The Case for Jamie (Charlotte Holmes #3)(18)

You do know you’re funding vigilante work, I told her via text.

She was saved in my phone as “Steve.” I brought you in on a case when you were ten. I don’t think this is the craziest decision I’ve ever made.

The apartment was unremarkable. Before I dropped either character or bags, I swept the room for surveillance. An hour later I had my laptop set up at the kitchen counter, and though I’d had the Wi-Fi base station removed, I still checked to make sure I hadn’t connected to any network. I’d even filled in the Ethernet port myself with glue so that no one could force a connection. This computer had to stay off-grid; here I kept my files, organized in the method my father had taught me.

They held the facts of my investigation thus far.

Lucien Moriarty was entering America often, “on business,” and not under his real name. He flew directly in, oftentimes from London, and once he reached the States he disappeared. He was in effect a ghost, one whose movements I could only really track when he was belted into a plane over the Atlantic.

I had determined this by staking out the most likely airport for three weeks straight. I hadn’t even had to buy a ticket. Heathrow Terminal 5 is rather large, but when you’ve determined that someone is flying out and back every week and then made a color-coded list of direct flights to four major American cities on the Eastern Seaboard, you can be assured of some measure of success. Especially if you set your mind to nothing else.

Besides, no one looks too closely at the girl holding the WELCOME HOME DADDY sign in Arrivals, amongst a half-dozen other girls doing the same.

I had never been interested in where Lucien Moriarty was going to. I wasn’t even interested in where he was coming from. That would come later. I wanted to know on which days he chose to return, and why.

From there things grew very technical, and I spent some time lurking in customs officials’ neighborhood Starbucks, taking temp jobs at their offices, interviewing them for my “high school newspaper.” I learned who he had bribed in England, and from there I made a plan to learn who he was bribing in America.

Why on earth wasn’t he traveling under his own name?

Why he was in America was never a question, not to me. Lucien Moriarty was a British political consultant. He was a fixer, a man who made scandals disappear. And yet for the last year, his client list had grown unwieldy and unpredictable. A Manhattan prep school. A large posh hospital in D.C.

And perhaps most disturbingly, a wilderness rehabilitation facility for teenagers in Connecticut.

He handled their public crises. He helped them build a brand. He kept a base in England, and he flew back and forth weekly, and still he made no move on me, none at all. But Lucien Moriarty had an idée fixe, and I wished it was something as simple as conceit to know that it was me.

Enough. My navel wasn’t growing any more interesting for all my gazing. Besides, the more I allowed myself abstract thought about this case, the more I found myself wandering to thoughts of what life could be like after. Seafood, perhaps, in a nice restaurant, in my own clothes, with my own face on. Uninterrupted sleep, and making a real go at getting myself off of cigarettes. And after . . . I had a storefront in mind, something in Cheapside, and I had hopes it would still be available once I had finished with the prison sentence I would likely serve when all this was over.

In the meantime, I had a plan.

Contact Scotland Yard, provide report.

Contact source at Sherringford, receive report.

Purchase new bulletproof vest. One with moisture wicking, this time. (I was tired of emerging from Kevlar a sweaty mess.)

In bulletproof vest, shake loose information from a certain shop in Greenpoint.

Begin running down remaining specs on Michael Hartwell identity.

Confirm interview with Starway Airlines.

Arrange CPR certification for candy-striping credential.

Text DI Green a photograph of my untaken pills.

Go ten minutes without thinking about Jamie Watson unwinding his girlfriend’s scarf.

Five minutes. Three. Any time at all.





Seven


Jamie


I DON’T KNOW HOW LONG I SAT THERE IN MY DESK CHAIR, making myself breathe in and out.

Finally, I stopped to look at my phone. The text was from my father: Leander wants to know if you’ve made up your mind.

The worst thing about my life so far? I wasn’t stupid. It would be so much easier if I was. But we’d been in New York City today, chasing after Moriartys, and I’d come back to an instance of casual sabotage. Even now, I saw the big red circle I’d made on my physics syllabus—individual presentations, 40% of your grade. It wasn’t murder. It wasn’t a kidnapping. It was small, and insidious, and I knew the way things would work now. I could recognize a pattern.

It would only get worse. But I was tired of giving in.

Someone was punishing Charlotte by punishing me.

It was either that, or my girlfriend was really mad at me for skipping writing club.

“Fine,” I said out loud. “Fine,” and I stayed up until dawn to get the damn thing redone.

THE NEXT DAY I HAD FRENCH CLASS FIRST THING. ELIZABETH walked me there, her hand in the crook of my arm. She was telling a story about her roommate leaving piles of orange peels underneath their bunk beds, how they smelled amazing until they began to rot. They’d argued last night about what point they’d need to sweep them out from underneath the bed—four days? Five? Should they leave them there at all? Despite my exhaustion, I was interested by the story’s strange poetry, Elizabeth’s gestures, her laugh. The normalcy of it all.