The Brooklyn North Murder: A Novel

CHAPTER ONE

Custody of the Eyes

Custody of the eyes. Up until now, it had been an abstract concept I had associated with the medieval and theology sections of the library where I worked—and a half-remembered anecdote about an obscure saint who always walked with his eyes fixed on the ground, so as not to inadvertently ogle any passing woman. This habit (pun intended) had caused him to be run over by a carriage—and wake up surrounded by the nursing sisters of the convent to which he had been conveyed.

Now, it was a practical challenge. Who knew how hard it could be not to look at the tiny red Speedo being worn by the man who had pulled me close for our Triathlon Team Photo?

Only a year ago, this triathlon had been the Morgansburg Annual Fun Run that had consisted of a single lap around Battlefield Bluff. Now it was the Billings Sprint Challenge Series and had apparently attracted the combined populations of Brooklyn and Poughkeepsie via a social media campaign that had pronounced it one of the ten summer events in the Hudson Valley not to be missed. The transformation—excuse me, rebranding—was also the reason I was shivering by the edge of an icy lake at the ungodly hour of eight in the morning, trying not to examine the all too evident assets that a conspicuously well-endowed hedge fund manager named Cam Billings was scarcely hiding beneath an entirely indecent red Speedo.

I was not wearing a swimsuit—or even a wetsuit, as the other competitors were. I had managed to weasel my way out of the swim by claiming a rotator cuff injury, and so was wearing running tights and a reasonably warm wind shirt. It’s not that I can’t swim—a summer camp instructor who fancied herself a Navy SEAL had made sure of that. But that statement only holds true if you consider the dog paddle a recognized stroke of the U.S.A. Swimming Association. I’m not particularly good with bicycles either. Toe clips remain an enigma. My mechanical abilities begin and end with forcibly rebooting a computer.

But as the college librarian and hot tech star destined to transform Morgansburg, N.Y. into the next Silicon Valley, I was expected to represent De Sales College, and so I was taking on the last leg of the College Relay Team. All that was required of me was the same brisk shuffle around Battlefield Bluff as last year’s Fun Run. My athletic abilities are as limited as my mechanical ones. I am adept at walking, running, and hiking—all activities that require no more skill than putting one foot in front of the other.

Paul Morgan flanked me as we locked arms for the camera. He was wearing a pair of bicycling shorts that did little more to disguise his assets than Cam’s had. But I didn’t have to imagine what lay beneath that thin, Lycra barrier. Paul and I had dated during our first year at Yale, back in the days when having sex seemed to be the done thing. Victorian brides were taught to lie back and think of England on their wedding. I lay back and rehearsed conjugations and declensions in my head in order to pass the time. Our relationship fizzled out somewhere around the Greek Middle Voice.

That didn’t stop him from grabbing me in a bear hug as he said, Look, after the swim, I need to be ready to tag in at the changing area. So can you go ahead and get some video of Cam when he comes out of the water for our real-time followers?

Real-time followers? I grumbled to Doyle. Who would really sit down and watch this in real time on their phone? My mother?

I regret to inform you that Helen Watson is not among the 12,467 subscribers to the Sprint Series webcast, Doyle informed me.

It was a rhetorical question. My mother was not what you’d call a doting parent. When I presented her with a copy of my published dissertation, she had asked, What do you want me to do with this?

The response I squelched was unprintable.

Okay, so I was complaining to my phone. Pretty weird, I suppose—at least if you’ve been living off the grid for the past five years. Some people talk to Siri. Some talk to Alexa. Hell, my ninety-year-old grandmother binge drinks Cosmopolitans with them while they cheat at online bridge. So, sue me if I talk to Doyle.

