You Are Not Alone(94)

I narrow it by adding “New York.”

There are still hundreds of millions of results.

Something important happened on that date. That must be why Detective Williams asked me about it in the sterile questioning room.

I close my eyes and see the bloody scalpel. When I first glimpsed it, I’d guessed that Amanda had taken it from work. I’d rolled around different theories in my mind, each more unsettling than the next: Maybe Amanda had used it in an earlier suicide attempt, but had changed her mind. Or it could be evidence of some malfeasance at City Hospital—maybe a surgeon had operated on the wrong patient with it.

There are other possibilities, though.

I add one more search term to further refine my results: “Twist bar.”

A headline bursts onto my phone screen: BUSINESSMAN FOUND DEAD IN CENTRAL PARK.

My eyes move frantically down the screen: James Anders was found murdered in Central Park just a few months ago—on Thursday, August 15.

“He looked like he’d been butchered,” a police source told the paper.

Butchered. The horrifying word seems to pop off the screen.

I grab my notebook and start recording facts. My hands are shaking so violently my words are barely legible: He was thirty-seven. A divorced father of one. From a town called Mossley in upstate New York. No suspects.

I click on a few more links, writing down everything I can find about James Anders. The obituary from his local paper, The Courier, described how he attended Syracuse University and married his college sweetheart. After his divorce, he’d begun to split his time between Mossley—where he’d lived his whole life—and Manhattan as he tried to start up a new business selling custom sporting equipment.

This article also has a picture. I squint at the grainy photo of a man wearing a suit and tie.

“Hey, hon, we’re closing up in a few.” The waitress puts the check on my table. It’s signed with her name—Shirley—and a smiley face.

I lean back and briefly close my eyes. It seems like I should be inured to shock after the events of the past couple of days, but what I’ve just learned feels like a blow to my solar plexus.

I hear the door to the diner rattle and my eyes snap open. It’s just a customer exiting.

Still, it reminds me of how vulnerable I am. Keep moving, my brain tells me.

In a few hours the city will begin shutting down. I don’t want to be wandering around, trying to find bars that close late and diners that open early. Hotels no longer feel safe.

I need a different place to hide. Somewhere I won’t be disturbed, so I can think. Some place unexpected.

I check the time on my phone. It’s almost nine P.M., and I’ve got 68 percent of my battery left. I’m down to less than a few hundred dollars.

I know one other thing, too: I’m being set up for a murder.



* * *



The subway sways along the tracks, its wheels rumbling, as I head out to Far Rockaway in Queens for the second time tonight. When I reach the end of the line, I’ll cross the platform and ride the thirty-one miles back to 207th Street at the northern tip of Manhattan again.

Then I’ll do it again and again, until dawn breaks.

The subway in New York never sleeps.

I made one phone call just before I descended the stairs to the turnstiles. I called the number on Detective Williams’s card. She didn’t pick up, maybe because I used the burner phone and she didn’t recognize the number, or maybe because she was busy with a case.

My words rushed out uncontrollably in the message I left: “I know Amanda’s friends are setting me up for the murder of James Anders, but I didn’t do it! They planted that stuff and more in my apartment—you’ve got to believe me, please. I’m innocent!”

I probably sounded completely crazy to her; I might even have made things worse for myself.

Now I look out the window of the train and see the graffiti painted on the walls of the city’s tunnels has yielded to a suburban landscape since we’ve moved aboveground: We whiz by trees, single-family homes, and glowing porch lamps. A kid’s bike propped up against a railing. A doghouse.

I’m sitting in the middle of the train, as close as I can to the conductor, who pays me no notice. I know exactly where the emergency buttons are in this car. My duffel bag contains my change of clothes, wallet, burner phone, a power bar, and my Data Book and pen. My arms are wrapped around it, and my eyes never stop moving as commuters get on and off the train. I scan every single face.

The people who appear and then disappear around me are like a microcosm of the city: late-night Wall Street workers in expensive suits mix with equally weary-looking cleaners in blue aprons, and a woman carrying a guitar case sits across the aisle from a guy in a Jets jacket, while voices from the boisterous party crowd—women in skirts and sequins laughing as they take selfies, a group of guys heckling their drunk buddy who fell over when the train lurched forward—soar over it all.

But as the night wears on, the crowds grow thinner.

Right now it’s just me in the subway car. I look at the conductor again, then clutch my duffel bag even tighter.

It must be two or three o’clock, but I turned off my phone to preserve the battery when it hit 26 percent. Reception is so spotty on the subway that I ate up a lot of battery looking up everything I could find on James Anders, and my charger is back in the hotel room, along with my iPhone.