Act I: The Call from the Whitmore
Marcus Vale had been a homicide detective long enough to know that the calls that came at midnight were almost always the ones with bodies, and the calls that came at twelve forty-seven on a Tuesday almost never were. This one was the second kind, which usually meant it was about to be the first.
"Vale." He took the call standing in his kitchen, the kettle still going. He turned the burner off without looking.
"It's Reyes. Whitmore Building. Top floor. We've got a missing person, but it's not a runaway and it's not a domestic. Captain wants you on it before the family lawyers wake up."
"How long has she been missing?"
"Forty-five minutes by the time I'm telling you. The concierge logged the elevator at 12:03 going up empty, came back down empty at 12:07. Suite was locked from the inside. Cousin opened the door with the family override at 12:31."
"Who's the family?"
A pause. "Hartwell."
The Whitmore penthouse, 12:47 a.m.
Marcus poured the unboiled water down the sink. Hartwell was the kind of name that made cases stop being cases and start being problems. The kind that, by morning, had three lawyers, two PR firms, and one congressman attached to it.
"I'm leaving now," he said. "Don't let anyone touch the suite. Especially the cousin."
"The cousin's the one who called it in."
"Don't let her touch the suite."
He was on the FDR in eight minutes. The Whitmore Building rose out of the Upper East Side the way old money rises—without explanation, as if it had always been there and you were the one who needed to justify your presence. He pulled into the garage at 1:02. Reyes was waiting in the lobby with a face that was already trying to apologize for what Marcus was about to walk into.
"Forty-second floor," Reyes said. "Penthouse. The whole floor's hers. Was hers. Is hers. I don't know the right tense."
"Present tense until we find her or don't."
The elevator was the kind that didn't make sound. Marcus watched the floor numbers count up and thought about the four minutes between 12:03 and 12:07 when the elevator had gone somewhere with no one in it.
"Talk to me about the dinner party," he said.
"Eleven guests. All cleared the building by eleven thirty according to Pierre at the desk. The staff stayed until 11:50 to clean. By midnight she was alone in the suite, or so the system says. The cousin came back up at 12:28 saying she'd forgotten her phone. Used the family override at 12:31 when no one answered."
"Why'd she come back at twelve thirty?"
"That's exactly the question," Reyes said.
The doors opened onto a private vestibule, and then onto the suite itself. The Whitmore penthouse was the kind of apartment that had been photographed for magazines that nobody actually bought. Floor-to-ceiling glass on three sides. A view that put most of Manhattan beneath it. Furniture that looked uncomfortable on principle. The dinner table was still set for twelve—eleven place settings used, one untouched at the head.
Marcus stopped at the threshold and just looked.
A glass of red wine was sitting on the side table by the balcony door, half-finished. A book lay open on the chaise—Isabella's reading, presumably, from sometime after the guests had left. Her phone was on the kitchen island next to a glass of water. Her shoes were beside the entryway, not put away. Everything about the suite said she had been there ten minutes ago. Nothing about it said she had left.
"Where's the glove?" he asked.
Reyes pointed. "Balcony. Don't go out yet, the print team's still—"
"I know."
He looked anyway. The terrace door was ajar by perhaps three inches. The glove lay on the limestone tile six feet from the rail, palm up. Black silk. Long. Evening wear. A single fingerprint on the inner cuff that would belong, almost certainly, to Isabella Hartwell.
"Cousin's where?" Marcus asked.
"Library. Down the hall. Lawyer's already with her."
"Of course he is. Security feed?"
Reyes hesitated. "That's the other thing. Hallway camera, elevator camera, lobby camera—all three went down at 12:01. Came back up at 12:05. Four minutes of nothing on every system in the building's east column."
Marcus looked at him. "Just the east column?"
"Just the east column."
"That's not a malfunction."
"No, sir. It's not."
Marcus stood in the doorway of the penthouse and counted, the way he always counted at the start of a case—not the things that were there, but the things that should have been and weren't. No struggle. No body. No note. No forced entry. No clear exit. One glove, four missing minutes, eleven dinner guests, one cousin who came back for a phone she could have lived without until morning, and one safe—the safe, he knew now, that had been opened at 11:47, sixteen minutes before whatever happened.
He had until sunrise. After that, the case would belong to the family, the press, and the precinct above his pay grade.
"Get me a list," he said. "Every guest, when they arrived, when they left, who they sat next to, what they drank. I want Pierre at the desk in thirty minutes, and I want him separated from his union rep for the first ten. And get the cousin out of the library and into the kitchen. Libraries make people calm. I don't want her calm."
"Yes, sir."
Marcus stepped just inside the suite and stopped where the entry tile met the carpet, careful not to disturb anything yet. The half-glass of wine. The open book. The single shoe set neatly beside its mate. A woman who had been here. A door that was open by three inches. A glove on the terrace.
"Isabella," he said quietly, to nobody. "Where did you go."
The city below the Whitmore answered the way the city always did: with traffic and wind and the long indifferent hum of two million people who had no idea what had happened in the room above them, and no reason yet to care.
He had until dawn.