Granted, Doyle was different from those virtual assistants he dismissed as the Code Girls. For one thing, the Girls simply crawled the web and retrieved information. Doyle didn’t crawl. He extrapolated. Or as Doyle would put it, the Code Girls were artificial intelligence; he was the real thing. I’m not quite so sure. For one thing, I’m the one who programmed Doyle. I know where the bodies are buried—or to put it in programmer-speak, I am aware of a few significant glitches that need working out. Primary among them is the fact that Doyle is a complete and utter ass.

My name’s Mary Watson. Yes, I know. Don’t even start with the jokes. Not only have I heard them all, I’ve catalogued them and cross-referenced them against each other and every typological index out there. Why? It’s what I do, and I’m pretty good at it.

I’m a reference librarian and digital resource officer. Once upon a time, we were a dying breed—the kind that fielded questions like Why do 18th-century English paintings have so many squirrels in them, and how did they tame them so that they wouldn’t bite the painter? Real question. Don’t believe me, ask the New York Public Library.

Now, we were on the cutting edge of information technology. Data aggregation. Entity recognition. Natural language processing and training sets for AI. You know, all that stuff from Facebook’s evil plan to take over the universe.

Sounds pretty sexy, right? The Vatican archives meet the White Hat hackers. What it really means is I divide my days between scripting on-line training modules for the college’s HR department and lecturing on appropriate citation methodologies while my students shop online or hack the Pentagon on their cell phones. Or that’s what it meant up until a year ago, when my life—as well as the life of greater Morgansburg—was turned upside down.

The triathlon, too, had been gifted with cutting-edge technology, in the form of electronic timing sensors that replaced the old-fashioned system of paper race bibs. "Shall I just pop over to the steward’s tablet and introduce myself to the sensor program?" Doyle suggested.

No need. It wasn’t just that I was certain I’d notice the red Speedo emerging from the water without any prompting from cyberspace; it was more that I didn’t want to imagine where Cam might tuck a sensor so it wouldn’t get lost.

So, I was caught flat-footed when 30 minutes later the race steward scanning the swimming entries swiped his tablet, and announced, That’s it. They’re all in. Time for the biking event.

What do you mean they’re all in? Cam’s not in yet.

He must be, Doyle said. The numbers all match, and numbers don’t lie.

Ones and zeroes can lie plenty, I said, as I hurried to the changing area, mentally rehearsing my excuses for letting down our 12,467 followers who, for reasons I could not fathom, were supposedly waiting to see Cam Billings emerge dripping from the lake. But the only person there was Paul, stretching his calves in preparation for the bike ride. There was nary a sign of Cam.

Porta-potties? I ventured. Food poisoning?

As our whispered consultation rapidly escalated in both urgency and tone, the Campus Security Chief erupted from the medic’s tent, tugged off his shoes, and dove beneath the surface without even bothering to strip off his shirt. He swam underwater, his head emerging at intervals for air as he traced the swimming route, then the rest of the lake in regular zig-zags.

Silence fell, when Mack Byrne finally emerged, shaking drops of water from his close-cropped hair. Well, the state search and recovery guys will have better equipment than I do, he said. But I’ve had pretty good experience with this kind of thing, and I didn’t see a trace of Cam Billings or anyone else down there.

CHAPTER TWO

Once in Love with Amy

In no time, Battlefield Park was filled with volunteer EMTs and firefighters, who stood in knots at the edge of the lake, gravely agreeing on one thing: Cam Billings was nowhere to be found. People standing around in knots pontificating was Morgansburg’s customary response to any crisis from a power outage to a downed tree, and it was customarily followed by equally knowing conversations in the Presbyterian Church’s Fellowship Hall, comparing the incident to that time Commodore Preston Morgan had staged his own disappearance from a capsized boat in the middle of the Hudson so he could run off with a fan dancer.

Everything changed when Paul Morgan called on his authority as our recently elected county attorney, and the knots of knowing conversations were replaced by an array of lawyers and spokespersons, who urged the crowd to disperse and leave the search in the hands of the professionals.

