20. Janet
JANET
Frank Liu lives in a beige Colonial in Flushing with a driveway and a basketball hoop nobody uses anymore.
I'm outside the house when I call Mike. His voice low and easy.
"Hey."
"Where have you been?" I lean my head back against the seat.
"Running errands. Sorry about the quick exit this morning."
"I have enough to worry about than having to worry about you too."
"Where are you?"
"I'm outside Frank Liu's house, waiting for him to come home."
"What are you going to say to him?"
"Like, what the fuck? Why are you dumping all this shit on me?"
"I wouldn't say it quite like that."
"No, probably not the best way to approach him."
I see Frank pull up in a town car.
"I have to go," I say. "He's here."
I'm out of the car before he can answer.
Frank doesn't see me until he's halfway up the driveway. He stops.
"Janet."
He looks around. He sets his keys in his palm, closes his fingers around them.
"Frank."
"You shouldn't be here."
"You threw me under the bus."
He doesn't flinch. "I told them what I knew."
"You told them it was my call. The video. All of it."
"It was your case."
"It was our case." My voice is steady. I worked for that. "You were my supervisor, Frank. You knew. You were there."
"Are you recording this?"
"No, I'm not, Frank." I show him my phone isn't recording. I open my coat, pull up my blouse. "I got nothing."
"I didn't sign off on anything in writing." Flat. Practiced. He's been rehearsing this. "And my copy — my only copy — has been sitting in a safe deposit box on a thumb drive that hasn't been touched in five years. Nobody accessed it. Nobody could."
"How did Vance get the video?"
He looks at me for a long time.
"You kept a copy," he says.
"Frank—"
"You told me you didn't. You looked me in the eye and told me there was no other copy." He takes a step closer. "You're lying because it didn't come from my end."
I don't answer.
"You kept it," he says. "And somebody found it. And you burned us both. So this is on you. You fucked me. Tell me I'm wrong."
His certainty throws me.
He walks past me into the house. The door closes.
I stand in his driveway until the porch light goes off.
The whole drive back from Queens, my mind won't settle.
Ryan Keller.
All of it turning over in my head until the city feels too loud and too close. Getting back onto the expressway is a nightmare. A guy in a black Escalade cuts me off with half a lane open and no reason for it except being alive in Queens. I lay on the horn. He gives me the finger.
By the time I get home, I'm still shaking. Not from fear. From the shape of it. From knowing something is wrong and not knowing where the rot starts.
I call Rosemary.
She has a date. Cancels it without making me ask twice.
I owe her one. More than one.
I'm at my kitchen table with the Ryan Keller file open.
I put her on speak phone. I tell her I was hacked.
Not guessed. Not sloppy. Hacked.
Someone got into my system and found exactly what they needed. Which means it wasn't random. It wasn't some kid in a basement looking for credit cards.
It had to be someone close.
Someone from the office. Maybe IT. Maybe someone with access. Maybe someone I've passed in the hallway a hundred times and never thought twice about.
She wants to go through the file page by page. Start from scratch.
We split it in half and keep the phone on between us. We flag anything that seems out of place.
I should have done this weeks ago but now I know why I didn't. I didn't want to relive the Ryan Keller case.
I'm at my kitchen table with my laptop open, Rosemary in my ear, when the knock comes.
"Rosemary, let me call you back. Someone's at the door."
"I'm going to put something in the microwave. I'll call you if I find something."
"Same," I say.
I know it before I open the door.
Mike is standing in the hall with his jacket still on, two coffees in his hand, and that look on his face he gets when he's trying not to look worried.
"You never called back," he says.
I pull the phone away. "Come in."
He steps inside, sets the coffees on the counter, and he's crossing to me, tipping my chin up, kissing me. Slow at first. His hands slide into my hair and I forget every cold thing I was thinking on the drive home. I pull him in and kiss him back harder than I mean to.
"Hey," he says against my mouth.
"Hey."
He holds me. I exhale.
His hands rub my back. Slip under my blouse. I slide mine under his jacket up his back.
He leads me to the bedroom. My shoulders drop and my feet follow.
We fall onto the bed, his shirt already gone, my blouse open at the buttons.
His mouth finds my throat and moves lower, tongue dragging across my collarbone, and I arch into him.
His hands move over me — unhooking, sliding, peeling away everything between us — and I want him to.
I pull him back up by the jaw and kiss him deep.
"Yes," I say.
He pulls back to look at me. Takes his time. His eyes move over my face like he's trying to hold on to something.
His mouth is on my breast, and I stop thinking entirely.
His hands are everywhere — gripping my hips, dragging up my thighs — and I'm already breathless when he slides down my body and puts his mouth on me.
I gasp and grip the sheets. He doesn't rush.
He never rushes. He works me slow and deliberate until my thighs are shaking and I'm pulling at his hair and saying his name in a way I won't remember later.
He comes back up, settles between my legs, and I reach for him. Guide him.
He pushes in slow, and I feel every inch of it, and I pull him closer, deeper, and his forehead drops to mine.
He moves, and I wrap my legs around him, and we find a rhythm that makes the whole city disappear.
His mouth is at my ear, my throat, my shoulder.
I dig my nails into his back, and he makes a sound low in his chest that I feel everywhere.
I'm close already, and he knows it — he knows my body now like he's been learning it for months, which he has — and he shifts his angle, and I cry out and he keeps going until I fall apart completely under him.
I look at the screen.
Rosemary.
“Shit. I have to take this."
"No," he says.
"I asked her to look into something — she wouldn't call back to back if it wasn't—" I answer it. "Hey."
I go to the living room and close the bedroom door behind me.
The living room is dark. I don't turn on a light.
"Janet."
“Yeah?”
"I found something."
I sit on the edge of the couch. "Tell me."
"I went through the Keller file. Background, family members, associates." A pause. "Mike Trent is in there."
I'm not sure what she said. It doesn't make sense.
"He's Ryan Keller's half-brother," she says. "Different fathers. Same mother — Carla Trent. He grew up in Queens. Enlisted after high school. Marines. Two tours. He saw combat, Janet. He was decorated." Her voice drops. "He's killed people."
I press my free hand flat against my sternum.
The bedroom door is twenty feet away.
"Janet."
"I heard you," I whisper.
"Is he there now?"
"Yeah."
She goes quiet.
"I have to go," I say.
"Get out of there."
I end the call.
I sit in the dark, and I don't move.
I think about every moment I have spent with him. The supermarket. His laugh across the bar at Nocturne. His hands on my face in the dark. I love you. Lying against his chest, feeling safer than I have in six years.
All of it planned.
I stand. I'm in my bra and underwear. My clothes in the bedroom with him.
The bedroom door opens.
Mike stands there. Jeans on, chest bare, hair still wrecked from my hands. He looks at my face and goes, careful.
"Are you coming back to bed?"
"It's the case." Almost normal. "I'm just spiraling."
He moves toward me. My body tenses.
"Are you alright?"
"Come back to bed," he says.
"In a minute."
He takes a step toward me.
My body recoils.
Something shifts in his eyes. "What's going on?" he asks.
We look at each other across the dark room, and I watch him understand. Watch it move across his face — the calculation, the stillness, the way his jaw sets. He's not panicking. He's thinking.
That terrifies me more than anything.
"Janet."
I back into the kitchen. My shoulders hit the doorframe. I turn and put the counter between us.
"You know," he says quietly. "Don't you?"
My hand finds the knife block. I pull one out the largest one and hold it between us.
His eyes drop to the knife. Come back to my face.