Some of them do both, Seanie. The ones who do both are the ones you don't walk away from.
I drink the coffee.
I do not think about which one Nadia is.
The cabin is small. It is also not small.
Small in footprint. One main room. Kitchen open to the living area where the couch sits. A short hallway with two doors. A bathroom. A bedroom. A back room I can see is locked from where I am sitting.
Not small in any of the ways that matter.
The walls are reinforced. The windows are not single-pane glass. The locks are not the locks anyone puts in a Catskills cabin. The cabinets are flush with no visible hinges. The pantry has a pressure plate at the threshold. I almost did not notice it. I noticed the second one, which is what gave away the first.
This is not a Moretti safehouse. I have studied the Moretti safehouses. They have a signature, same contractors, same systems, same configurations, down to the brand of fire suppressor in the kitchen.
This place has none of it.
Which means it is hers.
She built this place. Or had it built. She owns it through whatever shell company she registered it under. The only person on this earth who knows it exists is the woman who walked out of the kitchen pretending she does not know my name.
The woman calling herself Nadia has a private safehouse in the Catskills.
She brought me to it.
I am going to figure out what to do with that information.
She goes back to her bedroom for a few hours.
I hear her go in. I hear the door close. After that, the cabin takes on the kind of quiet a place has when only one person is awake inside it.
I get off the couch.
I move slowly. Not because of the wound. The wound is manageable. I move slowly because I do not know what kind of monitoring this place has.
I find a coat closet by the front door. Then a hall closet with linens. The locked back room with its biometric pad.
She has not given me her thumb.
I move on.
The kitchen has a lamp on the counter. Small. Ceramic. Ugly in the deliberate way a lamp can be ugly when no one in the building cares about lamps. I know this lamp. NYPD has used the same shape for surveillance plants since before I made detective.
I unscrew the base.
The interior is empty.
She has not bugged her own kitchen. Whatever happens here, she does not want a record of it.
I take the small tracker out of the false heel of my boot. I put it inside the lamp base. I screw the base back together.
You're a dirty cop now, Seanie. Don't ask me whether I approve. Ask me whether it works.
It will work. The signal is one-way. Doyle's team will pick it up the second I get within range of any cell tower.
I stand at the counter and look at the Chemex again.
A woman who keeps a Chemex in a Catskills safehouse is a woman who does not lower her standards for anything. Not for hiding. Not for the road. Not for the man bleeding on her kitchen island.
