End of Secrets (11 page)

TEN

The law offices of Milton & Booth sat in a cozy five-room suite on the seventh floor of an aging building on lower Broadway. Most of the walls were obscured by file cabinets, bookshelves, and other relics of the declining printed-word era. Any free wall space was jammed with framed plaques and law school diplomas.

When Kera was led by a secretary into the corner office, Raymond Booth was behind his cherrywood desk, frowning at the file his paralegal had created for their appointment. Booth was a presence, a human backstop of broad shoulders topped off with a head that seemed a scale or two larger than the rest. The temples of his eyeglasses disappeared into bushy gray hair on their reach for his ears.

“I understand you made an appointment with me, Ms. Mersal, but I do
n’t
see any of your paperwork. No matter, we can address that later.” He was kind, almost jovial. “What can I do for you?”

Kera introduced herself as a journalist from the
Global Report
. Booth glanced again at the file, understanding now why it was empty. This did not dampen the warmth of his smile.

“Unless yo
u’r
e here for legal advice,
I’m
afraid I wo
n’t
be of much help to you. I do
n’t
talk to the press about my clients.
I’m
sure you understand.”

“
I’m
not here about any of your clients. I wanted to ask you a few questions about Caroline Mullen.”

“Caroline,” Booth said. His sadness was real, even touching, though appropriate for a colleague. “Yo
u’r
e doing a story about her?”

“Perhaps. She was an associate here?”

“Tha
t’s
right.”

“What was she like?”

“She was first-rate,” he said without hesitation. “We lucked out with her. She was a class above us,
I’m
not ashamed to say. We never get associates of her caliber.”

“What did she do around here?”

“Nearly everything. W
e’r
e a small firm, as you can see. She wore more hats than anyone, and if she complained, she did it the right way—behind my back.”

“You specialize in estate law?”

“Yes.”

“Which means what?”

“Families today are as unique as ever. We help couples, married and otherwise, structure their investments, their property, their taxes and wills so that they can grow and protect their wealth over the course of their lives and beyond.”

“Do you remember what Caroline was working on when she disappeared?”

“I remember exactly what it was because as soon as she was gone, it nearly ruined us trying to pick up all her casework.”

Kera waited, hoping that he would elaborate, but he did
n’t
. “Can you give me an idea of what that casework involved?”

“I really ca
n’t
get into any details that involve our clients.”

“I understand. But, generally, what was her role?”

“Like any associate, Caroline drafted and filed documents with the courts and the state. But she picked things up faster than most. It was
n’t
long before she was handling all the due diligence for new clients. She was extremely good at it.”

Kera nodded. “She was good at her work. Do you think she enjoyed it?”

“Well, I was
n’t
close to her. I was just her boss—” he said, launching into the safe, automatic answer. But then he stopped himself on second thought. “Actually, yes,
I’m
confident she did like it. She had a passion for the law that ca
n’t
be faked. It certainly ca
n’t
be taught.”

“A passion?” Kera said. “What do you mean by that?”

Boot
h’s
eyes narrowed as he searched for the words. “Caroline wa
s . . .
idealistic.” Kera wrote that word down. “She was young, of course. And most young people are idealistic. But this was more than that. Fresh lawyers with her intelligence and Ivy League pedigree head straight to the big firms. Corporate finance, M-and-A, big-time employment law. But not Caroline. Her curiosity about the law was more grounded than that. She was interested in people and what they wanted to get out of life.
I’v
e seen a lot of associates come through here. Very few make an impact like she did. Especially in the short time before her passing.”

“Before she went missing, you mean.”

“Yes,
I’m
sorry. I
t’s
been long enough that, well, I guess
I’d
forgotten that they had
n’t
recovered her body.”

“But you believe sh
e’s
dead?”

Kera could see the answer within the internal struggle that was all over his face. “I see,” he said softly. “Tha
t’s
why yo
u’r
e here.”

“Do you have doubts about what happened to her?”

Booth shrugged. “The cops say they found her bike on the George Washington Bridge.”

“Yes,” Kera said. “And do you think she jumped?”

Booth hesitated. “I do
n’t
. No. Not Caroline. But what does it matter what I think? Sh
e’s
certainly gone. If all the evidence points to her jumping, well, at some point that reality must be faced.”

Kera nodded. “Mr. Booth, can I ask you a professional question? For your legal opinion, that is.”

“
I’l
l give you one freebie. After that
I’l
l have to bill you. Talking to reporters is not what keeps the lights on around here.”

