Page 64 of Murder Notes

“I tried. No go.”

“Of course not. Where are we on finding Woods?”

“His phone still doesn’t ping. He still hasn’t touched his credit cards or touched his bank accounts. He’s either dead, or he’s well funded and smart. Oh, and I got those fingerprints in an early delivery and ran them immediately. The only hits were you, a Maria Rodriquez, your brother, and Kane Mendez. Is that what you expected?”

Considering Maria is my maid, who I remotely buzzed inside each visit, and my brother and Kane had been there often before I left . . . “Unfortunately, yes,” I say. “All can be explained.”

“Back to Woods. I can’t connect him to Cynthia, but he has an ex-girlfriend, and in her case, there are plenty of phone records. She’s also on a cruise. Interestingly, she left yesterday.”

“Of course she did.”

“Find out if she has any connections to Romano or Nelson Moser.” I fight mixed loyalty but remind myself I have a job to do, and now Greg’s job is on the line, too. “Check for connections to the Pocher family or anyone working for Pocher.”

“The billionaire? No. Not the—”

“Yes. Him. I know this is a big job so start with the man himself and work backward from his closest confidants down. And Kane Mendez as well.”

“The Mendez whose fingerprints I ran?”

“Yes.” I inhale and let it out. “That one.”

“The Mendez of the Mendez Cartel?”

“Technically Kane hasn’t been proven to be a part of the cartel,” I say, unable to stop myself from doing what I always did in the past: defend him when I’m not sure he deserves that gesture. “Focus on him and his business,” I add. “I need any connection you can find between him, Woods, law enforcement, the victims, you name it.”

“Pocher, Romano, and Mendez.” He whistles. “What are we in here?”

“I’m not even sure any of these families are involved, but if these murders were done by an assassin, it makes sense to look at the two largest crime families in the area.”

“One of the victims worked for Mendez. It makes perfect sense, but Pocher is an odd addition to the list.”

Any comment I make to that could incriminate my father and brother, so I move on. “That list of people who connect to all three cities is too big. I need you to narrow it down. Do your tech thing. Probability. Crossing paths. That kind of thing.”

“Thanks to Murphy, I got help, so I’m on it.”

“Interesting,” I say. “Maybe we aren’t tied and gagged.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Get me stuff.” I hang up and double-step toward the subway, my shadow still on my heels, my destination the expected: every place Woods has ever set foot, and while yes, I will find what has been set up for me to find, I’m a profiler. I’ll use that skill to build a picture of his life that I can use to support or reject him as an assassin and the guilty killer.

Heading down the stairs, I head to a row of machines to buy a pass for the day. My man goes to another terminal to buy a pass for himself, his longish black hair hiding his face, his skin tone covered by an army-style green jacket. I grab my ticket, moving forward and through a gate, and I don’t stop until I’m on the lower platform where my train will arrive. I know the moment the man arrives, and I wonder if he really thinks he’s discreet. I wonder if there is someone else in the crowd, an additional tag who is discreet, who I’m missing by hyperfocusing on this guy.

The train arrives, and a pack of about twenty riders rush off the car while another thirty, including me, replace them. I move to the end of the car where I have a view of the entire compartment and lean on a wall while my new stalker remains a few feet away, holding on to a bar. He’s an odd bird who doesn’t scream any nationality. He could be white, Italian, Mexican. He could work for anyone.

The car starts to move, and I remove my phone from my coat pocket and debate texting Kane and asking him if this guy is with him. But if he’s not, Kane will send backup I don’t need or want. And if he is, I’ll just find a new reason to be pissed off. I stick my phone back in my pocket, my mind on Kane’s reaction to those photos. These cases are connected to that night. They’re connected to me. There is something in front of my face that I’m missing. Something that must have been there all those years ago. My mind goes back in time, to the bar where it all seemed to take place. Kane was supposed to be gone, but Kane came home. I have wondered many times whether I’d be alive today had he not. My gaze lifts to my stalker again, but he, of course, refuses to make eye contact, and I flash back to the bar, to that night.

The bartender offers me another drink, but I have a bottle of champagne and a Bloody Mary I’ve hardly touched. Alexandra is still at the end of the bar, cozying up to her movie-star fuck while I watch over her, like she needs a guardian angel to get her laid. I grab an olive off the bar and down it, eyeing the dark-haired man at the end of the bar who’s been there the entire time I’ve been here. He’s not from around here, and something about him bothers me. He’s not looked in this direction, though I have a sense of him being aware of me. I don’t like it. I will him to look at me, and suddenly he does, his dark eyes meeting mine, the absence of any emotion in his chilling. He stands up and tosses money on the bar and then leaves, but I am left with the lingering sense of discomfort, almost foreboding.

I blink back to the present, my stalker still where he was, my mind on that man at the bar. He wasn’t the one with the tattoo, but could he be Junior? And now that I know Greg is safe, I’m reminded of my morning with Kane and his obsession with the note on my window. Why is he so damn obsessed with that note? It’s a thought I don’t get far with as the subway car stops, the doors opening, and to my surprise, my stalker exits before me. I follow him, but he disappears into the crowd, and like that night, I have that sense of discomfort. A sense of déjà vu.

The day ticks on, and the sense of being followed never leaves me, though there are no obvious offenders, nor has my dark-haired stalker reappeared. Also notable in my book is that my phone has remained silent from those who should be behind making some noise: Eddie doesn’t call me. Alexandra doesn’t call me. Neither does anyone in my family, or Kane. It seems to me that no one likes the questions I’ll ask or the answers I’ll demand. But I charge onward, traveling from address to address, looking for people who knew Woods, with random calls from Tic Tac as we dig for clues.

By four, I’m sitting in a Starbucks, feeling really fucking frustrated. It’s clear at this point that whoever is behind all of this prepared well for investigators. No one who knew Woods seems to be around. Even the tenants that rented office spaces near him are either closed or gone on vacation. At this point, there’s no profile I can create on Woods beyond a generalized surface outline. I grab my file sitting next to me, and I open it, staring down at the image of the tattoo. Thinking of how Kane had stared at it, the stony man he had become.

The tattoo is the answer to every question I’ve asked. I believe that, and if I wasn’t too close to this, I’d be at tattoo parlors right now. And why am I hiding from the tattoo, anyway? If I’m doing what everyone expects me to do, then tattoo parlors are exactly where I’d go. In fact, holy hell. I have an excuse for going to them now that won’t bring attention to my past that I didn’t have before.

I google “top ten tattoo parlors in NYC” and pull up a list, keying each address into my phone. I have four hours until I have to be at Penn Station for a three-hour ride home. I decide this is a time to spend some of the money I inherited and never spend. I dial a charter service and book my own chopper for nine o’clock at a different airport than Kane uses. I ask them to list my reservation under a fake name that won’t allow Kane to find me. His people might follow me, but it will be too late when I get there to allow him to intercept. Though his silence is deafening today. I rattled him and Kane rarely gets rattled.