He pulled a Camel out of a pack left lying on the desk. Sometimes he just liked to hold one. I made a mental note to talk to him about the value of twelve-step programmes.
‘You got all that from some columns of numbers?’ he asked, impressed. I didn’t say anything.
‘I don’t know why she did it,’ he said at last. ‘I’ve got no idea.’
‘Nor do I,’ I replied, ‘but something happened. Something happened that day which changed everything for her.’
He shrugged. ‘Sure – it did for a lot of people.’
‘Yeah, but none of them checked into the Eastside Inn. She was determined to hide her identity and live off the grid. I think she made her mind up that day – she was going to murder someone. Checking into the Eastside Inn was the start of her preparations.’
The cop looked at me, and he knew it was a bad development: a person who had spent so much time planning a crime was far less likely to have made a mistake. His shoulders sagged as he thought of the long investigation ahead, and that, combined with the ache in his leg, was enough to make him look like he was about to crawl into the unmade bed.
I glanced up and saw someone pass the door. ‘Petersen!’ I yelled. ‘You got a cruiser outside?’
‘I can get one,’ he countered.
‘Throw your boss over your shoulder,’ I said. ‘Take him home.’
Bradley objected, but I cut him off. ‘You said yourself they were packing up – nobody’s gonna solve it tonight.’
Petersen had never heard Bradley ordered around before, and he couldn’t hide his delight. He bent as if to follow my instruction but his boss pushed him away, telling him there was always a vacancy on the sewer patrol.
Petersen smiled at me. ‘How about you – you need a ride?’
‘I’m fine, I can make my own way home,’ I said. It wasn’t true, though – I wasn’t going home, I was going to where I figured the killer had started her own journey on that terrible day. I was going to Ground Zero.
Chapter Twenty-six
I’VE BEEN TO many sacred places, but none so strange as the sixteen acres of Ground Zero. It was a construction site.
In the time which had elapsed between the attack on the Twin Towers and Eleanor’s murder, the whole area had been turned into a massive pit with almost two million tons of rubble being removed to prepare it for rebuilding.
Eventually new towers would rise from the scar and on them would be plaques carrying the names of the dead until, in less time than most of us would credit, people would hurry past, barely remembering they were on hallowed ground.
But on this quiet Sunday the sight of that raw expanse was one of the most moving things I had ever seen: the very desolation of the place was a more eloquent statement of what had been lost than any grand memorial. Staring out at it from the viewing platform, I realized that the attack was imprinted so deeply on our minds that the building site formed a blank canvas, an empty screen on which we projected our own worst memories.
With breaking heart I saw the brilliant blue sky again and the burning buildings, I watched people wave from jagged windows for help that would never come, I saw the wounded run down dust-filled streets, I heard the crashing thunder of the collapsing buildings and I saw rescue workers write their names on their arms in case they were pulled dead from the rubble. I smelt it and lived it and tried to say some quiet words to the twenty-seven hundred souls that would never leave that place. Twenty-seven hundred people – over a thousand of whose bodies were never found.
It was a wonder that any were recovered. At fifteen hundred degrees Fahrenheit, human bone turns to ash in three hours. Fires in the World Trade Center reached two thousand degrees and weren’t extinguished for a hundred days.
It says in the Qur’an that the taking of a single life destroys a universe, and there was the evidence in front of me – twenty-seven hundred universes shattered in a few moments. Universes of family, of children, of friends.
With the rising sun bringing light but little warmth, I left the platform and started to walk. I didn’t know what I was looking for – inspiration probably – but I had no doubt that the killer had started her journey to the Eastside Inn from very close to the path I was following.
There was no other way to get to the hotel – just after the first plane hit, the Port Authority closed all bridges and tunnels into Manhattan; buses, subways and roads across the island either stopped running or were gridlocked; a hundred minutes later the mayor ordered the evacuation of the entire area south of Canal Street. To make it to the hotel, she must have already been inside the exclusion zone.