The 6:20 Man(38)

“What do you know about her?” asked Devine.

“Nothing other than she’s got one of the hottest bodies I’ve ever seen. And she’s probably a nymphomaniac. Women who are exhibitionists are usually nymphos, too.”

“Is that so?” asked Devine.

The man sniffed, eyed the woman, and in a wishful tone said, “Well, on the streaming shows they almost always are. And the woman before her was just as hot.”

Devine started. “The woman before her?”

“Yeah. I’ve been riding this train for a long time. I remember them building that house. That’s Brad Cowl’s place, in case you didn’t know. Anyway, that chick would come out in a bikini, too, from time to time. She was a stunner, just like that one. Cowl obviously likes them young, beautiful, and nearly naked.”

“What happened to the other woman?”

“I don’t know. One day she was just gone.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, a little over a year ago, I think. It was during the summer.”

“What did she look like?”

“Pretty much the same as this one, only brunette.”

Devine turned to look back at the woman. She just sat there, her legs crossed one over the other. She didn’t appear to even realize a body of water was there. She lifted her gaze and it appeared for an unsettling moment that she was staring right at him. But that wasn’t possible. Not with the distance and the angle and the glass in between.

Right?

She rose, picked up her robe, and walked into the house. He and every guy on the starboard side, and probably a bunch on the port side, watched her every step of the way, their focus so intense it was like the last minute of their lives.

Maybe she does get off on that stuff, thought Devine. She knew the train was there, with people on it, watching her. He wondered how Brad Cowl felt about it. But then again, he was having sex with his employees on desktops.

The train picked up speed and headed on.

Later, he walked out of the subway station in the Financial District and into the heat of the morning. It was early enough for the city to still be waking up. Delivery trucks were parked illegally, and cabs, cars, and Ubers were hammering their horns, besmirching the only quiet time of the day the city had. Birds pecked at pavement trash, street sweepers were sweeping, yawning suits and nonsuits were shuffling to their jobs looking like they were heading to their graves.

Food carts serving breakfast items were opening for business. Later, for lunch, there would be offerings of grilled halal, cheong fun, rice noodles, and Indian king biryani, and traditional fare like pretzels, hot dogs, falafel, Tex-Mex, steak, BBQ, and sushi. If you couldn’t find a food here it was because it didn’t exist.

Construction crews were muscling pipe and wheelbarrows and gripping shovels and lunch pails and smoking their Camels and drinking their non-Starbucks morning eye-openers.

The sky was clear, the heat already percolating over the fingertips of the skyscrapers. At lunchtime the funneled warmth between buildings, coupled with billions of tons and thousands of acres of reflective concrete and glass, respectively, would spike the temperature on the ground to near volcanic proportions, or so it would seem to the clothed inhabitants just trying to earn a buck or enjoy their holiday.

And while he thought about all of this, Devine also mulled over his very serious problems: He had paid a visit to, and raised the suspicions of, a grieving mother. He, and apparently only he, had received an untraceable email about a murder.

And the email had not stated that Sara had died by suicide. Devine realized he had just assumed that was what the email had implied. Yet it had only said that she was dead. And then it had gone on to describe the hanging body. It was Wanda Simms who had mentioned suicide. She said she’d overheard the police. And Detective Hancock had confirmed that initial opinion during their first meeting.

He had to talk to people to find the sender of the weird-ass email, because it apparently could not be done with computer keys and a server. For Devine, it was actually refreshing to see that not every single problem today was solvable by technology alone. Sometimes a little shoe leather and the semblance of a personality and a few well-formed questions might just do what artificially intelligent thinking and petabytes of data hovering in fake clouds couldn’t. But the email was tied to Ewes’s murder, which had to be tied to whatever nefarious things were going on at Cowl. And this was exactly what Emerson Campbell had told him to work on in order to stay out of a military prison. His marching orders couldn’t be clearer.

He knew the guard currently on duty at Cowl. His name was Sam. He was around sixty, grizzled hair, pale skin, sloped shoulders, big gut that stretched his shirt’s fabric to near its breaking point, and a pleasing smile to top it all. He seemed like a favorite uncle or grandfather who would get down on the floor and play with the little ones, a beer in hand.

Devine walked up to the granite-topped reception console and placed his leather briefcase on it, rubbing a few sweat bubbles off his forehead.

“Hey, Sam.”

“Hey right back, Devine.”

“Pretty crazy shit happening around here.”

“Got that right. Police have been in and out. New developments.”

“Right, I heard. Murder instead of suicide. Pretty damn big difference.”

“Hell yes it is. You knew the woman?” asked Sam.