Chapter 5
1087 Words
Carmen got back to the precinct at 6:52am.
She'd slept exactly one hundred and nine minutes. She knew because she'd looked at the clock when she closed her eyes and looked at it again when she opened them and done the math the way she always did, automatically, the same way she did everything. Her brain didn't really know how to stop working. Her ex-husband once told her that, not as a compliment.
She poured herself some coffee, sat down, and opened the DMV records she'd requested before leaving.
Nine names. Nine vehicles. She spread the printouts flat on her desk and looked at them carefully, the way she look at eevry other evidence, without expectation, without the conclusion already written in her head waiting for the facts to catch up to it. That was the mistake with most people, They fail to look first before making a decision. Carmen had spent twelve years unlearning that instinct and replacing it with something slower and more useful.
She worked through the list methodically.
The first two she eliminated quickly. One vehicle was registered to a seventy-three year old woman in Flushing. The second belonged to a company fleet based in New Jersey, and the log she pulled showed it checked in at 9pm and hadn't left the lot. She drew a line through both.
The third was a possibility. Male, thirty-one, address on the Lower East Side, two prior traffic violations. She set it aside.
The fourth and fifth were women. She didn't eliminate them, she wasn't that kind of detective, but she set them in a separate pile. The witness accounts from the scene had described the driver as male, young, possibly early twenties. Witness accounts were unreliable and she knew it. But she also knew how to weight information without discarding it.
By 7:40am she was down to four names.
She pulled the third one back and looked at it again.
Then she picked up the fourth.
TheHonda civic, 2019, dark grey was registered by a Ryan CastellanoTwenty two years old, address in the East Village. She carefully checked it against the partial plate from the bodega footage. The two visible letters matched. The partial number didn't eliminate it.
She set it at the top of the pile.
She pulled up Ryan Castellano's record. Clean. No priors. A Fordham student, according to his listed occupation. She noted that and kept moving.
Then she stopped.
She moved forward to check the witness starting from the first responding officer. She never stopped reading it since last night and was reading it again now, slowly, the way you reread something very important over and over againg and trying not to miss out on the full details.
Driver appeared young. Male. The vehicle was borrowed according to one witness who stated they recognised the car but not the driver.
She underlined that last part.
Recognised the car but not the driver.
Which meant the driver wasn't Ryan Castellano.
She sat back.
So she wasn't looking for the registered owner. She was looking for whoever was in that car. Which meant she needed to speak with Ryan Castellano, and she needed to do that before anyone else did, and she needed to do it as son as possible, at the moment.
She was reaching for her phone when Lieutenant Graves appeared at the edge of her desk with a coffee of his own and the expression he wore when something was coming down from above.
"Reyes."
"Lieutenant."
"Commissioner's office called at seven. They want a status update by nine."
She kept her face even. "I'll have something for them."
"Not a something. A name."
She looked at him. "I'm close."
"Close by nine, Carmen. That's not a suggestion." He held her gaze for a beat. "I know what this case is. So do you."
He walked away.
She looked at Ryan Castellano's address.
East Village. Twelve minutes from here.
She picked up her jacket.
---
Lena had written the note at 4am.
She'd written it three times before she got it right, or as right as it was ever going to be. The first two versions she'd torn up and put at the bottom of the kitchen bin because she didn't want Ethan to find drafts. She didn't want him to see her working up to it. She wanted him to find the thing she meant, not the process of her meaning it.
Ethan. I've gone to sort this out. Do not come after me. Do not call anyone. I mean that. This is my decision and I've made it clearly and I need you to trust me the way you've always trusted me.*
Finish school. Get the job. Make it worth it.
I love you. Don't do anything stupid.*
L
She'd folded it and written his name on the front and left it on the kitchen table next to the notepad. Then she'd looked at the notepad. The numbers she'd looked at every morning for longer than she wanted to count. Rent. Utilities. Ethan's college payment. The arithmetic of a life held together with both hands.
She'd turned it face down.
Then she'd picked up her bag and walked out.
---
The 7th Precinct on Pitt Street looked exactly like what it was. A building that didn't apologise for itself. Pale brick and institutional windows and a flag that moved in the October wind that was still coming off the avenues like it had unfinished business.
Lena stood across the street from it for two minutes and forty seconds. She counted without meaning to.
A patrol car pulled in. Two officers got out, talking about something ordinary, coffee cups in hand. They disappeared through the door without looking at her.
She crossed the street.
The entrance smelled of industrial cleaner and old coffee and something underneath that she couldn't name but felt immediately, the specific atmosphere of a place where ordinary people came when things had already gone wrong. Plastic chairs along one wall. A noticeboard with the kind of official papers nobody read. A front desk behind a scratched panel of reinforced glass with an officer on the other side filling in a form without looking up.
Lena stood in the middle of the room.
She thought about the note on the table. Ethan's name written on the front of it in her handwriting.
She thought about the numbers on the notepad she'd turned face down.
She walked to the desk.
The officer looked up.
She opened her mouth.
- Writer