“I understand. What
I’m
wondering is whether someone like Caroline, being an expert in estate law, would know the sorts of things one would want to get in order if they planned to fake their own death.”

The Control Room was never empty, but after business hours it settled into a productive peace. Rarely anymore were there overnight teams tracking real-time surveillance targets on the other side of the world. J. D. Jones looked around the room and pondered this, not for the first time. It was half past nine, and he was sitting at the center of his semicircle workstation, surrounded 180 degrees by eleven large LED screens. The monitors ran off a computer linked to Haw
k’s
network, which had access to hundreds of public and private surveillance networks around the globe. During the first year that Hawk had been up and running, it was common to have one of the Mideast task forces working into the small hours. Two, sometimes three times a week, a group of men and women spent a night in the pit monitoring some action in Syria or Iran where it was daylight, local time. But not lately. Lately h
e’d
seen less and less surveillance from overseas. It made him uncomfortable.

Jones loved the ambiance of a room lit by LED screens. H
e’d
never watched much television growing up and watched almost none now, but he would have bet there were
n’t
a hundred people in history who had spent more time than he had in front of screens. Television was for passive audiences; computers were for builders. Even when he was just watching his screens, like he was now, it was an interactive experience.

He had two screens up, one for each of their live HawkEye profiles. She was on a downtown N train, reading unclassified e-mails on her smartphone. Jones noticed the way she took different trains each day, and sometimes cabs, and how she never walked the same route two days in a row. But however she got there, she almost always went directly home after she left the office. There she would usually log back into the Hawk network to do more work. The fiancé typically left his office much earlier in the evening and killed a few hours at a bar before going home.

Jones did
n’t
like watching her, yet he could
n’t
always help it. A camera in the Prince Street station captured her disembarking from the train, and another showed her come up onto the sidewalk and turn east. There were no more cameras between the subway and her apartment, but ten minutes later the yellow HawkEye dot confirmed that sh
e’d
reached her address. The fiancé, HawkEye told him, was already home.

Jones turned his attention to the fianc
é’s
profile. It was a familiar compulsion, one that his smoldering resentment permitted him to indulge. He selected the date field and scrolled back to the previous week. He found the videos from the cameras at the Hotel Grand International in Dubai. He watched them in sequence, as he had many times since h
e’d
first happened upon the footage. The cameras showed the fiancé leaving the ballroom with a young woman. They walked together to the elevator and then down the hallway to his room. When the door shut behind them, Jones killed the feed and closed out of HawkEye. He sat there for several minutes, letting the peaceful quiet of the Control Room calm his anger.

ELEVEN

First word of the mural came just before sunrise three days later. A jogger paused on the sidewalk and snapped a grainy, low-light picture of the side of the building, which was tweeted along with the words,
LOL.
M
ORNING, NEW YORKERS
! Minutes later, a few more pictures emerged on Facebook news feeds and Twitter streams, and an initial report was established on Gnos.is. Within a half hour, the uploading of pictures to social networking sites had become nearly continuous, spurred on by a swelling group of commuters who had gathered on the sidewalk beneath the mural. Bloggers supplied web page upon web page of commentary. The Gnos.is report grew, becoming richer and richer with photos, videos, and user-generated copy. Then it began getting serious traffic. By eight the mural was the top-trending story on the site.

Kera stepped onto an uptown R train at 8:17
AM
and stood against the doors so that she could check her e-mail on her phone without anyone peering over her shoulder. There was a message from Gabby requesting that Kera and Jones set aside time for a daily meeting with her to provide updates on the
A
TLANTIS
case. There was a reply from Detective Hopper, in response to an e-mail Kera had sent asking for an update. His message—that Rowena Pet
e’s
bank accounts had been quiet since her disappearance—was predictably useless. Nice of him to send that along a week into the investigation. It was the sort of thing HawkEye could determine in a fraction of a second. But then again, Hopper did
n’t
know about HawkEye, and he thought Kera was a journalist who was too clueless to track down information on her own. The detective also confirmed that the NYPD had received no word from any captor about a ransom, adding that they were now well outside the crucial forty-eight-hour window in which they had their best chances of finding a missing person. The only thing Kera found interesting about Hoppe
r’s
e-mail was that he did not seem to presume that Rowena Pete was dead. There apparently was too little evidence even for that. As he always did, he echoed the little phrase that had appeared in all his communications with her and that she thought was plainly ridiculous, given the circumstances:
there is no sign of foul play
.

