Deadly News: A Thriller Read online

  “I don’t know what any of you are talking about. Now do you want to hear about my completely irrelevant love life, or the possibly deadly important relationship between what’s happened to me over the past few days and tonight’s disaster?”

  “Love life?” the thirteen-year-old says, leaning forward.

  “Come on honey,” the wife says, pulling the girl back, then appearing to lean on her for support. “We can hear about that later. Go on Abby. What happened next?”

  You return your attention to Abby, and she begins once more.

  Abby’s Story, continued

  The next morning she got a call from an unfamiliar number. Reluctantly, she answered. “Hello?”

  “Abby. Abby Melcer?”

  “Yes—”

  “This is Officer Delano. I’m here with our forensics guys, and your landlord wants to check with you whether it’s okay for us to go in.” He did not sound pleased.

  “Oh. Yeah, of course.”

  “Great. Great. Hold on a second, you can tell your landlord that.”

  There was a rustling, then Abby’s landlord, a middle-aged man who doted like a long-lost aunt, came on the line. “Hello Abby. How are you this morning?”

  “I’m good, George. You can let the police in.”

  “Oh, yes, okay. You know, I just wanted to check in with you, make sure it was okay. I wouldn’t want you to hold me responsible if anything, well, I mean, you kids have all kinds of things these days, easily damaged things, expensive. I just wouldn’t want to be held responsible. You have renter’s insurance, yes?” Maybe it was just the phone, but his voice seemed higher than normal.

  “Yes, I do,” Abby lied. “It’s fine, you can let them in.”

  “Okay then, here’s Officer… here’s the officer.”

  “Wait!” Abby shouted, remembering her keys.

  “Yes!”

  “I lost my key. Can—”

  “No problem. No problem at all. I’ve been meaning to change the locks.”

  “You have?”

  “Certainly! Two break-ins in as many weeks? Both times no physical damage? Maybe someone has some keys they shouldn’t.” There was a pause. “You know I had to fire the last cleaning crew, those, uh, those people may have made copies before giving the keys back.”

  Abby wondered why the crew had keys to apartments in the first place, but was more concerned with the other break-in. “Who else was broken into?”

  “Um, this is Officer Delano. Maybe you can talk to your landlord when you get back, or on his own phone.”

  “Sure, sorry…”

  “Okay then. We’ll let you know what we find. Do you need a ride to the station?”

  “The station?” She looked at Ecks. “I can find my way there. When?”

  “We’ll let you know. I have a bunch of paperwork from a John Doe that needs to be done today, and our lab guys will need a bit of time to process the evidence, so probably tomorrow morning..”

  “Okay.”

  “Great. See you then.”

  They disconnected.

  “Who’s George?” Ecks asked from beside her.

  “My landlord. He wouldn’t let the police in.”

  Ecks chuckled. “Someone else was broken into? During the night?”

  “I don’t know, the cop took the phone back before I found out. We should go there later.”

  He nodded. “Coffee?”

  “You have tea?”

  “No.” He smiled. “But I don’t have coffee either.”

  Downstairs, not far from Ecks’s building, was a small coffee shop that, it turned out, served passable Pu-erh.

  Abby sipped hers as she used her laptop to search for W. Williams, and variations on it, a name which she remembered seeing on one of the sheets that was in the folder. There were slightly more than four billion relevant pages, according to Google. A LinkedIn profile looked promising, a CEO at a company in the city, but it was thin. No news stories related to him, and nothing noteworthy about his company; she hadn’t even heard of it before just now. Plus, she might be remembering the name wrong, and it was common.

  “Any luck?” Ecks was sitting next to her, sipping his coffee, intermittently glancing at her screen and watching the people outside go by the shop windows.

  “No. I don’t even know if the name’s right.” She sighed and checked her email for the tenth or twentieth time since she’d sat down, just in case she missed the new mail notification sound somehow. Nothing from Soren. Nothing from anyone. She shut her laptop, pushed it away from her, and put her head down on the table where it had been. The spot was already warm.

