Shoreline Read online

  “And the staff turnover high, I’d imagine,” Nora added. Anna laughed out loud as Pete waved his hand at them both.

  “What you cannot imagine is how happy she is to see me every morning,” he insisted.

  Sheila Biggs entered frowning. “I’m not happy to see you at all, though. I’d rather have everything in place for busting this guy and have you out bringing him in. Instead I’m not sensing any progress on any front with this thing.” Each of the three gave full attention to the Supervisory Senior Resident Agent. “The Crime Victims Center just emailed me that there is more evidence of abuse, and the director is convinced that the porn in question is coming from our alleged perp in McKean.”

  “Do you think the ones who are old enough will testify?” Nora asked.

  Anna said darkly, “I don’t think any of them are old enough.”

  Nora’s stomach twisted.

  Sheila Biggs’s tone was unpleasant. “Pete, even with the limited warrant you have you should be able to identify the IP addresses for the sites he’s using. Nora, you still need to be cross-checking missing persons with the faces on the material we have so far. I want proof—fast—people. You’ve had plenty of time.”

  Anna, Nora, and Pete exchanged glances as she stalked out.

  “Aren’t the images testimony enough?” Nora asked. “Can’t we make the arrest without the sources?”

  Anna shrugged. “Sometimes. Not always. But the issue is that Burgess has disseminated porn before. There’s more to the story this time. We want to figure out where he’s getting it and get to those guys. And find the little girls they’re using.”

  “Ugh, but Sheila just has no idea what I’m up against here,” Pete muttered.

  Nora looked a question at him.

  “Frank Burgess is fat and perverted. But he also knows how to use the Internet. He’s gone Dark Web on this thing, I’m sure of it. I’m going to need his computer.”

  “You want me to send for another warrant?” Anna asked.

  “Yeah, it’s going to have to be key to this thing. We might as well bust in and say we’re after the computer—this stuff is coming from a dynamic IP address that’s jumped all over. It could be in Erie. Or it could be in Thailand. But Burgess is just the small fish.”

  “Less likely it’s in Thailand,” Nora pointed out. “The girls are almost all Caucasian.”

  “I know,” Pete replied. “But the point stands. We don’t know where until we can go deeper. I’m trying now with what I have, but we need to just go over there and get the computer.”

  Anna pulled her reading glasses out of her hair and perched them on her nose as she wrote. “Internet Service Provider records are insufficient to fully establish browsing history…” she was mumbling to herself as she filled in the lines of the document. She quickly stood and crossed the length of the office to ask Maggie to submit the paperwork via email to the Assistant United States Attorney’s office.

  Nora followed her with her eyes, trying again not to weigh-and-find-wanting this tiny outpost on the seventh floor of one of Erie’s few high-rises. She was a world away from the FBI’s massive Philadelphia Field Office. Nora was one of three Special Agents here. In Philly, a senior Special Agent like Anna would have her own office and secretary. In Philly they would have handed such technical tasks as tracking down the mind-numbing IP addresses to the IT team; here the IT team was Pete.

  Anna was fighting her weight and a relentless, thin line of gray that poked up from under the coating of red she gave her hair. She was a master at harmonizing the efforts of state and local authorities. Arresting Frank Burgess, when the time came, would be a group effort. Unlike in Philly, where Nora had worked as part of a team she saw day in and day out, the work in Erie was fluid. Two weeks into her post, Nora was realizing that the team members rotated in and out, sometimes including the police department and state police, sometimes including the Border Patrol. The territory was vast. Their office was responsible for seven counties, most of which were rural.

  Erie was the urban center. Erie was where families trekked over an hour to visit the mall and eat at the Olive Garden, and where small-town kids who’d never before seen black people came to go to college. As Nora gazed out the long window beyond her desk, she watched a group of six motorcyclists making its way along State Street. Their mufflers, or lack thereof, resounded through the steel and glass corridor made by the rows of office buildings.

  Only after the sound had finally died away did Anna remark, “It would have been nice to get this porn perp into custody before the Roar.”

