Gone By Morning

by Michele Weinstat Miller

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Suspense; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

As the heat rises on a New York summer, a suicide bomb set off in a Times Square subway station nearly claims the life of 68-year-old ex-madam Kathleen. Then a woman is brutally murdered, her body dumped on a marshy beach in Queens. The woman, Sharon, was last seen by 26-year-old Emily—a Deputy Press Officer working at City Hall—getting into a car in front of the building where she and Kathleen both live in far upper Manhattan. Emily requests an autopsy report from the Chief of the NYPD, but she doesn't realize the gravity of using her position to gain information. Things turn deadly when a bomb is planted in her building, gutting it with a raging fireball. Kathleen, Emily, and Emily's two-year-old daughter, Skye, barely escape with their lives. Could Kathleen's criminal history be at the heart of the violence? If Emily can't help her, Kathleen could spend the rest of her life in prison. And when Emily discovers a shocking connection between herself and Kathleen, the stakes become impossibly high. By the time Emily realizes she's in grave danger, it may be too late. She's beyond the reach of the cops, of City Hall, of her family... and a killer is closing in fast.

Release date: August 10, 2021

Publisher: Crooked Lane Books

Print pages: 336

Sample

CHAPTER 1

THE TRAIN SQUATTED at Forty-Second Street/Times Square. Going nowhere. Tourists and commuters squeezed in the double doors, filling every inch of space. The scent of marijuana seeped in with an early-morning smoker, the smell repelling Kathleen. It was the smell of a troubled person, inebriated before ten AM, evidence of a problem.

Kathleen was grateful to have a seat instead of standing like a clove in a garlic press. She glanced around, observing a young lady who’d sidled through the crowd to perch in front of her. The bullring hanging from the girl’s septum was entirely wrong for her. Bullrings weren’t Kathleen’s favorite fashion look in the best case, not that they lacked a place in the fantasies of men. But this girl’s face was too long and skinny. The ring morphed her nose into a snout.

Kathleen cringed inwardly at her own harsh judgment—her mind had a mind of its own. It had once been her business to judge the beauty of women, and their stability, and sometimes Kathleen wanted to shake sense into random people.

Kathleen exchanged a momentary smile with the young woman before averting her eyes, imagining the girl’s mother forcing herself to remain silent about her daughter’s choices. One disapproving look could push a daughter toward twenty more piercings. At sixty-eight years old, with a longer runway of life behind than ahead of her, Kathleen wished more than anything that she’d been there for her own daughter’s poor decisions. Kathleen brushed aside a moment of deep loneliness and regret. Self-pity was not a good look on her either. Better an old woman with a bullring than that.

“Stand clear of the closing doors, please.” A disembodied voice spoke from above. “Thirty-Fourth Street/Pennsylvania Station next.”

A latecomer slipped in, holding the door open for the person behind him.

Kathleen looked toward the laughter of a rosy-cheeked family in souvenir T-shirts and Yankees hats who were amused by their slow New York subway experience. They were hoping for stories to tell. She heard the hard edges of Dutch or German when they spoke to each other.

Kathleen’s phone vibrated in her hand. The City’s harsh emergency ring tone sounded. Akin to a World War II air raid siren, it echoed through the car, the alert going off on many phones. Someone’s hand shot out, catching the closing door, keeping it open as if he realized he’d forgotten something at home and needed to get out.

Kathleen looked down to read her phone. Her heart pounded in her chest. Bullring girl peered up from her own phone at the same moment as Kathleen. Their eyes met. Fear.

Word-dominoes fell through the length of the car: “Getting off.” “Excuse me.” “Getting off!” An edge of hysteria in the voices.

The crowd moved toward the doors.

“What’s going on?” asked the man sitting next to Kathleen as she began to rise.

Kathleen showed him the screen of her phone:

CNN Alert: There are initial reports of an explosion in the New York City Subway System.

