Page 16

Sixteen

Tuesday noon

Charlie sat outside a cafe not far from Sabrina Sully’s apartment building, on the west side of Central Park. At the next table, a young woman was knitting and reading a book on her tablet at the same time. There was an upmarket food shop next door, and a boutique along with half a dozen cafes and bars. There were as many cars as on the east side, but it was quieter. Fewer people shouting and not so many sirens. In other circumstances, he would have been enjoying himself watching the passersby. But he needed to talk to Orianna about Tom.

“He’s no better, but he’s no worse either,” Orianna said. “Where are you, Charlie?”

“Trying to find out who did this.”

“You need to know that my fixer has been by. Dana. She’s had the police round asking for all the hate mail.”

“Murphy brought them over yesterday and we both looked at them. There was one that could have been genuinely scary, but the rest were getting off on writing rude words.”

“You can’t know that, Charlie.”

Actually, I can, and I do. Because I was there, and because I’ve been doing this job for long enough. Which is why I’m looking for who killed Kaylan Sully, and not following a dead end.

What he said was that he expected NYPD would look for the possibly genuine threat. What he thought was why are NYPD asking for hate mail they already had?

“But tell me more about Tom,” he said.

“They’re giving him massive doses of antibiotics, and I think they’ve hooked up even more machines. Verity sits with Tom the whole time and Gordon keeps getting all of us food and cups of coffee. I keep telling Gordon about you, but he doesn’t want to hear. He says if Tom was living with someone, he’d have told his parents. Which maybe he would if they bothered to contact him. I’ll keep trying. I’ve got photos of the two of you with A to Z on my phone. In Tom’s house.”

Charlie had those photographs too, and a lot more. He looked at them, filling his eyes with Tom, wishing they were warm and three dimensional, afraid that flat images would be all he had left. Pleasepleasepleaseplease.

Electronic noises disturbed the call.

“My boss is trying to ring me, Ori. I’d better see what he wants.”

* * *

Mal Kent wanted the same thing Orianna wanted — to know where Charlie was. But he asked about Tom first, and Charlie managed to tell him without letting too much of the despair come through. He hoped. Because Kent’s sympathy would undo his self-control altogether.

“I’m on the west side of Central Park, sir.”

“Sightseeing?”

“What’s the problem?” Charlie asked. Charlie heard the loud sigh bouncing off the satellites, or the fiberoptic cables or however the signal crossed the Atlantic. “The problem, Charlie, is the call I’ve just had from the New York Police Department, and the call that my boss had from the FBI.”

Heat suffused Charlie’s face. He glanced over at the woman with the knitting. He must have made some kind of noise because she was watching him with interest. He picked up his coffee cup as a distraction and took an over-hasty gulp of cold dregs.

“You are apparently interfering in an ongoing investigation into a shooting, according to my opposite number in New York, and they’d like you to stop. The FBI are investigating a hate crime and wonder why you are trying to stop them. So, inquiring minds would like to know what the bloody hell is going on.”

Charlie ran through the events of Sunday night. “The New York police don’t seem interested in Kaylan, and there’s no real evidence that Orianna was the target. I was there , sir, and the shooter wasn’t looking for Orianna, I’m sure of it. He had a target, and as soon as that target was dead, he fired up the ceiling and legged it. Kaylan was shot at close range. The gunman made certain. It wasn’t random. And the FBI guys say they are looking at a hate crime, but they are actually from the cybercrimes team.”

“You are interfering.”

“I came here for a holiday,” he said firmly. “Some bastard shot Tom and he’s in intensive care and they won’t let me see him. I want to know who did it.”

“I expect the NYPD want to know that, too, and they have the resources to find out.”

“I’m sure they do, but they’re looking in the wrong place. And so are the FBI. If this was an attack on a gay writer who is also a friend, I’d hardly be opposing them. But it wasn’t. Kaylan was the target, and my guess is that’s why the FBI are interested.”

“I don’t know what you’re not telling me. I do know this isn’t your business.”

“Did you know, sir, that Kaylan’s father was shot in a drive-by shooting last year, and that no one has been arrested for it?”

“I didn’t know, and I don’t know why you think it’s important. I do know that you are at risk of upsetting a lot of powerful people, and those people have no reason to like you. Unlike me. Time to pack it in Charlie.”

There was a lot Charlie wanted to say. About how he was sure that if anyone close to Mal had been injured, Mal wouldn’t rest until they were behind bars. About how the police and the FBI had everything wrong. About how an NYPD detective was helping him investigate. About how this was about Kaylan, and the more he thought about it, the more he was convinced. He didn’t say any of those things.

“Listen Charlie. Reading between the lines, the FBI might not want any light shed on their decision to get Kaylan Sully out of jail. You are one of the only people who knows about what happened. It’s possible they may be regretting that decision. Do you see why you might want to leave this alone?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. I hope Tom is okay.”

Charlie ended the call, and tried not to think about Tom, in a coma, without him. The only thing that made any sense at all was to keep going. He looked up to see Murphy hovering at the door to the cafe, a thick folder under his arm.