Page 10 of Nobody's Hero

Sally’s was the local bar. Its patrons called it a dive bar, although it was in a good neighbourhood and didn’t feel edgy like the best dive bars did. Harper had made herself a regular as it was where the bellboys and maids and concierges hung out after work.

‘Maybe later,’ Harper said. ‘But I’m kinda beat tonight. Just going to head to my room and get some stuff.’

Which was what Harper did. She went to her room and she got her stuff. She was on the same floor as Reynolds, and her stuff included a camera, a portable laser printer, an acetate sheet, a tube of wood glue and a laptop.

She’d gotten a maid drunk at Sally’s the night before and cloned her key card while she was throwing up in the bathroom. She used her clone to slip inside Reynolds’s room. The floor’s CCTV had been working, but at 9 p.m. it went down. It would stay down until the following day. Harper turned on the lights and examined Reynolds’s wineglass. She had three prints to choose from. She selected the thumb. She thought the thumb was the most likely. She took a dozen photographs, selected the best one, and Bluetoothed it to her laptop. She opened an image-editing app and created a negative of the photograph. She sent this to the laser printer and printed it onto the acetate sheet. This created a 3D structure of the negative. She cut off the tip of the wood-glue tube and spread a thin layer across the print. She took the acetate sheet to the bathroom, rested it on the heated towel rail, and waited for it to dry. She checked her watch. She figured her dad would have convinced Reynolds to order a dessert by now. After fifteen minutes she peeled off the slim thumbprint copy. It was an unsophisticated hack, but more than enough to unlock Reynolds’s laptop. His government files had additional layers of security, but Harper had no interest in them. She opened a fresh Word document and began typing. It took her two minutes. She proofread it, then proofread it again. It was correct.

She rechecked her watch. It was time to leave.

But before she did, she had one last job. Maybe the most important job. She walked over to the fruit bowl and put the banana in her bag. She couldn’t leave that there.

That wouldn’t do at all.

Thirty minutes after leaving for her break, she was back on the restaurant floor. Hank Reynolds was just leaving.

Hank Reynolds stepped inside his hotel room. He rubbed his eyes and rolled his shoulders. He felt like he should go for a stroll. Walk off the meat and the liquor. Funny that Stillwell was allergic to egg yolks but could handle egg whites. He hadn’t heard of that before. Come to think of it, he hadn’t said he was allergic to eggs. He’d said, ‘Something like that.’ What the hell did that mean? The more Reynolds thought about it, the more he realised there was something a little off with Stillwell Hobbs. Talking to him was like watching a movie where the audio was slightly out of sync. Shouldn’t spoil your enjoyment, but it did anyway. Reynolds didn’t have an ego, but when someone tells you they have a government job, it’s normal to ask what that job is. But Stillwell hadn’t cared.

Reynolds sat at the room desk. ‘Stillwell Hobbs’ was an unusual name. Maybe he was on a database somewhere. He lifted the laptop lid and pressed his thumb against the scanner. Reynolds stared at the screen in confusion. It should have opened on the desktop. A photo of his wife, his two-year-old daughter and his labradoodle, Monty. The photo he’d taken on their trip to Montana. But instead of grinning faces and a panting dog, there was an open Word document. Reynolds rarely used Word. He communicated by email, departmental intranet or Teams. He reached into his inside pocket for his reading glasses.

He read the first line out loud. ‘“I’ve been living a lie . . .”’ He blinked in surprise. ‘What the hell?’

Which was when the cord from the dressing gown, the thick white towelling one that hung from the back of the bathroom door, was slipped around his neck. Stillwell Hobbs was too experienced a killer to pull the cord back. For sure it would have been easier to murder Reynolds that way, but he was staging a suicide, and even a first-year pathologist knew the difference between a hanging and a ligature strangulation. The wounds were different. Pulling back would leave a horizontal furrow on the neck. Instead, Hobbs yanked the cord up. Made sure the wound followed the underside of the jaw, all the way up to the ears. Reynolds scrambled back but only succeeded in falling off his chair. Hobbs had counted on that. Reynolds was now only being held up by the cord around his neck. As if he had hanged himself from a door handle.

Which was exactly where the maid found him twelve hours later.

Hanging from his bathroom door.

Chapter 7

‘This goes to trial, you’re coming in second,’ Detective Mallinson said. ‘There’s no way a New York jury finds for you.’

‘My colleague’s right, Mr Koenig,’ Detective Wagstaff added. ‘Don’t matter what fancy-ass trick your lawyer pulls, they’re gonna find for the DA. Juries always do when a cop’s been killed. Makes ’em feel safer. That usually means life without the possibility of parole. Come clean now, though, and you might get out before you’re eighty.’

Mallinson and Wagstaff had been interviewing Koenig for an hour. Mallinson was wearing a Brooks Brothers suit and a stained tie. Looked like coffee. Wasn’t the worst cop Koenig had met, wasn’t the best. Wagstaff had a Van Dyke beard, trimmed and dyed. He seemed the smarter of the two. Koenig got the impression neither he nor Mallinson liked Beetle-Brow and his crew. Probably didn’t even know why. Corrupt cops gave off a vibe other cops could sense. Like when you knew which dog was going to bite and which one wasn’t. They were still cops, though. The blue shield covered them all.

The interview room was small and boxy. Drab but functional. A table bolted to the floor, two light chairs on the cops’ side, a welded bench on Koenig’s. The bench had an eyebolt, and his handcuffs were threaded through it. They’d exchanged his rigid arrest cuffs for a pair with a longer chain. Meant he could take a drink from the beaker of dusty water they’d put in front of him. A dome camera stuck to the ceiling like a shiny wart. Koenig could see three microphones but assumed there’d be more he couldn’t. Courts had ruled the NYPD were allowed covert mics in interview rooms.

‘What time is it?’ Koenig said.

‘That’s the third time you’ve asked what the goddamned time is,’ Mallinson said. ‘The time is whatever the hell I tell you it is. That’s what time it is.’

Koenig nodded. ‘I agree that time is an artificial construct,’ he said. ‘That it’s just an illusion of memories. If the human brain didn’t have memories, time as we know it wouldn’t exist. We would live in a succession of nows.’ He took a sip of water. ‘Did you know there’s a clock that’s so accurate it only loses one second every fifteen billion years?’

Wagstaff sighed. ‘You may not believe me, Mr Koenig, but we’re trying to do you a favour. We know Cunningham and her crew are douchebags. Everyone in thisprecinctknows they’re douchebags. And I have no doubt that they were up to something they shouldn’t have been. No way do the four of them decide to meet for a coffee at an internet café. Not on their day off. Not unless those places pay you to drown cats.’

He paused a couple of beats and, in a well-rehearsed move, Mallinson took over. ‘Maybe they ripped you off, maybe they did something else. But can we at least agree that what you did was a staggering overreaction?’

Koenig said, ‘What time is it, please?’

Wagstaff threw up his hands. ‘If I tell you the goddamned time, will you tell us what happened in that goddamned parking lot?’

‘No,’ Koenig replied. ‘But I will tell you what’s going to happen next.’

Chapter 8

‘Fine,’ Wagstaff said. He checked his watch. ‘It’s coming up to five after seven. Happy?’

Koenig did some mental calculations. Decided he could give a little back. He said, ‘You’ve heard of the East Coast Sweeney?’

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