End of Secrets (10 page)

EIGHT

The bar at the Empire Hotel was on the roof with a view up and down the seam of Broadway. To the west, the sun set over the Metropolitan Opera House and, farther in the distance, the New Jersey horizon. At five thirty, the bar was only beginning to show signs of a busy Friday night: suits wound down with scotches and loosened ties, underdressed tourists rested their legs and crooked necks, and couples began dates that would eventually move across the street to the opera or ballet.

Kera circled once through the ba
r’s
seating areas, first indoor and then outdoor, looking more like a businesswoman searching for a friend than someone reconnoitering the place. Figuring that any bartender established enough to work the lucrative Friday-night shift was as likely as anyone to know the regulars, Kera returned to the main bar inside.

The bartender was a woman in her late twenties dressed in a collared maroon shirt under a black vest. She was shaking a martini as the lights of the Upper West Side twinkled through liquor bottles displayed on ledges behind her. She approached Kera within seconds, smiling professionally as she peeled a cocktail napkin from a stack and laid it on the bar. Service happened fast around here.

“Want to see a cocktail menu?” the bartender asked.

Kera said she would. When the woman stepped away to retrieve it, Kera opened a copy of the
Post
, which sh
e’d
bought in the hote
l’s
lobby.

After leaving her voice mail for Parker in the cab, she realized sh
e’d
rushed out too quickly and had to call Jones to ask him to look up a few things. Running data-intensive HawkEye queries on her tablet generated reports that were classified and were therefore not accessible on the device outside Haw
k’s
secure offices. She wanted to know if there were any patterns in the time of day or day of the week that the four subjects had visited the Empire Hotel. The answer was yes: mostly early evening, almost always on weekdays, usually Friday. She also wanted to know specifically when Rowena Pete had been at the hotel. As a minor celebrity, she would be the most conspicuous in the minds of any of the staff that worked at the hotel bar. Jones told her that the singer had made two appearances in recent months. Kera copied all this down in cryptic shorthand and thanked him.

“Great view,” Kera said, glancing out the window when the bartender returned. Sh
e’d
left the tabloid in front of her open to a prominent headline over three photograph
S:
L
AST
K
NOWN
P
ICTURES OF
R
OWENA
P
ETE
. The bartender nodded politely, neither closed off from nor inviting conversation. “How long have you worked here?”

“A year, I guess.”

“I mean this as a compliment. You look like the kind of person who is
n’t
just a bartender. What else do you do?”

This question earned Kera a cautious glance, followed by a slight smile. “
I’m
an acto
r . . .
sometimes. Tonight
I’m
a bartender. What can I get you?”

“
I’l
l have a chardonnay.”

The bartender headed for a rack of wineglasses. There were two cameras on the ceiling behind the bar, one in the corner overlooking the seating area, and there had been one in the elevator on her way up. They were all part of the hote
l’s
private, closed-circuit surveillance system, off-limits to HawkEye without a warrant.

The bartender returned with a glass of wine, and Kera looked up from the article to thank her. She caught the bartender glancing at the photographs. This was her opening.

“Bizarre, is
n’t
it?” Kera said. “I always wanted to see her in concert.”

“I saw her a couple of times. It was a really great show. And—” She hesitated, as if deliberating whether it was appropriate to divulge what she had been about to say. Kera kept her eyes on the photographs, feigning nonchalance. “Sh
e’s
been in here before. Just a few weeks ago, actually.”

“Oh, yeah? Tha
t’s
cool.” Kera had learned from Jones that Rowena Pete used her credit card at this bar on a Tuesday evening exactly twenty-four days earlier. “Was she nice in person?”

“Yeah, totally.” She grinned. “Well, I did
n’t
really talk to her, but she was
n’t
rude or anything.”

Kera leaned in, affecting mock shame for wanting to gossip. “Who was she here with?”

The bartender flicked her eyes to meet Ker
a’s
briefly, and then she looked away. “No one important,” she said. Perhaps the bartender was just afraid of getting in trouble with management for discussing clientele, but Ker
a’s
instinct told her that the question had struck a deeper nerve.

The bartender made a show of glancing down the bar, where stools were starting to fill and a few pairs of eyes were trained her way, pleading for drinks. “I gotta get to these people. Let me know if you need anything else.”

Kera finished the last of her wine and paid in cash. Ten bucks for a glass of chard. A waste of money, but maybe not a waste of time. The bartende
r’s
name was on the receipt. Erica. This Erica knew more about whomever Rowena Pete had met with at the bar, and there was something overriding her human instinct to gossip about it.

Kera rode the elevator down to street level and stopped on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. She glanced around until she made the two surveillance cameras—both operated by the NYPD—that had captured the subjects entering and leaving. One was across Columbus Avenue above the Lincoln Center taxi stand. The other was attached to the hotel itself, mounted on the corner of the building nearest Broadway. She called Jones on her way to the subway and told him about her conversation with the bartender. “Whatever this girl knows, sh
e’s
holding it close to her chest.”

“You coming back to the office?”

“Nope. Do
n’t
wait up for me.”

Jones was silent on the line for a moment. “Yo
u’r
e going to scout the other location, are
n’t
you?”

She smiled. There was no point in lying. “I want to get a look at what the surveillance cameras could
n’t
see.”

“Wait until tomorrow when ther
e’s
daylight.”

“Are you worried about me, J. D. Jones?”

He hesitated. “Yo
u’r
e not authorized to work in the field. Gabby was clear about that, Kera.”

“Your concern is noted.”

“The subjects were out there months ago. Even if we knew what to look for—and we do
n’t
—i
t’s
probably gone.”

