“Damn straight.” The cop frowned at his empty dish, then motioned to the last corner of pie in the tin. “Hey, mind if I finish that off?”
Brewster didn’t trust his voice enough to try answering. He shrugged.
The heavy, plain-clothed cop slid his plate aside, grabbed the tin, and put his fork to work.
“Were you born in a barn, Jonesy?” his partner asked. “Use your own plate.”
The big cop grunted and ate.
Brewster turned to the skinny cop… Barnes. “I’m really not following this story.”
Barnes grinned, deepening the hollows of his cheeks. If anybody needed another slice of pie, this guy was the poster child, but he’d hardly touched his plate. “Here’s what Jonesy is trying to explain in that half-assed story-telling style of his. We’re investigating a case from last year. A woman jumped, fell, or got pushed onto the subway tracks in Manhattan and—”
All of a sudden, Brewster couldn’t hear anything over the ringing in his ears. He was pretty sure he dropped his fork with a clang, because all three men gave him an odd look, and the piece of silverware wasn’t in his hand anymore. He’d just been with Carla, a year ago, and she’d been planning a trip to Manhattan to purge herself of a subway suicide nightmare. He told her not to go alone.
Now he told himself not to leap to the obvious conclusion or bust out crying or lose it in any way. Nervous breakdowns were best suffered alone. He needed to keep cool, speak coherently if called upon, get these cops out of the house as soon as possible, and then collapse. “Sorry,” he said.
“Hey, no problem,” the Northbrook cop said. “It’s your china.” That brought a laugh out of the other two, but suspicion lurked in their sharp eyes.
The heavy cop, Jonesy, had almost finished demolishing the rest of the pie. He picked up the thread of the story. “Think the dreams are weird? That ain’t all. This chick buys it in one of the busiest subway stations in America, and there isn’t one other person on the scene at the time.”
“Granted, the accident didn’t happen during rush hour, but still,” Barnes added.
Something about that heightened the buzz in Brewster’s head. He placed his palms flat on the table to keep them from trembling.
Jonesy shook his head. “The security cameras in the station went down. Some kinda malfunction. I guess we wouldn’t be here if they’d been working.”
“But the cameras outside didn’t show anybody going into the station for a good five minutes before the accident,” his partner said. “Plenty of people came up the stairs, but nobody went down, except the victim.”
“The cashier was on a landing one level above the platform,” Jonesy added, “so she didn’t see nothing, either. Neither did the idiotic transit cop flirting with her at the time.”
Brewster averted his gaze from the Northbrook cop sitting across from him, begged himself not to faint, and refused to even blink for fear he’d see a sign reading We’re hiding from the butterflies the instant he closed his eyes.
“The station drained out before the accident,” Barnes said.
“Like rats chasing tail outta the sinking ship, only it wasn’t sinking yet,” Jonesy added. He speared the last remnants of the pie.
“There was a bus accident a block away at the time,” Barnes added. “That drew the crowd away. I guess most people would rather look at carnage than take the subway on home.”
The thin cop reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out an all-too-familiar business card. He laid it on the table for all to see. Brewster DeLay, Words escape me. “They found this card in the victim’s purse.”
Brewster took the card and flipped it over, praying to read a punch line—the gotcha at the end of a sick practical joke—but he came up empty and let the thing slide out of his hand. “Why—” His mouth had gone dry. He couldn’t choke out another word.
Barnes scooped the card up and slid it into his shirt pocket. “So…we have a woman alone in a subway station, standing near the tracks.”
Bewilderment, incomprehension, and even a vague sense of betrayal twitched one of Brewster’s eyelids.
“A train comes along and almost doesn’t stop,” the thin cop continued, “because the operator has a blackout from a mild heart attack. He comes to and hits the brakes but not in time to avoid this woman who is now on the tracks.”
“No witnesses but the operator,” Jonesy said. “And he claims at first the woman bought it without any help.”
“But he changes his story last week, and a witness from a passing train comes forward and corroborates,” Barnes added. He gazed intently into Brewster’s eyes. “We showed them some pictures, and they both identified you as the man standing with that woman.”
Brewster couldn’t even begin to process what he was hearing. He wanted to open his eyes and wake up. “Wait. How do you have my picture?”
“Facebook,” Jonesy said.
“But you say you have an alibi,” the Northbrook cop chimed in.
Barnes sighed and broke into a gentle smile, back in the role of good cop. “Brewster, this woman’s name was Carla Summers. She had your card in her purse. You knew her, didn’t you?”
Knew her? He still did. And that was the thing. A large part of the emotion trying to filter through his shock was grief, but a voice of logic—or denial—kept whispering that if Carla really did die a year ago, somehow she’d cheated death to interact with him after the fact, meaning she was still alive. Unless—his cup-all-the-way-empty voice argued—she’d been visiting him in her time-traveling dreams before she died, and those dreams ended the day the train took her out.
Could he prevent that? What if he took another spin through the wormholes and told her to drop Manhattan from her itinerary? Carla had thought she could change his
