Day One Of Eleven

Marcus POV

Faraz parked on Birchwood at five-forty-two in the morning.

The block was three-story brownstones and maples and the kind of parked cars that suggest a neighborhood where nobody moves them between Tuesdays. A quiet block. A Park Slope block. The sky was the color concrete takes just before sunrise, and the SUV, black, tinted, unremarkable, settled against the curb across the street and four houses down from number 437.

Faraz cut the engine.

He said, without turning, "Long one today?"

"A few hours."

"Coffee?"

"No."

He nodded once. He took a paperback out of the door pocket on his side I did not look at the title, I had made a practice of not looking at the titles of the books Faraz read and he adjusted the angle of the mirror and he settled in.

That was it. That was the whole of our shared vocabulary for the morning.

I opened my tablet.

I pulled up the case file. I pulled up the neighborhood map. I pulled up the utility records I had cross-referenced in the last forty-eight hours to confirm the couple’s occupancy patterns. Derek’s phone geolocation, pulled from his carrier through a data contract Arbitr had with a federal partner, placed him at 437 Birchwood between the hours of eleven PM and seven AM on seventeen of the last twenty weekdays. Saoirse’s phone, which she kept on a different carrier and which I had needed separate access to, placed her at 437 from five AM most mornings and then at various locations across the five boroughs from roughly eight onward.

She left for work at seven-fifteen or seven-thirty every weekday morning.

She was, I had inferred from the data, the kind of person who got up significantly earlier than she had to.

I was interested in why.

At six-fourteen AM the front door of 437 opened.

I had not been sitting at the window of the tablet. I had been reading an email. I looked up because the small motion-tracker app I had been running on a livestream from a traffic camera a block over had flagged a door opening within its field of view, and I set the tablet on the seat beside me, and I looked across the street.

And I saw her.

She was barefoot.

That was the first thing I noted, which is a thing I want to record honestly because I do not ordinarily begin a subject’s profile with what is on or not on their feet. It was November. It was fifty-one degrees. The porch boards of a Brooklyn brownstone at six in the morning in November are the kind of cold that transfers into the soles of a human foot in under ten seconds, and she was barefoot on them, and she did not, as far as I could tell from four houses down through a tinted window, appear to register this fact.

She was holding a coffee mug.

Both hands around it. The way a person holds a mug when the point of the mug is the warmth of the mug against the hands, not the contents of the mug inside the body.

She stepped out of the doorway and took three steps toward the porch railing. She did not look at her phone. She did not look at the street. She did not look at anything in particular. She stopped at the railing. She stood there. The coffee mug rose to her mouth once, twice, and then rested back against her chest, and she stood there, and she breathed.

I do not have a better word for what she did. She breathed.

I watched her do it.

I timed her, because I time things.

She stood at the railing for four minutes and eleven seconds.

In those four minutes and eleven seconds she looked at nothing. She moved once a small adjustment of weight from her left foot to her right, the kind of shift a person makes when the cold has finally reached a threshold their body is going to complain about and then she was still again, and the mug rose and fell twice more, and then at four minutes and eleven seconds she turned.

She did not turn all the way back toward the house.

She turned slightly.

Just enough to angle her body away from the front window.

I noted it.

I did not immediately know what I was noting. I noted it because I note things. Her body had, in the last five seconds of standing still on a cold porch in her own house, rotated approximately eleven to fourteen degrees clockwise, away from the rightmost front window of 437 Birchwood. The window behind which according to the layout of a standard two-up-two-down Brooklyn brownstone and the placement of the couch I had inferred from the streetview of the living room I had pulled on my tablet during the drive Derek Calloway would most likely be sitting if Derek Calloway were awake and in the living room at six-eighteen in the morning.

She had done it without looking toward the window.

She had done it without, I was almost certain, being aware she was doing it.

Which meant she had done it many times before.

Which meant her body had, across some unknown number of months or years, internalized the geometry of her own porch as a function of the sight lines from the inside of her own house, and had developed a habit of angling itself, in the small unobserved mornings when she had the porch to herself, away from the place her husband’s eyes could reach.

I had, in four years of case files, read several dozen academic papers on the embodied behavioral signatures of long-term intimate-partner abuse survivors.

I had not ever, in four years, watched one.

Not in real time.

Not with my own eyes.

She went back inside.

At six-nineteen the light changed in an upstairs window the second-floor east-facing, which in that layout would be the bedroom and then dimmed again, which I took to mean she had gone upstairs to dress. At six-forty the light came on in what I was confident was the kitchen. At seven-twelve the front door opened again, and she came out carrying a bag in her good hand and wearing a coat and shoes now, and she walked the seven steps from the porch to the curb, and she got into a white unmarked cargo van that had been parked in front of the building since before we arrived.

The van had a commercial plate and a decal on the driver’s side door that said S.B. Logistics.

I made a note of the business name. I would pull the registration when I got home. I was already confident she was the sole proprietor.

She drove west.

I did not follow her. I was not, today, interested in where she worked. I was interested in the porch.

I watched the porch for the rest of the morning.

Derek Calloway came out at eight-forty in a suit. He locked the door behind him in the specific way a man locks a door when the locking is part of a performance, jiggling the handle once, twice, three times to confirm, and he walked to the corner and got into a car service I had already pulled the receipts on. He would be at his desk at nine-thirty. He would leave that desk at six-ten. He would be home by six-forty-five. His wife would be home from her warehouse in Sunset Park at approximately seven. They would eat dinner at seven-forty. On weekday nights Derek’s alcohol consumption, traceable through the credit card he used at the liquor store on Fifth Avenue, averaged three to five standard drinks.

I knew, essentially, everything about Derek Calloway’s life that a person could learn without entering his body.

None of it was what I had come to watch.

"Faraz."

"Mr. Reed."

"We’ll come back tomorrow."

He nodded. He set the book down. He started the engine. He pulled away from the curb and he turned at the corner and he drove us home.

I watched the window for the whole ride.

I did not look at the tablet.

I did not look at the Calloway file.

I did not open the photograph.

I looked at the window, and at the part of my face reflected in the window, and at a single thought I had not yet permitted to finish inside my head, which was:

Derek Calloway is no longer the interesting problem in this case.