The train moved on, and the air and noise stilled fast in its wake. Two blocks away, its brakes screeched as it pulled into the station she had just left. Nikki rolled over and sat to regain her breath from the excruciating whack she had given her kneecap on her scramble up the ladder. When she tested it with her fingertips, it didn’t feel broken, although the sting told her some skin would be missing. She used her phone flashlight to look for blood on her pants but didn’t see any. Just a smudge of railroad grime on the knee, identical to Nicole Bernardin’s.
Heat rose to her feet. She swept her light around the Ghost Station and saw a study in contrasts. One the one hand, design and equipment from the early part of the last century, left as it was the day the station had been sealed: a deco ticket booth; a vintage disposal machine for chopping tickets after entry; overhead fixtures for individual bulbs instead of fluorescent tubes; rows of scalloped ceiling accents; an ornately wrought banister descending the stairs from the capped sidewalk entrance; a scrolled iron gate that the station agent lifted for passengers exiting the trains; and a terra-cotta panel with “91” in relief on it, set into the wall to designate the station. But the romance of frozen time had been offset by its defilement.
Nearly every surface in the station wore a coat of graffiti: the wall tiles; the banisters; the support pillars. Soda cans as well as broken wine and beer bottles littered the ground, collected in corners, and rested next to a plastic cooler on the decaying concrete stairs. The doors to both restrooms had been broken off and taken. Nikki didn’t venture inside either one but could see and smell the violations inside the battered, tagged stalls.
This was the handiwork of the Mole People, she assumed. The Moles were the stuff of urban legends in the New York underground, which told of tribes of misfit subcultures that had organized to rule these tunnels. In reality, they were just tag artists making their marks or homeless who survived in the musty darkness. There had been a TV drama called Beauty and the Beast Nikki watched when she was in grade school that was about a lion man living below like that, but she had never seen dear, urbane Vincent with a spray can and a bottle of fortified wine.
A noise behind her made her turn and switch off her light. As her eyes adjusted to the muted street glow filtering down through the grates she and Rook had investigated, Nikki figured she must have heard the approach of another train. This one raced downtown on the opposite side of the tunnel from her. She waited until it passed before she lit up her phone again. She didn’t want to chance being seen and reported. She had work to do.
Nikki began old school, just like the station. She looked for footprints. A thick layer of soot and dust coated everything down there, and if Nicole Bernardin indeed had been there before she was killed, Heat just might find hers. She squatted down and held her light close to the floor. Slowly, patiently, she swept the beam just inches above it, alert for any disturbance or telltale shape that she might follow to the hiding place. The problem was that so many Moles had used the platform that the footprints were myriad. She made one more pass, this time walking the station floor in a stoop, seeing if any smaller, female prints emerged, but none did.
Next, she searched the ticket booth, which only took seconds. It had long ago been trashed and gutted. As she’d expected, both restrooms presented no hiding places when she examined them, too. The cooler on the stairs was empty, as was the inside of the ticket shredder, whose door had been pried off and left on the ground. She even inspected the bottom of the sidewalk grate itself, in case that was, literally, where Nicole had been styling. It wasn’t.
Unable to accept defeat, Nikki ignored her frustration and thought. Again she put herself in her mother’s shoes, asking herself, if she had been Cynthia Heat, and had been directed to find the drop, would Nicole expect her to search for footprints in the dust?
No.
Then what? How would Nicole let her know exactly where to look?
By giving her a clue.
And she had—the bracelet with the numeral charms.
Nikki looked up at the nine and the one embedded in the wall.
Could it be?