“
I’m
just doing my homework. I wo
n’t
sleep if I do
n’t
check it out.” Sh
e’d
reached the stairs to the 1 train. “Speaking of sleep, do you ever go home, Jones?”

“Home is boring compared to what I get to do all day in this room.”

She noticed a security camera across Broadway, mounted on a little arm jutting out from the corner of the Time Warner Center. The lens was directed at the plaza where she was standing.

“Jones?”

“Yeah?”

She paused. “Never mind. W
e’l
l talk tomorrow.”

“Be safe,” he said, but she was already descending the stairs toward the screech of a breaking train.

Boredom turned out to be a bigger obstacle than safety. The industrial blocks by the West Side Highway were deserted. She spotted a few homeless people, a few intoxicated revelers who had stumbled west from the Meatpacking District, and a night jogger coming off the bike path that ran along the Hudson. She took a few pictures of the empty streets and then walked east until she could flag down a cab to take her home.

NINE

The following Tuesday, the rooms of their apartment were filling with first light as Kera tiptoed from bed to bathroom to kitchen, a dance just delicate enough to keep Parker from waking. She skipped her morning run, swearing it would be the only time this week. It was counterintuitive that she ran more when she was engrossed in a case, but it had proven to be so. Her body seemed to crave the morning exertion. Today, though, she was on a mission to beat Jones to the office, just once, and the run was sacrificed.

When she pushed through the Control Room doors a few minutes before seven, there he was at his workstation, every screen around him lit as if he were a stockbroker hours into the trading day. He was exactly as sh
e’d
left him the night before, except he was wearing a different T-shirt.

“Have a look at this,” Jones said by way of a greeting.

“What time do you get here every day?
I’v
e never seen your workstation empty.”

“Missing people do
n’t
find themselves,” he said, not looking up.

“Is that what gets you out of bed?” Sh
e’d
meant it as harmless ribbing, but Jones fell into a tense silence. She realized she did
n’t
know anything about him other than what sh
e’d
gleaned from their interactions in this room.

The moment expired when, without looking up at her, he said, “I think I found something.” Except for a HawkEye map of the city on his center monitor, all his screens were filled with images of murals and sculptures. “
I’v
e been looking for additional cases of missing people who fit the profile of our
A
TLANTIS
subjects. I have
n’t
found any of those yet, but every time I run a new query, I stumble across these.”

He leaned back to let her get a look at all the monitors. She recognized the colorful billboard mural and the odd sculpture bolted to the pavement at the center of a city intersection. Sh
e’d
seen him looking at those before. But now, in addition to those, there were other murals, sculptures, and even video projections. She counted nine of them total.

“What are they?”

“The
y’r
e the work of an anonymous street artist called It.”

“It?”

“Tha
t’s
right. Ever heard of him? Or her?”

Kera shook her head. “Him or her?”

“No one seems to know. Ther
e’s
quite a bit of chatter about it online.” He moved one of the images aside and pulled up a list of articles and blog posts about the artist.

“Wha
t’s
the connection to the
A
TLANTIS
case?”

“I did
n’t
see it at first either. Tha
t’s
why I kept dismissing these every time they popped up. But then I saw this.” He tapped on a link to a
Village Voice
article titled
W
HO
I
S
I
T
? “
I’l
l spare you the artsy bullshit. What caught my attention is that nobody knows who the artist is. I do
n’t
mean that the artist keeps him- or herself anonymous, you know, as some sort of gimmick. I mean that there is no earthly evidence that this person exists, other than these works of street art that seem to just appear. At least, tha
t’s
what this article claims. Obviously, that did
n’t
sit well with me. I do
n’t
believe in ghosts, and tha
t’s
because I believe in cameras. I take it kind of personal when HawkEye ca
n’t
ID someone.”

“You used HawkEye to look for the artist?”

“Yes. And it turned up nothing. Ther
e’s
no trace of this person,” he said, as though hating each of the words as they came out of his mouth.

“Except for the art itself,” Kera said, admiring it. “You think this artist might be connected to the others?”

“Tha
t’s
what I was thinking. But the timeline does
n’t
fit. The first person we know of to go missing disappeared eleven months ago. The first piece of art like this appeared a year and a half ago.” He pointed to the billboard mural.

“Are you sure i
t’s
the same person creating all of these?”

“
I’m
not sure of anything. But look at them and you tell me.”

He was right. The nine works of art were nothing alike in medium or size, but they did possess an unmistakable singularity, a bold and fearless quality that went beyond what most graffiti artists did to texture the city. This case had challenged Ker
a’s
instincts almost constantly, but on this account they felt solid: the nine installations had been created by a single mind.

“It,” she said, shaking her head.

Kera left Jones in the Control Room and went back to her office, where she stood for a few minutes studying the note cards on the wall. The
y’d
been hanging there for a few days, and now when she looked at them, she realized that they had become too familiar. Sh
e’d
originally arranged them chronologically by date of disappearance, and that perspective had gone stale. She needed to look at them in a different way. She took down all the cards and thought about ways to reorder them. She started with age—Rowena Pete, at twenty-eight, was the youngest; Cole Emerson was the oldest at thirty-four. But what did that tell her? Next she thought about the ways they had disappeared. All could have been described as staged suicides, though Emerson, the filmmaker, and Shea, the novelist, could have been categorized as boating accidents. But she did
n’t
think there was anything accidental about any of their disappearances.

The last criteria sh
e’d
written onto the cards referred to the subject
s’
occupations or otherwise notable hobbies. This was the one area where there was a clear separation: three artists and a lawyer.