CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“We need the network online,” Marcus said, leaning forward, frustration tight in his voice. “Cox doesn’t move without leaving a trace. Cameras, traffic lights, ATMs—he’ll be on something.”
Marcus stared at her. “You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was. Budget cuts. They don’t monitor twenty-four-seven anymore.
We get what we pay for.” She sat back, shaking her head.
“You know, this reminds me of a story from the seventies. City bus drivers were on work-to-rule. They did exactly what the handbook said—nothing more. Dispatch radioed a guy driving through Queens. Told him to detour, there was a serial killer on board. He refused. Said if he took the detour, he’d have to drive extra mileage to get back onto his route. So he stayed the course.”
Marcus looked up from his coffee, brow creased. “What happened?”
She shrugged. “The killer got off two stops later, apparently none the wiser. Rules don’t keep people safe. People do.”
Her phone buzzed sharply on the table. She answered, voice clipped. “Torres.”
It was Gina Park, breathless through static.
“We’re at St. Bartholomew’s hospital, ma’am.
No one here, but someone’s been living rough—sleeping bag, food cans, kettle on a stove.
And a lot of photographs. Same guy in all of them—looks like a doctor, or a scientist. There’s one more thing…
a half-full box of Tic Tacs. Peppermint. ”
Marcus was already on his feet. “Kate,” he said quietly. “That’s her. It has to be.”
Torres’s expression didn’t change. She took a slow sip of coffee, considering. “Or Cox wants us to think so.”
“Come on—peppermint Tic Tacs? That’s Kate’s tell. I promise.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” She snapped her phone shut and stood, pulling on her jacket. “Either way, we don’t wait for eight fifteen. Get uniforms, patrol, aviation—flood the area around St. Bart’s. If they’re both there, I want them boxed in.”
The tired hum of the precinct snapped to life. Phones rang, boots scuffed, radios crackled. Outside, sirens began to rise—a low, swelling chorus that rolled east toward the river.
***
Kate followed Cox’s instructions to the letter. The bus hissed to a stop on Lexington and 47th, and she stepped out into the brittle morning light, phone pressed to her ear.
“Walk south,” his voice murmured. “Keep to the right-hand side of the street. No pauses, no sudden turns.”
She obeyed, merging with the slow current of commuters and early risers. Steam rose from subway grates; delivery vans idled, engines growling. Every few minutes his voice returned, low and steady, directing her like a conductor guiding an unwilling instrument.
“Cross at Forty-Second. Use the subway entrance. Take the express train downtown. I'll tell you when to get off."
She passed under the ironwork arch, the city’s heat closing in around her. The phone signal wavered as the train roared through the tunnel. Kate’s reflection in the window looked alien—pale, sleepless, eyes alert but unfocused. She tried to slow her breathing.
When she surfaced again at Canal Street, Cox’s tone had softened. “Left. Then west toward Broadway. You’re being very obedient today.”
But she wasn’t listening to him so much as to the world around her.
She kept noticing people—men and women who didn’t quite fit the Saturday morning throngs.
A woman wrapped in three coats, staring too long at her reflection in a pawnshop window.
A man with a shopping cart stopped dead at the curb, head slightly tilted, lips moving in rhythm to her footsteps.
Another on the corner of Grand, clean fingernails, tidy hair. Smoking an unlit cigarette.
And they all had that way of being that reminded her of Tommy Rodrigues. Alert yet also vacant. Stamping their feet, blowing on fingers that never got warm. Watching, waiting.
Her pulse ticked upward. This is paranoia, she told herself.
You’re seeing ghosts in daylight. But the doubt crawled under her skin like static.
If Cox had turned the city’s forgotten into his eyes and ears, then she was walking through a maze of invisible threads.
One wrong move and he’d know. And he drew people to him.
She’d seen that, time after time; Cox was a pied piper.
Her radio came to life with a hiss of static. It startled her.
“Who’s calling?” Cox asked sharply, his voice rasping against her jaw.
“It’ll be my partner.”
Cox laughed. “The quarterback with the brain damage?”
Kate refused to dignify that with a response. The unit made robot bleeps as Marcus keyed the channel.
“Don’t answer it,” said Cox. His tone had turned icy, almost ugly. “Keep walking.”
“He’s going to know something’s wrong if I don’t respond,” Kate hissed under her breath.
“I said don’t.”
The noise stopped. Two seconds later, it started up again.
“Persistent,” sneered Cox. “It must be love.”
