So she said, “I just wanted to ask if there was a photo of Bob your family wanted to share. I don’t want to make things any more awful than they are. Your brother did something really special, you know? When a lot of folks would’ve run in the other direction, he went into Devotion Diamonds to try to help people. I want to acknowledge his bravery when we write about what happened. I also want to respect your feelings and do right by your family, but I’ll let you go this minute if you don’t want to deal with a prying journalist. My paycheck is not big enough to put grieving people through the emotional wringer.”
For a long time, he didn’t speak. Then he laughed again, a corrosive, broken sound. “You want to acknowledge his bravery? Man, that’s hilarious. You don’t know how hilarious. I know only one person who’s a bigger pussy than Bob, and that’s me. Our uncle made us ride a little baby roller coaster once, a thing for tots at a county fair, when I was thirteen and Bob was eight, and we both fuckin’ cried the whole way. There were five-year-olds on that ride who looked embarrassed for us. I don’t know why the fuck he’d go in there. It’s completely out of character.”
“He thought the shooting was over,” Lanternglass said.
“He would’ve had to have been pretty fuckin’ sure,” said Brian Lutz, and when he laughed again, it sounded closer to a sob. “We cried on the Little Zoom-Zoom coaster! I even wet my pants a little! After we got off, our uncle couldn’t look at us, either of us. Just took us straight home. I’ll tell you about my baby brother. He would’ve died before he walked in someplace where he coulda been killed. He would’ve just fuckin’ died.”
9:38 A.M.
Lanternglass had two e-mails speaking for Alyona Lewis, Roger Lewis’s wife. The first came through her lawyer, at 9:38. Lanternglass read it at her desk in the open-plan office of the Digest.
“Today Alyona Lewis grieves the loss of her beloved husband of twenty-one years, Roger Lewis, killed in the senseless mass shooting at the Miracle Falls Mall; Margot and Peter Lewis grieve the loss of their beloved son; and St. Possenti grieves the loss of a lively, good-humored, and generous community member.”
The e-mail went on for another eight hundred words, all of it just as formal and forgettable. Alyona and Roger had opened their first jewelry store in Miami in 1994, attended the Next Level Baptist Church, owned three Brussels griffons, wrote big checks to the Special Olympics. Flowers might be sent to the Lawrence Funeral Home. It was a tidy, professional public statement, and there wasn’t a single thing in it that Lanternglass could use for a quote.
10:03 P.M.
The second e-mail came from Alyona herself, a half hour after Lanternglass went to bed but while she was still awake, lying under a single sheet and staring at the ceiling. Her phone pinged, and she rolled over to have a peek. Alyona’s personal e-mail address was Alyo_Lewis [email protected], and her message was just a single sentence long:
I bet he was fucking her.
Lanternglass didn’t see how she could quote that e-mail either.
July 9, 5:28 A.M.
RASHID HASWAR DIDN’T HAVE A listed landline; he didn’t have a Twitter handle or an Instagram profile; his wife’s Facebook account was private. He had a job at the Flagler-Atlantic Natural Gas Corporation, in the accounting department, but the receptionist refused to give Lanternglass the number for his cell.
“If he wanted to talk to you, to any of you newspeople, he’d call you,” the receptionist said in a thin, indignant tone. “But he hasn’t, because he doesn’t.”
Lanternglass had one other idea, though, so Tuesday morning she woke Dorothy before dawn and walked her out to the car. Dorothy was still about two-thirds asleep, her eyes partly shut as she tramped across the dew-soaked grass. Today she had on a thick white fluffy cap with a polar bear’s face on it. She fell back to sleep in the rear of the car, on the drive across town.
The Islamic Center was in the Black & Blue, in a low and ugly concrete building, across the street from a strip mall that contained a Honey Dew Donuts, a bail bondsman, and a discount shoe store. The last worshippers were already going in for morning prayers, women through a door in the side of the building, the men through the double doors in the front. A lot of them were brothers in dashikis and kufis, although there were a few Middle Easterners among them. Lanternglass parked herself in the Honey Dew, found seats at a counter by the window where she could keep an eye on the street. Dorothy got up on a high stool beside her with a glazed and a big bottle of milk, but she had only one bite and then put her head down. Outside, the sky was a shade of royal purple, the clouds kissed with gold. The wind was freshening, and the palms rattled their fronds.
Lanternglass had been watching the mosque for ten minutes when she noticed a slender, wiry man in a black baseball cap, his arms crossed over his sunken chest, standing just inside the doughnut shop’s door. He was watching the street, too. The first time she looked at him, she noticed dark circles under his bloodshot eyes. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. What made her glance at him a second time were the words FLAGLER-ATLANTIC NGC embroidered on the breast pocket of his blue denim shirt. Lanternglass kissed Dorothy on the cheek—her daughter didn’t seem to notice—and slid three stools to the right, taking her doughnut and coffee with her, so she was almost right next to the guy.
“Mr. Haswar?” she said gently.
He twitched as if he’d been stung with a fizzle of static electricity and looked around, his eyes wide and surprised and a little frightened. She almost expected him to dart out the door and away from her, but he didn’t, only stood there holding himself very tightly.
“Yes?” he asked, no accent.
“You’re not praying?”
He blinked at her. When he spoke again, there was no anger, no defensiveness, just curiosity. “You with the press?”
“I’m afraid so. I’m Aisha Lanternglass from the Digest. We’ve been trying to reach you. We were hoping you might share a photo with us, of your wife and baby. We’d like to do our best to honor them. And you, your loss. Your family’s loss. It’s awful.” She thought she had never sounded more phony.
He blinked again and rotated his head and looked back out at the mosque. “I read your piece about the massacre.”
He didn’t go anywhere further with this statement, didn’t seem to feel the need to add to it.
“Mr. Haswar? Do you know why your wife was there that morning?”
“For me,” he said, not looking at her. “I asked her to go. My boss, Mrs. Oakley, was retiring. I was being promoted to her position. Yasmin ran by the mall to pick something out that I could give to Mrs. Oakley at the party. Yasmin . . . always got excited when she had a chance to buy something for someone else. Giving gifts was her favorite thing. She was excited for Ibrahim to be older so we could give him things on Eid. You know Eid al-Fitr?”