All Chapters of The Killer Who Found Me : Chapter 31 - Chapter 40

52 Chapters

The Acceleration

Marcus POVI was at the café before her.I want to tell you why, because the why matters. I had not engineered the encounter. I had in the eleven days since the burial of the tulips stopped engineering. The folder had grown to twenty-one entries, and the entries had begun, without my having decided to let them, to include things I could not have observed at a distance. A guess about how she took her coffee in the morning at her own apartment. A suspicion about a song she would have liked. The guesses were data of a different kind. They were data about me.I had stopped engineering because I was at the point in the project where the engineering had become indistinguishable from need.I had been at the café on Cortelyou Road, on Saturdays, at midday, for three weeks. Not because I had any expectation she would come. Because I had identified, from her movement data, that the café was a place she occasionally went on Saturdays, and I had wanted to put myself in the same physical space as h

The Man At The Door

Saoirse POVEddie Doyle came to my apartment on a Saturday at seven-eighteen PM.I had been home for two hours by then. I had eaten dinner at the small kitchen table I had bought myself the week before. I had put my grandmother’s photograph on the windowsill. I had been, in the slow careful way a woman recovers from a long week, beginning to feel the apartment settle around me as a place where I lived.My buzzer rang.I did not, at first, register it as a problem. The buzzer in this building rang for any number of reasons — a delivery, a neighbor needing the front door, a misdialed apartment. I went to the intercom by the kitchen door.A voice came through. Low. Easy. The specific calibrated friendliness of a man who has done this thousands of times. “Mrs. Calloway? Eddie Doyle. I’d like a few minutes if you can spare them.”The name hit me before the request did.Detective Reyes had told me he would come. She had told me, at the door of my mother’s apartment, that he was the type tha

The Variable

Marcus POV I sat at the terminal in my study and I watched the pin.It was a small red dot on a map tile of Ditmas Park, parked in the middle of Argyle Road eighty feet from the front of Saoirse’s building, and it had not moved for forty-six minutes. The pin was Eddie Doyle’s Ford. The Ford was empty. Doyle was, by my read of the data, currently inside her apartment.I had a model for this.I want to be specific about the model, because the model is the thing I had built my life on, and the model failing is the subject of the next hour of my evening. The model handles the scenario ‘man you have decided not to remove conducts surveillance on subject under your protection’ by recommending one of three responses, ranked by efficacy and risk. Response one: passive observation, accept the cost. Respo

His Voice

Saoirse POVOn Sunday afternoon I went to the bookstore on Cortelyou Road.I want to tell you why, because the why was not what a reasonable woman would have said if you had asked her on Sunday morning. The reasonable woman would have said *I needed to get out of the apartment.* She would have said *I needed to be in a place with strangers, with high ceilings, with the smell of new paperbacks, with the small ordinary public life of a Sunday in Brooklyn.* All of that would have been true.The true thing underneath the true thing was that I had spent the night with Eddie Doyle’s sentence in the kitchen, and the only place in the world I knew of where the sentence might quiet for an hour was a bookstore.I had loved this bookstore since I was twenty-two. I had not been allowed to go to it for the last three years because Derek had decided, early in the marriage, that bookstores were precious and that I was performing when I went to them, and I had stopped going rather than have the argum

The One Sentence

Marcus POV On Sunday morning I made a decision I had not been planning to make until later in the week.The decision was that I was going to speak to her that day.I had not planned it for Sunday. I had planned, in the architecture I had built across the previous two weeks, for the speaking to come later closer to the end of the month, at a moment of my choosing, in a place I had calibrated for both of us. The architecture had assumed I had time. The architecture had assumed Doyle was a manageable variable.The architecture had been correct up to seven-oh-five PM on Saturday.At seven-oh-five PM on Saturday, Eddie Doyle had taken a photograph of me on a sidewalk in Ditmas Park, and the architecture had stopped being correct.I want to be precise about the calculation, because the calculation is the only honest way to describe what was happening to me that Sunday morning. Doyle now had a face. Doyle would, within seventy-two hours, run that face against every database he had access to

