Watch You Die (16 page)

When he was finished, he shocked me again. “Bring your kid in as soon as you can, OK?”

“For this?”

“It’s a formality, but better safe than sorry, right?”

“Right.” But I didn’t want to bring Nat here! It would terrify him. And then I remembered something. “He gave fingerprints at the agricultural fair on the Vineyard, at the police booth, just two summers ago. Can we use those?”

“Sure.”

“And I can give you one of his recent school photos.”

“Perfect.”

He was humoring me now because he was a father and he understood. I liked this man.

“Another thing,” he said as we walked back through the detectives unit and returned to his desk. “Get me copies of dental records, for both of you.”

I nodded; at least I thought I did. My mind was reeling. I was basically to do nothing while simultaneously preparing for the worst possible outcome. How would I live with this? And then I thought of my mother – my sweet, strong, incoherent mother who had come through more than I could possibly imagine – and recognized the insignificance of my own problems.

“I’ll call today.”

He handed me his business card on which he had handwritten his cell number, and copies of a sheet entitled “STALKING LOG”. I was to fill it out each and every time Joe made a move in my direction. The idea was to record events as they occurred, not to entrust to memory details that could prove crucial in the future. Clearly, our tactic was to prepare for the worst while hoping for the best. Not what I’d expected when I walked through the door.

“It’s going to be OK,” he said in a kind voice that was reassuring regardless of whether or not it was true – whether or not it
would
be OK. He walked me back down the hall and, in a gesture I now recognized as his signature gallantry, pushed the elevator button for me and waited for it to come. “If it makes you feel any better, you’re not alone. Unfortunately I’ve had a lot of stalking victims ask for help over the years.”

“Victim? But nothing’s happened to me yet.”

“Sure it has. It’s happening to you right now; that’s why you’re here. It’s ongoing. When it’s finished – that’s when you’re a survivor of a crime. Until then, as long as you’re experiencing it, you’re a victim-in-progress. This is something I’ve said to cops and prosecutors and judges and everyone and I can’t say it enough. It’s a slow-drip crime, some people don’t even notice until the consequences …” He stopped when he read the dismay on my face.

He smiled – a friendly smile – and touched my shoulder. “My wife Angela says I’ve been doing this too long. Says I don’t understand how bad it sounds to people who aren’t used to it. Honestly, it’s a maze, but I’m here to guide you, OK?”

“OK.” But could he guide me past dangers neither of us saw?

“Keep the faith. Jesus will show you the way.” He smiled, revealing a wide gap between his two front teeth. “I hit everyone with that once.”

Laughing, I stepped into the elevator. “Thanks, Detective—”

“Nickname’s Jess.” He winked.

“Jess. Thank you.”

It was after eleven by the time I got into work. I stood in the elevator bank and waited five minutes until a door finally dinged open. And when it did, as
if
orchestrated to test me, Joe was alone inside. When he saw me a smile blossomed on his face and his eyes appeared to brighten.

“Hi!” He pressed his hand against the doorjamb to prevent the doors from closing.

I felt suddenly hot, confused, and hesitated. Stood there, remembering Jess’s advice not to acknowledge him in any way. Certainly that had to include sharing elevators with him – and the last thing I wanted was to be stuck inside a tiny exitless room with the man. He pushed his mail cart into the far corner, as if that was what was deterring me.

“There’s plenty of room. Sorry I missed you last night, by the way. Out having fun?”

I hated him
. I believed he knew perfectly well I’d been home last night. He was probably outside, watching. I said nothing.

“You’re getting back from an early interview, I bet. Morning meetings slow down the day, don’t they? I’ve been here since nine on the dot. Left a little early Friday and didn’t want to risk getting on Mac’s nerves first thing Monday. Mac’s my supervisor, nice guy. I think this job’s really going to work out. I’ll work on my writing, I
will
, and when the time’s right I’ll apply for the internship program. Maybe you can help me. Maybe—”

I walked five feet to stand in front of another elevator and stared at its tightly seamed doors. On
the
wall above, a light board showed that the next elevator was three flights away.