A fragment of conversation from across the car reached her ears and pulled her attention away from Hoppe
r’s
e-mail. She looked up. The two men who were talking stood braced against the doors directly across from her. Both wore skinny jeans and T-shirts. One had a tattoo on his neck and piercings in his ears, nose, and over one eye. They were huddled together around a tablet. It was difficult to hear what they were saying over the cacophony of ads that, for a few prime hours each morning and evening, assaulted rush-hour commuters with a ferocious cross fire of flashing screens synched with voice-overs and music. She slid between two commuters to get closer, still pretending to be engrossed in her e-mail as she eavesdropped.

“I
t’s
gotta be It, right? Anyone else would claim credit.”

“That thing looks massive. It ca
n’t
be one person.”

“Who knows.”

“
I’m
sorry, but is that a new one?” asked a girl nearby who had also picked up on their conversation.

“Yeah, just this morning,” said the guy holding the tablet. He tilted it so that she could get a look.

“Where is this?” she asked.

“Hold on a second. I just read tha
t . . .
” The guy began scrolling. Kera waited. She could
n’t
see the screen.

“Looks like Franklin and Varick. In Tribeca.”

The train decelerated and lurched to a stop under the Flatiron building at Twenty-Third Street. A fresh hoard of commuters pressed in on them. Kera hesitated, walking herself through the motions of having second thoughts. But she knew she would go. Sh
e’d
known it as soon as sh
e’d
heard them speak of the new mural. She pushed shoulder-first through the onboarding crowd and, moving with difficulty against traffic, broke free onto the platform just as the doors slid shut.

The 1 train was two blocks west. She covered the distance at a near run and stood on the downtown platform, winded, peering up the tunnel and willing the headlights of a train to curve into view. After two minutes light played against the tunnel walls, and then the train swung into sight. She rode impatiently near the door, gripping a handrail as the train lurched its way toward the southern tip of Manhattan. The crowds thinned below Houston Street. She got off two stops later, at Franklin. A bottleneck slowed her on the stairs, and it was then, even before she reached street level, that she first sensed the pandemonium above.

Car horns and sirens echoed through the canyon maze of buildings overhead. When she finally reached the sidewalk, her eyes easily found the source of the commotion.

The mural covered the middle three floors of an eight-story apartment building kitty-corner across the intersection. She was
n’t
an art critic, but if she had to categorize the style of the mural she was looking at, the words that came to mind were “provocative mock realism.” The image made it appear as if a large swath of the buildin
g’s
outer wall had been blown away, exposing what lay within. In the foreground was a network of crisscrossing septic pipes, clearly burdened with a heavy load. Kera thought they looked a little like prison-cell bars. Trapped beyond the pipes were individual apartment units, in which people ate and bathed and defecated and fucked, one on top of the other, a compartmentalized tower of humanity imprisoned within its cage of piped sewage. There was something both playful and profound about the depiction, and Kera, standing in a crowd on the sidewalk with her head tilted back, was surprised to hear herself laugh out loud like some sort of madwoman.

The mural had thrown half of lower Manhattan into chaos. Mobs of onlookers swelled against hastily erected police barriers, crippling the intersection. Cops waved furiously at the jammed traffic, ushering rubbernecking motorists through and hollering empty threats at streams of jaywalkers. Kera skirted the mob at the base of the mural and stood farther back to take in the scene from a wider perspective. There was the painting itself, striking in its vivid detail and amusing in its voyeurism. But what sh
e’d
really come to examine was the feat of the production. Where had this mural come from? Its existence felt like a taunt.

The building, Kera began to see, was a perfect target for the stunt. There were no windows on the wall, which had previously butted up against an adjacent structure, long since torn down and replaced with the small, fenced-in parking lot that charged twenty-two dollars an hour for valet parking. The windowless wall provided a clean, vast canvas, and the parking lot provided a buffer between the wall and the street, where at night curtains of light must have hung from the infrequent street lamps, cutting off a view of everything in the shadows.

Kera shifted her eyes between the corners of nearby buildings. She could see just three cameras, all of them trained on the building
s’
entrances. The awning of the parking lo
t’s
valet hut also sported a low-budget camera, but it was aimed at the cash register. Drawing her eyes to the roofline, she swept them back and forth. No obvious sign of how the artist might have suspended him- or herself into position. She could speculate about rappelling devices, but it would be only that—speculation. Without surveillance footage or physical evidence, looking at the mural provided her with no greater insight about its origins than if sh
e’d
come upon Michelangel
o’s
ceiling—had it appeared suddenly overnight and without the permission of the Sistine Chapel.

