I Am Pilgrim(79)

Expecting the worst for himself, he plunged into a deserted office and found a marker pen to scribble his name and Marcie’s phone number on his arm. He looked out the window and couldn’t believe it – a hundred and twenty feet away the South Tower was collapsing. Until then, he hadn’t even known it had been hit.

He ran for safety to Emergency Stairway A and it was then someone told him that there was a guy in a wheelchair way up above, waiting for help. Thanks to the teenager’s account, I learned that Bradley was the middle-aged guy who had called for volunteers, led the other three men up to find the crippled man and carried his evacuation chair down the sixty-seven floors.

The teenager wrote that the team found their way to the mezzanine and somehow got the evacuation chair and its occupant outside. Terrified that the tower would collapse, they ran for safety. One of the rescuers – a big guy, a young insurance salesman – realized the other members of the team were running on empty, dropped his corner of the chair and threw the crippled guy over his shoulder. He yelled at Bradley and the other two – a security guard and a foreign exchange dealer – to beat it.

Two minutes later the world caved in – the North Tower collapsed from the top down as if it were being peeled. Everything in those minutes was random, including death – the insurance salesman and the crippled guy took cover in a doorway that offered no protection and escaped the falling debris unharmed. Ten feet away the security guard sustained a direct hit from a blast of rubble and died instantly. Bradley and the forex dealer threw themselves under a fire truck that got buried by a mountain of concrete.

Trapped in an air-pocket, it was the forex dealer – thirty-two and a millionaire – who Bradley held tight and whose dying message he memorized to give to the guy’s family.

Five hours later a fire crew with a sniffer dog hauled Bradley out, saw the details on his arm, called Marcie and told her to get to Emergency as fast as possible.

I stood for a long time in silence. It was one of the most remarkable stories of courage I had ever encountered, and I knew that the following day I would offer Bradley the only thing of value I could give. I would tell him I would invent one last legend and talk at his damn seminar.

I turned away and started to think about what I would say to a gathering of the world’s top investigators. I figured I would claim to be Peter Campbell, a former doctor turned hedge-fund manager. I would tell them that I had first met Jude Garrett back in my medical days when he consulted me on a murder he was investigating. We became friends and there was hardly a case or investigative technique he had pioneered which he didn’t discuss with me. I would reveal it had been me who had found the manuscript of the book after he died and that I was the one who had prepared it for publication. I would lead them to believe, as Bradley had suggested, that I was Dr Watson to his Sherlock.

It wasn’t perfect, but it would do. Mostly, I was confident because I knew Campbell’s academic credentials and a host of other details I would need to invent would survive almost any scrutiny. I could rely on Battleboi for that.

Sure, I could establish Peter Campbell’s legitimacy, but what would I actually say when I addressed them? I wondered if it would be possible to take such elite investigators into an unsolved case, to lead them through the strange details of a brilliant crime – in other words, could I throw open for discussion the murder at the Eastside Inn?

It certainly had all the right elements for a good case study: a woman who changed her appearance every day, a hotel room washed down with industrial antiseptic, a body whose teeth had been pulled and the killer’s use of Jude Garrett’s own book, the one that had caused such a stir among the attendees, as a step-by-step manual.

But they were just facts, and the audience wouldn’t be satisfied with that. ‘Give us a theory,’ they would say. ‘Where’s the narrative? Why September eleventh? Isn’t that the first thing a brilliant man like Jude Garrett would ask?’

And they were right, of course – of all the days, why that one? I thought that if I was Garrett – which, fortunately, I was – I would tell them—

A startling thought swept into my head. Pressured by my imaginary performance, I had an idea of why, when everyone else was running, she was looking for a place to stay.

Say there was somebody she wanted to murder but she had never known how to do it without being caught. Just assume she worked in one of the Twin Towers and was running late that morning. Say she wasn’t at her desk but was standing outside and saw the buildings burn and fall. If all her work colleagues were dead, who would know she had survived?