Cases came in through the door. Kat handled them. A taxi driver claimed a socialite was trying to beat a fare. A woman complained that her neighbor was growing pot plants. Minor stuff. She checked her cell phone. No reply from Stagger. She didn’t know what to make of that. She sent him another message:
Really need to talk to you.
She was about to pocket her phone when she felt the vibration. Stagger’s answer had come in: Assume this has to do with prison visit?
Yes.
The delay was longer this time.
Busy until eight. I could stop by tonight or we can wait till the morning.
There was no delay on Kat’s part.
STOP BY TONIGHT.
• • •
Kat didn’t pretend that she wasn’t anxious to see if Jeff had replied.
At the end of her shift, she changed into jogging clothes, ran across the park, hurried past the doorman with a smile and nod, took the stairs two at a time (the elevator could be slow), and unlocked her door in one smooth motion.
The computer was in sleep mode. Kat gave the mouse a shake and waited. The little hourglass popped up and started going round and round. Man, she needed a new computer. She was thirsty from the run and debated getting up for a glass of water, but the hourglass stopped.
She loaded up YouAreJustMyType.com. It had been too many hours since her last visit, so the site had again logged her out. She typed in her user name and password and clicked CONTINUE. The welcome screen came up with six words big, bright, and green:
One response waiting in your inbox!
Her heart pounded. She could actually feel it, the slow, steady thud that she was sure would be visible to the eye. She clicked the green lettering. The inbox came up along with the tiny profile photograph of Jeff.
Now or never.
The subject line was blank. She moved her cursor over it and clicked to open the e-mail. Jeff’s message came up:
HA! Cute video! I always loved that one. I know men always say that they love a woman with a sense of humor, but that was really a clever way of reaching out. I’m also really drawn to your photographs. Your face is beautiful, obviously, but there is something . . . more there. It’s nice to meet you!
That was it. No signature. No name.
Nothing.
Wait, what?
The truth smacked her hard across the face: Jeff didn’t remember her.
Was that possible? How could he not remember her? Hold the phone, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. She took a deep breath and tried to think it through. Okay, at the very least, Jeff didn’t recognize her. How much had she changed? A lot, she supposed. Her hair was darker and shorter now. She had aged. Men are luckier, of course. The gray at Jeff’s temples just made him better-looking, damn him. Being objective, the years perhaps had not been as kind to her. Simple as that. Kat stood up, started pacing, looked in the mirror. You don’t see it on yourself, of course. You don’t see the changes that the years bring. But now, as she started to search her drawers for old pictures of herself—the bad hair, the chubbier cheeks, the glowing youth—she could almost get it. He had last seen her as a bright-eyed albeit devastated twenty-two-year-old. She was now forty. Big difference. Her profile offered up no real personal information. It didn’t list her address or degree at Columbia or anything so that you’d know it was Kat.
So on one level, it made sense that Jeff may not recognize her.
Of course, when she started to think about it a little more, her justification started to, if not fall apart, at least unravel a bit. They’d been in love. They’d been engaged. That song—that video—had been more than “cute” to them, more than something you’d pass off or forget or . . .
Something snagged her gaze and held it.
Kat leaned closer to the computer monitor and saw a beating heart next to Jeff’s profile photograph. According to the little grid at the bottom, that meant he was currently online and would accept instant messages from “those who’ve previously communicated” with him.
She sat down, opened up the instant message box, and typed,
It’s Kat.
To send, you had to hit the RETURN button. She didn’t waste time or give herself a chance to talk herself out of it. She hit the RETURN button. The message was sent.
The cursor blinked impatiently. Kat sat there and waited for his response. Her right leg started jackhammering up and down. She had never been diagnosed with restless leg syndrome, but she guessed she was on the borderline. Her father used to shake his leg too. A lot. She put her hand on her knee and willed herself to stop. Her eyes never left the screen.
The blinking cursor vanished. A small cloud popped up.
That meant Jeff was typing his reply. A moment later, it popped up on her screen:
No names. At least, not yet.
She frowned. What the hell did that mean? Somewhere in the back of her mind, she remembered reading something during her initial “orientation” to YouAreJustMyType.com, some warning to users not to use their real names until they were certain that the person was someone they’d want to meet in person.
So he wasn’t sure?
What was going on here? Her fingers found the keypad and started typing:
Jeff? Is that you? It’s Kat.
The cursor blinked exactly twelve times—she counted—and then, the beating red heart disappeared.
Jeff had gone off-line.
Chapter 8
If it was Jeff.
That was the other thought that suddenly entered her mind. Maybe the widower in the profile wasn’t Jeff. Maybe it was just some guy who looked like her ex-fiancé. The pictures, now that she studied them anew, were grainy. Most of the shots were outdoors, at something of a distance. There was that one in the woods, one on some barren beach with a broken fence, one on what might have been a golf course. In some, he wore a baseball cap. In others, he wore sunglasses too (never indoors, thank goodness). As in Kat’s own photographs, the Maybe-Jeff never looked completely comfortable, almost as though he were hiding or caught off guard or avoiding a photographer who had made it a point to include him anyway.
As a cop, she had learned firsthand the power of persuasion, of want, of the unreliability of the eyes when it came to full-on suggestion. She had seen witnesses pick out the person in a lineup that they, the cops, wanted them to pick out. Your brain can fool you with simple inducements.
What can it do with all this want?
Last night, she had been scanning quickly though a website in search of a lifetime partner. Weren’t the odds better that she would conjure up the one man who had been closest to that in her life than actually seeing him again?