  Ecks briefly rubbed her back. “Don’t worry.”

  She rolled her head to look at him. “Don’t worry?” Hearing her own voice, she lifted her head to glance around the shop. She began again in a quieter voice: “Someone broke in and stole something I had right next to me. He was right next to me, while I was sleeping, defenseless.”

  “I’m sorry. I know that must, it must be uncomfortable.”

  She pinched the bridge of her nose. “Psh. Isn’t this a reporter’s dream? Get involved in a massive conspiracy story?”

  “Conspiracy?”

  She waved her hand. “Whatever it is.”

  They sat in silence for a moment.

  Abby stared out the window. Three yellow cabs were stopped within view. After a minute, they drove on and were replaced by a mildly motion-blurred line of traffic. “What am I gonna do?”

  “The police are checking your place. If they find something—”

  “If. Yeah. If not?”

  “I don’t know Abbs, I’m just a reporter, not a detective.”

  “Same.”

  They finished their drinks in silence.

  A black sedan with tinted windows drove slowly past as they exited the coffee shop, and Abby stared in horror, expecting it to stop and men to pour out and throw her in, or the window to roll down a crack, something black and round to poke out, and then the gunshot that would take her life.

  “You okay?” Ecks asked as the car continued on without incident. There was a number on the back. Uber. She was freaking out over a glorified cab.

  “Yeah.” She began walking. “Let’s get back to your place.”

  “Already?” he asked, smiling.

  She looked at him as he came up beside her, shook her head. “Jesus.”

  For a while they walked on without speaking.

  “Now what?” Ecks asked out of nowhere.

  “You keep asking me that question, like I’m going to know.”

  Ecks started to speak, made some sounds instead, then closed his mouth. He sighed.

  Abby laughed. Then it turned into something else. Her pulse increased and she got that burning, sinking sensation in her chest. “I can’t believe this is happening to me.”

  “Me either.”

  She looked around at all the people going about their days. Among the numerous other people, a mother and stroller passed them on the sidewalk. The baby inside was smiling, and Abby imagined she could hear its laughter, even though she couldn’t, not over the noise of everything else. It held a toy, a rattle maybe, and shook it with the halting clumsiness of the very young.

  “Hey.” Ecks grabbed her arm, stopping her.

  “What is it?”

  He shook his head. “Oh, nothing. You were kind of scaring me.”

  “How?”

  “You were smiling.”

  She shook free of his grip and continued on, crossing her arms over her chest as she walked.

  “Hey,” Ecks called, catching up with her again. “I just meant that it’s a sign of extreme stress, like how people usually either laugh or freeze in disasters.” He punched her shoulder. “Thought you were a psych major.”

  “You thought wrong.”

  “But, it’s how you got the job— I mean…”

  “I guess everyone knows.” They reached Ecks’s building. Abby went up the steps and waited by the door for
him to open it.

  He slid his card across the scanner, waited a moment, then pulled the door open.

  “I minored in psychology, majored in journalism.” She entered the building.

  “Oh,” Ecks said, standing outside, still holding the door open for any ghost who might seek entrance though a means more like that used by the living.

  As the door shut, Ecks having gone inside after Abby, a black car with tinted windows pulled up a block or so away at—unknown to its occupants—the very edge of a surveillance camera’s reach, just enough in frame to see clearly its license plate. The driver would never be found, having disappeared the following day. When his identity was investigated, it would crumble under the scrutiny, and leave nothing of value behind.

  Abby stares at the fire after telling you this, and you think you have a hunch what comes next.

  The thirteen-year-old is leaning so far over in her chair that you are starting to have an actual concern that she will fall into the fire. She’d probably be fine, but still. “Careful,” you say.

  She doesn’t respond.

  You sigh and look back at Abby. You want her to go on, but you don’t want to be the one to prod her to do so.

