Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(57)

Yet unlike Vic’s daughter—as far as he knows, anyway, which is a chilling thought—Nora Fellows very likely had a run-in with one of the suicide bombers who brought down the World Trade Center.

Yesterday, she called the police to report an incident she’d witnessed on a flight last month. The locals passed along the information to the FBI.

Now, operating on a few hours’ sleep and at least four cups of coffee, Vic sits in a folding chair across from Nora. Beside him is Detective Al Lozen from the NYPD.

When they were introduced this morning, Vic asked Lozen if he knows Rocky.

“Name sounds familiar,” Lozen said. “Is he . . . okay?”

That was a loaded question. Ever since Vic arrived in New York yesterday, he’s heard people asking it of each other. Is he okay? Are they okay? Is everyone okay?

Translation: Did you lose someone on Tuesday?

“He’s okay,” Vic told Lozen. “How about you? Everyone okay?”

Lozen shook his head grimly, and Vic regretted asking.

The guy’s NYPD, lives in Brooklyn. Every New Yorker, especially every cop, knows someone who died on Tuesday. Everyone’s lost someone—for most, it was more than one. Some people have lost not just family members and friends, but dozens of colleagues and acquaintances.

Besides O’Neill, Vic’s own list includes a couple of childhood pals from the old block back in the Bronx, and several men and women with whom he’s crossed paths over the course of his career.

“You know, I have two daughters,” Lozen is telling Nora, “and they share a bedroom and bathroom, and you should hear how they fight. I can’t imagine how all of you girls don’t go crazy and kill each other.”

“We’re never all here at the same time,” Nora assures him, “so it works out. A lot of flight attendants live this way. It doesn’t make sense to have your own place when you’re hardly ever home, right?”

Lozen agrees, and Vic glances at his notes. Time to get down to business.

At the moment, Nora has the apartment entirely to herself. Her roommates have been stranded since Tuesday at airports all over the world. None, thank God, were aboard American Flights 11 or 77 but Nora knew several of the flight attendants and both pilots who were killed when they crashed.

“I would have been flying myself on Tuesday.” She plays with the hem of her sweatshirt, which is a couple of sizes too big. “Not on the planes that went down—I always fly out of JFK—but still . . .”

“Why weren’t you flying that day?” Vic asks.

“I ate at this new Thai place and got food poisoning on Monday night. I should have known not to eat there, because that place was such a hole in the wall, you know? It was so bad . . . I mean, it seems crazy to even worry about something like that now. After everything that’s happened to all these people . . . people I know . . . like, nothing else even seems to matter, you know?”

“It’s okay,” Lozen tells her. “So you were sick . . .”

“Yes, and I couldn’t fly. So I was here, and I’ve been watching TV, and when they started saying that the planes were hijacked by Middle Eastern men—I totally remembered that guy from last month. And I thought I should call.”

Vic nods. “Tell me exactly what happened on August twenty-fourth.”

She takes a deep breath. “Okay. I was working a flight from Miami to JFK, first flight of the morning. I noticed a passenger acting suspicious. He was sitting the bulkhead, you know . . . at the front of coach, and just sort of . . . paying really close attention to what we were doing as we boarded the passengers and got ready to take off. Then I saw that he was talking into a little tape recorder. He was speaking in a foreign language. But he spoke English, too, you know—pretty well.”

She went on to describe how she’d reported his actions to the lead flight attendant, who told her to go into the cockpit and bring it to the captain’s attention. She did, and was told to keep a close eye on the passenger.

“I tried,” she tells Vic, “but, I mean, I was busy, especially after we took off, and . . . to be honest, he wasn’t really doing anything. He was just watching. And recording himself. At the time, it bothered me, but I had no idea . . . I mean, if I had known what could happen . . .”

“You did the right thing, reporting him. Tell me about the rest of the flight.”

She does. It was uneventful, the passenger disembarked, and she never saw him again.

“Would you recognize him if you did?” Vic asks as his personal cell phone vibrates in his suit coat pocket.

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Excuse me for a minute, please.” Vic steps into the hall and pulls out the phone. “Vic Shattuck.”

“Vic. Jesus, it’s good to hear your voice.”

“Rocky. Yours, too.”

“Yeah? Even though I’m talking with my mouth full? I thought you said that was a bad habit.”

A faint smile crosses Vic’s face. Amazing what connecting with an old friend can do for a person, even in the midst of a crisis. “We were five when I said it,” he points out, “and it is a bad habit.”

“Yeah, well, there are worse,” he says, chewing. “Ange made me a frittata and I don’t want it to get cold.”

Vic imagines Rocky sitting at the worn oval table in the kitchen of his duplex in the Bronx, a stone’s throw from the block where they grew up—and really, just ten miles or so from here.