She pulled out her smartphone and took a dozen pictures of the scene. Then she dialed Jone
s’s
workstation in the Control Room. “Have you seen this?” she said when he answered.

“Seen what? Where are you?”

“It. The artist. A mural appeared overnight on the side of a building in Tribeca. I thought
I’d
come by and have a look for myself.”

“Forget the mural, Kera. Get back here. HawkEye identified a POI.”

Gabby stood over Jones with folded arms. He was showing her the HawkEye map with the clusters of dots when Gabby turned to acknowledge Ker
a’s
arrival with a look that was one part concern for her disheveled appearance, and two parts scorn for her being late.

“Everything OK?”

“Eventful commute. Wha
t’s
up?” Kera said.

“J. D. was just walking me through a very detailed explanation of how our computers recognize patterns. He was, I hope, about to get to the point.”

Kera could see Jones clench his jaw, but he continued. “Using HawkEye, we discovered that all four of our missing subjects were at the Empire Hotel in the weeks leading up to their disappearances. But we do
n’t
think any of them were there at the same time. Which mean
s . . .
” He looked at Kera.

“They had to have been there for something—or someone—else. Tha
t’s
what I was hoping to find when I went up there last night,” Kera said.

She braced herself for a reprimand from Gabby. Venturing into the field without permission was prohibited. But Gabby only said, “And?”

“I looked around, talked to a bartender named Erica.” Kera shook her head. “She knew something. She was working when Rowena Pete was in there last month, and I think she was being coy about who the singer was having drinks with. But my gut says she does
n’t
know the full picture. Wha
t’v
e you got?”

“While you were at the bar last night, I reprogrammed a few of the queries I use to pull data out of HawkEye,” Jones said. “You both know the basics of our surveillance software. It can identify faces as well as flag specific objects or traits, like a piece of luggage left alone for too long on a subway platform or, say, people wearing blue shirts, that sort of thing. But it can also be programmed to detect more abstract patterns. For example, you can isolate a single camera and look at, say, weekdays from 0800 hours to 0900 hours. The software begins to recognize people over time and can sort out wh
o’s
there routinely and wh
o’s
never been I
D’d
there before.” Jones looked up to see if they were following. They both nodded. “Between our four subjects, we had fifteen confirmed sightings at the hotel. And we have this.” On a different monitor, he pulled up the feed from a surveillance camera. Kera recognized the location immediately. It was a clear view of the sidewalk outside the main entrance of the Empire Hotel. “Using the time stamps from those fifteen confirmed sightings, I wrote a quick program that would look for general facial-recog patterns across a period of one hour on either side of each of those sightings.”

“Any hits?” Kera asked.

“Yep. The Empire Hotel has three full-time doormen. Our camera here became familiar enough with them to know when they worked overtime or missed a shift.” Ker
a’s
heart sank. They were
n’t
looking for doormen. “It also identified three front-desk attendants, a concierge, and a dozen bartenders, chefs, waiters, and cleaning personnel.”

“Can I see some of the footage? I can ID the bartender I spoke to,” Kera said. It was unlikely that any of the doormen or lobby staff had a connection to their case, but she could
n’t
shake the feeling that her questions about Rowena Pete had meant something to Erica.

“I think the bartende
r’s
only role here is that she shows up for work like all the rest of the staff.”

“You said you had a person of interest,” Kera said.

“We do.” Jones was not someone who grinned, but Kera could hear the equivalent of that in his voice. He pulled up a series of screenshots from the surveillance cameras. The same man appeared in each of them. “Her
e’s
the needle HawkEye lifted out of the haystack. He was at the hotel each time one of our subjects was spotted there.”

“Holy shit,” Kera said.

“Can you ID him?” Gabby asked.

“Of course. The software builds a 3-D faceprint using hundreds of different identifying values, such as the distance between the eyes, or the depth of hollowness around the eyes and cheeks, and even something as nuanced as skin tone. If the camera can catch a clear view of a subjec
t’s
face, it compares that to faceprints in our available databases—”

“For Chris
t’s
sake, spare me the details,” Gabby said.

“The ID is a match for a guy named Charlie Canyon.”

“Not staff?” Kera asked.

“Definitely not staff.”

“Not missing?”

“Nope. Mr. Canyon is alive and well at last check. H
e’s
an account director at a boutique PR agency in Hel
l’s
Kitchen. Interestingly, personal details get sketchy beyond that. H
e’s
gone pretty far out of his way to lighten his digital footprint. No social networking, no search engine results other than his employee profile on his fir
m’s
website. I
t’s
redaction city when it comes to his online identity.”