Below it, the City’s official emergency notice:

Notify NYC: Due to police activity at 34th Street, avoid subway travel in that vicinity. Expect mass transit delays.

Her muscles bunched for flight, Kathleen took her place among the people heading toward the doors. She tried to stay calm, telling herself there were hundreds of miles of subway. Odds were they were safe, even if the explosion was on Thirty-Fourth Street, one stop away. But no part of the subway system was as enticing as Times Square. She was stuck, waiting to move, at the heart of a terrorist bull’s-eye. Aboveground was where they all needed to be.

“Move, move, move!” heavy-hipped police officers shouted, their handcuffs and keys clanging noisily against them as they ran down the stairs to the Times Square platform, trying to get through the crowd.

Seas parted for the cops, the commuters bunching together on the sides of the stairs to open a corridor. Kathleen held tight to the banister, making sure she kept her balance as the cops passed and the crowd jostled her. She was in good physical shape for her age but knew a fall would be worse for her than for a younger person. And more likely to happen.

She warily scanned her surroundings with each step upward. Explosions came in sets, like the one in London, where the bombs emptied out the trains before hitting a bus, or the one in Brussels that hit a train and an airport. Kathleen climbed, not really knowing if she was headed away from danger or toward it.

Just then, Kathleen heard a boom. Below. Displaced air hit the crowd. Screams from the platform. Screams around her. Kathleen cried out, too, startled into an upward lurch that threw her into the back of a man on the step above her. She grasped a handful of his back to balance herself. He didn’t seem to notice. The throng sped upward, panic replacing the slow and steady evacuation. More police were running down, toward the noise, shouting louder at the civilians as the police aisle narrowed. “Move it. Move! Move! Move!”

The crowds lurched faster. A wisp of metallic black smoke above their heads raced them up the stairs. Kathleen ran, cradled by the crowd scuffling upward, stepping on each other’s heels from the sheer closeness. Her muscles screeched as the mob sprinted and she thankfully kept pace.

She heard a young child cry, a woman calling to him shrilly, “Go, go.”

The woman had a toddler in one of her arms while an overwhelmed boy of about four years old strained against her, nearly in temper-tantrum mode. The mother was struggling to keep the boy moving. He didn’t understand the danger. He was tangling up and pulling back, becoming long armed and dead weight to keep his mom from dragging him.

Kathleen released the safety of her banister and took his hand. “I’ve got him,” she said to the mother, then looked into the boy’s wet eyes. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

The boy held tight to Kathleen’s hand, cooperative for some reason, and she climbed alongside the young woman who carried his younger sibling. Kathleen noticed now that a man in the crowd above them had a stroller held high as he climbed.

At the top of the stairs, the man who’d carried the stroller left it with an infant still sleeping inside. The boy stepped on the plastic runner at its back. With a quick thank-you, the woman was gone, two babies piled inside the stroller meant for one. Kathleen paused to catch her breath.

 

CHAPTER 2

IT WAS A warm summer morning, the light slanting brightly on Forty-Second Street from the east. A six-story-tall male model pranced on a building, selling underwear. Emergency vehicles had blocked off Eighth Avenue in front of the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Cops with assault rifles and revolvers in hand were sprinting toward the subway entrances from all directions and tracking alongside police cars. Civilians flowed out of office buildings and the subway, milling and taking in the field of ambulances, SWAT trucks, and police cars.

The crowd watched but seemed to reach consensus in unison: they would head out on foot to their neighborhoods, where they could lock their doors and be safe inside, no matter how long it took to walk there. Living tendrils of tension and sorrow moved from the high-risk tourist area along side streets. It was obvious that some people wouldn’t be getting home today, although no one in the crowd knew the extent of it. Tens of thousands of people trying to text, call, and check the internet had crashed the cell signal.

More wailing ambulances arrived at the subway entrance a block south of where Kathleen stood. She turned away and walked north. She would only be in the way if she stayed.