Four Days

Saoirse POVThe envelope was on my doormat on Monday morning at seven-eleven.I want to tell you what that exact time felt like, because it had a quality I am not sure I am going to be able to describe correctly. Seven-eleven was the time I left my apartment on Monday mornings to drive to a job in Williamsburg. The envelope had been placed on the mat with the specific timing of a person who knew the door would be opening within minutes, and who had not wanted me to find it on Sunday night, when I would have had to carry it through the long hours of a Sunday evening alone, but had wanted me to find it on my way out into a Monday I already had reasons to be in.That was a kindness.I noted the kindness.I picked the envelope up.──I want to tell you what was inside, because the inside was a small object that contained one of the larger pieces of information he had given me yet.A slip of paper. White. Handwritten.Three things on the slip.An address, a number, a street name in Brooklyn

The Door

Saoirse POV The door opened.I had been expecting, I suppose, him. I had imagined, in the four days between the envelope and the knock, what the opening of that door would look like the variations of the scene I had been running while I drove to Williamsburg and packed crates and ate dinner alone in my apartment. In none of the variations had it been a different man.The man who opened the door was not the man whose face I had been trying to imagine.He was older than I had expected. Mid-forties. Tall, but not tall in the way the man in my living room had been tall a different tallness, a more anchored one, with the specific carriage of a person who had spent a long time being still on purpose. Iranian, possibly. A close-cut beard going grey at the edges. Dark eyes. A charcoal suit that fit him in the way suits fit men who have worn them at work, not at parties.He looked at me for a small, complete second.Then he stepped back and he said: “Ms. Boyle. Please come in. My name is Fa

The Information

Marcus POVI had ordered the sentences in the SUV.I want to tell you that, because the ordering was the only part of the next hour I had control over. I had been composing the order across the four days since the envelope. I had rejected three versions. The version I had ended on, sitting across from her now in my own front room with her in the armchair and the water she had not yet touched on the table between us, was the one I had decided was the one that did the least violence to the person I was about to hand the information to.I began with the smallest, most factual sentence I could begin with.I said: “My name is Marcus Reed.”She did not say anything.Her face did not, as far as I could read it, change. She was looking at me with the small specific attention she had brought into the room, and the attention did not break. I had expected the giving of my name to land as a discrete event. I understood, watching her face, that the giving of my name was not the event — it was the

The Count

Saoirse POVHe said: “Seventeen, publicly. Twenty in fact.”He said it the way he had said the other things — directly, without preamble, with the small specific clarity of a man who had decided that the woman across the table was owed the numbers in their actual sequence and not in the version of the sequence that softened them for her.I held the numbers.I want to tell you what holding them was like, because I have thought about it and the truest thing I can say is that holding them was an act of small physical labor. The numbers had weight. *Seventeen.* I had read that number in a tabloid on the F train two years ago and had not stayed with it for longer than the article required. *Twenty.* That number had not, until that night, existed in the world

The Calm

Marcus POVFaraz came back to the house at ten thirty-one PM.I heard the front door. I heard the small unhurried sound of him hanging up his own coat on the hook beside the one he had hung Saoirse’s coat on three hours earlier. I heard him in the kitchen running a glass of water. Then I heard him in the doorway of the study behind me, and I knew, without turning, that he was waiting for me to be the one who spoke first.I said: “She got home.”“Yes, Mr. Reed. She did.”“You did not follow her.”“I did not.”A small silence.Faraz said: “I watched the van turn off Henry. I confirmed she made the turn south. I came back.”“Good,” I said.Another small silence.Faraz said and this was, I understood, the sentence he had walked the half-block from his car to my study to say “She used my name, sir.”I turned in my chair.Faraz was standing in the doorway of the study with his hands clasped lightly in front of him in the carriage he had developed across seven years of being in this house, a

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