Shadows Still Remain (16 page)

Wednesday at eight in the morning, jackhammers start breaking up pavement on Houston.
Jesus Fucking Christ.
O'Hara throws on her coat, takes the back stairs down to the lobby and steps into the flat December light. Directly next door to the Howard Johnson Express Inn is a modest storefront bearing the hand-lettered sign
YONAH SCHIMMEL'S KNISH BAKERY—ORIGINAL SINCE
1910, and when O'Hara sees the squad car rolling toward her up Houston, she decides that's original enough for her. In her five years in the Seven, O'Hara has had the pastrami and brisket at Katz and bagels and lox from Russ and Daughters, but never darkened the threshold of Yonah's, and as she steps through the door, a tray of the eponymous steaming cylinders ascends from the basement oven via a creaking dumbwaiter. O'Hara orders one and a coffee, and in a move that surprises the ancient blond at the register, who doesn't take O'Hara for a tourist, she drops another fourteen dollars for one of the black Yonah Schimmel Original Knishes T-shirts hanging from a piece of twine stretched across the ceiling.

Back in her room, O'Hara's first encounter with Jewish comfort food is highly satisfactory. For a potato-eating mick,
it's hardly a stretch. The surge of well-being induced by the warm, sweet starch recalls the unlikely optimism she felt just before she passed out. The last thing she did the previous night was read the timeline, and after a quick search of the room, she picks it up off the floor, where it had fallen behind the desk.

She scans the eight entries and stops on the underlined phrase, “Ten feet north.” It refers to the spot where Narin, the crime scene tech, found several thick drops of Pena's blood on the curb and sewer drain. According to Narin, this is where Pena was struck from behind, probably as she bent over and got sick, but why had she turned north before she was attacked? Pena's apartment at 78 Orchard was only a seven-minute walk from Freemans, but had she been heading home, she would have walked east straight across Rivington Park, not turned north. And if Pena was not going home at four in the morning, where was she headed? Even in the harsh light of a sober morning, it's a promising question. Unfortunately, at least for now, O'Hara has no way of answering it.

O'Hara's final note, scribbled at the bottom of the page, is “one hour and fifty-one minutes.” That's the time between when Pena left McLain at her apartment and her next known destination, when she purchased those two CDs at Tower Records. Three weeks after Pena's murder, those one hundred and eleven minutes have still not been accounted for. What makes that gap in the timeline such a promising area of investigation is that Pena lied about the time twice, first to McLain when she told him she was meeting her friends for dinner, then to her friends when she told them she had just come from the gym.

O'Hara gets up from the desk, and for first time since she checked in, opens the curtains. The third-floor room faces west over Rivington Park, and standing close to the window and tilting her head to the south, she can see the outline of the Atelier towering over its tenement neighbors on the far side. Its steel skeleton looks like an ink drawing. At the base of the construction site, O'Hara can just make out the spot where Pena was attacked.

While O'Hara gazes over the leafless trees, a crosstown bus hisses to a stop beneath her. In front of the glass shelter, at the corner of Forsyth and Houston, is a vending machine for the
Post
.
SHE JUMPS
is the headline in the window, and as intended, it gets O'Hara to race down and buy a copy. It isn't until she's back in her room that she finds the sidebar on page 11 headlined
COPS ANXIOUS TO QUESTION DETECTIVE WHO FLED THE SCENE
. Illustrating the story are a pair of video stills of a woman who looks a lot like O'Hara pushing in and out of the revolving doors of Bobst Library.

The pictures are too small and blurry to cause any problems with good Samaritans on the street, but obviously Lowry and Callahan and everyone else in the Seven know who it is. This is confirmed by the six new messages on her home answering machine: four from Callahan, one from Lowry and one from a detective she's never heard of, who's working the Tomlinson suicide. O'Hara deletes the messages and tosses out the paper. At this point, the only thing that can save her ass is finding Pena's murderer. Thinking about anything else is a waste of brain cells.

O'Hara showers, pulls on her new black T-shirt. It's a little tight, but at least it's clean, and, sinking her chin into the collar of her parka, she steps back into the raw morning. She passes her favorite knishery and the Sunshine Cinema, turns right on Eldridge and east again on Rivington. Directly across the street from the Rivington Hotel, she steps down into a basement-level vintage clothing store called Edith Machinist.