  Nora looked up slowly from the computer screen, where she had just begun attempting to match faces from Burgess’s porn files to the dense pile of missing persons reports. She decided she hadn’t heard correctly. “Excuse me?”

  Anna swiveled her head to regard Nora. “You haven’t heard about the Roar?”

  Clearly she had not, so she didn’t repeat herself.

  “Roar on the Shore,” supplied Pete. “Erie’s annual celebration of biker culture.”

  This she did repeat, turning the words over in her mouth. “Biker culture?”

  Anna harrumphed. “Bandannas and leather jackets and tattoos and everything related to the mighty Harley Davidson, from insurance to how to keep your scrawny-granny-biker-chick from flying off the back when you hit a bump. Bikers. Bikers flood the city. Eighty thousand of them.”

  Pete, ever so slightly more cheerful about the topic, added, “They’re gearing up for it now. It starts tomorrow.”

  Nora nodded. “And what is required of us?”

  Pete and Anna exchanged glances. Anna said, “Occasionally Erie PD calls us in for help with special issues as they get stretched thin with crowd control. But in reality I’ve never had to do anything except turn up my TV to drown out the noise. They’re harmless and happy.”

  “Beyond that,” said Pete, “don’t lean on anyone’s bike.”

  Anna shook her head, looking tired, then added, “And no matter how much you are tempted, buy no leather halter tops. It’s just skanky.”

  * * *

  Her father’s voice was gruff. “What are you eating? Where do you get food?”

  Nora decided to work a very patient tone. “They have a Wegman’s here. We talked about this. That store we went to in Jersey once. It’s way cheaper than Whole Foods. Their deli section thing with all those rotisserie chickens and stuff is pretty amazing.”

  “That chicken isn’t halal,” her dad said.

  “Yes, but when there’s no halal meat available you’re allowed to eat regular and then just say the name of God over it before you eat,” she countered. “Because God actually hates it when you starve.”

  She heard her dad laughing and envisioned him shaking his head. “Nora, I will freeze something for you every day and then bring you a cooler full of food when I come.”

  “How about you just focus on Ahmad,” she replied, though her tone was gentle. “How’s he doing?”

  “Grumpy. He doesn’t like working in the restaurant in summers, you know. Then again, he does like the new waitress, Madison.”

  Nora smiled, imagining. “Madison?”

  “She has an earring in her tongue, which of course I didn’t notice when I hired her. But I keep seeing her sticking out her tongue to show him, and now I need to figure out a way to fire her.”

  “For having a tongue piercing?” Nora asked. Other servers had had worse.

  Her father’s voice was full of frustration. “No, for flirting with my boy.”

  Nora said, “Baba, Ahmad’s a man now, you have to let him be.”

  “So he can end up with a kafir like you have?” her father hurled.

  And with that, the conversation, like most of their conversations, crumbled.

  There were only so many times that Nora could relate the same problem to Ben, she felt, and so she stopped talking about her father’s irrational anger and tried to speak mostly about work, and the city, and things they would do wh
en Ben came to see her.

  Ben had made fun of Erie when he helped her move in. No skyscrapers. Not enough people. You won’t last a week.

  She had been terse in response. You still have no idea how tough I am, Ben Calder.

  She’d claimed toughness to Ben. In fact, she’d been terrified. She’d never really been alone before. Her little apartment in Chinatown had been just moments from home, moments from Ben, and in a neighborhood dense with people, alive with city clamor, and afloat in some of the best, most comforting smells in the world. Just thinking about it made her ache for dim sum. Quantico had meant almost no privacy; she constantly shared space with fiercely eager agents, chattering, vying with each other for the attention of their teachers, undercutting each other, occasionally bullying.…

  Now, the only break in the quiet was the mad violinist one floor up.

  Of course she hated it; of course she missed the city, even if she disliked proving Ben right.