Kathleen walked most of the way home, the subways shut down until the NYPD and Homeland Security could ensure that the threat was over. There were no cabs in midtown. Without usable internet, Uber must be spinning around like a malfunctioning robot.

Kathleen wanted to walk anyway, needing to burn off her nervous energy. She walked with various strangers along the way, hiking from Fiftieth Street to West Seventy-Second beside an Asian woman with a baby in a stroller. She strode ten blocks up Central Park West with an old man, stooped over and fast-walking in a warm-up suit befitting an Olympian. He told her where he’d been when the explosions happened and she told him where she’d been.

He gave forth a gravelly humph when he heard her story. “You walked with angels today.”

After two hours, Kathleen stopped at a hot dog stand at 110^th Street and Central Park West, but the food fell like a brick into her belly. She took a few bites, drank half an iced tea, and tossed it all in a corner garbage can. She resumed her hike north, downhill through the Harlem Valley and uphill in Washington Heights.

There was a hush over the city once Kathleen arrived in her neighborhood: Inwood. The northernmost tip of Manhattan. Upstate Manhattan, she sometimes told people. Her feet and legs ached from the seven miles of unyielding cement underfoot. She was as happy as she’d ever been to arrive at the cocoon of home.

She turned on NY1, the same station she’d watched nonstop on 9/11. In 2001, she’d lived in a Tribeca apartment, one flight up from her business in a doorman building where no one asked questions. All residents had to leave the area, which lacked breathable air. She’d walked with a scarf held to her mouth and nose through the dissipating cloud of pulverized buildings and people. She’d been lucky enough to snag a hotel room on West Seventy-Second Street that day because of her friendship with the hotel manager. Crowds camped out on sofas in the hotel’s lobby, not so lucky. The bridges and tunnels were shut tight, barring anyone in or out on that first night.

Now, gazing as if hypnotized, Kathleen stood in front of the flat-screen TV in her ample living room. Two soft couches sat catty-corner to each other. Under a deeply grained oak coffee table, an area rug covered a shiny oak floor. Afternoon sun streamed through the windows, which were on a high enough floor to allow the privacy of treetops without blocking the light.

A ribbon of headlines ran at the bottom of the TV screen. Two explosions. Times Square and Penn Station. Dozens dead. When she saw the photos, her sadness deepened and her anxiety for her friends and family ramped up. From the moment she’d reached safety on Forty-Second Street, she’d wanted to see the Facebook safety check-ins. They were usually ridiculous in a place as big as New York City, where millions of people would check in even if they were nowhere near the site of an attack. But it wasn’t ridiculous when there had been an attack with mass casualties, the one New Yorkers had feared since 2001.

In an alcove area meant to be a dining room, Kathleen had set up a home office with a computer station, bookshelves, and a plush reclining chair. Kathleen preferred the eat-in kitchen for meals, even if she had company, so she had no need for a dining room. She sat at her desk and clicked into Facebook. Her profile appeared on her PC monitor: a photograph of a woman in her twenties with freckles, full cheeks, and short auburn hair stared back at her with a wry smile. She bore no resemblance to Kathleen, whose own skin was luminous and lightly wrinkled, her cheekbones prominent, gray-white hair cut to just below the nape of her neck. Kathleen was attractive. But she was by no means a young woman who’d recently graduated with a master’s degree from a Wisconsin university like the woman in her Facebook photo.

Kathleen entered Emily’s name. A photo of Emily appeared, twenty-six, wearing jeans and sneakers. She was crouched next to a half-grown golden retriever with a little girl of two and a half between her knees.

Kathleen paused, appreciating Emily’s ash-brown curls, a lighter version of her mother’s hair. Emily had recently cut her hair short, haphazardly, in a cute, longer-in-front style. Kathleen knew she was being objective when she appreciated Emily’s beauty. Emily had an inner glow and sparkling gray eyes that took Kathleen’s breath away, creating a longing that she carefully hid when she was in Emily’s presence. Kathleen more easily got away with her obvious adoration of Emily’s daughter, Skye, with her wheat-colored curls and eyes and glorious laugh. Everybody loved babies.

