“Jesus, that’s amazing,” Remy said.
“Thank you.”
“I mean, how did you know to look for…” Remy was having trouble following all of this. “How did this… I mean… it’s just one piece of paper. All this for…”
Markham got serious again. “What are you saying, Brian?”
“Nothing… I’m not saying anything. I’m just amazed. I just don’t see how you knew to connect… and you did all this work for… a recipe?” Remy looked through the jeweler’s loupe again. “You don’t even know that it had anything to do with that day… I mean… maybe she took it off her wall months earlier.”
Markham pointed to the birthday picture again. “Her twenty-sixth birthday was six days before the attack. That’s when this photo was taken, her twenty-sixth birthday – six days before she supposedly died.”
“Maybe someone else picked up the recipe after… I mean, the paper went everywhere, didn’t it?”
Markham nodded as if he’d been expecting such an answer. “There is no dust on this recipe, Brian. None. We had it tested in the lab. Right after we made the fish. This sheet of paper had to be in a briefcase or in a purse. It was not blown out of the building. It was taken out beforehand.”
Remy looked at the office picture again. She was even prettier in this one, shy and wide-eyed, and it occurred to Remy that she was in love with whoever took the picture.
“Yeah, that’s what we think, too,” Markham said.
Jesus. Was he still saying aloud what he was thinking? Remy looked up to see if he was speaking this thought too, but Markham didn’t seem to notice if he was. He put the two pictures side by side: March smiling in a restaurant, March smiling at her desk.
“These pictures were taken with the same camera. Whoever took them is the key. A lover. Possibly illicit. We find the person who took these pictures, we’re halfway there,” Markham said. “I believe that if we find this camera, there’s a good chance we’ll find March Selios alive. And there’s a good chance we’ll find her with someone you might find interesting.”
Remy felt slow, as if he were thinking in mud. “Who?”
Markham reached in his briefcase and emerged with another picture, of March sitting outside at a little table on a rooftop with a handsome young Middle Eastern man, his hair and beard both at stubble length, his deep-set eyes seeming to peer through the camera.
“This was taken on the roof of March’s apartment building. March cooked the meal and a neighbor served them and took this picture. The man is Bishir Madain,” Markham said. “Saudi ex-pat. In the United States for twelve years. Worked for an importing consortium. Romantically linked with Ms. Selios until about eighteen months ago. Mr. Madain hasn’t been seen since the morning of the attacks. We have recovered documentation – telexes, e-mails, rustic catalog order forms – that could indicate that Mr. Madain is part of a sleeper cell here. We believe he may even have had advance knowledge of the attacks that morning, and that he may have decided to alert his old girlfriend.”
“But I still don’t see how-”
Markham slid a two-page interview report across the table. On top was stamped the word Classified and the initials D.D. “That morning, at 7:12 A.M., soon after arriving, Ms. Selios called in a repair order for the laser printer on her floor. At 7:48, the technician arrived, as you’ll see by his interview. The technician had always found Ms. Selios to be-” Markham looked at his notes. “ – smoking hot. That morning, he flirted with Ms. Selios, who was, he claims, not entirely unaware of his intentions or unimpressed by his mac-daddy game. Dude was workin’ it, when March suddenly received a telephone call. She appeared agitated by the call. The technician was removing a jammed sheet of paper from the laser printer when he looked up and saw March Selios walking toward the elevators, crying. The technician himself left a few minutes later, arriving on the main floor, and was, as far as we know, the last person to get off that floor before…” Markham mouthed the word boom, and shrugged, as if that explained it.
Remy was surprised to hear himself asking questions. “Did anyone see her leaving the building? Or afterward? Is there any other evidence that she’s alive?”
Markham looked pleased. “These questions are why we brought you in.”
Remy looked down at the interview transcript. “I don’t know. I mean – couldn’t that call have been anything?” he said. “An argument with a boyfriend? Maybe she wasn’t going to the elevator. Maybe she went to the bathroom. What have you got here – a horny repairman and a recipe. And that’s supposed to prove she got advance warning?”
Markham pointed at the close-up of March Selios’s cubicle. “Imagine the walls of a young woman’s cubicle. Covered in pictures and recipes, Cathy cartoons, and Buddhist koans. Now, let’s say she has a fight with her boyfriend, as you say, and she runs off to the bathroom. Would she really stop to strip the walls of her cubicle on her way out? Would she grab recipes and pictures? Why would it occur to her that she was not coming back?”
Markham held out his palms again, then began collecting his papers. He glanced up at Remy. “Any questions before you get started?”
Remy didn’t know where to start. “This all seems so… sketchy. Maybe it’s just me, but…” He rubbed his eyes, trying for the millionth time to clear the streaks. “I’m having a lot of trouble… connecting things.”
Markham stared at him for a long moment and then nodded and looked like he might cry. “I know. It’s hard. I forget sometimes that you guys went through hell that day. I can’t know what that was like. None of us can. This is tough. And it never gets easier. But that’s precisely why we wanted you.” Markham reached back into his briefcase for the index card in the baggie. “Read the last line of this ‘recipe.’”
Remy read it: Garnish with two twisted orange slices.
Now Markham handed him another detail blowup, this one from the photo of March and Bishir Madain at dinner on her roof. On the platter between them he could clearly see what looked like a piece of fish garnished with two twisted orange slices. Then Markham cocked his eyebrows, as if he’d made another ironclad case, and took the picture back. “Look, this is going to be tough. I’m not going to kid you. But we’ve got to find March Selios. And if it turns out she is, in fact… dead… well, then everything is copacetic. Not for her, obviously…” He laughed uncomfortably. “But for the record. That’s our federally mandated charge, after all – to have a pure record. All the columns adding up. But if, in fact, she’s alive – well, then, we’ve got a problem. In fact, we’ve got a big problem.” And he closed the briefcase.
“A FORMALITY,” said a woman in her fifties, tall and professional, staring over the rims of stylish glasses up at Remy. She sat at a wide desk, next to a rooster-haired man roughing up his nose with a wet handkerchief.
“There are no right answers,” the man said. “Relax.”
The woman asked, “Chronic back pain?”
“What?” Remy asked.
“Just to get the paperwork flowing,” the tall woman said. “A formality. We just have to check a box.”
The man asked, “Chronic back pain?”
Remy looked around the room. There was a poster on the wall behind him showing a cartoon man with a push broom through his head like an arrow and the caption: Industrial Accidents Are Nothing To Laugh At. Remy leaned forward. “My back is fine,” he said. “I mean, if I need anything, I guess it’s some kind of counselor. See, I’m having some trouble… focusing. There are these gaps. I lose track of things.”