“I’m moving next week.” Still holding his elevator open, he leaned out into the lobby to see me. “I hope you’re still free Saturday night for dinner. Did I mention you can bring your son?”

I shifted so my back was to him. The lobby was empty except for a security guard, posted at a desk twenty feet away.

The elevator arrived. I stepped inside, feeling relieved to be away from him … until I heard the clatter of wheels on the lobby’s marble floor. The mail cart entered first, followed by Joe, whose forehead was covered with beads of sweat.

How could I do this? I, pressed into one rear corner of the elevator, and he, his cart pressed into the opposite corner while he stood there effectively blocking the doorway. He emanated a sense of blind insistence and a strange rotten kind of misery. My instincts rose above my mind and everything Jess had told me flew out the window of this windowless elevator where I was now trapped with someone who frightened me more than anyone had ever frightened me in my life. Ignoring him wasn’t working.

“Oh, so we do fit easily,” I said, glancing at his mail cart.

“Sure. I ride up and down with people and the cart all day long.” His tone was breezy in a forced way,
incompatible
with the tension in his expression. I wondered how I could ever have thought him
adorable
as I had just a week ago. Adorable and harmless and sweet. My antennae had never been more off.

“Joe.” Seized by an inspiration, I looked at him straight on now, right into his weird off-balance granite-chipped eyes. “This has to stop, OK? No more following me. No more phone calls. No more gifts. It’s become very … awkward, you know?”

“It doesn’t have to be
awkward
,” he said, adding a bitter twist in his mimicry of the word.

“But it is. We work together. There’s some basic protocol to follow, isn’t there?”

“I don’t think so, Darcy.” He was smiling now, basking in the attention I was giving him. The more of it he soaked up, the more satisfied and grotesque he looked. The mask of his face seemed to distort and magnify as if my words – any word from me, positive or negative – fed his inner monster. I saw I had made a mistake talking to him, had been making mistakes all along. “I know we could be really good friends. You’ll see. And you’re going to love the dinner I make for you on Saturday. I’m a pretty good cook. Is your kid a picky eater? I was.”

We reached the fifth floor and the newsroom. I was shaking when I stepped off the elevator, shaking and praying he wouldn’t follow me out. He didn’t. I
could
feel his eyes burning on my back as I walked away.

The newsroom was buzzing and Courtney was deep into the bones story, phone pressed to ear and simultaneously typing. When she saw me, she angled the mouthpiece away from her face.

“I’m on hold. You OK?”

“I just rode up with our little friend and I did everything Jesus told me not to.”

She was speechless so I saved her.

“My detective, Jesus Ramirez, goes by Jess. What’s
your
detective’s name?”

“I’ve got a hairdresser, not a detective.”

“Touché, lucky woman.”

“So?”

“A lot of advice, some protocol to follow. My stats are on record so if my body surfaces in the river they can identify me.”

She put her call on speaker, lay the handset on her desk – tinny muzak now piping into our section of the room – and got up to hug me. It was a short but restorative hug, and then her caller came on the line and she jumped back to work.

I took a peek into Elliot’s office but he wasn’t there. Returning to my desk, I set up my laptop and emailed Sara:
Please send me the box
. I called our dentist on the Vineyard and asked his assistant to send me copies of Nat’s and my dental X-rays; I
gave
her my credit card number so she could overnight them to my office. I phoned the Martha’s Vineyard police and asked if they could dig up those fingerprints of Nat’s – they impressed me with an immediate response that it was all computerized and they could email it by the end of the day. And then I took out one of the stalking logs Jess had supplied me with and made my first entry:
Monday, 11.00 a.m., followed me into the elevator, non-stop talk, repeated dinner invitation for Sat. night
. I stashed the log in the top drawer of my desk for future use; I had a feeling there would be plenty of opportunities.

Finally, I opened Abe Starkman’s envelope.

I was just starting to look through it when Courtney finished her phone call, so I summoned her to join me. She rolled her chair to sit beside me and I handed her pages as I finished them. When we were through, we looked at each other, excited.

“Perlotti Industries, Song Song Direct Hauling – and Metro Trucking again,” she said.