Kathleen scanned Emily’s page, seeing nothing about her whereabouts. She was probably working at crisis pace at City Hall, a job that Kathleen had greased the wheels for her to have. Not that Emily knew it. Emily thought Kathleen, named Sophie Monsey for Facebook and Instagram purposes, was a college friend she couldn’t remember meeting. Emily thought Sophie had graduated with a bachelor’s from NYU the same year as her and moved back to her home state of Wisconsin. Kathleen had grabbed an anonymous girl’s Getty image two years ago and created a Facebook page with a Gmail address she’d set up for that purpose. Emily was too polite to ever acknowledge that she didn’t remember meeting the young woman who’d friended her.

Kathleen had named herself Sophie after looking up the most popular girl’s names twenty-six years ago. As Sophie, she’d reached out to Emily enough times, commenting, sharing, and messaging her about trivia, that Emily had likely forgotten she never knew her. They’d become good friends, although Emily thought they lived in distant states now. It was Sophie who’d told Emily to apply to a City Hall job she’d seen online, sending Emily the posting. Kathleen had made a few confidential telephone calls to old friends once Emily said she’d applied so she could at least get an interview.

Now Kathleen wrote Emily on Messenger. Are you okay? Heard about the attack.

Kathleen knew Emily pictured her in a house in the woods of Wisconsin. Emily had no idea her friend was typing in Manhattan, age spots on the back of her veined hands. Kathleen intended to keep it that way.

CHAPTER 3

EMILY WALKED ON the edge of a herd of staff and security that surrounded Mayor Derick Sullivan, who stood a head above even the tallest member of his dark-suited NYPD security detail. The temperature was perfect for a June day, upper seventies and sunny. The leaves of City Hall Park’s huge old trees rustled in the cooling breeze, cicadas humming in rhythm. A whiff of salt floated in from the East River half a mile away.

On Broadway, a platoon of cops lined up outside the wrought-iron fence that encircled City Hall. Sirens and helicopter blades chopped the air. But stores were open and people were doing oddly regular things, walking their dogs, taking their kids to playgrounds, and lining up at Starbucks. Emily could hear the music from the break-dancers who entertained tourists at Brooklyn Bridge Plaza at the opposite side of City Hall. She found it hard to imagine that the tourists were in the mood.

The people Emily passed on the street had a darkness in their eyes, quiet, mournful, watchful. They were all starting to get the death toll on their phones. It was the children that ripped at Emily the most. There were some middle school kids missing from a school she herself had attended on West Seventy-Seventh Street. They’d been on a field trip, traveling to a Broadway showcase. She could imagine their anxious parents waiting for word now. She had to push away the thought of how she would feel if she were among them, waiting for Skye.

Emily entered a glass structure manned by two uniformed security officers. Her phone rang. Hector, Skye’s father. She flashed her ID card and bypassed the X-ray conveyor belt that scanned visitor briefcases and pocketbooks. The metal detector buzzed repeatedly as Emily and the others walked through. She exited a second door, held open by the person in front of her, and entered a plaza at the foot of City Hall within the fenced-off perimeter.

“Is everyone okay?” she asked Hector, holding her phone to her ear as she climbed the sweeping City Hall stairs.

Hector worked nights as a chef at a boutique hotel in SoHo, so he would have been out of harm’s way, just waking up. But his mother worked at a midtown office and he had three younger sisters, one a student at the CUNY Graduate Center not far from Times Square.

“My sisters were still home when it happened. My mother was at the office and walked home. What about yours?”

“My mom’s fine. She was supposed to go to a doctor’s appointment with Carl today and didn’t come downtown.”

“A friend from work is picking me up later and we’re driving down. I’ll get Skye from day care before I go. I can bring her to my mom’s if you have to work late.”

“I really appreciate that. Thank you.”

