Ethan sat back, feeling a sense of dismay as he saw the flames burning around the stricken tanker and the police struggling to both apprehend the two men lying in the road and free crash victims trapped in their vehicles.
‘What about cameras in Manhattan and Williamsburg, coming off the bridges, and private security cameras?’
‘I’ll see what I can get,’ Jarvis promised, ‘but it’ll take time. A lot of camera systems run a twenty-four-hour recording loop, deleting as they go. If you don’t access the footage within that time window, it’s lost.’
‘And we’re already forty-eight hours down the road,’ Lopez muttered. ‘That’s sloppy. They could have pulled something by now.’
Ethan stared at the screen and rewound the images, playing them again. Something about the footage seemed off, somehow, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.
‘You know, these guys must have had some other way off the bridge,’ he said. ‘Police were already moving to block the exits on the Williamsburg side of the bridge into Queens, so traffic would have been stopped and searched.’
‘The bridge was closed after the incident for over twelve hours,’ Jarvis agreed. ‘Caused havoc around Brooklyn.’
‘Maybe they went into the water?’ Lopez guessed. ‘It’s a hell of a drop and swim, but it’s not impossible.’
‘In winter?’ Jarvis replied. ‘I doubt they’d have made the shore before succumbing to the cold, and the currents would have dragged them far downstream.’
Ethan looked up. ‘But if they’d planned for it? They might have got beneath the bridge, maybe stashed something there in case of the police blocking them on the bridge during their escape?’
Jarvis frowned. ‘Seems a long way to go, and high risk, too.’
Ethan shook his head slowly. ‘Something’s just not right,’ he said as he played the footage back: the chase, the crash, the confrontation, the truck spilling the cases from the rear and then the tanker hitting the parked vehicles as the thieves disappeared out of shot.
‘Wait one,’ Lopez said, and pointed at the screen. ‘Wind that back a little.’
Ethan spun the footage back slowly and Lopez jabbed her finger at the flatbed’s open passenger door.
‘Stop there!’
Ethan froze the image. The two unidentified thieves were backing toward the camera around the front of the vehicle, their weapons aimed at the cops. Lopez pointed at the glass of the open passenger door. ‘That enough to get a clear image?’ she asked Jarvis.
Ethan smiled as he saw a vague reflection of the driver in the glass, the angle of the door reflecting his face.
‘It might just be,’ Jarvis said. ‘Copy that image and send it to this address,’ he said as he handed Ethan a card with an email address on it. ‘They’ll sharpen it up in no time and send it back here.’
Ethan tapped out a quick email and then sent the image as he looked up at Lopez. ‘Not just a pretty face, then?’
Lopez smiled back at him and raised an eyebrow. ‘Was that a compliment, kind sir?’
Ethan looked at Jarvis. ‘If this does link the murders, then it changes everything. If we do have some kind of spectral murderer hunting down these individuals, it suggests that there’s something much bigger going on here.’
‘And that links it to the trial,’ Jarvis agreed.
A few minutes later, the computer in front of Ethan pinged and an email notification appeared. Ethan opened the link and an image appeared.
The reflection in the car door taken by the traffic camera had been blown up to full screen and programs with complex algorithms used to enhance the pixelated image into something approaching clarity.
It only took a moment of observation for them all to nod together.
‘That’s Wesley Hicks,’ Lopez said. ‘Tom was right.’
Jarvis pulled out his cellphone. ‘It still doesn’t help the case against the two men in custody,’ he said. ‘They didn’t fire at anybody and can still claim their truck was hijacked by Hicks and his accomplice.’
‘True,’ Ethan replied, ‘but it gives us a lead to follow and it means we have leverage against Gladstone and Thomas, maybe enough to get them sweating a little because they won’t know that Hicks and Reece are dead. How about we start searching the clerk’s background and try to figure out why she’d be helping these losers.
‘You think she’d need a reason?’ Lopez asked. ‘There were five of them in on this. That’s close to a million each.’
‘Of illegally obtained cash,’ Jarvis replied for Ethan as he dialed a number. ‘Come on, let’s figure out why a law-abiding legal clerk would risk life without parole for these two assholes.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ Ethan said.
33
She awoke, but it was as though she were somehow still dreaming.
Joanna wanted to blink her eyes, but there was no means by which she could do so. From a milieu of colors and light, she focused on the scene before her, even though that scene was physically impossible.
She felt no fear. She felt no pain.
Joanna looked down at her own body as it lay far below her on a metal gurney surrounded by tubes and wires and electrodes and monitors. Her first instinct was to look at her face. She was shocked at how much weight she had lost, her eyes sunken into darkened orbits and her cheekbones visible beneath pale skin. Her hair looked lank and had been hacked short, but her expression was entirely calm, her lips relaxed and her eyes closed as though gently resting.
There was no sound, as though she were watching a silent movie in full color. Doctor Sheviz stood nearby, watching a monitor that was attached to electrodes placed on her temples that she guessed were recording brainwaves. All four lines were straight, registering no activity. She looked at the heart monitors, and saw no rhythm.
With a start of realization, she knew that she was dead.
And yet she was not dead.
The heart-bypass machine was filtering its chilled saline solution through her veins as she watched and she felt a mild sense of disgust at how her body was being violated by the insane man in the room with her. But rage would not come.
She saw Sheviz turn from the monitor to look at her body, saw him smile as he ran a hand through his thick white hair. As he dropped his hand, he knocked a pencil from the top of a desk to land on the floor. He bent down and picked the pencil up, then tossed it to one side on the desk.
Joanna felt something change around her. She looked down but she had no body of her own as she hovered above herself, as though she were a single point of light. The room around her seemed to lose focus slightly and then it began to draw away from her, as though she were climbing up into the night sky. She looked for the city lights but saw nothing but a darkness as deep as the universe.
She felt as though she were being watched, and turned.
Far away, in the darkness, she saw a pinprick of light that glowed with the hue of a rainbow, a pearlescent sphere that began to grow as though sunbeams were reaching out to her. She felt warmth permeate her soul and the endless interminable suffering that she had endured fell away like discarded clothes.
A thousand worries and concerns, the coalesced pressure of years of life, tumbled from her mind and spiraled away into the darkness behind her as the light grew stronger. It folded around her in a glowing blanket of warmth as every emotion that she had ever felt faded away into insignificance before a light filled with completely unconditional love. She felt herself smiling, felt unable and unwilling to resist the light as it grew brighter and brighter, blazing with the strength of a billion suns and yet as gentle as an angel’s touch.