Val Brady laughs, at her refined social skills presumably. Then he sighs. “I wish I had something for you, Ellen, but the well is dry. As a fucking bone.” There are voices in the background. He’s in a bar, or a busy newsroom, she can’t tell which. “The thing is,” he goes on, “from what I’m hearing in the department? They’ve got nothing. And not publicly yet, but they’ve even stopped talking about it in terms of a regular terrorist threat. They’re thinking more Beltway sniper now, with some kind of a twist to it, political maybe or… who knows. It’s all just guesswork. The eyewitness accounts they have so far are pretty confused, and they’re not holding out much hope either for the surveillance material they’ve managed to gather.”
“Holy shit.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty weird, alright. And because this was the third hit, or attempted hit anyway, the story is just going to mushroom, you know. With everyone waiting to see what happens next. I’m telling you, watch what it does overnight.” He pauses. “The cops are going apeshit, as well. I mean, this is really bad for the city.”
Ellen can’t believe it. “They’ve got nothing?”
“That’s my understanding.” He pauses. “I spoke to one senior detective on the case earlier this evening, and it was incredible, I’d never seen anything like it, he was putting his hands together, looking up, and saying, Just one lousy clue, Lord, that’s all I ask, just one lousy fucking clue.”
Ellen is stunned, but before Val Brady has a chance to ask her any questions, she mumbles something and gets off the phone.
She makes it back to the apartment in about two minutes flat.
She goes straight to her desk, calls up the file, and sits watching it with her jacket still on.
Adrenaline has cut a swathe through her buzz from the joint, and the clip isn’t quite the lost Kubrick masterpiece it seemed like it might be back in Flannery’s, but it nonetheless gives a much clearer idea of what happened outside the Rygate than the MSNBC version-the one that’s been running for most of the day, and that the cops and the Feds are now presumably going through with a fine-tooth comb.
This one shows faces.
It’s fleeting, but you can see them-two young guys, white, nondescript, sort of scruffy. They’re like members of some indie band you’ve never heard of.
But who are they?
She watches it again.
The first thing you see is Lebrecht emerging from the revolving doors and then the uniformed doorman suddenly lurching sideways. He collides with Gray Hoodie; they entangle and in turn collide with another man, who falls over them and rolls onto the sidewalk. In the background, there’s a melee as Woolly Hat struggles with a couple of suited limo drivers. There’s a lot of shouting, but no words can be made out, and then there’s a really loud bang, which everyone reacts to by pulling back-including Ellen, but only for a split second. In the confusion, Woolly Hat breaks free, Gray Hoodie struggles to his feet, and they both take off in different directions. Gray Hoodie heads straight out into the traffic. Someone then slides over the front of a car to follow him, but this person is immediately blocked by a bus. When the bus moves on, Gray Hoodie has disappeared. In the stunned aftermath, one of the limo drivers clutches his side, and another comes to his aid. The doorman pulls out his cell phone and barks into it as an ashen-faced Scott Lebrecht leans back against the wall, poking a finger-curiously-into his own chest.
Sirens are soon rising in the background, and as the first one closes in on the scene, Ellen withdraws.
The clip is jerky and blurry in parts, but enough of it is clear, in three- and four-second bursts, to make it feel like there’s something there, something in it to be seen.
If you look hard enough.
She takes off her jacket and sits at the desk, hunched forward, leaning in close to the screen.
And watches it again.
And again.
She pauses, fast-forwards, rewinds. Plays it with sound, plays it without.
Eventually-after maybe the ninth or tenth replay-she does spot something. It’s tiny, hardly a lead at all, and may well prove to be of no significance whatsoever, but at the same time it’s the kind of thing she could imagine Val Brady’s NYPD source zeroing in on.
She plays it over and over. Gray Hoodie is on the sidewalk, wrestling with the doorman, and at one point in the struggle-for less than a second-his zip-front jacket gets shoved up a bit, over his abdomen. Under the jacket he’s wearing a dark T-shirt, and on the T-shirt something is printed, some lettering, a word or words.
She freeze-frames it.
The only thing she can make out, the only thing that’s clearly visible, is a single letter, an uppercase A. It’s in some weird font. The succeeding couple of letters are a complete blur.
And that’s it.
She grabs the image, saves it, and prints off a copy.
She holds up the page to study it.
A.
Significance? There can’t possibly be any. It just seems like it might be significant because it’s the only concrete, extractable, quasi-evidentiary element from the whole clip. There’s no point at which the gun is visible, for instance. The two faces are visible, okay, but that’s of no use to Ellen. It’s not like she’s got any face-recognition software and a database she can run them through.
So… just a fragment of something printed on a T-shirt, then?
Yeah. She sighs, and places the sheet of paper next to the keyboard on her desk. She leans back in the chair.
Either she stops this right here, or she takes it forward in some way.
But how?
For a few minutes, in the still silence of the apartment, staring into space, she mulls it over.
A.
A.
A.
She glances at the sheet of paper again.
The font is weird. Half Gothic-y, half futuristic. What does she know about fonts? Not a lot.
She leans forward and reaches for the keyboard.
8
FRANK OPENS HIS EYES. It’s morning. He must have fallen asleep at some point, even though it felt like he was awake all night. He remembers lying there staring into the void, aware of each hour passing on the clock, his thoughts on a continuous loop but at the same time maddeningly, perpetually incomplete.
He tried to go over his finances, to calculate how long he might be able to string things out, but the figures kept dissolving and re-forming, refusing to compute into any comprehensible pattern.
He tries again now, sitting on the edge of the bed. Fully awake this time, he finds it just as hard, though for different reasons. He may have simplified everything-recalibrated his priorities, consolidated his accounts, cut down on his outgoings-but all of that was done in the context of paid employment. Now, with a negligible severance package and any prospects of new employment hopelessly compromised, the figures might compute, but not into any pattern he wants to comprehend.
He takes a shower and gets dressed.
His phone is on the kitchen table. He passes it on his way to the fridge.
OJ first.
But holding the fridge door open, about to reach in for the Tropicana carton, he hesitates. Then he turns quickly and picks the phone up from the table. Like an idiot, he’s been putting this off, as though the delay were some form of Zen discipline.
He turns the phone on and waits.
Keys in his PIN.
Waits.
Fridge door still open.
No messages, no voicemail.
Fuck.
He goes back and rereads the various texts he has sent to Lizzie since Saturday. There are four of them, all short and to the point. Call me, basically. Plus, he’s left her about three voicemail messages.