He remembered the cranberry bogs. Remembered the dead things. But that was long ago, and he wasn’t here to do any picking tonight.
He’d found this patch of spongy ground a while back, used it for another of his jobs, and hadn’t had a problem locating it again. It was the ideal place to dispose of her, hidden at the end of a dirt trail among a million acres of unpopulated wilderness out here in the Jersey barrens… miles and miles of nothing, of nowhere, a quick shot from Manhattan. The drive had been under forty minutes, and he’d taken it slow to make sure the staties didn’t get interested in him. When he was finished looking over his work, he would pull his rental back onto Highway 73, head a few exits down the ’pike to the Lincoln Tunnel, and then he would be across the Hudson, out of that underwater tube, city lights greeting him, Broadway in his face, the Empire State Building thrusting into the eastside sky like a giant multicolored glowstick. But here, right here, none of it seemed to exist.
Over the river and through the woods, amazing.
Remaining very still over the body, he switched off his flashlight on an impulse that, while not quite unconscious, arose from a chamber of his mind buried deep down at the lowermost level of consciousness.
And then the world went dark.
He could have been anywhere.
He could have been nowhere.
Nowhere, U.S.A. Riding along some unmarked road, mile after empty mile, in a big old Mack truck that was redder and shinier than a fire engine, he thought with a smile of bitter recollection, his free hand briefly touching the right side of his neck.
After a second he thumbed his flash back on, turned, and walked away from the evidence of his latest atrocity, bearing with him an indelible reminder of the many crimes of his past.
FIVE
Avram Hoffman dashed by Jeffreys on his way to the elevators in the DDC’s ground-floor entrance hall. It was already twenty minutes past nine, late for his morning prayer session, and he couldn’t afford to run even a minute later. Mr. Katari had left the Club in a huff well before Avram returned from yesterday’s hastily arranged meeting with Lathrop, and his indignance over having been put off was understandable. In the competitive hustle of the jewelry trade, one’s time was not to be squandered. A missed appointment could lead to another, and that might result in lost opportunities. The domino effect could be rapid and serious. All the hard, quantifiable appraisals of a gemstone’s value, its cut and carat, clarity and color, scientific identification and grading—all of it — meant less than its tenuous hold on a potential buyer’s fancy. No man or woman had ever died for lack of a precious bauble. It could sparkle with the brilliance of a thousand suns, but what did that matter if it couldn’t arouse a comparable gleam in the eye of the beholder… or if its lure to the eye faded before a sale was closed? The true measure of its worth would be found in dreams, desires, and passions — and these were fleeting intangibles, enchantments of fickle power. That diamond you promised me hasn’t arrived? The broker was held up at an appointment? Well, I’m flying out of town tonight and will have to shop around.
Avram had needed to shower Katari with apologies, guarantee him exclusives and special discounts, practically offer verbal supplication over the phone to convince him to come back here today. But Katari was a major client, and Avram wouldn’t hang himself with a noose of pride.
He stepped into the elevator now, out of breath, bleary-eyed with exhaustion, his cheeks flushed above the line of his beard. It was the rushing. The constant scurrying to get things done. He’d been awake most of the previous night in his home laboratory examining the Kashmir with his various instruments… a binocular microscope, a polariscope, an immersion cell analyzer, all state-of-the-art equipment for which he had paid many thousands of dollars. At about eight o’clock, his youngest daughter, Rachael, had knocked on the door with a stack of books in her hand… would he read to her? Avram had sent her off to bed in a brusque, preoccupied tone for which he still felt guilty. Told her he was too busy, knowing he had broken a promise made earlier. But he’d considered it an urgent must to look for any signs of artifice before dropping the sapphire off at the GIA laboratory… a stop he had made first thing this morning, eager to get the certification process underway, hours of his own extensive tests having shown him absolutely nothing that might indicate the stone wasn’t of natural origin. Though the lab was just down the block from the DDC building on Fifth Avenue, Avram’s need to wait for his regular man and put in a request for prioritization had put him behind schedule. If there was a trait shared by experts of every kind, he thought, it was that they seemed to enjoy stretching the patience of those who depended on their services.
As he rose to the trading floor in the elevator, Avram remembered the hurt look on Rachael’s face over his snappish dismissal, and silently pledged to make it up to her soon. Tonight, if he had the time. He would try to be better with Rachael tonight.
Meanwhile, he had to pull himself together and set his mind toward the long day of bargaining ahead.
What Anthony DeSanto usually did after walking the two blocks from his apartment to the office at Dunne Savings and Loan every morning was browse through the newspapers over a cup of spiced apple cider and a blueberry muffin, preferring the city’s two major tabloids, the Daily News and New York Post, for their extensive sports coverage. There were enough hours in the day for him to get beat over his head with the stories of war, terrorism, crime, politics, and economic turmoil that dominated their front-page headlines, and Tony figured the latest developments on all those glorious subjects could wait until he was caught up on the game scores.
Tony guessed he was a creature of habit, and scanning the papers — back to front — was stage one of his ordinary routine at the bank, a chance to catch his breath after hustling uptown on the train, a comforting transitional phase to help ease him into the feverish rhythms of the workday. Right now, though, things weren’t routine, or ordinary, and he couldn’t pretend they were. For maybe two, three days after Pat disappeared, Tony had tried to go about his mornings as if nothing was wrong, thinking it would help stave off his creeping fears. He had picked up the papers at the newsstand outside the Union Square subway exit, bought his cider and muffin at the green market, and, once he’d plunked himself down at his desk, studied the sports section as though everything was the same as usual… although he’d been constantly and ever-more-keenly aware that it wasn’t. But it seemed worth a shot trying to focus his thoughts on the previous night’s monster jams and power plays — even a halfhearted shot — if there was any chance it could temporarily distract him from thinking about what could have happened to his best friend of twenty-five years, a guy who’d seemingly vanished into thin air.