He checked the walls and found a light switch. Crossing his fingers, he flicked it on.
Buzzing fluorescent lights washed the room in pale blue. Before he’d moved down here, he had expected the tunnels and rooms to exist in a state of perpetual darkness, but had instead found lights affixed to many tunnel ceilings and working lights in long-deserted rooms.
He sat on the stool, and Edison put his warm muzzle in his lap.
“We’re in a bit of a bind, Edison.” Joe leaned his head against the wall. A bit of a bind? That was an understatement.
Joe was screwed, but maybe he could find a good home for the dog. Edison, after all, was innocent of everything, and he had good job skills to boot.
Edison whined.
The logical move was to call Daniel, meet him someplace, and go in for questioning. He’d done nothing wrong — everything would be fine. Except that he couldn’t do it. It meant that he would have to go outside.
He hated his agoraphobia. No matter what the psychiatrists said, he viewed it as cowardice. He should be able to man up, take a deep breath, and go outside. Logically, he knew that going outside wouldn’t kill him. Staying down here and playing hide-and-seek with the police and a killer might.
But he couldn’t go outside.
After he’d left his house, he’d run through the tunnels for over a mile and switched from the commuter train tracks that ran through Grand Central to the subway lines at Times Square. They were more heavily patrolled, he imagined, but at least they were patrolled by cops who weren’t specifically looking for him.
At the 68th Street/Hunter College station, he’d climbed onto a platform, hoodie pulled low over his face to keep the surveillance cameras from recognizing him, although a man coming out of the tunnels with a golden Lab was already distinctive enough that they didn’t need facial-recognition software to identify him. He stared at the friendly blue station sign with its green border and took a few deep breaths before joining a mass of people heading toward the stairs leading outside.
Each step seemed harder, and the crowd shifted him against the right-hand wall, the side reserved for the injured or weak. He fell in behind an elderly woman with a nimbus of thin white hair that shivered like dandelion seeds in the wind coming off the subway. She struggled with each step, but hauled herself upward. When she reached the step bathed in gray sunlight, she neither stopped nor slowed, but moved up to the next step, and the next. Behind her, Joe stopped.
His heart raced. Sweat drenched his T-shirt and ran down his back. His breath puffed out in front of him in rapid clouds. When he grabbed the cold railing to keep from falling, he realized that his hands were numb. A feeling of dread consumed him.
He would die here on the steps.
Edison tugged at his leash, but Joe didn’t have the strength to move. The dog took the leg of his jeans in his mouth and pulled him down a step. Joe watched Edison. The dog stood one step below him with a mouthful of wet jeans. He set his front legs far apart and dragged Joe down another step. His implacable strength comforted Joe. He released his hold on the railing and let the dog guide him through the stream of people back into the tiled tunnel and the dark safety of the platform.
He couldn’t go out there.
After that, he’d led the dog back down the tunnels to the abandoned janitor’s closet where they now sat. A dark, wet circle on his knee showed where Edison had taken hold of him. The dog deserved better than a master who was stuck down here until the cops caught him or he got hit by a train. “You’re a great dog, you know that?”
Edison cocked his head. Clearly, he didn’t think that this was news.
“OK, Yellow Dog,” he said. “Why would the CIA come to talk to me about a murder in the New York subway?”
Edison yawned.
“Don’t yawn. That’s the most interesting piece,” he said. “Think about the jurisdiction, Edison. For a simple murder, the cops would have come on their own. For a complicated murder, like the work of a serial killer who killed in multiple states, they might have also brought along the FBI. But they brought the CIA. Why?”
The dog flopped onto the dusty floor, obviously not interested in analyzing the case.
“Some partner you are.” Joe pulled treats from his pocket and handed them to Edison. Soon, he would have to sneak out and get them both real food.
He pulled out his laptop, felt ridiculously thrilled to see an electrical outlet in the corner, and compiled what he knew about the case. Not much, really. One man beaten to death recently, two men and a child bricked in decades ago. In spite of everything, it felt good to be doing something meaningful again.
Rebar was the key. Joe needed to find out why he’d been killed, and why the CIA cared. How had he known that the car was there? Had he found the treasure that he’d expected to find inside?
Joe remembered the footprints in the dust and how the man had clearly searched the skeletons’ pockets. The car itself might hold the answer.
He struggled to understand why the CIA would care about an event that far in the past. It was more likely that Rebar had been wrong about the car, that he had been chased because he’d known something from the current day, maybe had had proof about an activity that the agency desperately needed to keep secret. The answer must be in the documents that the man who had chased him had asked about.
The shaky video he’d taken of the crime scene was still on his computer. Maybe the answer was in there. He hesitated before opening it. He didn’t want to see the blood-spattered scene again. He hadn’t watched much television as a child, or movies, and he still found such images unnerving in a way that he’d never been able to explain to his college peers who’d grown up immersed in a world of simulated bloodshed.
Still, he’d have to fight his squeamishness, because he wouldn’t allow himself to be intimidated. He took a deep breath and clicked the Play button. The video started with footprints in the dust and moved to take in the skeletons that had been dragged into the center of the room. The skulls had both fallen off and rolled to rest against the far brick wall. The person who’d moved them clearly hadn’t cared about the skulls. He must have been looking for something they’d carried in their clothes.
Joe scanned through the video but didn’t see any identifying indicators that would help him to figure out the men’s identities. Because of the way that the soldier’s body was positioned, he couldn’t see the front of his shirt, where his name might have been sewn on. These people must have been important (hence, the train car), and they must have been considered dangerous, maybe because of chemical contamination or biological infection.
As if he’d known his later self would want to know, the film focused on the tiny skeleton, the one that he’d assumed belonged to a child. Unlike the others, this one wore no clothes. And its legs looked wrong. He enhanced the image and zoomed in until the images got grainy. The spine didn’t look right. It had several extra vertebrae. A tail.
Joe’s heart lightened when he realized that the bones didn’t belong to a dead child, but rather a monkey. That explained why it was naked, but it didn’t explain why someone had bricked the poor creature up deep under New York City.
Maybe it was a pet. Maybe it was more sinister, like an escaped lab monkey. Had they used monkeys for testing that long ago? If so, then perhaps the men, and the monkey, had been infected with a disease. And, now, maybe Joe was, too. He shivered.
The goal was to identify Rebar, not to solve the crime, but he’d come back and watch the video later and search for more clues. In the meantime, he fast-forwarded past the rest of the room to the part where he’d filmed Rebar’s body.