  “I don’t get it,” the scruffy man says, shaking his head. It looks like he’s looking past Abby, at you, but the way the fire lights his face makes it hard to tell.

  “What?” Abby says, still staring at the fire.

  “How’d you know they were on camera? How’d you see the footage?”

  “Remember how my place was broken into, that cop who took the report?”

  “Yeah—”

  “I knew it!” the teen interrupts. “Corrupt, right? Or a bad guy? Like a fake cop?” She looks around grinning. “I knew it. Who, I mean what real cop would just come into the station like that, through the front door?”

  “He was real,” Abby says. “It was just an office we went to. No, he wasn’t corrupt either. Hell, actually, maybe. I don’t know. But he didn’t do anything wrong by me. He let me see the footage to see if I knew anyone, or could spot anything familiar. I noticed the car was a cab and said so. That’s how they found the guy—or at least his false identity.” She pauses for a moment, looking blankly at a spot above the heads of the people in the circle. When she continues, her voice is quieter, her speech slower. “I saw them pull up, because he let me watch the whole tape. The reason he was showing it to me, was because of what happened later. What happened that night, while we were sleeping.

  “At three sixteen AM, two minutes after a police car passed in and out of the camera frame, two people get out of a car that had been parked there for nearly twenty-four hours. We think one was the mysterious driver, a man, the other could have been man or woman. They wear all black, and keep their faces down. It doesn’t matter, the camera isn’t good enough to make out any features, and even if it had been, the angle is too sharp.”

  “No one noticed people sitting there all day?”

  Abby shrugs. “Maybe someone did, maybe a bunch of people. Would you call the police? Would you even notice?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I,” Abby says, then leans forward and continues her story. “They walk out of the frame of the surveillance camera several seconds later, there’s a gap where we can’t see them, then they’re visible on the cameras in Ecks’s building’s elevators. These cameras are much better, but it doesn’t matter, ‘cause they’re wearing masks now. They wear gloves, though their hands are empty.”

  Abby looks directly at you. “One of them tried to wipe the sweat off their forehead, even though they were wearing a mask and couldn’t do that, and I remember laughing at that. That they were nervous or uncomfortable, and so distracted that they forgot they were wearing a mask. Like this,” she says, dragging three fingers across her forehead, then looking at them. “Maybe it was just a nervous tick.”

  “How did they get in?” the man with the suit jacket asks. “Didn’t you say there was a lock?”

  Abby shrugs one shoulder. “So after they get out of the elevator, we lose track of them. But that’s okay, we know where they went. And I know for a fact we locked Ecks’s door, and the windows, and everything. And still, without any damage, they stole in, and…

  Abby’s Story, continued

  The two figures moved through the dark apartment, coming upon the sleeping forms of two people.

  “We’ll need clothes,” one whispered.

  “Why bother?” the other asked.

  “Just get some, I’ll bag him.”

  The one did as the other one said, quietly rummaging through drawers and closet for clothing for the male. The female was to be left here, unaware, because that would be more effective, or so it was now thought. If only, the one gathering the clothes thought, my name and goddamn dossier hadn’t been with the rest of those. One stupid slip up, one simple mistake, and here I am. God, damn my luck.

  Off to this one’s side, on the bed, the male jerked briefly awake as the needle pierced flesh, but he was immediately out again. He probably would remember it, if at all, as a brief dream fragment, or nightmare.

  This next part was delicate. Getting the male out, without waking or disturbing the female. Any drugging of the woman would be evidence, however circumstantial, and while tracing the drug that was used all the way back to them seemed entirely impossible, it wasn’t; it was simply implausible. But there was always that chance, and it was not one that they would take.

  And so, with infinite care, the two lifted the one slowly from the bed, which moved far less than expected.

  “Memory foam,” one whispered.

