James Grippando - Need You Now

“Something bothers me about Scully,” she said.

Lilly’s remark had taken me aback. We were seated side by side, so I couldn’t read her expression, and my attention had been drawn across the street, where a kitten seemed to be losing the race against time to find a warm place to spend the night.

“Bothers you how?” I asked.

“It’s mostly a feeling I get.”

“There must be something behind it.”

“Well, for one, I don’t like the way he’s been trying to talk you into a gunfight.”

“He’s training me to protect myself so that I don’t end up like Evan. That’s all.”

“Maybe. But even more than the guns, it worries me the way Agent Henning cut you loose tonight-just like that. Two hours after Evan was shot, the three of us were in Chinatown trying to figure out how the FBI could help us and how we could help the FBI. Another two hours later, we’re sitting at the kitchen table with Scully-whom you haven’t seen since you were a teenager-and Agent Henning calls to tell you that we’re on our own.”

“Scully didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“I’d hate to think he did,” she said. “But why does it keep gnawing at me?”

I didn’t have an answer, but she didn’t seem to be waiting for one. It was just something she wanted out in the open, off her chest. I was about to suggest that we rescue that kitten across the street, but a neighbor opened his front door and called the nearly frozen feline inside.

“Don’t you love happy endings?” asked Lilly. She’d been watching, too.

“Yeah, I guess I do.”

She paused before asking the follow-up, but I could feel it coming.

“Patrick, what do you think is going to happen with us?”

No easy answer came to me, so I ducked it. “I think Shia LaBeouf will play me and Jillian Michaels will play you in a summer blockbuster that will spin off into a reality show called Wall Street Three: The Biggest Losers .”

Her puff of laughter crystallized in the night air before me. “Seriously,” she said. “So much has happened in the last few days, but we haven’t really talked about us. I’m just asking: assuming we don’t get shot, strangled, or arrested, where do you and I end up?”

“That’s a pretty big question,” I said.

“That’s a pretty vague answer.”

She was right. “The fact that after four full days of hell we’re sitting here next to each other says a lot, don’t you think?”

I had intended to speak from the heart, but I could feel from her reaction that my words had fallen short. Maybe I was too tired to do better. Maybe she wished I wasn’t so afraid to say the wrong thing at the wrong time. Maybe all the stress since Lilly had dragged me into Puffy’s Tavern on Monday morning had made our six months in Singapore seem like the distant past-made us seem like two different people, even.

Lilly squeezed my hand gently as she rose and said good night. The cold metal hinges creaked as she pulled open the storm door.

“Lilly?” I said.

She stopped and looked at me.

“I’m glad you’re here,” I said, then tried to do better. “I’m glad you’re with me.”

There was warmth in her eyes, but she offered no words. She pushed open the front door, and I heard the loud slap of the metal storm door as she went inside. I was alone on the stoop, and the night felt colder without her. I started a mental list of perfect responses to Lilly’s question, but I fought off the second-guessing. It suddenly occurred to me why I was having so much trouble with the thrust of her question- What’s going to happen to us? It wasn’t that I didn’t care about Lilly and me, the relationship.

I was more worried about Lilly. Really worried.

A ndie ducked under the yellow plastic tape in Evan Hunt’s doorway and reentered the apartment. Two hours of decoding Evan’s walls had left her bleary-eyed and in need of coffee. She was recaffeinated and rejuvenated, ready for the second leg of a Tour de France-like journey through the mind of a quant.

Even though the body had been found in the Dumpster, the living space of Evan’s apartment was the focus of the crime scene investigation. Members of the team, some on hands and knees, aimed LED flashlights at anything of potential interest, bagging and tagging everything from suspicious hairs and fibers to traces of dirt that may have come from the killer’s shoes. A ballistics specialist scoured the walls for stray bullets that may have missed their target and buried themselves in the plasterboard. Two other investigators collected fingerprints. The investigation team was exclusively NYPD. The FBI’s investigation into BOS money laundering had officially ended, and homicide was technically outside the jurisdiction of the FBI. Technically. There was no doubt in Andie’s mind that Evan Hunt was caught up in a financial crime of federal proportions, and until she was on a jet flying back to Miami, she would spend every waking hour trying to prove it.

“How long you staying?” the lead detective asked. He was a young guy, full of confidence, with eyes that roamed Andie’s body as he spoke.

“Just wanted to take one more look at the wall for my final report,” Andie said.

He glanced at the jumble of words and photographs on the only wall with a window-the window that Evan had covered with butcher paper in order to keep his flowchart continuous. “Good luck,” he said. “Looks like the work of a class-A nut job to me.”

Andie shrugged and smiled, but the detective’s words struck a deeper cord. Indeed, he’d hit precisely on the reason she’d returned to Evan’s apartment. The suspicion was unavoidable that certain people in Washington-the powers who had abruptly shut down her BOS investigation-wanted the world to dismiss Evan’s analysis with similar disparagement.

Just the work of a class-A nut job.

The detective checked her out one more time as he started away, then stopped himself. “We’re ordering Chinese from the restaurant downstairs. You interested?”

“No, thanks.”

He handed her the menu. “If you change your mind, there’s a bit of a trick to reading this thing. The restaurant saves trees by making double-sided copies, but it’s all screwed up. Page four is page one, page two is page two, page three is page three, and page one is page four.”

Andie gave it a look. “Wow, that is confusing.”

“The hostess said it happens all the time. The busboy they send to the copy center to run off the takeout menus speaks no English and always forgets to hit the collate button. It’s become a running joke-kind of a signature of their takeout business. The regulars dig it.”

Information you dug up, no doubt, while hitting on the hostess.

“If you don’t want takeout,” he said, “maybe later you and I could-”

“Four, two, three, one,” said Andie, noting the wedding ring on his finger. “I got it.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

Andie walked to the middle of the room, turning slowly to take in the 360 version of the Cushman world through the eyes of Evan Hunt. A photographer was on the scene to capture it in segments. A videographer recorded the panoramic version. They were working too fast to appreciate the details. Andie allowed herself a long, studied view.

It would have been easy to dismiss Evan’s walls as the work of a disturbed, paranoid genius. At first blush they were a jumble of unframed photographs connected by hand-drawn lines in a variety of colors. The rest of the story was told in words, a handwritten narrative in which each independent thought was expressed inside a separate oval, rectangle, or other seemingly random shape. It reminded Andie of a crude version of an LCD that was connected to a computer with no pop-up blocker. The arrows, however, were the key. If Andie followed the color sequence, she could follow the story. She couldn’t blame NYPD for not seeing it. Andie’s investigation of Lilly Scanlon and BOS/Singapore had given her at least a glimpse into Evan’s world. But these walls supplied pieces that even the FBI didn’t have. Until now.