14
Finn rode the F train one stop to Broadway-Lafayette, changed for a downtown G train and then changed again for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, which she rode all the way down to Bowling Green. She stood rigidly, her hand wrapped around the pole, staring at the doors and not really seeing anything at all or anyone around her. Seeing Delaney had been the last straw. The look of the man as he came hurtling across the street wasn’t that of someone willing to offer a helping hand. He already thought she was somehow implicated in Peter’s death and probably had something to do with Crawley’s murder as well. Adding Raptor Head to the body count wasn’t going to make him any less suspicious even if it had obviously been self-defense. She didn’t even know who the Asian kid was, for crying out loud! Suddenly she was a suspect in multiple murders with cops chasing after her up and down New York streets and into the subway.
The train rolled into the Bowling Green station at the southern tip of Manhattan and Finn snapped out of her fugue. According to the map the next stop was Borough Hall in Brooklyn. She’d had a hard enough time learning how to navigate around Manhattan; this was definitely not the time to start on a new borough. When the doors slid open she stepped out along with a couple of dozen bright young things, male and female, out to make their mark on Wall Street, no doubt.
Finn climbed up to the surface, glanced briefly in the direction of where the Twin Towers had stood, then turned away and crossed over into Battery Park. She found a bench down by the jogging path that ran right around Manhattan’s big toe and stared downriver at the Statue of Liberty, a distant ghost in the morning haze. She stripped off her knapsack, put it on the bench then sat down beside it, curling one long leg underneath herself, thinking out her options.
Her name was Fiona Katherine Ryan from Columbus, Ohio, and she was an art history student at NYU. She’d slept with fewer than half a dozen guys, she liked Hдagen-Dazs better than Ben and Jerry’s and she didn’t really believe anything she heard on Howard Stern or saw on Sex and the City reruns. She’d traveled to Italy, spent a little bit of time in Amsterdam and Paris and she’d been well and truly drunk about three times in her life. She didn’t smoke dope or take drugs except for Extra Strength Tylenol when she had especially bad period cramps. She worried about zits in the winter. The biggest secret she had was the knowledge that she would have sex with Johnny Depp in the middle of Times Square if he asked her to, which wasn’t likely. She knew she was fairly intelligent, maybe a little smarter than average. She knew she was pretty, but not beautiful, which was fine with her. She liked small animals, especially cats. She didn’t much care for spiders or anchovies.
In other words, she was completely normal. So what was she doing being homeless, chased by cops and guys with great big knives? She was caught in the middle of something but she didn’t have the slightest idea what. All she knew right now is that she wished she smoked. She sighed and stared at the ripply patch in front of her where the waters of the East River and the Hudson met. That was kind of how she felt right now-swept along.
She had a twentieth-century English lit prof they called the Bald Bear because he had hair all over his body and none on his head. He was in his forties, wore argyle socks and shorts to school in the middle of February and talked on endlessly about the Ambler theorem. Eric Ambler was an early thriller writer and all of his books followed the same pattern: an ordinary person suddenly finds him- or herself in an extraordinary, and usually dangerous, set of circumstances. The Bald Bear had all sorts of his own theories about why Ambler wrote this way, but Finn was pretty sure he did it because he knew that spies and murderers weren’t going to be reading his books-ordinary people were, so why not deal them into the game?
Well, that was her, and for the moment she couldn’t see any way out. And in this case it was no game. If she went and handed herself over to Delaney she’d have to start everything by explaining why she ran. She had visions of Law amp; Order interrogation rooms, being interviewed by Lenny Briscoe and being thrown into some women’s jail. The only other option she could see was simply getting out of town and going back to Columbus. She had a key to the house, a bank account and friends. She could camp out there forever, or at least until her mother got back from the Yucatбn or wherever. At least she’d be safe there. Or would she?
Someone had been waiting in her apartment and had slashed Peter’s throat. Probably the same person who had killed Crawley and had tried for her again this morning. She didn’t kid herself that the Asian kid on the bicycle was anything else but hired help. Crazy as it sounded, someone wanted her dead because she’d seen, or simply knew about the drawing from Michelangelo’s notebook, and they weren’t going to stop chasing her now. How difficult would it be to find out who the nude model with the red hair was at the New York Studio School, or Cooper Union? Not to mention NYU. She wouldn’t be difficult to trace back to Columbus at all.
A tug slid by, sending up a muscular-looking bow wave. So what did you do when you were drowning and going down for the third time? You screamed for help, that’s what you did. Finn didn’t have a bullhorn or a whistle but she did have a phone number.
“If it’s really life or death and you can’t get in touch with me for some reason phone this number.” Her mother had given her the longest, dirtiest look ever and then scowled even harder. “And I mean real life or death, sister, or you can come back and finish college here and marry David Weiner.”
The ultimate threat. David Weiner, aka the Weenie, had loved her since he was six years old and still carried a torch for her she could see from Manhattan on clear nights. He had been the only boy in Columbus to throw up during his own bar mitzvah, splashing the rabbi and narrowly missing the Torah he was supposed to be reading from. The Weenie was now a space architect, which wasn’t half as exotic as it sounded. It meant he never actually designed anything; you told him how many people you had to fit into a building and he told you how many toilets you needed and how many cubic feet of air you were going to need so people wouldn’t suffocate. David was, of course, now getting extremely wealthy, but was still dull as plaster drying. He had hair like a scouring pad and feet so big he could walk across Lake Erie and not get his ankles wet.
According to her mother the man at the other end of the phone number had worked with her father. Her mother had said it strangely at the time, as though her father had been something other than a professor of anthropology from Ohio State. Finn had quizzed her, but her mom had clammed right up. The look on her face said it wouldn’t be wise to dig any deeper.
Her mother had used an indelible laundry marker to ink the number onto the inside flap of her knapsack, reversing the number and adding three extra digits to the left and two to the right. When she was finished doing that she made Finn memorize the number until she had it cold. Not the normal mother-henning you expect from a mom sending her daughter off to university, but then Amelia McKenzie Ryan was no normal mother hen. Whatever the case, this was the life and death situation she’d talked about. Finn lifted up her pack and walked back across the park to the pay phone at the edge of the sidewalk. She dug a quarter out of her jeans, dropped it in the slot and punched in the numbers. It rang three times and then anticlimactically it clicked over to an answering machine.