I found a conductor two cars away. "Where's the next stop?" I asked him.
"Ridgemont, New Jersey."
"Is there a library near the station?"
"I wouldn't know."
I got off there anyway.
Eric Wu flexed his fingers. With a small, tight push, he forced the door.
It hadn't taken him long to track down the two black men who'd helped Dr. Beck escape. Larry Gandle had friends in the police department. Wu had described the men to them, and then he went through the proper mug books. Several hours later, Wu spotted the image of a thug named Brutus Cornwall. They made a few calls and learned that Brutus worked for a drug dealer named Tyrese Barton.
Simple.
The chain lock snapped. The door flew open, the knob banging against the wall. Latisha looked up, startled. She was about to scream, but Wu moved fast. He clamped his hand over her mouth and lowered his lips to her ear. Another man, someone Gandle had hired, came in behind him.
"Shh," Wu said almost gently.
On the floor, TJ played with his Hot Wheels. He tilted his head at the noise and said, "Mama?"
Eric Wu smiled down at him. He let Latisha go and knelt to the floor. Latisha tried to stop him, but the other man held her back. Wu rested his enormous hand on the boy's head. He stroked TJ's hair as he turned to Latisha.
"Do you know how I can find Tyrese?" he asked her.
Once off the train, I took a taxi to the rent-a-car place. The green-jacketed agent behind the counter gave me directions to the library. It took maybe three minutes to get there. The Ridgemont library was a modern facility, nouveau colonial brick, picture windows, beech-wood shelves, balconies, turrets, coffee bar. At the reference desk on the second floor, I found a librarian and asked if I could use the Internet.
"Do you have ID?" she asked.
I did. She looked at it. "You have to be a county resident."
"Please," I said. "It's very important."
I expected to see a no-yield, but she softened. "How long do you think you'll be?"
"No more than a few minutes."
"That computer over there" - she pointed to a terminal behind me - "it's our express terminal. Anyone can use it for ten minutes."
I thanked her and hurried over. Yahoo! found me the site for the New Jersey Journal, the major newspaper of Bergen and Passaic counties. I knew the exact date I needed. Twelve years ago on January twelfth. I found the search archive and typed in the information.
The Web site went back only six years.
Damn.
I hurried back over to the librarian. "I need to find a twelve year-old article from the New Jersey Journal," I said.
"It wasn't in their Web archive?"
I shook my head.
"Microfiche," she said, slapping the sides of her chair to rise. "What month?"
"January."
She was a large woman and her walk was labored. She found the roll in a file drawer and then helped me thread the tape through the machine. I sat down. "Good luck," she said.
I fiddled with the knob, as if it were a throttle on a new motorcycle. The microfiche shrieked through the mechanism. I stopped every few seconds to see where I was. It took me less than two minutes to find the right date. The article was on page three.
As soon as I saw the headline, I felt the lump in my throat.
Sometimes I swear that I actually heard the screech of tires, though I was asleep in my bed many miles away from where it happened. It still hurt - maybe not as much as the night I lost Elizabeth, but this was my first experience with mortality and tragedy and you never really get over that. Twelve years later, I still remember every detail of that night, though it comes back to me in a tornado blur-the predawn doorbell, the solemn-faced police officers at the door, Hoyt standing with them, their soft, careful words, our denials, the slow realization, Linda's drawn face, my own steady tears, my mother still not accepting, hushing me, telling me to stop crying, her already frayed sanity giving way, her telling me to stop acting like a baby, insisting that everything was fine, then suddenly, coming close to me, marveling at how big my tears were, too big, she said, tears that big belonged on the face of a child, not a grown-up, touching one, rubbing it between her forefinger and her thumb, stop crying David! growing angrier because I