Emily followed Mayor Sullivan and the rest of their group into the soaring, domed rotunda. Floating marble staircases led to a columned mezzanine overhead. She hung up, grateful she hadn’t needed to ask Hector for help with Skye. She couldn’t have hoped for a better partner to raise a kid with. On a day like today, she needed to be a part of the mayor’s team, staying as late as needed. Everyone would have understood if she’d needed to leave work to pick up her kid, but she knew that was no match for being there during an emergency.

Mayor Sullivan paused to give quiet instructions to Martha. Dark-complexioned and skinny, Martha was the mayor’s press secretary and Emily’s boss. She virtually thrummed with energy all the time, but even more so today. Emily saw stress and determination on Martha’s and all her coworkers’ faces. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know this was the mayor’s big test. His career was on the line. Maybe even his sense of purpose in life was at stake. He had probably imagined this scenario many times. Emily knew how important it was that he do a good job.

It was also close to presidential primary season. The mayor had needed to fly back to New York from New Hampshire when the explosions happened. He’d been campaigning and had a fair shot at winning the nomination. The terror attack would be either his campaign’s viral miracle or its never-ending nightmare. No one knew when or if the laser beam of public scorn would end up pointing his way—if he made a mistake, if he missed a cue that cost lives, if he were perceived as insensitive. That had to be heavy on the mayor’s mind. He was only human.

The press office was on the first floor, a desk-filled room where light streamed in through tall windows. TV monitors along one wall played multiple news stations. The phones were already ringing, reporters calling. Before coming to City Hall, Emily had worked at an online local news site, first as an intern and then as a reporter. When the site went bankrupt, she landed a job in public affairs at Con Edison. For two years, she’d spent much of her time explaining power outages to angry callers and standing under a sweltering tent, handing out logo swag at street fairs. She’d been lucky to eventually land a job as deputy press secretary at City Hall. It had been excellent timing for her—she’d been soul-searching about how she could use her journalism and communications degrees to do more good in the world.

Now, the worst kind of emergency had come, and she needed to behave like a leader. When terrible things happened, she had to consciously choose between taking responsibility and expecting someone else to take care of her. The latter was not an option if she wanted a career in politics.

“Emily,” Martha said, “you have the mayor’s schedule?”

Emily sat at her desk. “Everything’s canceled. Decks cleared for the press conference.”

Roger Merritt entered the room, grabbing a piece of candy from a bowl on the receptionist’s desk before heading their way. He leaned back against the empty desk of a staffer who’d taken a leave of absence to work for the campaign. Roger looked more like a politician than the mayor. Tall, with a bronze golf tan, he had a full head of silver hair that gleamed preternaturally for a man in his fifties. Emily had googled him when she’d first come to City Hall. He was “old money,” born rich. Based on Emily’s observation, that seemed to bestow a full head of hair on men way past middle age, unless they were English royalty.

Roger was a powerful lobbyist, although he was mostly referred to as a “political strategist” if his name came up. He was with Mayor Sullivan as often as the most senior staff and wielded more power. He’d helped the mayor get elected to progressively more powerful positions since Sullivan began his career as a community board member in Queens. Roger made money from clients who used him to get access to the mayor. If Mayor Sullivan became president, all the people in this room, including Emily, would likely go with him to the White House. And Roger would know all of them, access worth millions instead of hundreds of thousands. It would also mean world-size power. If there was one thing Emily had learned in her stint as a reporter and now working at City Hall, it was that money and power went hand in hand.

“We’re getting flack about the mayor being out of town when the attack happened,” Roger said to Martha.

Martha looked askance at Roger. “So much for trying to build a relationship with the press corps.”

She said it with snark, but then looked to one of the flat-screen TVs. Tears pooled in her eyes. Emily followed Martha’s gaze to a video of stunned parents at the middle school.

Emily swallowed hard, wishing she could unsee the look on their faces. She spoke to Roger. “The mayor was back here in three hours. He never lost contact.”

Martha looked from Emily to Roger, all business again. “We’ll make sure the media knows that.”

