Sliver of Truth (18 page)

She stopped abruptly then, almost as if something had startled her. She stood still for a second as I moved closer. Then she reached her hand behind her, as if she was trying to scratch an itch on her back she couldn’t quite reach. She jerked again. By the time I caught up with her, she was on her knees and all the street noise around us seemed to go deathly silent. I dropped to my knees beside her. Her face was a mask of pain, her skin so pale it was nearly blue. She opened her mouth to say something and a rivulet of blood traveled down her chin and onto the pink collar of her shirt. People around us started to notice something was wrong and cleared a path; someone screamed.

“Help me. I need an ambulance,” I said, holding on to her as she sagged into me. Soon I was supporting her full weight. A young man stopped beside us and used his cell phone to dial 911, dropping his briefcase on the sidewalk.

“What’s wrong with her?” he said.

I didn’t answer him; I didn’t know. He lifted her off of me and laid her on the ground, opened her coat, moved the strap of the messenger bag she wore slung across her body. Her hair fell around her like a halo. Two bloodred blossoms marred the front of her shirt. She looked like a broken angel lying there on the concrete.

He looked at me, incredulous. “She’s been shot.”

I stared at him, then past him. In the crowd of people gathering around us, a man in black moved slowly away. He wore a long dark coat and a black felt hat. He seemed to glide, to be swallowed by the crowd. I heard the wail of sirens.

“Hey!” I yelled.

The young guy kneeling over Sarah turned to look at me, his face flushed. “What is it?”

But I was already up and running, pushing my way through the throng.

“You can’t leave!” I heard him call after me. “Don’t you know her?”

My eyes locked on the man in black as he moved quickly up the crowded street. I kept losing and regaining sight of him as he got farther away. He was moving west, impossibly fast. By the time we’d crossed Eighth Avenue, I was breathless. At Ninth, I lost him completely. I stood on the corner and looked up and down the avenue.

A homeless guy lying on a cardboard mat gazed at me with interest. He looked as relaxed and comfortable as if he were lying on a couch in his own living room. He held a quivering Chihuahua in his right arm, a sign in his left hand. It read
DON’T IGNORE ME. THIS COULD BE YOU ONE DAY
. I ignored him.

“For five bucks, I’ll tell you where he went,” he said after a minute.

I regarded his dirty face and matted blond beard, his ripped Rangers team shirt, his mismatched shoes. He didn’t look
that
bad for someone who was lying on the street on a piece of cardboard. I pulled a five from my pocket and handed it to him. He pointed south.

“He dropped something in those trash cans, hailed a cab.”

“He hailed a cab?” I said, dismay and annoyance creeping into my voice.

He shrugged. The little dog yipped at me nastily.

I walked over to the trash cans he had pointed out; there were three gathered together at the curb. The smell was awful. “Which one?”

“That one,” he said, pointing to the right. I hesitated.

“Pretty girl doesn’t want to get her hands dirty,” he said to his little dog, giving me an amused grin. “Welcome to my world.”

I gave him a dirty look, grabbed the lid, and lifted it up. I was assailed by the odor and by what I saw inside. On top of the white trash bag lay a handgun with a silencer on its muzzle. I don’t know if it was the smell or the gun, but I felt as if I might vomit. In spite of that, I reached in and picked it up, more to convince myself it was real than anything else. It was real. I stared at it in disbelief. I’d watched a girl get shot on the street, chased her assailant, and found his gun with a silencer. I felt a weight on my chest; my hands started to shake. I’m not sure how long I stood like that.

“Put the gun down. Put your hands in the air.”

I froze and lifted my eyes from the object in my hand. I was surrounded by cops. Four uniformed officers stood around me. Two patrol cars pulled up next to us. The homeless guy was gone.

Depression is not dramatic, but it is total. It’s sneaky—you almost don’t notice it at first. Like a cat burglar, it comes in through an open window while you’re sleeping. It takes little things at first: your appetite, your desire to return phone calls. Then it comes back for the big stuff, like your will to live.

The next thing you know, your legs are filled with sand. The thought of brushing your teeth fills you with dread, it seems like such an impossible task. Suddenly you’re living your life in black and white—nothing is bright, nothing is pretty anymore. Music sounds tinny and distant. Things you found funny seem dull and off-key.