“Interesting.” Metro Trucking, which we already knew was owned by a distant cousin of Tony T’s, had been enlisted to transport the bones into storage – without proper paperwork. Finding them on the presumably
real
land sale documents strengthened Abe Starkman’s claim that the actual seller of the lots was Tony T, hiding behind his cousin’s company, an enterprise he very well may have
bankrolled
and controlled which was characteristic, after all, of how the mob operated. It also substantiated the idea that he may have bought influence when he undersold his land.

“Darcy, I’m heading over to Buildings in a few minutes to snag a hard copy of the official paperwork Livingston & Sons filed on the lot purchase, then I’m taking one of my Buildings contacts out for lunch. A good person for you to meet. Come.”

“Love to. I just need to talk with Elliot when he gets in. Did you see him this morning?”

“He was here until a little while ago, then he went to see Paul Assholdley.” She winced. “So you see? He’s on the case for you. Elliot keeps his promises, which is only one of the things I like about working for him.”

I liked Elliot too and felt he had my best interests at heart, much as he obviously didn’t care for the direction it was taking. No one did – except maybe Joe himself. I was curious, and a little afraid, to find out how Paul Ardsley would react to the news that I’d taken the problem out of house before he’d even had a chance to contain it. I wondered if they would fire Joe,
hoped
they would, but wouldn’t count on it.

Elliot still wasn’t back by eleven forty-five. Courtney began to gather her things to leave for the Buildings Department.

“Go without me,” I said. “It’s kind of effort-overlap to go together, anyway.”

“Well, yes, except that four eyes are better than two.”

“I have to wait for Elliot.”

“I know you do. Don’t worry, I’ll come back when I’m through and we’ll compare notes. Anyway now you can talk to Elliot about your source’s land sale docs; they’ll give him a dose of confidence that he’s doing the right thing.”

“I will. Have fun.”

“Oh, yes, I
love
the Buildings Department.” She rolled her eyes, hiked her green leather purse to her shoulder and strutted out of the newsroom.

I worked alone for a while before Elliot finally appeared, trying to develop a plan to unravel the lot sale documents Abe Starkman had provided. We’d have to hit every nail on the head, visit every place mentioned in the chain of ownership, follow every lead to see where it originated. Bit by bit, we would lay out the puzzle pieces and see what picture materialized. Abe Starkman was making it easy for us, delivering a road map. First the bones. Now the documents. Meanwhile a hue and cry was rising among city activists to identify the bones.

Sitting at my laptop, I Googled key words and snagged threads of popular response to the two stories we’d published so far. Like a virus, it had already
spread
throughout the Internet. What I learned confirmed my own instinct that finding out who those people had been was precisely where the story lay. Most readers and bloggers were jaded enough to expect an unholy alliance between developers, government officials and to some extent even the mob, and while it inspired outrage they seemed prepared to leave it to the experts to resolve. But death and identity? Everyone felt a primal despair at the thought of dying alone and invisible. Already that was the drumbeat that was rising in reaction to our stories: people wanted to
know. I
wanted to know.

A remark my father once made to my mother, as I trailed them around our local mall, now surfaced from the depths of memory. I was six, maybe seven, and didn’t understand what they were talking about but his tone caught my attention and vivified the moment. In his musical German accent, he turned a mall full of shoppers into ghosts in my young mind. “Eva – these faces! Strangers to us, all of them. But each has a unique soul and each lives life with purpose just as we do.
That
is what I saw in the half-dead skeletons I buried. So many of them.
Their faces
. I was just a boy and I didn’t understand but now I understand perfectly. I didn’t know them and yet I knew them all. Buried, some
alive
, without a marker! A heap of people. We failed them, we who survived. I can’t help it, Eva; their faces haunt me.”
She
took his hand, squeezed it, cast him a concerned look. We kept walking, they ahead, I behind, as was our family pattern; a triad for just two more months before we were reduced to a solitary, resilient pair.

When Elliot returned he went straight to his office and immediately buzzed my extension, asking me to join him. I shut his door without asking and sat across from him.