  She missed the paths along the Schuylkill River, haunted as they were by the gray clouds from Philadelphia’s constant, creeping traffic. She missed the crowded anonymity of the sidewalks. Erie wasn’t tense and teeming, wasn’t a kaleidoscopic jumble. And so she felt as though she stuck out in a way she never could have in Philly, even when things were really bad.

  Only Nora’s morning runs kept her sane. She loved the bay, splayed out as it was under a wide sky that, like the water, fluctuated between bright blue and murky gray. The lake was somehow always different. Some mornings it was flat and serene, other mornings its surface rippled constantly, at a slow, steady boil. Often it foamed with whitecaps that made her wonder why boaters would leave the shelter of the bay for the even rougher waters beyond. She had never been on a boat, and the thought made her woozy.

  State Street tumbled down the hill and into the bay, but not before providing an anchor for the Bicentennial Tower, a webby gauntlet of stairs that provided sweeping views from its top tier. No one ever seemed to run the tower stairs but her. In fact there just weren’t that many runners period—in Philly, she’d had to fight for space. The runners were fierce and focused, with expensive shoes that would cause Nora to slow her pace as she passed, ogling. More than this, though, the trails she ran had been riddled with infants pushed in overpriced strollers and octogenarian speed-walkers in spandex that did them no favors.

  Here she could really run. She would rip along the Bayfront and then into Frontier Park, along its footbridges and across its wide pathways lined with a universe of tall, softly swaying grasses. There were occasional walkers, a few joggers, but no one who was really serious about running. She wasn’t yet lonely for competition. She liked putting on blistering spurts of speed and feeling the burning in her chest that eventually gave way to a hard, fast breathing that blotted out all other sounds and made her feel strong and self-sustaining.

  But when she came home the loneliness really seeped in, and she wandered through the three large rooms of her apartment as though lost. She missed Ahmad’s messes and his constant eating. She missed her father and all his blustery overprotectiveness. On nights when she awoke to raid the fridge, she half expected to encounter Baba sitting in his undershirt and shiny Adidas sweatpants on her couch, shouting advice at cooking show contestants.

  Missing Ben was constant, a continuous twisting in her belly, and so she often walked around her apartment with her hand pressing against her navel as though to calm the churning within. There was some wisdom, she’d decided, in not falling in love. Just marrying some guy who was suitable and being done with it. She didn’t have time for the distraction of thinking about Ben when she should be working, should be focusing on taking this new job by storm.

  She didn’t need to switch to anti-terror, but at the very least she was going to have to prove herself so she could get a better post. An East Coast post. A post near Ben.

  PRELIMINARY EVENING

  She had to marvel at her neighbor’s will. The passage she was playing seemed demonically hard. Nora had learned it by heart, because the violinist had played this particular passage no less than fifty times in the last hour. It was indeed becoming smoother. The times when the violinist stopped midway through and began again at the beginning had become fewer. Nora knew now what it sounded like when she got it right.

  But Nora was starting to lose her mind. She had just rolled over and cast a resigned glance at her clock, which absurdly read one-thirty in the morning, when she heard the unmistakable sound of breaking glass. It sounded to Nora like it had been the broad, heavy pane that filled her oaken front door.

  She was out of bed in an instant. She plunged her feet into her sneakers and, head tilted, listening intently, she crossed to where her gun holster dangled from one of the four posters of the bedframe. Her neighbor had heard the sound as well, it seemed, because the music stopped midstream.

  Nora didn’t even have a chance to assess if there was an intruder in her own apartment. She suddenly heard heavy footsteps pounding across the floor above and a scream that stopped Nora cold. She dashed back to the bedside table and pounded the numbers 9-1-1 into her BlackBerry, even as she raced, phone in one hand and gun in the other, to her front door and out to the porch she shared with the violinist.

  The intruder had smashed the glass front door which was the twin of hers, then unlocked it from the inside. It stood ominously open now, the heavy glass littering the porch in large shards. Just as she was about to enter, Nora’s BlackBerry finally responded, “9-1-1, what is your emergency?”

  From within, Nora heard another gut-wrenching scream. “Intruder, possibly armed, attacking a woman—100 French Street, second floor, hurry!”

