Smoke

trying to keep her boot heels from clicking on the tile floors.

When she came to the place she thought the door should be, she realized that she must have turned right where she should have turned left. She doubled back, feeling a little stupid, butterflies in her stomach. She couldn’t shake the feeling that it was too easy to move around a building that had such tight security. It would have been more logical for Jeffrey to come in with the meeting group, she knew that. But she’d had a strong desire to see Trevor Rhames, to understand more about The New Day. Now she wondered, as she usually wound up doing at some point, if she should have listened to Jeffrey. Maybe they knew who she was, were watching her, giving her just enough rope to hang herself. Then again, maybe she was just being paranoid. Maybe the cameras Dax had mentioned didn’t come on until the building locked down.

At the end of a long hallway, she came to an institutional-sized kitchen. She pushed through one of the doors marked NEW DAY STAFF ONLY. In the dark, she felt her way through a maze of large ovens and grills, metal sinks and cabinets, shelves of canned goods. It was a kitchen that served a lot of people, maybe hundreds. For some reason the place gave her the chills.

At the back of kitchen, she found the door and took a deep breath before opening it, bracing herself for an alarm if Dax’s intel was wrong and preparing herself for a sprint. But the door pushed open quietly and standing there was her favorite sight. Jeffrey. He stepped inside and took a roll of electrical tape from his pocket and taped the latch of the door down so that it appeared closed but remained unlocked. When the place shut down, they’d still have a way out, unless the system read that a door wasn’t closed properly. She let the door shut behind him.

“I told you it would be all right,” she said.

“We’ll see,” he said. “Anyway, what are we looking for in here?”

“Lily Samuels for one. Or any evidence that she might have been here,” she said, shrugging. “I don’t know exactly. I guess we’ll know it when we see it.”

Hello?” The voice was groggy, as if its owner had been sleeping. Matt looked at the clock. It was just after ten… not that late.

“I’m looking for Randall Holmes.”

There was a pause on the line, a drawing in of breath, a rustling of sheets.

“Who’s calling?” It was hard to tell if he was talking to a man or a woman, the voice was hoarse, sounded old.

“This is Detective Stenopolis from the NYPD. Mr. Holmes made a call to a tip line. I’m following up, sir. Sorry for the late hour.”

The voice heaved a sigh. “Son, that was two weeks ago.”

“You’re Randall Holmes?”

“Well, who the hell else would I be? You called me.”

Matt smiled. “You’re right, sir. I’m sorry.”

The man grunted on the other end of the line.

“You told the tip line operator that you saw Lily Samuels in church. Is that right, sir?”

“No, that’s not what I said,” he said. “That place is no church, I’ll tell you that. Bunch of Moonies, if you ask me.”

“Which place?”

He heard the man breathing heavily on the other line. “How do I know you’re not one of them?”

Matt put his head into his hand. After going through Lily’s file and finding nothing, he’d started sifting through some copies of the tip line transcripts he’d brought home with him. About halfway through the stack, he’d come across Randall Holmes, who’d claimed that he’d seen Lily at church. The notation from whoever took the call was that Holmes was “unstable, ranting.” A note indicated that Jesamyn had made a follow-up call the next day and came to the same conclusion, that the guy was nuts. But now, knowing about The New Day, this call about a church from a man who lived in Riverdale held more potential. At least that’s what Matt had hoped.

“Sir, I’m a Missing Persons detective with the NYPD. I’m one of the good guys. I promise.”

The old man snorted. “I’ve heard that one before.”

Matt sighed, feeling disappointment and frustration squeeze at the back of his neck, tense the muscles on his shoulders. Another dead end.

“Okay, Mr. Holmes, thanks for your time,” he said, getting ready to hang up and go to sleep.

“Anyway, you’re too late,” he whispered.

“Too late for what?”

“Too late to help that girl.”

Matt felt his stomach do a little flip. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I watch them go in. Some of them come out. Some of them don’t. I sit on the porch after most of the others have gone to sleep. I like to go outside still, like to breathe the clean air. The rest of the people in this place are already dead, they’re just waiting to stop breathing. Not me. I want to suck every last breath of air out of this world.”

“Where are you, sir?”

There was a pause. “At the home here, the Sunnyvale Home for the Elderly. Boy, you don’t know much of anything, do you?”

He was calling from almost directly across the street from The New Day.

“No, sir, not really. Maybe you could help me out.”

“I sit in the dark corner of the porch so I can see without being seen, you know. It’s always so much better not to be seen.”

“I agree,” said Matt solemnly. “What can you see from your porch?”

“I can see the brown building with the stained glass window. They try to make it look like a church. But there’s no God in there. I know that for a fact.”

“You said you watch people go in?”

“Some nights they gather outside, groups of people. They look nervous and hungry like they’re waiting for a meal or a handout. A thin girl with bony shoulders and no tits opens the door for them after a while. They go inside; a few usually come out in the first half hour or so. Some come out a couple hours later. Others don’t come out at all.”

“You saw Lily Samuels there one night?”

“The girl on the news. I saw her. I told the nurse. She said it was dark and my eyes aren’t what they used to be. So I called the number they gave on the television. I have a phone in my room, my son makes sure I have a good television and my own phone number here.”

“He must be a very good son,” said Matt.

He made some kind of grunting noise that might have been assent or disdain. Hard to tell.

“So you saw her standing and waiting with the others?”

“That’s right. She looked lost,” he said. “Very sad. Sadder than the others, somehow.”

“Did you see her come out?”

“No. She didn’t come out that night.”

“That night? You saw her come out another night?”

The old man laughed. “No, son, haven’t you been listening? What I’m trying to tell you is that if they don’t come out the same night they go in, they don’t come out at all.”

What are you doing over here, miss?”

“I’m sorry,” said Lydia with an embarrassed smile. “I got a little lost on my way from the bathroom.”

The woman looked at her stonily. She had hard, angular features and creamy white skin. “You’ll have to return to the meeting now.”

“I was just heading back.”

The blonde woman who’d led the group gathered outside into the meeting walked her back to the auditorium. Lydia slipped back into the dark and noticed that the crowd had thinned considerably. Trevor Rhames was booming now, his voice resonating; he was pacing wildly; something about society trapping people in a prison of self-hatred and materialism. But she wasn’t listening anymore. She was looking for a way out. She scanned the room for other doors and saw one down by the stage. But heavy and metal, with a glowing red exit sign over it, it looked like an exterior door. Shit, she thought. It was always a bad idea to split up. Always.