'You sure everything's okay, Mr. Keller?'
'Yeah, thanks, Carlos. Everything's fine.'
He hung up and immediately called down to the garage. He went through a similar routine. No one there had seen anyone come in and use the elevator. No one who didn't belong, anyway. Pablo, the main guy at the garage, wouldn't swear that no one could get in without being seen but it was unlikely. And anyway, he said, nobody could get up to the apartments without having a key. It was impossible.
Jack tried to think who had keys to get into the place. He had one, of course, plus a duplicate set. As a reflex, he stuck his hand in his pocket to feel the key. It was right where it should be. He then went into the kitchen, to the small hook that hung by the refrigerator where the spare was kept. It was there, too. In fact, two spares were there, which puzzled him for a moment, then he realized he had a third set. Caroline's keys had been returned to him, along with her other possessions from Virginia.
Who else? Dom had one and his name had also been left downstairs as someone who could be let in anytime. If anyone was above suspicion, it was Dom. Mattie had had a key and her name had also been left downstairs. But poor Mattie was dead and, even if she were alive, could never have done anything remotely like Jack realized now that there was some kind of commotion out on the street. Strange. Usually you couldn't hear the traffic up this high, but there was frantic honking. Must be some kind of an accident. Jack instinctively turned toward the balcony, at the same time felt a small blast of hot, summer air, and that's when he realized the sliding door was open. No, not just open…
Someone had broken it.
A small section of the large glass pane had been shattered. Right by the handle. And the door had been left open. Maybe six inches.
Jack walked slowly over to it. He stared down at the shards that were gleaming in the carpet. Looked back up at the jagged hole. Then he looked out across the balcony, at the wall that stretched over to the next building.
No one had needed a key to get into his apartment.
Someone had walked across the wall. The ten-foot-long, one-foot-wide wall. Eighteen stories above the street.
Jack remembered Kid, not long before his death, leaping up onto the retaining wall and walking.
Hey, do you know you could actually walk to the next building from here?
Jack remembered his stomach tightening.
Seriously. The buildings are connected.
He remembered his mouth going dry. He remembered getting dizzy…
Someone could walk along this ledge and get to that rooftop. You'd have to be kind of nuts but…
Jack slid the balcony door shut, hard enough so more glass cracked and showered to the floor. He stood there, sagging a bit, holding on to the handle for support, still staring out at the nearby rooftop. No longer just wondering who had killed Kid. No longer wondering who had killed Leslee.
Now wondering if that same person was going to try to kill him.
Jack took one step toward the phone. He was going to call McCoy. Get her over here, let her see this, make her understand what was going on and let her protect him. Then he thought: No. She still won't understand. And cops don't protect, they react. She'll tell me to get a new door. And an alarm. She'll ask me if I did all this myself just to make her think I was right.
Fuck McCoy, he thought.
And fuck whoever did this.
I'm not going to stop looking. I'm going to find her. And I'm going to find her now.
FORTY-TWO
By three o'clock the next afternoon, the glass door had been replaced, an alarm system installed – the installer muttering, over and over again, 'Who'd be crazy enough to try to break in from here?' – and a painter was at work on the living room and bedroom wall.
And Jack had spent just over three hours sitting in front of his computer, trying to find the Rookie.
She was the logical one to go after, partly because Jack suspected she had, over time, metamorphosed into the Destination, and partly because he had remembered back to winter, about two weeks into January. He remembered so specifically because it was the first day Kid had seen the Hopper painting. After checking the day he'd gotten the painting, then using his calendar to pinpoint his first session with Kid after that, it was not difficult to specify the exact day – January 17.
Jack could recall the conversation as if it were yesterday.
I regard Edward Hopper as the depressive's Norman Rockwell.
What!
Jack, I don't know shit about art. I'm just quoting.
A member of your fucking team?
The Rookie. She has very strong feelings about art.
Do me a favor and tell her to go fuck herself.
You don't want to mess with her, Jack. Not with what I've learned about her.
Your goddamn team. I don't think they even exist.
They exist, all right. Hey, the Rookie was even written up in yesterday's Times. She's famous.
He was annoyed as hell at the time, even hurt, but the words had still been mere banter then. Now they seemed so much more. The Rookie has very strong feelings about art. And clearly did not like Hopper. If the Rookie had been the one to break into his apartment the night before, was that why the Hopper had been removed from the wall? You don't want to mess with her, Jack. Not with what I've learned about her. Because she was so dangerous? Because she was capable of killing? And best of all: The Rookie was even written up in yesterday's Times. She's famous.
A starting point.
Using AOL, he went to nytimes.com. At the web site, he registered, typed in a password – 'jacks' – and as various choices came up, he elected to go back into their selected archives. He typed in 'January 16' and, suddenly, there was that day's newspaper of record up on the screen. He decided there was only one way to do this and that was thoroughly, so he began reading the paper from cover to cover. As he read, he took notes, keeping track of any woman being written about who conceivably could have had a connection to Kid or who could, in any stretch of the imagination, have been on the Team. After a few minutes of reading, he realized he should keep track of every single woman mentioned, just in case he needed to backtrack. So on a yellow legal pad, as he went through each section – front page, Metro, The Arts, Sports, Business Day and Dining In – he started dividing the names into three columns labeled Likely, Less Likely, and Unlikely. With each name, he jotted down any relevant information – a brief description, a job title, a company name or the name of an agent, anything that might help him locate her.
The first story he came to where the woman seemed 'Likely' was about a young, dynamic assistant DA who was prosecuting the killer of a high school principal. The next was a hotshot Wall Street executive who was handling a large merger. He put a star by the name of a young professional tennis player who lost in the quarterfinals of a tournament. Others on that list were a policewoman who had been fired for posing nude in a magazine and the daughter of a real estate developer who was now in Paris modeling. Margaret Thatcher, who was lecturing on global economics at Harvard, was placed in the Unlikely column, as was a fifty-two-year-old lesbian colonel in the air force, a very overweight black woman who was the voice of a service that gave movie times, and Kathie Lee Gifford. Tipper Gore also went into Unlikely, although Jack's pen lingered over Less Likely for just a moment.
By midafternoon, he had twenty-two Likelys, twenty-seven Less Likelys, and a long string of Unlikelys. As he ran his finger over the final list, staring at the information he'd written down, one line popped out at him. It was when he came to the name of an up-and-coming young art dealer. She was getting attention for an avant-garde show she had put together at a gallery in SoHo. But it was the address of the gallery that got his attention: 137 Greene Street. It seemed familiar. He recognized it from somewhere. His mind drifted, trying to picture the street, imagining the last time he'd been in that neighborhood…
