Nora hadn’t yet been able to get her hands on the autopsy reports for Corinna Dewar and Tomas Soares—she had no informants in the Fiftieth Precinct—but Maidali’s killing had made the murders a serial crime, which bumped the whole thing up the ladder. The entire city was paying attention now. Nora expected to get access to the complete file eventually, but today it had been important for her just to be here, to get a feeling for the crimes.
Nora stuffed her hands into the pockets of her fitted hoodie and made herself small, hoping to draw as little attention as possible. Some of the relatives of the first two victims were on the stairs as well, and she had already spoken to several of them while working on the larger story. At thirty-one, she had already paid her dues as a journalist, both in print and digital media. Early on, she had written about her generation and its place in American culture, about social justice and modern media, and occasionally about New York City itself. Over time, New York took over, with Nora focusing more and more on crime and corruption. For the past two years she’d worked as an investigative reporter at NYChronicle, the premier urban-news source in the region, and one with a global readership.
The job was perfect for her for other reasons also, but those were after-dark reasons, not thoughts for the bright of day.
The priest reached the top of the stairs just as Maidali’s mother saw the sprawl of flowers and mementos and photographs that had been placed around the graffitied mailbox. Somehow the graffiti added to the beauty and the pain of the memorial. Lit candles burned in tall glass cylinders, their flames dancing as the late-September breeze kicked up again.
The dead girl’s parents held hands and lowered their heads. The two news teams crowded in at the edges of the mourning circle, cameras rolling. Some of the spectators took out their phones, and only then did Nora do the same. Rafe frowned at her, a ripple of distaste crossing his features, but she forced herself to ignore him, taking thirty seconds of video and then snapping a few quick photos of Maidali’s little brother—You don’t know his name, Nora … you should know his name—kneeling by the mailbox and picking up one of the flowers there. A white-and-purple lily, its head fat and wilting.
The past year had seen a growing concern about children going missing in New York. Statistics suggested a certain percentage of them were runaways—some kids’ day-to-day nightmares were too dark, or dreams were too big, and they wanted to find their own corner of the sky. But every law enforcement source she’d spoken to off the record had indicated that the past few years had seen a slow but steady rise in these numbers that could not be attributed to runaways. The other options were abduction and murder. Her ex-colleague, ex-boyfriend, and current friend-with-benefits, Sam Loh, had been working on an in-depth series on human trafficking in the northeastern United States, and how traffickers—so long unpunished for the thousands upon thousands of immigrants they’d tricked or stolen and sold into slavery—were now feeling bulletproof and had been expanding their business, snatching children who were sure to be missed. Children the police were going to make a real effort to find.
Those kids never came back.
As Nora stood and let the grief of Maidali Ortiz’s family wash over her, she wondered if it would have been better if Maidali had never been found. Was it better to have a missing child, one you could imagine might in time have escaped harm, might have found a way back into the sunlight … or better to know for certain that the baby you’d held swaddled in your arms, the one whose every fever had filled you with fear, the one whose laughter had filled your heart to bursting … was it better to know that child was dead?
God help her, she thought it might be. It was the ugliest question, and the most hideous answer, that had ever planted roots in her mind.
Nora snapped several more photos with her phone, pictures of the people gathered in that mourning circle, even a few shots of the news teams that filmed the scene. She avoided taking a shot of Rafe, mostly because of the guilt she felt pinking her cheeks, knowing he must think her just another vulture.
The priest cleared his throat, sighing heavily before he launched into a prayer. Nora had thought Maidali’s father might say something to those who had come out to honor the memory of his daughter, but she could see the pain in his eyes and realized that he barely registered the presence of others.
Rafe lowered his head while also shifting slightly away from her. She saw his disapproval, the wrinkle of his brow, and she wanted to speak to him—tell him she wasn’t as heartless as he thought, that her photos weren’t gruesome souvenirs but a vital part of telling Maidali’s story. The feeling frustrated her, that need to apologize for who she was and what she did, and she felt herself drawing away from him, too. At least she wasn’t crowding the dead girl’s family with a TV camera, van parked at wrong angles against the curb, turning their daughter’s murder into a ratings grab, with a warning that if you didn’t watch their report on the killings, the same thing might happen to your child. The media didn’t like to do stories about human trafficking because those stories never had an ending. Murder, though, was an ending of its own. Even without answers to the who and why of it, people could understand mourning. But a missing child … those stories haunted. Lingered. The public didn’t like those stories.
The priest finished his prayer. He put a hand on the father’s shoulder and faced the crowd, offering a blessing to them for their support of the Ortiz family in their time of need. The boy handed the mother his wilting lily and she took it, eyes wide with such pain that she must have slipped into a world of numb incomprehension.
Nora had wanted to blend. To get the story from inside the sorrow, not merely as an outside observer. Now she wished she were anywhere else.
Rafe gave her another disapproving glance, and she moved away from him even farther, barely even aware of the priest’s intonations. Circling behind Rafe and the rest of the onlookers, she moved toward the stairs. She had left her car down on Bailey Avenue, thinking she’d return to it when the family was gone and the crowd had mostly dispersed. Now she did not want to wait. She had the information and the photos. The one thing she didn’t have was the only thing that mattered—answers.
The sun had shifted in the sky, moving the shadow of the house to the top of the stairs so that she could not avoid passing through it. Five steps from the summit, adjacent with the first lamppost, she entered the shadow and faltered, sucking in a tremulous breath. Her limbs felt leaden and cold, and a sharp pain stabbed at her eyes. A dreadful stink washed over her, along with a wave of nausea.
Just go, she told herself, and staggered down two or three more steps.
Pain lanced through her skull again, and her knees felt weak. The shadow around her seemed to breathe with malice. Angrily, she pushed it back, casting the shadow away so that it clung to the wall of the house and left the stairs in full sunlight for an eye blink before she allowed the shade to return to normal.
The shadows were hers.
She refused to fear them.