  The other clenched teeth and scowled in response, which went unseen under the mask, and shook their head as they lowered the male to the floor. Some part of him—his heel?—thudded against the wood floor, and the two froze, hunched down below the sight level of the bed.

  …

  “Ehm,” moaned Abby. “Ecks.” She swept her hand across the bed next to her—just warm sheets. She opened her eyes, blearily looked around the darkened bedroom. There was a faint light coming through the open bedroom door. It seemed too dim to be coming from the kitchen, but she wasn’t familiar enough with the place yet to know for sure.

  Yet. She grinned at the word. “Get me some water,” she called toward the kitchen area, then let her head fall back onto the pillow. “Em. Or wine,” she mumbled into it. By the time her brain processed the chill of the room, the smell of unfamiliar sweat, the sound of life, of another human nearby who wasn’t Ecks, she was already asleep. She dreamt of running away, while staying in place. She dreamt of falling and grasping, but missing. She dreamt of Ecks reaching out for her, but their hands not quite reaching one another’s, and then he was gone, and she was always too late.

  …

  “Ecks?” she called out, sitting up in bed. Maybe he went to get coffee. She disentangled herself from the covers, crossed the bedroom to the closet, and looked at herself in its mirrored doors. She was so pale now that her tan lines were gone. She ran a hand across her stomach, used her forearm to push her boobs up, then walked into the bathroom to take a shower and brush her teeth before Ecks got back.

  She had to have taken at least a half hour, but when she was done, he still wasn’t back. In the bedroom, hair still damp, she put on the last of the clean clothes she’d brought with her, then went to the kitchen to look for clues as to where he’d gone, or a note, but there was nothing. What an asshole. He knew what was going on and that leaving without telling her would worry her. She went back to the bedroom and tried to find the door to his office. It was hidden well; it took several attempts to actually find and open it.

  She proceeded up the winding staircase, walked to the balcony overlooking the rest of the apartment, and just stared. She hadn’t really expected him to be up here. But where was he? She was looking at the front door now, like she expected it to open—or maybe to be open.

  When she got the call from Officer Delan
o, she was already assuming the worst, and had little idea how much time had passed:

  “…isn’t that uncommon. I’m sure he’s fine.” He paused. “So do you need that ride after all?”

  “You don’t understand, he was supposed to be here. I mean, this is his place. He’s gone.”

  “Well, sometimes men—”

  “No. You don’t get it, this is his apartment. He wouldn’t just leave.” She suddenly remembered she was supposed to be at work. So was Ecks. Maybe that’s where he had went? But no, he would have told her, got her to come with him.

  “Well,” Officer Delano went on, “I can’t do anything about that for another, say, twenty hours, unless there’s evidence of a crime. But your place, well, we found quite a bit.”

  “What?” Abby said, momentarily distracted from her worry about Ecks.

  “I don’t want you to get too excited, but we found finger prints. Surprisingly few. Yours of course, I’m assuming, but also two others that were only in a few areas. It could be anyone who’s been over, but we got a hit for one of them.”

  “So you know who it is?”

  “No, it’s only a partial match. There’s a two or three in one hundred chance that the finger print left at your apartment was left by someone other than who our database says. But it’s a good start.”

  “I will need that ride then.”

  “Great. I’ll come by now.”

  “You need directions?”

  “No. I’m a patrol officer. I, you know, patrol the area. Kinda familiar with it by now.”

  “Oh. Okay.” She looked around the empty apartment. “You have the address? Yeah, that’s it. All right. Locked. I’ll keep it with me. Don’t worry, I don’t plan on it. Bye.” She let the hand with the phone in it fall to her lap. Now she had to sit here and wait. Sit here and do nothing until someone came and rescued her.

  She hated it. It was waiting at her old babysitter’s until her mother got off work all over again. Old was apt, since the woman had been in her seventies. Abby often thought, now, as an adult, how risky that was, leaving a child with someone so old. What if the woman had fallen? Abby wouldn’t have known what to do. What if she had died?