O'Hara has been aware of this place, like HoJo's and Yonah's, for years but never come close to walking in, and has never bought a “vintage” or, as she would describe it, a used piece of clothing in her life. As with Schimmel's, however, she sparks immediately to the displayed items, their unique character and un-crass beauty, and she can see the affection that went into every choice. The bags hanging from pegs on the side wall look like the portraits of a dozen singular women and the boots arranged in a half circle on the floor up front like the class of whatever huddled for a reunion photo. O'Hara slips off her parka and tries on a big-buttoned navy peacoat. The dark blue sets off her fair skin and still-wet hair, and the snug fit looks so stylish that the haughty salesgirl, who had written off O'Hara with one look at her rubber-soled shoes, abandons her breakfast to help.

“That looks great on you,” she says. “And your T-shirt is so cute I can barely stand it.” Mixing and matching from three different decades, she finds O'Hara a gray cashmere sweater with black stripes, a braided leather belt with circular brass buckles, and to be worn with her jeans stuck into them, a pair of oxblood Bally boots. To cover her telltale red hair and freck
les, O'Hara tops the ensemble with a blue Nordic ski cap and big fat Gucci shades. Total cost: $290. Upgrade in her style quotient: priceless.

By the time O'Hara steps back onto the street, she looks so chic she can barely recognize herself, let alone be mistaken for a cop. With her old clothes dangling from her arm in two crisp bags, she blends right in with the skinny shopping machines walking in and out of the Rivington Hotel or sitting in the window at Moby's little tea shop. Although her new look attracts little extra attention from male pedestrians, her female rivals are all over it, icily checking her out from cap to boots.

Feeling conspicuous yet invisible, O'Hara walks down Orchard until she's facing the street from Pena's old stoop. If she's going to be able to fill in those missing one hundred and eleven minutes, O'Hara needs to retrace Pena's steps after she left her apartment for the last time. Since left leads south toward Chinatown, and Pena's next known stop, Tower Records, is north of Houston, O'Hara starts with the calculated guess that Pena began by turning north up Orchard. If O'Hara is correct, she should be able to prove it, even nineteen days later. Almost every shop on the street has a video camera mounted above the door, and a few of them probably even work.

After coming up empty at a bookstore, whose prominently displayed camera is a fake, and a bodega, whose tapes only go a couple of days back, O'Hara tries her luck at Joe's Drapery, a substantial enterprise occupying a large building at the southeast corner of Orchard and Delancey. When a salesman with a
bad rug hurries over, O'Hara fends him off with her shield and explains what she's after.

“Then you want Seth, our head of security,” says the man with a wink. “Seth wears many hats. The one he likes best is heir apparent.”

He directs her to a basement office, where a twenty-something slacker with impeccable bed head sits on a ratty couch, amusing himself on his cell. Mounted to a wall above him are two TV monitors, each split into quadrants displaying the feed from the store's eight video cameras.

O'Hara introduces herself as a detective and points to the live view of Orchard in the upper-right corner, which captures pedestrians as they stroll north and south. “You still have the tape from that camera from the night before Thanksgiving? That would be the twenty-third.”

“We should. We try to hold them twenty-one days before we start to tape over.” The kid points to a cardboard box in the corner. “Knock yourself out.”

“Or,” says O'Hara, after sniffing the air like a narc, “you could get off your spoiled ass and help me out.”

“That sounds like a much better idea.” He jumps off the couch, pulls what he estimates is the right tape from the box and stuffs it into the player. As it spools backward toward the center of the tape, pedestrians lurch past the store on a sun-filled afternoon, and when he hits
PLAY
, they stride more gracefully in the opposite direction. Then he hits
PAUSE
and reads the time code in the upper-right corner: 11:23:13:07.

“You got the right day,” says O'Hara. “Now fast-forward to eight-twenty p.m.”

He does, but the tape runs out at 18:42, almost two hours short, and when he pops in the next one and reads the time code, it's the following day.

“Jesus Christ,” says O'Hara, “you're taping over it now.”

Seth hurries to the two four-deck recorders in the corner, ejects a tape, and, looking apprehensively at O'Hara, pops it into his player and spins forward until today's overcast morning turns abruptly into the night of November 23. The time code reads 11:23:19:27.

“No sweat,” says O'Hara. “We made it with an hour to spare.”

Seth speeds forward to 20:20 and hits
PLAY
.

