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“I recorded this last year. Study hall. So things won’t be too quiet. It’s mostly just clicking on laptops and us joking around. I thought it might come in handy someday.”
“That’s creepy, dude,” he says.
I point to my head with both hands. “Expert, remember?”
Then we go out the window and close it behind us. I think of the night before and Lila, her back pressed against the lawn. The smell of crushed grass underfoot is as heady as any perfume.
“Walk casually,” I say.
We get into my car, which stalls twice before it starts, causing Sam to give me the wide-eyed expression of a man who’s looking down the barrel of explaining a suspension to his parents. A moment later, though, we’re pulling out of the lot with the headlights off. I click them on as we turn onto the highway.
Then I head toward the address in the file, the one where Janssen was last seen. Quarter of an hour later we’re parking near Cyprus View apartment complex. I get out.
It’s one of those modern places with a doorman in the lobby and probably a gym up near the penthouse. There are bright lamps burning on the manicured lawn, bushes cut into round balls near the stretch of concrete walkways, and a park across the street. A block over is a supermarket, and a block from that is a gas station, but when you look at it from the right angle, the place is nice. Expensive. Sprinkler system, but no cameras that I can see, and I walk twice around one of the lights to be sure.
“What are we looking at?” Sam asks, leaning against the side of the car. In his uniform jacket, with his tie loose, he could almost be a gangster. So long as you don’t notice the Wallingford logo over his breast pocket.
“Janssen’s mistress’s condo. I wanted to see if it felt—I don’t know—familiar.”
Sam frowns. “Why would it be familiar? You didn’t even know Janssen. Did you?”
I’m slipping up. I shake my head. “I don’t know. I just wanted to see it. Look for clues.”
“Okay,” Sam says skeptically, glancing down at his watch. “But if this is a stakeout, I vote for us getting snacks.”
“Yeah,” I reply, distracted. “Just give me a second.”
I walk across the grass and past the groomed bushes. I don’t remember any of this. I must have stood on this grass and waited for Janssen, but I don’t recall a single thing.
A woman in jogging clothes runs in the direction of the apartment building. She’s got two of those big black standard poodles on a leash. Staring at her, I get a flash of memory, but it feels so distant that I can barely catch it. She looks in my direction, then turns abruptly, jerking the leashes. I get a really good look at her face just before she takes off down the street.
She must be an actress, because the memory I have of her is a scene from a movie. I’m sure it was the jogger, but she was wearing a short black dress, with her hair up, and a necklace with a single sparkling amulet dangling in the valley between her breasts. She had a bruise on her face and she’d been crying. A faceless actor in my brother’s leather jacket took her by the shoulders. A man was lying on the grass, facedown.
I can’t remember anything else. No plot. Not even whether I saw the film in a theater or on television late one night. The memory makes no sense.
If she’s some actress, how come she started running when she saw me?
And how come one of the actors was wearing my brother’s leather jacket?
Only one way to find out. I chase after her, my Wallingford dress shoes clacking like beetles on the pavement.
She veers off across the street, and I follow. A car’s high beams catch me, and the grill of a Toyota nearly slams into me. I hit my hand against his hood and keep going.
She’s almost made it to a small park. There are a couple of other people, walking under flickering streetlights, but she doesn’t call out to them and they don’t seem to want to involve themselves.
I pump my legs faster, pounding my feet against the dirt. I’m gaining on her now. One of the dogs barks as I reach out and catch the hood of the woman’s pink velour top.
She stumbles, and the dogs go crazy. I had no idea enormous poodles were so protective, but these things look like they want to rip my arms off.
“Wait,” I say. “Please. I’m not going to hurt you.”
She turns back toward me, the barking dogs between us. I hold up my hands in surrender. The park is quiet and dim, but if she starts running again, she could make it to the buildings beyond it, businesses that would probably not see my chasing her in a favorable light.
“What do you want?” she says, studying my face. “Our business is over. Done. I told Philip I didn’t want to see any of you.”
The creeping realization that there was no movie comes over me. Of course. Barron must have taken my memory and changed one small detail—the part where it happened in real life. That must have been easier for him than erasing the memory completely. And I’d forget it the same way I forget every other late-night cop show.
“I already paid you,” she’s saying, and I focus on memorizing her, shaking off all other thoughts. Her dark hair is pulled back into a ponytail, and her artificially plumped lips are painted a bubble-gum pink. Her eyes are tilted up at the corners, her eyebrows high enough to give her a perpetual expression of mild surprise. Between that and her wrinkled neck, I guess she’s had some work done. She’s beautiful and unreal; I can see why Barron changed her into a movie star in my head. “I’m not giving you anything else. You can’t blackmail me.”