Emily turned to pick up her phone. “The mayor will speak at five PM Eastern,” she told a reporter who had a thick French accent.

Reporters were calling from all over the world, and her job was to say nothing quotable at this point. People didn’t realize how much of a press officer’s job it was to make sure City Hall wasn’t quoted … until they wanted to be. Martha spoke to Max, a deputy press secretary like Emily. “I need you to work with Operations to set up the press conference at NYU hospital.”

“Got it,” Max said from the desk next to Emily’s.

“Emily, call the press officers for Transit, NYPD, and FDNY and tell them to refer all inquiries directly to City Hall. We need centralized messaging.”

Emily normally covered the uniformed services, NYPD and FDNY, and Max covered transit and transportation issues. So, this meant they were working as a team on the subway attack. Max seemed enthusiastic about that. He was a nice-looking guy, a state senator’s son with dark hair and long-lashed blue eyes, but Emily didn’t want to mix business and pleasure. And he’d fallen squarely in the friend zone as she’d gotten to know him.

Martha looked down at her phone and then back up at them. “Meeting in the COW, five minutes.”

At mezzanine level above the rotunda’s floating staircases, the COW—short for Committee of the Whole—was where City Council committees had met in the nineteenth century. But it had been a mayoral conference room for as long as anyone could remember. A round table sat at its center, and dignitary portraits in gilt frames lined the walls. The mayor and Roger were in a heated discussion at the far side of the room next to a marble fireplace.

At six foot seven inches, Mayor Sullivan had the limbs of a daddy longlegs. He had a generous smile of bright white teeth and charisma that shaped his awkwardness into approachability. When he spoke to people, even for a moment, he made them feel they had one hundred and ten percent of his attention. None of that was on display now as he cursed at Roger, the governor’s name threaded like pearls on a string of profanity.

“He’s just afraid you’ll do a Giuliani on him,” Roger told the mayor, eyes flashing.

The mayor whisper-shouted, “This is a City issue, goddammit.”

Emily sat in the second row of chairs surrounding the conference table, the deputy mayors and agency commissioners taking seats at the table. New York politics were tricky. She’d been in elementary school when Giuliani was mayor, but she’d later learned how he’d overshadowed Governor Pataki after 9/11. The governor had been left looking like he was photobombing in every shot, trying to get attention at the expense of the victims.

The FBI, Homeland Security, MTA, and the federal Department of Transportation began announcing themselves on a speakerphone as they came on the conference line.

“Okay, let’s get started,” the mayor said as he sat down at the table.

An NYPD chief in uniform stood and spoke from the second row near Emily. “For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Chief Fred Reilly. I will be embedded at City Hall for the duration of this crisis.”

Emily had worked with Chief Reilly before and found him competent and approachable.

“We’ve reviewed the video feed,” he continued. “One man planted the bombs. It looks like he acted alone. He placed the first bomb in a subway garbage pail at Thirty-Fourth Street, and the other was in a suicide vest. The bomber is dead, pending identification.”

Mayor Sullivan leaned forward. “So, the threat is over?”

“We believe so. We’ve inspected every subway station in Manhattan. We’ll have the whole system done by the end of the afternoon.”

A tinny voice spoke up from the speaker. “Mr. Mayor, this is ASAC Gendell from the FBI. There was no uptick in terror cell chatter prior to the attack. No one has claimed responsibility. ISIS generally waits to make sure the killer is dead before taking credit. So, it’s too early to say definitively, but we believe he was a lone wolf, potentially ISIS inspired, of course. We’ll remain on high alert, but we believe the danger is over.”

“Is there any word on who he was?” Mayor Sullivan asked.

“Not yet,” Chief Reilly said. “But I can guarantee you this. The NYPD has dozens of cameras in the subway stations and all over Herald Square and Times Square, plus private security cameras in the commercial establishments. By the end of the day, we’ll not only know who he was but where he lived, where he went to school, and where he got his molars pulled.”