Jo had spent all afternoon searching through boxes in the gym’s basement storeroom, looking for the microcassette player she’d purchased back in the nineties when such devices were cutting-edge tech. She found it in a box, along with a collection of tiny tapes that she’d used to practice her responses to job interview questions.
Nessa, Franklin, Harriett, and Jo gathered around Nessa’s dining-room table with the cassette player in the center. Then Jo leaned forward and pressed the play button.
“Okay, we’re recording.” It was Josh Gibbon’s voice.
“What is that thing?” asked a female voice. She sounded young and nervous.
“This? It’s a microcassette recorder,” Josh said.
“Like from the Middle Ages?”
“Like from the days before people could hack into your phone. So let’s get started. I’m standing in a broom closet at Brooklyn Flea with a young woman and her mother who just came up and introduced themselves to me. Would you mind repeating everything you just told me, starting from the top?”
“All right. Umm. My name is—”
“Okay, stop,” Josh said. “Don’t use your real name. Who’s your favorite celebrity?”
“Beyoncé?”
“Great. We’ll call you Beyoncé.”
“All right,” the girl said, as though she suspected he might be insane. “My name is Beyoncé. I’m fourteen years old, and I live here in Brooklyn.”
“I just want to cut in for a moment to say that Beyoncé’s mother is here with us. Right, Mom?”
“Yes, that’s right,” said an older woman.
“Okay, Beyoncé. One more time.”
“Yeah, so I’m a big fan of your podcast. I listen to They Walk Among Us every week, and my mom and me went to see you live at the Bell House last year. Like I told you, I’m fascinated by serial killers, and something happened to me that I thought you’d want to hear about.”
“Tell me your story.”
“Yeah, so I was out on the island at the beginning of July visiting my friend—” She paused. “. . . Kim Kardashian.”
“Good job,” Josh praised her. “No real names.”
“So Kim and I stayed late at the beach talking to some kids. Before we went home, she stopped to pee in the public restroom, and I waited outside in the parking lot. It was just getting dark when this man pulled up beside me.”
“What kind of car was he driving?”
“I dunno much about cars,” the girl said. “But it was black and nice. Anyways, he gets out and tells me he’s a police officer. He said someone had reported me for keying one of the cars in the lot. He told me I had to come with him to the station so the witness could ID me.”
“What did you say?”
“I figured he was full of it, so I said I wanted to see his ID. Mom told me that when a cop’s out of uniform, they have to show you their ID. But the guy wouldn’t do it. So I told him to go to hell.”
“And what did he do when you said that?”
“He grabbed my arm and tried to drag me to his car.”
“How’d you get away?”
“I kneed him in the nads just like Mom taught me. Then I ran into the restroom and banged on the door. My friend let me inside and we called her parents to come get us.”
The conversation was interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Just a minute!” Josh Gibbon called out. “Did you recognize the man?” he asked the girl.
“Not when it happened. But the next day, I was watching TV and I saw him on an ad for Newsnight. He was the cop talking about the Danskammer Beach murders.”
“Hey!” someone shouted in the background. “You aren’t supposed to be in there!”
“Okay!” Josh shouted back. “Are you positive?” he asked the girl.
“Oh yeah. A hundred percent.”
“Thank you, Beyoncé. I have your number. I’ll call you this evening, and we’ll set up a studio date to record this for real.”
After that, the recording came to an end. Jo leaned forward and pressed the stop button.
“That girl would be dead if she hadn’t fought back. How many teenage girls would kick a cop in the balls? Every girl in America should be able to do what she did.”
“Now we know how Rocca was involved,” Harriett said. “He was using his job to kidnap teenagers.”
“The girl on the tape said Rocca approached her the beginning of July, the day before the Newsnight episode,” Jo said. “That’s three whole weeks after Spencer Harding’s helicopter went down.
“What does it mean?” Nessa asked.
“It means that not only was Rocca involved—he didn’t stop after Spencer died,” Franklin said.
Defiled
“Jo.” Art was gently shaking her.
“What!” She sat up so quickly that she almost bumped heads with him. “Is Lucy okay?”
“She’s totally fine,” he told her. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
The sun was streaming through the bedroom windows. For the first time in ages, she’d missed sunrise. “Oh my God,” she said, her hand reaching for her phone on the nightstand. “What time is it?”
“Eight thirty. I knew you got home late, so I let you sleep in. Lucy’s been fed and she’s keeping herself entertained. But I gotta hop in the car. I have a meeting in Manhattan at eleven.”
“Isn’t it Saturday?”
“Every day is a workday for the foreseeable future,” Art said. “That’s showbiz.”
“Okay, no problem.” Jo yawned and planted a kiss on his chin before scooting around him to the edge of the bed. “Go make good art. I got it from here.”
She grabbed a pair of leggings off the top of the hamper and pulled them on.
“Hey, before you run off, there’s something I wanted to talk about.”
“Sure,” she said as she searched for a top to put on over the sports bra she’d worn to bed. “What is it?”
“I’m going to have a lot more meetings on my calendar going forward. There will be times when I need to spend the whole day in the city. After a while, I’ll need to be there all night, too.”
If he hadn’t been half out the door, she would have climbed right on top of him. This was the Art she’d fallen for—the one who could go for days without sleep when he was in the zone on a project. The one who always had three projects lined up. That Art had been gone for so long that Jo had started to wonder if he’d been a figment of her imagination. And yet here he was, sitting on the side of her bed. He even looked years younger than the man she’d been married to a few weeks earlier. If she hadn’t known better, she would have wondered if the man in her room was a time traveler.
“We have plenty of money for a pied-à-terre,” Jo told him. “Why don’t you look for a small place in Manhattan or Brooklyn?”
“Jo,” he said in his serious voice.
“What?”
“I don’t think it’s a good idea for the family to be apart. It’s gotten too dangerous. For God’s sake, Josh Gibbon was murdered yesterday.”
Unpleasant memories from the previous day flooded back into her mind. “In Brooklyn,” Jo pointed out half-heartedly. She knew where Art was headed, and she knew he was right.