Things appeared to return to normal on Monday morning when I found a spate of FOIL requests from the Morgansburg Times awaiting me at my office. I’d fulfilled more than my fair share of freedom of information requests from the Times, a somewhat weekly newspaper sporadically edited and published by the aging hippies on the edge of town. Most of its front-page articles, which I read in a spirit that could either be described as masochism or schadenfreude, explored the hidden history of the Hudson Valley, from Black Helicopters to the annual Pine Bush UFO Fair. The rest of its pages were filled with legal notices and classified ads for handymen, lawn services, and nannies that were photocopied from their business cards. When it came to breaking news, its editor took advantage of his position as an adjunct at De Sales College to treat the library as his personal reference desk, peppering me with requests for everything from maps of the Hudson Valley ley lines to the sexual hygiene of the colonial settlers. So, it came as no surprise that he was now requesting any information that might link Cam Billings’ disappearance to the local legend of a lake monster named Battlefield Amy—as well as any associated government coverups.

As I was calling up a Google list that said editor could have easily found himself, Mack Byrne’s shadow loomed across my desk, announcing his presence as effectively as a major-domo. It was not just that Byrne was a big man. It was that his natural mode of interaction with people was to loom. It had served him well as Chief of Campus Security. The moment Byrne’s shadow loomed so much as a block away, frat house parties dissipated as swiftly and silently as my cats after something crashed in the kitchen.

Got a minute? he asked. I need to ask you a few questions.

About Cam Billings? I asked. He still hasn’t turned up?

No sign of him. In or out of the water. Byrne shook his head. I went back down with the state recovery crew, and we didn’t find a thing. If this were the Hudson, I’d say we simply missed him or the tide got him. But this is a small lake. A pond really.

Maybe to some. But for others of us, it was a body as filled with menace as the Bermuda Triangle. Byrne must have recalled my opinions on that matter, because he kept his voice carefully casual as he asked, How’s the rotator cuff?

I flushed. The rotator cuff had been a white lie, which, like all spur of the moment excuses, was rapidly taking on a life of its own. Feels fine, I said. Like it was never torn.

Which was not an untruth—at least if you left out the word like.

The white lie had had its birth when Paul and Cam had announced they’d convinced Byrne to do a few training sessions for our triathlon team. Guy’s former Special Forces, Paul had said. Gonna kick our asses into shape.

He’d said that as if it were a good thing. My idea of triathlon training had been to take the Metro-North down to the New York City Yale Club, where I swam my half-mile in the form of 32 laps—not lengths. The Yale Club pool was gem-like in many ways. It was tiled in blue, with a white Y on its bottom, and had gilded lion-head waterspouts. The water temperature was kept at a balmy 80 degrees. And it was tiny—so small that one could comfortably push off the wall and reach the opposite one in the matter of a few dog paddles that I was pleased to call the breaststroke. In the old days, when women were charged a reduced membership fee so that the Old Boys could swim comfortably in the altogether, it was simply known as the Plunge.

My idea of training was emphatically not shivering at the edge of Battlefield Lake at six in the morning, preparatory to having my ass kicked by a man who looked like a drill instructor. Not to mention the little matter of the lake itself. Lakes, I am sorry to say, do not have tiled bottoms nor heated water. And the water they do have is murky and slimy, hiding God alone knows what hazards in their depths. Snakes. Snapping turtles. Giant clams that trapped deep sea divers underwater until their oxygen ran out…

Doyle, I’d said, looking for a way out of so much as dipping my toe in the lake. Do you have any statistics on people killed by snapping turtles?

Although the bite of a snapping turtle is powerful enough to break a human’s finger, and on at least one occasion severed the tendon of an eight-year-old boy, there are no corroborated cases of a snapping turtle actually killing a swimmer.

Corroborated, huh? What about crocodiles?

I assume you mean alligators. The only place you can find a crocodile in America is a zoo. I must say it is quite unlike you to slip up on such a simple detail. Are you certain you’re quite alright, Watson?

