to make your acquaintance last night. Your friend Amber has been keeping me company in the meantime. I think, for her sake, you and I should meet. Don’t you?”
* * *
“Think harder,” Nell said to the kid behind the counter at the camera shop.
The second log trace had taken her to a busy stretch of road in the East Village, just a twelve-minute walk from the drug dealer’s pad. There were more numbers on the list, more towers pinging north, but the time stamp showed that Arthur Wendt’s mystery woman had spent a good twenty minutes on this block.
She had eyed the trails and greens of Tompkins Square Park as she strode down the sidewalk, and the rainbow-flag facade of the Big Gay Ice Cream Shop. There were bars and lounges whose doors wouldn’t open for hours yet, a place for small-dish Venezuelan bites, a vintage fashion resale boutique. Nowhere she expected a woman on the run to linger. Nell reviewed the trail in her mind, her file folders tucked safely in the faux-leather attaché case at her side.
The woman had Arthur’s phone. That didn’t mean she had Arthur’s trust, or his passwords. Nell tried to walk in her shoes; she was alone, adrift, probably hadn’t slept since the night before, the sole witness to a murder. A witness who had, for some reason, decided she couldn’t turn to the police. The connection to “Ducky” stood out there. Her first move, after a night of terror, was a house call to her drug dealer.
So, I’m probably high, Nell thought, imagining herself in the mystery woman’s shoes. That or strung-out, at loose ends, and all I have—my only souvenir from the murder that went down right in front of me—is Arthur’s phone. If I’m curious, industrious, I want to unlock it and figure out what kind of trouble he was in. If I’m low on cash and looking to score drugs, I want to sell it to someone who won’t ask where it came from.
Both possibilities tugged her gaze across the street, to the hole-in-the-wall camera repair shop, its windows plastered over with vintage ads. Some people’s bones ached when the rain was rolling in. Nell had her own form of bodily radar: the tip of her highly trained nose itched in the presence of shady business. Her nose rarely led her astray. She rubbed her finger across its sharp bridge and crossed at the next light.
“I don’t know anything about anything,” said the sleepy-eyed kid at the register. She knew better. She’d seen the nervous look in his eyes when she started talking to him. Then the shift in his hips, like he might break and run for the back room, when she asked about the woman. She laid one of her business cards down on the counter.
“I’m not a cop,” Nell said. “Whatever kind of hustle you’ve got going here, I don’t care. I’m hunting for a story and you aren’t it. Tell me what I want to know, and you never have to see me again.”
He shot a nervous glance at the card. “And if I don’t?”
She put both hands on the counter and leaned in close.
“Then you and me,” she said, “are going to be best friends. I’m not a cop. That doesn’t mean I don’t know any cops.”
She gave him a second to think about that.
“I didn’t think she’d be any trouble,” he said. “This guy I know, he called ahead and vouched for her, said her name was Seelie. Seemed cool.”
“Tell me about her,” Nell said.
“Just a kid. Sixteen, maybe seventeen. Looked like an art-school chick.”
Nell’s brow furrowed. She wondered if she’d missed something in her background on Wendt, some daughter she didn’t know about. Then she remembered the burgundy silk sheets and the wineglasses, and the smell of sex still lingering in the air.
“Was she high?” Nell asked.
“Nah. Not that type. Trust me, I deal with a lot of junkies in the, uh…”
He trailed off, and she offered him a lifeline. “The camera-repair business.”
“Yeah. Not her. She was clean. Focused.” He waved at his face. “Bags under her eyes, though, looked like she’d been running all night.”
That part sounded about right. “Was she looking to unload the phone or unlock it?”
“She wanted me to crack the passcode. Which I did. Thing was damn near factory default, though. Only nonstandard app on it was WhisperMe, and like I told her, getting that open is outside my skill set. She took it with her, and that