🌁 chapter fourteen: careless people [let me be your ghost]

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness." -F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

“They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

-F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

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Nobody could leave the island.

That was the first thing the police did right—they froze the boats. Three hundred of the most flight-capable people in America stood corralled in a prison exercise yard with their phones lighting their faces like votive candles, watching SFPD string tape across their evening, and I stood among them cataloguing everything, because when I grieve, I watch. It’s the only prayer I know.

Kira was covered now. That was all the mercy the night had organized.

The facts assembled themselves in fragments, overheard and observed, and I strung them together in my shorthand on a cocktail napkin because my notebook was on the mainland. She’d gone toward the lighthouse around ten, during the laser tag—two waiters saw her, laughing, alone, carrying two glasses of champagne. Carrying two. Nobody saw who the second glass was for. At 10:19 the string lights on the north path browned out for a moment—generator hiccup, the event company said. And the service cameras on the north side, the ones covering the lighthouse approach and stairs, the ones that ran all night while every human eye was on the game—

“Nine minutes,” I heard a tech tell a detective, low, baffled, holding a tablet like it had personally betrayed him. “The feed just—there’s a gap. 10:14 to 10:23. It’s not cut, it’s not looped, it’s just gone. This is Crane hardware, this doesn’t happen—”

Gaps happen, said a voice in my memory, mine, weeks old, a different woman’s.

Not in my father’s world, answered his. In my father’s world, gaps are made.

The driveway fire—system dark, no prints, encryption defeated. Geneva—forty minutes of security logs, evaporated. And now nine minutes on an island, on the family’s own hardware, at the exact right time above the exact right stairs. Three gaps. One signature. The same hand had been turning off the world’s eyes for a year, and tonight it had turned them off above Kira, who had opened a vault and booked a meeting and told me the party would keep.

I looked across the yard at the people I had spent six weeks interviewing, and the case stopped being a cold case in a manila envelope. It was warm. It was here. It had shared canapés with all of us and was, statistically, still standing inside this tape.

The detectives found me on their own. I was always going to be found.

“Ma’am—you came with Mr. Crane? And how long have you known the deceased?” Notebook out, tone polite, eyes not. “And during the game portion of the evening, you were where, exactly?”

Alone in Block D, is where I’d been. Alone, out of sight, in the dark, a stranger with a sealed past standing fifty yards of open ground from the stairs. I watched the youngest detective do that math in real time, and the oldest fear I owned—the cuffs, the cell, the record with my name finally on it—came up the well shaft with its hands out.

It was Conrad, of all people, who waded in.

“Hey—hey, no. Not her.” He arrived like weather, gray-faced, bourbon gone from his hand, and put himself half between me and the cops with their notebooks. “She’s Eze’s. Been at the house six weeks, she’s the reason he’s eating dinner like a human being again, and if you make this night worse for that man by sweating his—his person—I will have your captain on the phone before your pen hits the period.” A heavy hand landed on my shoulder, warm, steadying, enormous. “She was with the party, fellas. Come on.”

Grief had made him kind, or kindness was useful tonight, and standing inside the shelter of it I honestly could not tell which, and that frightened me more than the detectives did.

But detectives keep lists, and I stayed on theirs. An hour later a different pair came back with harder questions—could anyone besides the deceased’s friends confirm my movements during the game, and would I mind coming to the mainland to make a formal statement—and the yard noticed, conversation dropping in a widening ring, three hundred careless people relieved to have somewhere to put the night’s horror that wasn’t themselves or anyone they summered with. The woman no one knew. The stranger in green silk.

“She was with me.”

Eze’s voice came from behind my left shoulder, aimed at the detectives and loud enough for the whole yard to bank on. He arrived beside me still in his ruined evening clothes, Kira’s blood dried on one cuff from where he’d knelt at the bottom of the stairs, and he put his arm around me where three hundred witnesses had watched it live all evening.

“From the game onward. We were together in Block D—it was my birthday, gentlemen, and I intended to spend a portion of it kissing someone, which I’d rather not diagram for the press.” His voice didn’t waver on kissing, didn’t waver on any of it, a man spending his own reputation with both hands. “We heard the scream together. Whoever was above those stairs, it wasn’t Lola Whitman, and the next person who wonders aloud can wonder to my attorneys.”

The detective’s eyebrow did what eyebrows do. Behind him I watched the story ignite and spread through the yard—Crane’s girl, they were together, mystery solved, of course—the alibi and the romance fusing into one fact, official now, on the record, in the notebooks. The cover story stopped being a costume in that moment. It grew a paper trail. Somewhere across the yard, a society reporter typed away on her phone with her thumbs, glowing.

“Don’t say anything else,” Eze murmured against my ear. “Not to police, not to anyone. Attorneys are on a boat already.”

“Eze—your cuff—” Kira’s blood, brown at his wrist.

His jaw moved. “I know,” he said, and his voice stayed level and his eyes, up close, were the worst thing I saw all night.

…

The feds landed at midnight.

They came off their launch in windbreakers, four of them, jurisdiction-flavored words moving ahead of them through the cops like a bow wave—high-profile, task force, we’ll take witness logistics—and the third one through the light of the generator lamps was Matthew.

The yard tilted. I put a hand on cold hundred-year-old stone.

He looked like himself, boyish and sandy and unremarkable, a man built to be forgotten by bartenders, and he clipboard-nodded his way along the witness rows like middle management, and I watched him clock me next to Ezekiel Crane—watched the flick of his eyes tally the silk, the arm around me, the blood on my client’s cuff—without one muscle of his face admitting we’d ever shared a time zone.

They processed the guests in batches, Eze floating around and discussing things in hushed tones with others. It was nearly two when a windbreaker collected me for “routine witness intake,” steering me into the old administration building, down a corridor of peeling federal paint, into a room with a folding table—and closed the door with Matthew already inside it.

“Ninety seconds,” Matthew said. He didn’t sit. “The locals think the Bureau’s taking routine witness statements. Don’t make it weird.”

“You flew here in three hours, Matthew. For routine statements?”

“A woman died fifty yards from my asset, so yes, Lola, the Bureau charters things.” Under the even voice, something I’d never heard in nine years of him. Speed. He was rattled. “Now you listen to me. Your tapes are working. Everything you’ve sent—his security gaps, his contract exposure, his own words about how his systems fail—that’s the spine of the NSA review right now. You did that. D.C. is very pleased with the product and very unhappy with the producer, because tonight their ghostwriter is in the society pages sleeping with the target—”

The floor moved. Your tapes are working. The review with the specific questions, phrased almost exactly the way he phrases it. Kessler thinks we have a leak. I had wondered, all evening, with a coldness I couldn’t place, and here was Matthew handing me the answer like a commendation. The knife in Eze’s back had my handwriting on it—