Rescue story. It wasn’t a news piece, just a series of profiles on these people who might have been some of the children removed from their homes. She wasn’t that into it, did it more to make a new editor at the Magazine happy. But she learned something during her research that really got her jazzed.”
“What?” I said. There was something skittish about her, as if she might get up and bolt at any second. I had the urge to reach out and hold on to her wrist to keep her from fleeing.
She shook her head. “I have no idea.”
I looked at her, tried not to seem exasperated. “Okay,” I said, releasing a breath and giving her a patient smile. “Let’s start at the beginning. She was working on these profiles…” I began, letting my voice trail off. She picked up the sentence.
“And she was doing some background research about the investigation, about Maxwell Allen Smiley and about you. She talked to some people at the FBI. She got really annoyed one day. She’d just come back from an interview at FBI headquarters and said that she’d never had so much resistance on a ‘fluff piece,’ especially when the investigation was already closed. She said she was getting the feeling that there was much more to the story than had been revealed.”
“So she set out to find out what that was?”
She looked at me with wide eyes. I was starting to think there might be something wrong with this girl. She was either a little on the slow side or scared and reticent because of it. I wondered why she had agreed to meet me.
“I’m not sure. I think so. Everything happened so fast.”
She looked down at the table, and when she looked back up at me, she had tears in her eyes. I was quiet, waited for her to collect herself and go on.
“She was in her office. I heard her phone ring. She took the call, then got up and closed her door. I couldn’t hear her conversation. About a half an hour later, she left her office, told me she was leaving for the day on a lead, and she was gone.”
“You didn’t ask her where she was going? What she was working on?”
She looked at me. “She wasn’t like that. She didn’t talk about her work. Not until the words were on the page. Anyway, I guess she was right about me.”
“What do you mean?”
“During my last review with her, she told me she worried that I wasn’t curious enough, that I didn’t seem to have a ‘fire in the belly,’ as she put it. And that maybe I was more cut out for research than news investigation.”
I could see that the comment had hurt her, but I could also see that it might have been dead on.
The waitress brought our coffee and my pastry. I wanted to shove the whole buttery, sweet turnover in my mouth all at once in an effort to comfort myself.
“When I went to shut down her computer and turn off her light for the night,” she said, after a sip of her coffee, “I saw something strange on her computer.”
I paused my own coffee cup between the table and my lips, looked at her.
“There was a website open. The screen was completely red.”
She slipped a piece of paper across the table. I recognized the website address as the same one I’d seen at my father’s and at Jake’s. That humming I get in my right ear started up. I found myself looking around the restaurant, wondering if anyone was watching us. Just the mention of that website made me nervous. I didn’t know why.
“Did you tell this to the people investigating her disappearance?” I asked.
“Yes,” she answered, with a shrug. “They didn’t seem to think much of it.”
“Do you know anything about that site? What it means?”
She shook her head slowly. “I don’t know much about computers,” she said, casting her blue eyes down.
I put my coffee cup on the table and rubbed my forehead. I was getting the feeling that she didn’t know any more than I did about any of this. I wondered again why she had wanted to meet with me. This time I asked her as much.
“I want to help her. I feel like if I’d been more curious, the way she wanted me to be, then I might have been able to tell the police more. They might have been able to find her. I thought you might know something,” she said plaintively. After a moment’s pause: “Do you?”
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“You said weird things have been happening to you. Like what?”
The warning in the text message came back to me. I’d already confided in Ace; for all I knew, that had been a mistake. I looked at this girl and wondered what could be accomplished by telling her anything, if there was more potential for gain than for risk. Finally I slid the matchbook across the table at her. She picked it up and held it close to her face, squinting and wrinkling up her nose. She took glasses from her pocket, placed them on her face, and gazed at it a while longer. She opened it and read the note inside. She handed it back to me with a shrug.
“I’m sorry,” she said. There was something odd on her face.
“It doesn’t mean anything to you?” I said.
She was rummaging through her bag then. She placed five dollars on the table and got up quickly. “I have to go,” she said. “I don’t think we can help each other. You should-” I noticed she was looking over my head at something behind me. I turned to follow her eyes but I didn’t see what she was seeing.
“You should,” she repeated, “be careful.”
“Careful of what?” I said, turning back to her.
She moved out of the booth and headed quickly for the door. I put another five on the table and followed. On the street, she had broken into a light jog.
“Sarah!” I called, picking up my pace. “Please wait.”
She stopped abruptly then, almost as if something had startled her. She stood still for a second as I moved closer. Then she reached her hand behind her, as if she was trying to scratch an itch on her back she couldn’t quite reach. She jerked again. By the time I caught up with her, she was on her knees and all the street noise around us seemed to go deathly silent. I dropped to my knees beside her. Her face was a mask of pain, her skin so pale it was nearly blue. She opened her mouth to say something and a rivulet of blood traveled down her chin and onto the pink collar of her shirt. People around us started to notice something was wrong and cleared a path; someone screamed.
“Help me. I need an ambulance,” I said, holding on to her as she sagged into me. Soon I was supporting her full weight. A young man stopped beside us and used his cell phone to dial 911, dropping his briefcase on the sidewalk.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said.
I didn’t answer him; I didn’t know. He lifted her off of me and laid her on the ground, opened her coat, moved the strap of the messenger bag she wore slung across her body. Her hair fell around her like a halo. Two bloodred blossoms marred the front of her shirt. She looked like a broken angel lying there on the concrete.
He looked at me, incredulous. “She’s been shot.”
I stared at him, then past him. In the crowd of people gathering around us, a man in black moved slowly away. He wore a long dark coat and a black felt hat. He seemed to glide, to be swallowed by the crowd. I heard the wail of sirens.
“Hey!” I yelled.
The young guy kneeling over Sarah turned to look at me, his face flushed. “What is it?”
But I was already up and running, pushing my way through the throng.
“You can’t leave!” I heard him call after me. “Don’t you know her?”
My eyes locked on the man in black as he moved quickly up the crowded street. I kept losing and regaining sight of him as he got farther away. He was moving west, impossibly fast. By the time we’d crossed Eighth Avenue, I was breathless. At Ninth, I lost him completely. I stood on the corner and looked up and down the avenue.
A homeless guy lying on a cardboard mat gazed at me with interest. He looked as relaxed and comfortable as if he were lying on a couch in his own living room. He held a quivering Chihuahua in his right arm, a sign in his left hand. It read DON’T IGNORE ME. THIS COULD BE YOU ONE DAY. I ignored him.