In the right corner of the screen, chilled New Yorkers pass the store's Orchard Street entrance. After so much fast-forwarding and rewinding, seeing them move in real time is like watching grass grow, at least until the time code hits 20:38, and Francesca Pena rushes into view.

“Stop,” says O'Hara. “Rewind a little, stop, and play it again.” Pena reappears in the frame in her dark red jacket, her hands in her pockets and body tilted forward into the wind. With her short back hair and delicate face, she looks a little like Audrey Hepburn. “That girl is hot,” says Seth.

“She's dead,” says O'Hara, seeing her alive for the first time.

Seth replays the tape three more times. From the way Pena carries herself and braces against the cold, O'Hara believes
that Pena has started out on a journey of some distance, and is not just walking a couple of blocks. She also surmises that Pena is running late.

“So what are you going to do when you take over, Seth?” asks O'Hara, already moving toward the stairs.

“What do you think I'm going to do? I'm going to liquidate—make a deal with a developer and turn the building into condos.”

“Dumb question.”

Over the next couple hours, O'Hara works slowly north up Orchard on both sides of the block. When a squad car carrying Chamberlain and another rookie patrolman, Ivan Rodriguez, rolls slowly by, they stare right through her. From Delancey to Rivington, and Rivington to Stanton, she doesn't get a thing, but from Stanton to Houston, she gets three new hits. The first is on a camera attached to a bridal shop called Adrienne's, the next two at American Apparel, a big new clothing store at the corner of Orchard and Houston, whose gleaming white walls are covered with soft-porn photos of its wholesome girl-next-door employees. On the first camera, Pena is still trucking north at the same determined clip. On the second camera, she has turned west on Houston, and the third, mounted on the westernmost corner of American Apparel, catches Pena stepping off the curb and heading west across Allen. Pena steps out of frame halfway across the wide double block. O'Hara hustles out of the store and finds the spot where Pena stepped off the curb. Her line across Allen heads directly to the entrance of the Second Avenue subway station.

When O'Hara runs down the steps and sees the size of the station, whose walkways and platforms disappear into the distance in every direction, her heart sinks. Back in her motel room, with her feet finally out of those frigging Italian boots and thawing on the electric radiator, she can think more clearly. People entering the Second Avenue station can take the F or V train south to Borough Hall and Brooklyn or north to Thirty-fourth Street, Rockefeller Center and Queens. Since Pena just spent ten minutes walking north, the uptown option seems more likely. Pre-9/11, finding footage of Pena anywhere in the subway system would have been a logistical nightmare, if not impossible. Now at least there's one central location, in the transit police precinct under Union Square, where detectives can review film from every camera in the subway system, but under the circumstances, O'Hara can't risk going there herself.

“Dar, you're out of control,” says Krekorian when she gets him on her cell. “Callahan and Lowry are already up my ass.”

“I'm sorry about that, K., but I'm in too far. I stop now, my career is over.”

“Yeah, well, whose fault is that?”

“I'm a fuckup, Serge. Always have been.”

“Utter bullshit.”

“But here's the thing. I'm making progress. That last night after Pena left McLain at her apartment, I got her entering the Second Avenue subway station on Allen at 8:43 p.m. Almost certainly heading uptown.”

“How the fuck you get that?”

“When she left her apartment, she had to go somewhere. I guessed north, and got her on four different cameras. The last one has her heading straight toward the subway.”

“Why do you think that's so valuable?”

“A couple reasons, but mainly because it's all I got.”

“That must have been quite a sight at the library last night.”

“The sound was worse.”

“Good acoustics in there?”

“The best. But as disturbed as Tomlinson must have been, I don't see an eighty-eight-pound anorexic breaking into a construction site, dragging Pena in and out, and loading her on and off a van.”

“So you want me to find out where Pena got off the subway?”

“I need it, K. It's my only chance.”

“Calm down, Dar. My shift doesn't start till four. I'll go to surveillance now. No one has to know I'm doing it for you.”

“And if they find out?”

“I go to business school, make more money than my brother.”

“Then he'll punch you.”

“That will be the day.”

“Listen…,” says O'Hara, but Krekorian, who senses that his partner's gratitude and stress are pushing her dangerously close to tears, cuts her off. “It's going to take me a couple hours at least. I'll call you from there. And I'd stay off the street as much as possible. Lowry has warrants out on you—one for interfering with an investigation and leaving the scene of a crime.”

“Fuck him.”

“That's how I feel.”