No, I was not alright—quite or otherwise. What about the stories about the water monster that haunts Battlefield Lake?

You refer, I assume, to Morgansburg’s own Battlefield Amy?

A shadow fell—no, loomed—across my phone. You ready for the swim? Byrne had asked that day.

Actually, I said. I think I’d better skip it this week if you don’t mind.

Some kind of problem?

If this had been summer camp, I would have pleaded my period—just as I had unflinchingly done for two weeks straight beneath the disbelieving glare of the SEAL wannabe posing as camp counselor. But Byrne was a man—a very manly man—brimming with the sort of testosterone that would have been equally envied by Cam Billings and my camp counselor. More to the point, Byrne was a man I had to face in my professional capacity on a regular basis.

I’d racked my brain for the litany of sports injuries that always seemed to be scrolling across my news feed. Rotator cuff.

That so? How’d you do that?

Don’t know. It must be a chronic thing. At first, I thought it was carpal tunnel…

You don’t get carpal tunnel in your shoulder— Byrne cut himself off as he caught sight of the grainy series of photos of Battlefield Amy that Doyle was obligingly loading onto my phone. If I thought I glimpsed a sudden grin of comprehension, it was gone before Byrne said with a shrug, I guess it affects everyone differently. But it doesn’t pay to ignore something like that. Messed up my own arm pretty bad once. Wish I’d taken better care of it.

He raised his voice. Cam! Paul! We’ve got a problem. Dr. Watson here tore her rotator cuff. Now, of course, she was ready and willing to tough it out for the team, but I can’t sign off on that. Provost will make my life hell about liability and assumed risk. So, what do you say we make this a relay team instead? Can’t be a problem with Dr. Watson running, even if her arm’s in a sling.

Now the race was in the past, Cam was missing, and Byrne was looming over my computer monitor. Paul Morgan said you took pictures of them finishing the swim. Mind if I take a look?

Damn. I owed this guy big time, and here I was about to let him down. Paul should have said, I was supposed to be taking pictures. But I never did, because I never saw Cam come out of the lake. And honestly, I could not have missed him. He was the only one not wearing a wetsuit. And his swim trunks were…quite noticeable. Bright red.

I turned back to my monitor. But if you have Cam’s bib number, I can probably pull up a list from the course steward’s tablet, and we can search for the number. That would at least give you a time frame.

How can you do that? That cutting-edge program of yours?

Unlike most people, Byrne sounded genuinely interested. Unfortunately, when it came to Doyle forging connections in cyberspace, it was often best not to know. And definitely best not to talk about it. Hacking is such an ugly word—even if Doyle would prefer to term it sharing a few bits and bytes among friends.

It’s scarcely cutting-edge. Just an AI bot, I said, ignoring the snort of disgust that erupted from my computer’s speakers. But he does know how to throw together a quick and dirty subroutine.

As the speakers continued to crackle in outrage, I turned back to the monitor and typed in the number Byrne gave me. The screen filled with a video. But the man in the image that swam up wore neither a wetsuit nor a little red Speedo. He sported a porkpie hat pulled down low over his saturnine features, and balanced on a silver-headed cane as he leaned toward the camera to inform us, The dragon has always had a powerful hold on the imagination of man…

Sorry! I hastily shut down the screen. "I was just googling Battlefield Amy for the Morgansburg Times. Some kind of computer glitch must have conflated the two searches."

It was no computer glitch! Doyle howled from the speakers. Instead of insulting my colleague’s intelligence—virtual or otherwise—by merely requiring a list of bib numbers, I inquired into any insights he might have into the disappearance of Cam Billings.

And his answer was the legend of a dragon that some enterprising developer created years ago to boost the tourist trade in Morgansburg?