  Then she was in. As she mounted the stairs, she was met by the sound of a heavy lamp crashing against a wall and a bulb shattering, and a voice roaring out the word bitch over and over. Now she galloped up the stairs two-by-two, leaping into the room, gun drawn. The living room was empty; she continued to what had to be the bedroom.

  The door had the same crystal doorknobs as her own bedroom one floor below; it was not fully closed. Through the gap, she could see figures, and the sound of her neighbor whimpering in pain. With a quick kick, Nora burst in.

  The man was bigger than she’d expected, with wide, rippling arms spilling out of a gray muscle shirt. Tattoos rampaged across biceps, forearms, and neck. Sandy hair framed a wide face with chiseled features. His expression was already one of fury, but when he spied Nora’s gun pointing at him, it turned to white-hot rage. Squirming beneath him, pinned to the floor, was the violinist. The blood dripping down her cheek and from her already-swollen bottom lip made a jarring contrast against her pale skin. Nora was surprised his position alone hadn’t crushed her.

  “Get off of her and put your hands on the floor, slowly,” Nora said, mustering her angriest, most commanding voice. She begged God for a squad car with extra loud sirens, but nothing came.

  “Fuck you,” answered the man, his chest heaving, his tone scathing.

  He didn’t move. Nora scanned his clothing for a weapon and saw a bulge in his pocket that looked more pocketknife than gun. Still, she did not want to gamble.

  “I’m Special Agent Nora Khalil of the FBI. If you refuse my direct order to stop this attack and surrender yourself, I will shoot you. Is this clear?”

  She watched the man assessing her, weighing his options. She watched him assess incorrectly. He lunged at her, and she shot him twice, point-blank in the chest, as she deftly side-stepped his barreling mass.

  The weight of his dying body splintered the door against which he fell. As the echoes of Nora’s shots faded, the violinist’s soft sobs became audible. The jockeying of nearing sirens struck a dissonant chorus.

  * * *

  It wasn’t how Nora had intended to meet her neighbor, but it was certainly effective.

  Nora looked from the corpse to the woman, whose eyes were not on the massive dead man but instead riveted on her violin. It had evidently been tossed on the bed where it
lay now, facedown, the bow pinned beneath it. Nora, reading her mind, walked over to the instrument, picked it up carefully, and showed it to her.

  “Not a scratch,” she said, before replacing it on its back on the bright quilt. Then Nora walked over and crouched next to her neighbor. “Are you okay?”

  The woman nodded, sitting up, feeling her limbs gingerly for breaks.

  “Just a little bruised, I think.”

  Nora tilted her head, observing her. “A lot bruised. Should I assume that guy’s a neighbor who couldn’t take the midnight practicing thing?”

  The violinist raised her eyebrows and then burst out laughing. “My ex-husband,” she answered finally. “And yes, it always made him crazy, too.” She stuck out a slim hand. “I’m Rachel.”

  Nora took it, noting the graceful, tapered fingers. “Nora,” she said.

  “You saved my life, Nora,” Rachel said. “He intended to kill me this time.”

  Nora digested the words, “this time,” and regarded her curiously. “Yeah, I got that impression, too. I’m glad you’re okay.…” She couldn’t help adding, “But that doesn’t mean we aren’t going to talk about suitable practice hours.”

  Three police officers rushed in at that point, guns drawn, and Nora and Rachel spent the next ninety minutes answering questions. The ex-husband had come for Rachel from Buffalo where she had met, married, and divorced him. His continual physical abuse had earned him a restraining order that Rachel thought she could bolster by moving away. She had taken a job with the Erie Philharmonic in order to make a new start.

  But the ex had not been ready to let go.

  One of the officers was attempting to call an ambulance, but Rachel insisted that she would walk to the emergency room which was, after all, only two blocks away. Nora recognized this as a move typical of those who don’t have health insurance. When she further realized that Rachel wasn’t going to call any friends or family to accompany her, she refused to let her go alone.