Chapter 22
Twenty minutes later, Kylie and I were back in Matt Smith’s office. I noticed that Cheryl’s door was closed and her lights were out, which meant she wouldn’t be going home with either of us.
“What have you got?” Kylie asked.
“Evelyn’s last known whereabouts were right here,” Smith said, pointing to a Google map of the Upper East Side on his monitor. “Hackie’s Pub. Second Avenue and Eighty-Eighth Street. She paid her tab with an American Express card at eleven oh-nine p.m. Her apartment is on Ninety-Fourth and Park, which is maybe a ten-minute walk. It was a balmy night, so she might have chosen to walk. But even if she caught a taxi right away, which isn’t likely on a busy weekend, what with traffic and red lights, it would take about the same ten minutes. And since we know she never made it home, she went off the grid not too far away from the bar.
“Working under the assumption that she was on foot, I pulled up traffic and surveillance camera pictures along Second. It must have taken her a few minutes to get out of Hackie’s after she paid the bill, but at eleven seventeen a traffic cam catches her at Eighty-Ninth Street walking uptown on Second. We pick her up again at Ninetieth, then Ninety-First, and that’s it. Nothing shows up on any cameras above Ninety-First Street and Second Avenue.
“Then I went back to her cell phone records. Her iPhone continually pings her location. I checked with Verizon, and they have her at the bar all night, then the signal keeps refreshing, and they can track her as she walks up Second. At eleven nineteen, she’s in the vicinity of Ninety-First and Second. Five minutes later, she’s twelve blocks south at Seventy-Ninth Street. Eight minutes after that, she’s on the Fifty-Ninth Street Bridge heading for Queens, and then the signal goes dead. Verizon never picked her up again. Either she turned off her phone, or it’s at the bottom of the East River.”
“So a car or a taxi picked her up near Ninety-First Street,” I said.
“That strip of Second Avenue is loaded with bars,” Smith said. “There are three of them between Ninety-First and Ninety-Second, which is where we lost her. But none of them have cameras outside on the street.”
“Even so,” Kylie said, “it’s Friday night on the Upper East Side. There would still be plenty of potential eyewitnesses.”
“But most of them would be inside one of those bars,” Smith said.
“I’m not talking about the people inside the bars,” Kylie said. “I’m talking about the ones outside.”
She turned to me. “Remember what Leonard Parker did to keep Muriel Sykes from lowering his property value?” she asked.
“He sent her outside to smoke,” I said. “Good call, Detective. So now all we have to do is hang outside this strip of bars, find some nicotine addict who was there at eleven p.m. on Friday night and was still sober enough to notice Evelyn get into a car and head downtown on Second.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Kylie said, more upbeat than she’d been all day. “Let’s go barhopping, partner.”
Chapter 23
The Post-it note on Emma Frye’s desk said “Call Gideon.” The big block letters at the bottom of her grocery list said “CALL GIDEON!!!” But Emma had let the whole day slip away without calling her son. Like a lot of New Yorkers, she’d been glued to the TV set, riveted by the Rachael O’Keefe murder trial.
“Emma,” Sherman yelled as he came through the front door, “did you call Gideon yet?”
Emma muted the TV and hurried down the stairs, stopping briefly to check her hair in the hall mirror. “Look at you,” she said to her reflection. “Giddy as a teenager.”
Sherman was at the kitchen sink, putting flowers in a vase.
After her husband died a few years ago, Emma didn’t think she’d ever have another happy day in her life. The flower shop she and Roy had owned together was successful, but without him, Emma couldn’t handle it alone. “I’m going to sell it,” she told Gideon.
Gideon found the perfect buyer. Sherman Frye had been a history teacher and a track coach at John Adams High and had just retired after thirty-five years. He offered to buy the shop, but only if Emma agreed to help him run it for the first year.
She said yes, and after two months they started going out for the occasional business dinner. Then came weekends. Golf, antiquing, road trips to Civil War battlefields, and marina hopping on Tecumseh, Sherman’s beautifully restored thirty-three-foot Chris-Craft cabin cruiser.
The night Emma’s year of service was up, the two of them went to their favorite restaurant, La Nora on Cross Bay Boulevard. He waited till they were having coffee and cognac before sliding the envelope across the table.