If you choose to refer to it that way. My colleague prefers to describe it as the water-dragon Amangemokdem, variously called Amangegach, used by the Algonkian people as a bogey to frighten recalcitrant children, and known in Morgansburg legend as Battlefield Amy, Doyle said. The only documented references to it in Native American culture are found in Northern Manhattan…

"Who are you talking—Wait. That’s the project that netted you a half-million-dollar grant?" Byrne asked.

I should have been insulted, but frankly, I shared his disbelief—and had done so ever since I’d been inexplicably transformed from another at-will adjunct into De Sales College’s premier source of outside funding.

His name’s Doyle, I said. He can hear you."

Fully equipped with voice recognition abilities, Doyle assured Byrne. And unlike certain other programs I could name, I don’t have to learn vocabulary, I have the complete OED in my databases.

How does it work? Byrne asked.

It’s complicated, I said. Let me think about how I could best put it into layman’s terms…

Try me, Byrne said. I had some computer training in the Army.

What was wrong with me? Suddenly, I sounded as pompous as Doyle. Okay, then. What Doyle does is write texts by extrapolating the intervening points between two known points of data in order to reconstruct the missing information. In this case the data points being several databases of classic mysteries and the extrapolation being a new plot created from his collection of classic examples.

He writes new stories by extrapolating plots from the old ones, Byrne said.

Everyone in AI is doing it. Honestly, when it comes to the actual programming, it’s a long way from rocket science. More like straightforward successive approximation…

Most people’s eyes began to glaze over by this point. Byrne’s didn’t. He just kept studying the blank computer screen before he decided, I guess he’s like the TARDIS. More impressive on the inside.

I’ll say, Doyle chimed in. And I would reciprocate by paying our good inspector the same compliment. But I fear we must put aside such niceties for the moment, for I have just received a rather urgent communication from a colleague on the Historical Society’s security system.

My monitor lit back up with grainy footage of the cashbox that served the Historical Society’s box office and gift shop, which sold post cards and maps as well as quilted potholders, crocheted toilet paper covers, and preserves left over from the Presbyterian Church’s Harvest Fair. An avatar sprawled face down across a spool of paper admissions tickets, beneath a scrim of gore that would have done Sam Peckinpah proud.

At the same time, Byrne’s phone pinged with a text. He studied it, then frowned at my computer screen. I just got an urgent alert from Peg at the Historical Society as well. What are the odds the two are connected?

Everything’s connected, I told him. At least when it comes to Morgansburg.

CHAPTER THREE

The Body in the Library

You have time to head down there with me? Byrne asked.

If I didn’t, the Historical Society would forcibly compel me, I said. They have stern ideas about the responsibilities of permanent members of the Executive Committee.

Meaning you?

I nodded and put my earpiece in so I could hear Doyle if needed. I was one of two de facto permanent members of the Historical Society’s Executive Committee. One was the board chair, who was always a scion of the Morgan family, a supply that was dwindling as swiftly as their supply of artifacts seemed to be proliferating. The other was me. It’s a little-known statute that any Historical Society must have at least one board member with a background in library science, and I’m the one. My position is secure until I can find an unwitting victim to take my place.

We arrived at the Historical Society to discover Lawrence Morgan and her cousin, Blanche Morgan Philipse, the twin doyennes of Morgansburg society, already standing guard at the entrance, flanking the woman who had texted Byrne. Apparently, the alarm had gone out with the efficacy of the apprentice silversmith who had spotted the approaching redcoats and wakened Colonel Morgan’s Irregulars.

Lawrence Morgan was possessed of the horsey good looks and naturally erect posture of a girl schooled at Vassar via Miss Porter’s. Her cousin Blanche was her opposite, round and querulous where Lawrence was stalwart and angular. And the woman who stood between them—affectionately known as A Bit Simple, but a Treasure and who was the de facto caretaker and housekeeping staff of all of Morgansburg’s not-for-profits, as well as De Sales College—wore an apron over a faded housecoat and sturdy running shoes.

Hi, Peg, Byrne said to her. "Got your text.