Page 12 of Nobody's Fool

“How’s Henry?” I ask her.

Henry is our infant son. He is about to turn one. When Henry was born, my entire world shrank down into a six-pound, fifteen-ounce mass. Your world is one thing before you have a child. It is another after. I don’t mean this to advocate for or denigrate the act of having a child. Do your thing. But the reality is, want it to or not, a child changes absolutely everything down to a molecular level. No one is immune.

“He’s up and wired for sound,” Molly replies. Henry is not a great sleeper. Then she asks in a tone I still don’t like: “Do you know what time you’ll be home?”

“Not really,” I say.

“So this is something big, right?”

I am not sure how to reply to that. “It’s a lot, yeah. But it’s okay.”

“You’re being a tad cryptic,” Molly says.

“I don’t mean to be. I can try to explain now—”

“But you’d rather do it in person.”

“Yes,” I say. “Very much.”

“Okay. I love you, Sami.”

“I love you more,” I say because I do.

Molly disconnects first. I make up time on the Major Deegan and before I know it, we are both on Interstate 95 heading toward Connecticut. I check my gas gauge and am happy to see I still have half a tank. Craig often uses my car, which isn’t part of the deal, but he knows I don’t care and he’s usually good about putting gas back into the tank. Craig works administration for the Bronx Zoo. He lost his wife, Cassie, a boisterous explosion of a human, to ovarian cancer two years ago and now when Craig smiles, it never reaches his eyes.

I keep my eyes glued on the road. The tracker veers off at Exit 3. I do the same. I try to think it through, try to figure out how it could be Anna and why she came to my class, but then I remember the Sherlock Holmes quote on that old blackboard:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

In short, keep your mind open. Don’t theorize so fast. Wait until you know more.

Yeah, that’s not going to happen.

I flash back to that cop in Fuengirola, Carlos Osorio, his youthful yet world-weary face indicating he didn’t believe one word I said when I was telling the truth. Or part of the truth anyway. Not the whole truth. Who would tell a police officer the whole truth in that situation? Who would mention, for example, waking up with the murder weapon in your hand? But I was a dumb kid—I’m sure Osorio could sense I wasn’t coming completely clean. I remember the way he folded his arms and waited patiently until I was wise enough to shut up and then he launched the pointed questions: “How much did you drink?… How much did you smoke?… How much did you snort?… Should I give you a drug test right now?”

I follow the tracker down a high-rent main street that Molly would call “cutesy,” with upscale restaurants and well-coiffed boutiques that seem more hobby than business. My old clunker of a car fits into these wealthy environs like a cigarette in a health club. I crank down the window so I can smell the money. I curve off to the left and onto streets lined with ever-growing mansions—the farther you move from the main street, the larger and more remote the estates.

A mile passes. Then two. I can still see the occasional home, but only via twinkling lights through thick hedges. There are gates atdriveways and elaborate iron fencing. It is hard to believe that this exists in the same world as the Lower East Side, which again is neither an indictment nor an acquittal of one over the other. I’m clearly not a rich man, and while I get the primitive draw of the ginormous mansion—the simple human need for “more”—who really needs or wants that much space? How many rooms can you be in at one time? There is an idiom my father used as a warning about greed: You can’t ride two horses with one behind.

I think that fits here.

The tracker hasn’t moved, according to the app, in seven minutes.

Is she home? Don’t know. But if I’m reading this tracker correctly, she is not on a street. I use my fingers to zoom in. From the tracker’s viewpoint, it appears as though Anna is 1.8 miles away from where I’m now driving, in a remote spot at least two or three hundred yards from the nearest road.

Odd.

A satellite view option would be handy, but the tracker doesn’t have one. I pull my car onto the shoulder of the road and click the three dots on the top right-hand corner of the app. The drop-down menu offers up the target’s precise latitude-longitude coordinates. I copy and paste them into Google Earth and wait as the globe spins around.

When it stops, I say to myself in a low voice, “Oh boy.”

The spot where Anna—just for ease, I’m going to call her Anna instead of Maybe Anna for now—the spot where the tracker claims Anna has now stopped for the past nine minutes is blurred out on the satellite image.

Blurred out?

That’s fairly unusual. The government can request that satellite maps blur sensitive locations like military bases or certain bureaucratic buildings. I doubt this is either, because the rent out here is too high for such riffraff. But it’s a possibility. Google Earth will sometimes blurout a location if there is a compelling reason for privacy or sensitivity in a private home. They do not do it often. And it usually costs.

In short, someone with some power or money wants to keep this location—the location Anna seems to be at—a secret.

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