Jennifer Sturman - The Key

I scanned the list of missed calls. A couple bore the telltale number of the Winslow, Brown switchboard, a couple I didn’t recognize, and the last one had been dialed from my apartment. I was debating whether or not I actually wanted to listen to any of the messages when the phone rang. Once again, the number on the screen was that of my apartment.

Peter, I guessed. It would be just like him to call to apologize when I was the one who owed him an apology.

“Hi,” I said, trying to figure out what to say next. Maybe I could tell him that I was working on my apology and would get back in touch when it was ready?

“Fred,” he said. “Glad I caught you. It’s Peter Forrest.”

“It’s not Fred, it’s Rachel,” I said. “Who’s Fred?”

He chuckled, which was weird. Peter wasn’t a chuckler. “Listen, Fred. I’ve had an unexpected visit this morning, and I’m going to have to reschedule our meeting.”

I may have owed Peter an apology, and I may have been an emotional menace, but that didn’t mean I was in any mood for games. “Peter, what’s going on? This isn’t Fred. You know damn well who you called.”

“It’s funny, Fred-one of the guys reminds me of that O’Connell chap, from Boston. Or maybe more of that O’Donnell character we met last summer?”

Not only was Peter not a chuckler, I’d never heard him refer to anyone as either a “chap” or a “character” before. “Okay, now this is just stupid-”

Then I realized what Peter was doing. The two of us knew only a couple of police officers personally. One was a Detective O’Connell in Boston, whom I’d helped-more by accident than on purpose-to track down a serial killer a couple of months ago. The other was a Detective O’Donnell, who worked in a small town in the Adirondacks where I’d had the misfortune to discover the body of Emma’s former fiancé back in August. I leaned against a shop window and brought the phone closer to my mouth, using a hand to shield my words from the ears of passers-by.

“The police are in the apartment?” I asked.

“Sure, Fred. Your offices are pretty busy, too.”

“And they were looking for me at work?”

“That sounds great.”

“And you’re trying to warn me.”

“Right, right.”

“I’m a suspect? They think I killed Gallagher?”

“It could be even more than that,” he agreed, his voice still unnaturally jolly.

“And Dahlia? They think I tried to kill Dahlia?” It was hard to keep my own voice down given the wave of panic that was washing over me.

“Those projections seem to be on target. Listen, Fred, I have to go, but I’ll have someone get in touch with your team to reschedule.”

“My team?”

“What’s that, Fred? This isn’t the right number to use?”

“You’re saying that I shouldn’t call you. Because you think they’ll be tracing the calls you get?”

“Right back at you, Fred. Take care, now.”

“Wait-”

There was a click, and then he was gone.

I was having a bit of a head-spinning moment. Suddenly, it seemed as if everyone on the street was staring at me, as if my sunglasses no longer offered a protective shield and the eyes around me could penetrate their dark lenses and see through to the murder suspect lurking behind.

The crowded avenue and the brightly lit shops felt newly perilous, and I needed to sit down, preferably somewhere quiet and safe, in order to get the head-spinning under control. Fortunately, a quick scan of my surroundings presented a handy interim solution.

It was relatively easy to lose myself in the stream of tourists pouring into St.Patrick’s Cathedral. Given that I’d never been inside the church before, I probably should have tagged along with one of the groups, listening to what a guide had to say, but I was in no condition to fully appreciate the building’s architectural, artistic, and various other fine points. Instead, I took a seat in a pew about a third of the way down the nave and tried not to hyperventilate.

After a few minutes of determined deep breathing, I didn’t feel fully composed, but I was collected enough to take an initial inventory of the situation.

Glenn Gallagher had been murdered, and I was a suspect in his murder. I knew this was preposterous, but it wasn’t completely unreasonable that the police might see things differently. I’d definitely spent a lot of time telling people how happy I’d be to see Gallagher dead-in fact, I’d even joked about poisoning his stupid pencils, although I doubted that Jake or Mark had bothered to tell anyone about that. Still, I had a well-documented motive of sorts. While I knew I hadn’t really meant it-I’d just wanted the guy out of my life-surely the authorities were duty-bound to investigate anyone who’d been saying anything that could be construed as a threat. I’d had plenty of time to slip doctored pencils into the mug on Gallagher’s desk, so I had the opportunity, as well. As for means-cyanide couldn’t be that hard to come by, and while I wouldn’t have the foggiest idea as how to get the cyanide into the pencil, the actual murderer had figured it out, so it couldn’t be that much of a challenge.

But this all seemed too flimsy to result in the police taking the trouble to hunt me down at home when they couldn’t find me at work.

Which meant that they were likely there because of Dahlia instead of or in addition to Gallagher, as Peter had indicated. They had the unfortunate eyewitness testimony that somebody matching my description had pushed her onto the subway tracks, and there was probably footage from surveillance cameras, as well. And I’d paid for my MetroCard with a credit card, so perhaps they could even track when and where I’d gone through the subway turnstiles. I did some quick calculations-the timing would have been tight, but if I’d caught the train I’d just missed-I could have been at the 51st Street station at the right moment. I hadn’t, of course, but would anybody do the work to try and find witnesses or video placing me where I actually was when they already thought they knew? And what they thought they knew seemed to be sufficient that Peter, who under normal circumstances would be the first to suggest that I turn myself in and get things straightened out in a reasonable manner, was suggesting that it would be best to make myself scarce.

I wondered if I was missing anything. I replayed the conversation with Peter in my head, trying to glean what little information I could from his cryptic words. Was there a reason he called me Fred, for example? I didn’t know any Freds, and he’d never mentioned any to me, but was it a code of some sort? I played with the letters, rearranging them, but neither Derf, Dref, Erdf nor any of the other possible combinations meant anything to me.

Then my BlackBerry buzzed, reminding me again that I had messages waiting. And I remembered Peter’s warning about his calls being traced, and his “right back at you” response. The entire conversation had been awkward, but this comment had struck me as particularly awkward. Could he have meant that calls to and from me could be traced, too?

That, in contrast to the answers I was getting from playing with the letters in Fred, actually made sense. Dahlia had called this number the previous evening, and I’d called her back. I hadn’t managed to speak to her, but there were probably records of the calls in the computers of my wireless carrier.

And then I remembered that last night wasn’t the only time I’d called her. I’d called her this morning, too, by accident when I thought I was calling my office voice mail-less than half an hour before she was pushed off the subway platform. Some people might find that incriminating, especially if they were already disposed to incriminate me.