tell everything she knew, it was all over for them. All over for Howard, all over for Morris, and all over for Lewis Blocker.
Everything he and Howard had done to try to tie up the loose ends on this colossal fuckup, as Howard so aptly called it, would unravel the moment Allison Fitch decided to come out of hiding. Once she’d told the authorities about the murder, confessed to her blackmail attempt, and revealed her meeting with Howard, the shit would hit the proverbial fan.
They had to make sure that did not happen.
Several steps were being taken in that direction. First, Lewis had Nicole watching Fitch’s mother in Ohio. He figured, sooner or later, the girl would attempt to get in touch with her. What daughter in trouble didn’t want to talk to her mom? What daughter wouldn’t be wracked with guilt while her mother despaired over what had happened to her? Wouldn’t she, eventually, feel she had to allay her mother’s fears?
Lewis had decidedly mixed feelings about keeping Nicole on this project after the way she’d screwed up. His earlier confidence in her had been immeasurably shaken, and his initial impulse had been to make Nicole pay the ultimate price for her mistake. But right now, he needed all the help he could get, and Nicole, feeling her neck, had said she would help, indefinitely, to make things right. So he would use her until this mess was resolved.
Lewis also wanted to maintain surveillance, of a sort, on the Fitch apartment. Although he thought it highly unlikely the woman herself would return to the unit, he believed it was possible someone who knew her might show up at some point. Maybe just a friend dropping by to say hi. Or, and this was the eventuality Lewis most hoped for, someone Allison had been in touch with and instructed to go to her old place to see what was going on.
Either way, such a visitor might provide a clue to Allison Fitch’s current whereabouts.
Lewis couldn’t post someone in the hallway 24-7. Too obvious. And even though he’d spoken to the landlord, in the guise of a relative of one of the former tenants, and arranged to make sure the rent was paid every month for the foreseeable future, Lewis didn’t have the manpower to have someone in the apartment at all hours in case a visitor showed up. He stayed there himself for the first month, and the only person who came knocking was a guy distributing takeout menus for an Italian place down the street.
But he couldn’t shake the idea that a person of interest might, someday, show up. And when that person did, he wanted to have a look at who it was.
Which was why he installed the camera.
A pinhole affair, motion-activated, mounted behind the door, with an excellent view of the hallway. Whenever a person came to within a few feet of the apartment, it came on. At the end of every day, Lewis reviewed any images, which were automatically sent to his computer.
There was almost always something. Usually, it was the super, vacuuming the hall. One day, a pizza delivery guy at the wrong door. Lewis watched as he got out his cell phone, called his dispatcher, and sorted it out.
Lewis got a little hungry, watching that one.
On Halloween, some kids got into the building and went door to door, looking for candy. Two girls, one dressed as Lady Gaga, the other as an alien from another world-actually, he wasn’t sure which was which-struck out at apartment 305.
Every day, something. But nothing of value.
Lewis was thinking it was time to abandon this idea, take out the camera, stop paying on the apartment.
And then the guy with the Pearl Paint bag shows up.
Lewis sat at the desk in the study of his Lower East Side apartment, looking at the oversized monitor of his computer. Studying. The man knocked three times with the hand holding the bag from the art store. Lewis, in his investigation of Allison Fitch, before and after her disappearance, had never seen him before. Had no idea who he was, or whether this visit was in any way significant.
Was the guy selling something? Was he at the wrong apartment? Was he, in fact, someone who knew one of the two previous tenants, and had stopped by for a visit? If he’d known the two people who’d lived here, wouldn’t he, possibly, have shouted into the door? Something like, “Hey, anybody home?” How had he gotten into the building? Did he have a key? Did someone heading out of the building allow him access, or had he buzzed a bunch of people at random until one of them was dumb enough to buzz back?
Did it matter? Was this visitor important at all?
Then Lewis caught a look at the piece of paper in his other hand.
What was that? It had flashed twice past the lens very quickly. Lewis played the short bit of footage several times but was unable to make it out.
So he paused the video, and then used the cursor to inch it along, ever so slowly, until he got to a place where the piece of paper was marginally visible.
It appeared to be a standard piece of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven paper. The kind you put into your printer. There was a square, color image in the upper left quadrant of the page. It looked like a grouping of windows, although it was hard to tell for sure.
At the top of the page, some printing. Impossible to read on the monitor. But there was a logo of some kind in the upper left corner, multicolored. Lewis wasn’t sure, but he thought he recognized it. It led off with a stylized W, and there appeared to be three numbers at the tail end.
Lewis was pretty sure he knew what it was. The Whirl360 logo. For that Web site that allowed you to look at the actual streets of cities all over the world. He used it now and then. Like everyone else did at some point, he’d looked to see whether the house he’d grown up in was online. He’d keyed in the address of his Denver home, and sure enough, there it was.
If this was, as he suspected, the logo for Whirl360, then it made sense that the image on the page had been printed off that Web site.
Lewis magnified the blurry image as far as the computer would allow. It did appear to be a series of windows, like the ones on the old tenement buildings in the neighborhood where Allison Fitch’s apartment was. But it was impossible to see anything with any clarity.
Well, Lewis reasoned, if this guy could find the image online, then he could do it, too.
He opened up a browser, went to the Whirl360 site, and entered “Orchard Street, New York City.” And almost instantly, he was there, clicking his way down the street. When he got to the block where Fitch lived, he dragged the mouse across the screen, allowing himself to whirl around Orchard, looking from north to south and back again.
Maybe this guy who’d banged on the door was some kind of architecture student. Or someone from the city’s building department. Who the hell knew?
He positioned the image so he was looking directly at Fitch’s building, moved the mouse to the top of it, clicked, held, and dragged down, which had the effect of craning one’s neck upward to see the building’s upper stories.
“What?” he said under his breath. “What…is…that?”
He was focused on one particular window. He clicked to magnify the image.
“Holy shit,” he whispered.
THEY met again on the same Central Park bench. Lewis Blocker handed Howard Talliman a sheet of paper, folded once.
“What’s this?” Talliman asked.
“Something I printed off the Net. Just look at it.”
Talliman unfolded the sheet and looked at it, puzzled. “I have no idea what this is.” Howard had never been to the Orchard Street address.
“That window, that’s the apartment. What you’re holding there, that’s a printout from the Internet.”
Howard touched his index finger to the head in the window. “Lewis, is this what I think it is?”
“Yes.”
Howard handed the page back to Lewis, who tucked it into his jacket. “I still don’t understand.”
“You familiar with Whirl360?” Lewis asked.
“I don’t live in a cave, Lewis.”
“That was printed right off the site. That picture, as we speak, is online. Anyone in the world with a computer who happens to explore Orchard Street and angles right there can see that. What had to have happened is, one of those Whirl360 cars with the panoramic cameras was going along Orchard Street at the same time that Nicole was