I was sinking into that hole as I was questioned by homicide detectives at the Midtown North Precinct. I told my half-truth to them, over and over in as many different ways as they wanted me to: I was returning a call from Myra Lyall and found out about her disappearance from Sarah. Sarah asked to meet me. There was a misunderstanding; she thought I could help her find out what happened to Myra. She left the diner when she realized I didn’t know any more than she did. I went after her, feeling bad. I watched her fall to the street. By the time I got to her, she had two gunshot wounds in her chest and was dead. I saw the man who I thought might have shot her running away. I gave chase and found his gun.

If Sarah had saved my message, they’d know there was a bit more to my story than I’d mentioned. But I imagined she would have deleted it, as skittish as she’d seemed.

“So why was Myra Lyall trying to reach you?” said the third guy who’d come in to talk with me. He was older, looked pasty and tired. His belly strained the buttons on his shirt; his gray pants were too short. He’d introduced himself but I’d already forgotten his name. At this point, my depression felt more like apathy.

“I guess for a story she was working on, a profile on Project Rescue babies.”

He looked at me for a second. “That’s where I know your face.”

“That’s right,” I said, yawning in spite of how rude and arrogant it seemed to do so, or maybe because of that. I was so sick of all these cops, playing their stupid games. They all thought they were so savvy, that they knew something about the human condition, that they knew something about me. But they didn’t. They didn’t know the first thing. I’d sat in too many rooms like this since the investigations into Project Rescue began. The process had lost its ability to scare and intimidate me.

The cop kept his eyes on me. They were rimmed red, flat and cold. He was a man who’d seen so much bad, he probably didn’t even recognize good anymore.

“Are you tired, Ms. Jones?”

“You have no idea.”

He gave a little sigh, looked down at his ruined cuticles. Then he looked at me again.

“A girl is dead. Do you care about that at all?”

His question startled me. Of course I cared about that. In fact, if I let myself think on it at all, on my responsibility for what had happened to her, how she was the second person to die in front of me in less than two years, I would crumble into a pile of broken pieces on the floor.

“Of course,” I said softly. The admission brought a pain to my chest and a tightness in my throat. I hoped I wouldn’t cry. I didn’t want to cry. “But I don’t know who killed her or why. I’d only known her for twenty minutes.”

He nodded at me solemnly. He got up and left the room without another word. I folded my arms across the table and rested my forehead there. I tried not to see Sarah collapsing on the street in front of me, tried not to remember the night that Christian Luna had slumped over on the park bench, a perfect red circle in his forehead. I tried not to see the gun and silencer on the trash bag. But of course, all of these images flashed through my mind like some macabre slide show. Those black fingers were slowly tightening their grip around my neck.

The door opened and closed. I gave myself a few seconds before I looked up to see who was next to question me. I never thought I’d be happy to see Dylan Grace, but the sight of him caused every muscle in my body to relax. That’s when I started to cry. Not sobbing, just tearing with a little nose running. He walked over to me and helped me up.

“Let’s get you out of here,” he said quietly.

“You’re not going to cuff me, are you?” I said, wiping my eyes with the tissue he produced from his pocket. I figured that he was taking me into federal custody. I couldn’t think of any other way for him to spring me from the NYPD.

“No. Not if you behave yourself.”

His partner, whose name I still didn’t know and didn’t really care to know, escorted me out to the sedan while Agent Grace filled out the necessary paperwork. They were calling me a federal witness, I’d overheard in the discussion between Agent Grace and one of the detectives who had questioned me. I wasn’t sure what that meant.

His partner didn’t talk to me, just opened the back door and closed it once I slid inside. He stood right outside. It was a bright, sunny day, cool and windy. He lit a cigarette with difficulty, then leaned against the trunk. I tried the door handle; it didn’t open from the inside.

After Agent Grace got in the car, we drove uptown. I assumed we were heading to the FBI headquarters but eventually I realized we weren’t. I didn’t ask where we were going. I just used the drive to close my eyes and figure out how I was going to get away from these guys in time to get in touch with Grant, and get up to the Cloisters. Believe it or not, it wasn’t even one o’clock in the afternoon yet. I still had time.

