, his expression full of concern, and wonders why he didn’t just go to the homes of these noncommunicative kids. Why he hesitated. And then it hits her, the actor Lex reminds her of: Al Pacino when he was young, the cool masculinity and the soulful eyes, but taller.

  She asks, “This your first missing-kid case?”

  “Actually, yes.”

  “What’s your normal beat?”

  “Until last week, three years undercover for Vice.”

  Elsa worked undercover briefly, years ago, and hadn’t liked the constant gnaw of personal risk. “You survived that, you’ll survive this.”

  “This is more…emotional than I expected.”

  “You’ve got to learn to put a cap on that or your brain will stop working the way it needs to. And here’s one more piece of advice, if you don’t mind.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Dealing with kids, teenagers especially—well, you need to think a little differently than with adults. Try to listen between the lines when they talk. And allow your questions to come at them sideways. Does that make sense?”

  “I think so.”

  “Their minds work differently, so yours also has to.”

  “Right.”

  “Lex, here’s what I’m thinking. I understand why you’re worried about Ruby. I am too. If she weren’t almost eighteen, and if she hadn’t turned off that security camera and buzzed someone in, and if you’d gotten ahold of that best friend and that ex-boyfriend and they were as clueless as Ruby’s parents, then pulling the trigger on an Amber Alert yesterday would have been the right thing.”

  “I was tempted, but it seemed too soon.”

  “It was. But now, given the various factors, including that a whole day has gone by—it’s time.” Elsa texts Marco: initiate amber asap. “Within five minutes, every cop in the country will have eyes-out for Ruby.”

  “So it is bad.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Elsa says. “We keep digging until we find out. Where’s her computer?”

  He reaches under the desk for a battered backpack, his own, and withdraws two things: a laptop covered in a rubbery purple skin, and one of those hardback blank books.

  “That her journal?”

  He nods. “I had them at home last night, went over everything. She seems like a good kid. Couple of things jumped out, though. From her journal, it looks like things didn’t end too well with Charlie, the ex. And this other boy, Paul, starts turning up a lot in these pages over the past two weeks.”

  “Oh?” She leans back, away from the laptop. “Know his last name?”

  “Not yet, and nothing else specific, except that he has a skateboard. Paul who likes to skateboard. Must be hundreds of that boy in this city.”

  “May I?” Elsa reaches for the laptop and journal and slips them into her bag for later. “Come on, let’s take a ride.”

  The drive to Forest Hills Gardens, where Charlie the ex-boyfriend lives, leads them into a cozy network of genteel blocks with stucco-and-brick Tudor houses fronted by manicured lawns.

  “In high school,” says Lex, in the passenger seat beside Elsa, “I had a couple of friends living around here. It was fancy then too.”

  She glances at him, curious. “Where did you settle after you came over?”

  “Came over from where?”

  “You tell me.”

  “It’s that obvious?”

  “Well, you have a slight accent.”

  The charming smile, tinged with humor. “I was eight when I stepped foot in New York for the first time, fresh off the boat from Russia,” he says, reframing in sepia an immigration that probably occurred in Technicolor via plane. “Landed in Hell’s Kitchen, back in the day when it was hell. Shit schools until high school. Bronx Science. Lots of those smart kids came from places like this.”

  “So you were a brainy kid,” Elsa says. She too grew up in the city, but not Manhattan, and not Forest Hills. Her family lived modestly, way out in Ozone Park at the far end of Queens. She went to a decent high school, but not the best, and got through it. “Where’d you go to college?” Curious, suddenly, about this detective who needed her help so badly that she was summoned away from her father’s hospital bed.

  She waits for Lex’s answer, which doesn’t come. “I went to a state school—Purchase,” she prods, “and I worked my way through. Now you have to tell me yours.” She brakes for a red light and looks at him.

  He holds her gaze when he says it—“Cornell”—as if assessing how the credential will affect her view of him. She doesn’t blink, doesn’t even smile or nod, nothing to make him think she’s impressed. Because she isn’t, yet. He’s not the first Ivy League–educated cop she’s come across, and it doesn’t necessarily make you smart in the right ways for this job.