What do you know about love, Kate thought. But she kept quiet, slowed at a crosswalk, heart pounding. “If I ignore him, he’ll raise every alarm in New York. It’s better if I speak to him, Cox. I’ll keep it clean. I won’t say a word that puts my mom in danger—you know I wouldn’t.”
Silence on the line. She could hear his breathing—measured, deliberate.
Without waiting for permission, she thumbed the green icon, spoke into her neck. “Marcus.”
“Kate? Jesus, where are you? Are you safe?”
“I’m fine,” she said, forcing calm. “I can’t tell you where I am. Listen carefully. You mustn’t look for me. Repeat that back—do not look for me. Stand down. Please.”
“What the hell are you—”
“Stand down.”
She clicked off.
Cross’s voice returned almost tenderly. “Good girl. Now, east two blocks, then right. Don’t look behind you.”
Kate felt the phone in her pocket, her jaw tight. It was buzzing softly; bound to be Marcus trying another means of contact. Every instinct screamed at her to run, but she forced herself to move at an even pace.
She thought some more about the phone—its weight, its warmth against her thigh.
About the patterns her thumb would make if she were typing blind.
She pictured the muscle memory of it, the rhythm of the on-screen keys.
She used the thing, what? Five or six times a day, minimum.
She didn’t need it in front of her face.
The trick was—almost—to stop thinking so hard.
Let the grooves take over, the channels worn in her neurons by repeated use.
Some days, some nights, she spent so much time typing and texting that she caught her mind continuing to do the work, long after she’d switched her bedside light off.
If only she could trick herself back there.
Back there, but in the daylight. Upright, on a Saturday morning, in Manhattan, with unknown quantities of hostiles watching her every move. With her mom, in Maine, in the gunsights of a maniac. And Cox, breathing in her ear.
***
Torres barked into the phone, one hand gripping the receiver, the other scribbling notes on a yellow legal pad already drowning in arrows and scrawls.
“Run it again,” she said. “I don’t care if you have to brute force the triangulation—just give me the nearest mast she pinged when that call went through. Yes, I’ll hold.”
Across the room, Marcus sat slumped at a desk, elbows pressed to his knees, staring at his phone like it was an open wound. The text had come through two minutes ago.
From Kate.
He turned the screen toward Torres. “Look at this.”
A mess of symbols filled the screen:;:.=@@)(/!-08:;>-)—a jumble that made no sense, like someone had rolled their palm across the keys.
“She wouldn’t just—” He stopped, unable to finish.
Torres raised a hand for silence, still on the line.
“Yeah, got it. Good. Send the coordinates to my screen.” She hung up and exhaled through her nose.
“Okay. Her phone’s last tower connection was the one at the top of the Manhattan Detention Center.
That puts her somewhere within a few blocks.
Downtown, relatively central. Helpful but not very. ”
She straightened, eyes flitting to the tech desk at the far end of the bullpen. “But we might finally catch a break—CCTV ops are back online. I can get Manhattan’s feed up in five. And if she’s on foot, she’ll be moving relatively slowly.”
Marcus didn’t answer. He was frowning at the string of characters again, thumb hovering over the screen as if it might rearrange itself into meaning.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“There’s got to be something in it. Code, maybe? Numbers-as-letters? It’s too random otherwise.”
Torres crossed to his desk, leaning over his shoulder. The text glowed between them. For a long moment she just stared. Then her expression changed—sharp, sudden understanding.
“Oh, you clever girl,” she murmured.
Marcus blinked. “What?”
“She had the wrong screen up. I’m guessing it was in her pocket. But she still used the keyboard.” Torres grabbed a sheet of paper and drew a quick rectangle, marking out the grid of a standard smartphone keypad: three rows of letters, punctuated by a scatter of symbols.
“Look,” she said, already sketching. “If you line up what she pressed with where her thumb would naturally land—she’s spelling something. The symbols mirror the layout. It’s not nonsense, it’s position.”
Marcus stared down at her drawing as she started mapping each symbol to its mirror key. Slowly, the pattern began to emerge, jagged but legible.
Torres’s pen stilled. She looked up at him.
“She’s sending us a message,” she said quietly.
***
Kate’s legs trembled by the time she reached the seventeenth floor. The air in the stairwell was thick and stale, tasting of rust and disuse. She pushed open the door to the rooftop level and was momentarily blinded by the weak, pale light filtering through the dust-caked windows.
Elijah Cox was there, standing near the broken window where the skyline unfurled in smog and silver. He looked thinner than she remembered, hollow-eyed, his once-smooth voice a rasp of gravel.