When the car came to a stop, I opened my eyes. Agent Grace handed his partner a manila envelope.

“This paperwork needs to be filed,” he said.

“Why do I have to do it?”

“It’s part of your training,” Agent Grace said with a smile. “When
you’re
training a rookie, then you can get him to go and do
your
paperwork.”

“Where are you going with the witness?”

I watched their reflection in the rearview mirror, saw resentment on the partner’s face and indifference on Agent Grace’s. Agent Grace got out of the car without a word and then opened the door for me. We were at Ninety-fifth and Riverside. I wasn’t sure what was happening. His partner gave him a dark look through the glass, then pulled out quickly into traffic, tires screeching.

“What are we doing?” I asked him.

“We’re taking a walk,” he said.

I felt my heart start to flutter. I didn’t like Agent Grace’s partner, but he did seem like the “good cop.” He might be personally unpleasant, but he didn’t seem dangerous. I guess I didn’t trust Agent Grace very much. There weren’t many people around us. It was a residential neighborhood, working class, bordering Morningside Heights. Riverside Park is a narrow strip of land nestled between Riverside Drive and the Hudson River. It rests atop a high divide and the highway runs alongside it, down a couple stories below. I could hear the traffic racing by, though a tree cover blocked my view of the road. A couple jogged by us as we walked the path into the park. Other than that, the park and the surrounding neighborhood seemed deserted.

“What are we doing here?” I asked him again, coming to a stop. I didn’t want to walk any farther with him until I understood what he wanted. He stopped, too, put his hands in his pockets, and looked at me. Then he strolled over toward one of the park benches that lined the path and took a seat. Somewhere a car alarm blared briefly, then went silent. I hesitated a second, thought about sitting, then decided to stand.

“Let’s cut the shit, shall we?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s just you and me now, Ridley. No one can hear us. Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you and I have a common goal. We can help each other.”

I looked up at the trees above us, the blue sky with its high white cirrus clouds. I smelled exhaust and wet grass. I heard a radio playing a salsa tune somewhere.

“I can’t imagine what you think might be our ‘common goal.’”

“Isn’t it obvious?”

“No.”

“We’re both looking for your father.”

I knew he meant Max, and I hated him for saying it like that. Maybe because it was true. I
was
looking for my father, literally and figuratively. Maybe I always had been. A denial bloomed in my chest, then lodged in my throat.

“We’re all looking for him,” he went on. “I am, you are, your boyfriend, too.”

“Max is dead.”

“You know what? You might be right. But you still need to find him, don’t you? You still need to know who he was . . . or who he is.”

I looked anywhere but into his face.

“Do you even know why?” he asked, leaning forward and resting his elbows on his thighs. I sensed another of those one-sided conversations coming on. “Because until you know, really
know,
you think you can’t find out the answer to an even more important question. You can’t know who
you
are. Who is Ridley Jones?”

“I know who I am,” I said, raising my chin at him. But he’d opened a chasm of fear through my center, a fear that he might be right, that I wouldn’t know who I was until I truly knew Max. Since last year, the only thing I knew for sure about myself was that I
wasn’t
Ben and Grace’s daughter. That I wasn’t the good child of good people. I didn’t know whose daughter I was, not really. I had a better knowledge of my biology, but that was it.

You might be thinking that I am wrong. You might be thinking that if I was raised by Ben and Grace, taught and loved by them, then they are the people I come from—they are my true parents. And of course, in part that’s right. But we’re more than just our experiences, more than the lessons we have learned, aren’t we? Isn’t there some mystery to us? Any mother will tell you that her child was born with at least a part of his own unique personality, some likes and dislikes that had nothing to do with learning or experience. That was the piece of myself I was missing. I was missing my mystery, the part that existed before I was born, that lived in the strands of Max’s DNA. If I didn’t know him, how could I ever know myself? For some reason, I didn’t have the same burning questions about Teresa Stone, my biological mother. She seemed distant and almost like a myth I didn’t quite believe. Maybe those questions would come later. Max occupied this huge space in my life.