  She says, “So you’re a…”

  “Pain in the ass?” An arch grin.

  “No, I was going to say…what’s the word I’m looking for? Iconoclast.”

  “Oh?”

  “Either you come from a family of cops and you aimed higher before succumbing to the uniform, or you come from a family that expects everyone in it to go to schools like that and you shocked them by slumming it as police.”

  “Neither.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a battered tube of breath mints. “Like one?”

  She shakes her head. He pops one into his mouth and peppermint tinges the air. The light turns green and she steers the car onto Charlie Hendryk’s leafy block. They pull up to the curb in front of a brick pile with an alpine silhouette. A gardener kneeling in front of a bed of begonias doesn’t bother glancing up from his work.

  Lex cocks the door handle and a gust of warm air enters the car. “Look, we both know that the real show is what happens right now. With Ruby. Today. I requested you because I heard you were the best. Who gives a shit where anyone went to school?” He gets out and lets his door bang shut.

  She follows him onto the curb. “You requested me? That’s not what my boss told me.”

  “I don’t know what he said, but yes, I asked for you. You have a reputation.”

  She assumes she does, given her record, but is unaccustomed to having it pointed out. Except by herself, when she wants something from Marco that he says she can’t have.

  The front door of the Hendryk house opens and a woman stands there, looking at them, her fitted jeans and low-cut T-shirt revealing an overly toned middle-aged musculature. Rich lady who spends her days at the gym. A tall, skinny boy with a rash of acne on both cheeks joins her.

  Elsa glances at her watch—it’s still early. “Come on, let’s get this over with. If the ex-boyfriend isn’t helpful, we’ll go straight to the BFF’s house, that girl—”

  “Allie.”

  “Right. And then we can…” She stops abruptly, realizing how quickly she’s been talking, a tic when she’s anxious. And she sees the way he’s looking at her, with such stillness in his eyes, reading her so well, her eagerness to get away.

  “Full disclosure,” he says calmly, and already she doesn’t like this. “Supervisor Coutts mentioned that your dad’s in the hospital. Obviously you w
ant to get back.”

  Her insides gurgle up something sour she’d like to spit at Marco for saying anything about her personal life to a colleague she didn’t know until today.

  “The treatments alone can be pretty awful,” Lex adds. “For cancer.”

  Fucking Marco.

  “He isn’t getting any treatment,” Elsa says. “It’s too advanced. Once he’s stabilized he’ll get hospice visits at his apartment.” She raises an eyebrow and presses out a grin, but he refuses her bid to move the conversation to the safe ground of irony—the painful absurdity of reining in the symptoms of her father’s cancer so he can be sent home to let it flourish and devour him.

  “You’re not taking a leave of…” Absence, Lex seems about to say, but cuts himself off, apparently realizing that it’s none of his business. Which it isn’t. Nothing in her private life is anyone’s business but her own.

  “You’ve been checking your watch all morning,” he says, as if he knows what’s pulling at her—how, on top of everything else, there’s a detour she needs to make before driving back up to Sleepy Hollow. “Why don’t you head back to the hospital to be with your dad? I can handle this. We can touch base later.”

  “I appreciate that, Lex, but I’m here now. Let’s do this.”

  “I’m not asking you to walk away—I don’t want you to. I am worried about Ruby, and I know you are too, but here’s what I’m thinking. I’m grateful you came; you clarified the way forward. This, right now, is legwork that I can do alone. The minute I have a question, or if there’s a change, I’ll call you.”

  She watches his face, the way his skin molds over his cheekbones and flows into hollows that deepen when he speaks, not a twitch of uncertainty, the reassuring avuncular tone. She realizes that he doesn’t want her to mother him or boss him or dole out more advice than absolutely necessary. Maybe he’s not the kind of man who leaves his dirty socks on the floor until someone else picks them up. Maybe his competence is real and maybe she can resume her day off unless he needs her again.

  “Okay.” She jangles her car keys, opens the door to get back in. “As long as you keep me updated. You’ve got my number.”