Dead Man's Footsteps

crashing into the South Tower. They had spent the following weeks as part of the team sifting through the rubble at Ground Zero, in what they had described as the ‘Belly of the Beast’. Dennis had then transferred to the crime scene tent and Pat to the bereavement centre on Pier 92.
    In the ensuing years both men, previously extremely fit, had developed asthma, as well as trauma-related mental health problems, and had transferred from the rough and tumble world of the NYPD to the calmer waters of the Special Investigations Unit at the District Attorney’s Office.
    Pat brought Grace up to speed on their current work, which was mostly transporting and interrogating mobsters. They now knew the US underworld as well as anybody. Pat talked about how the Mafia no longer had the juice it used to have. Villains flipped easier today than they used to. Who wouldn’t try to cut a deal, Pat said, when looking at the wrong end of a twenty-year to life sentence?
    Hopefully they’d find in the next twenty-four hours someone who’d known Ronnie Wilson, someone who had helped him. If anyone could help him to look for someone who, Grace was becoming increasingly certain, had deliberately disappeared during 9/11 and its aftermath, it was these two.
    ‘You’re looking younger than ever,’ Pat said, suddenly changing the subject. ‘You must be in love.’
    ‘That wife of yours, she still never turned up, right?’ Dennis asked.
    ‘No,’ was his short answer. He’d rather not talk about Sandy.
    ‘He’s just envious,’ Pat said. ‘Cost him a fortune to get rid of his!’
    Grace laughed and at that moment his phone beeped with an incoming text. He looked down.
    Glad u there safe. Miss u. Humphrey misses u too. No one 2 throw up on. XXX
    He grinned, instantly feeling a pang of longing for Cleo. Then he remembered something. ‘If we’ve got five minutes,could we go into one of those big Toys “R” Us places? I’ll get my god-daughter’s Christmas present. She’s into something called Bratz.’
    ‘Biggest one’s in Times Square, we can swing by there now, then go on to W, where we thought we’d start,’ Pat said.
    ‘Thanks.’ Grace stared out of the window. They were going up an incline, past precarious-looking scaffolding. Steam rose from a subway vent.
    It was a crisp autumnal afternoon, with a clear blue sky. Some people were wearing coats or heavy jackets, and as they got further into the centre of Manhattan everyone looked as if they were in a hurry. Half the men scurrying past were dressed in suits with tieless shirts and wore worried frowns. Most of them had a mobile clamped to one ear and carried in their other hand a Starbucks coffee with a brown collar around it, as if that was a mandatory totem.
    ‘So, Pat and I, we worked out a pretty good programme for you,’ Dennis said.
    ‘Yeah,’ Pat confirmed. ‘Although we’re now working for the DA we’re happy to run you around as a favour for a friend and a fellow cop.’
    ‘I really appreciate it. I spoke to my FBI guy in London,’ Grace replied. ‘He knows I’m here and what I’m doing. If my hunches work out, we may well have to come back formally to the NYPD.’
    Dennis hit the horn at a black Explorer in front of them that had put its flashers on and half pulled over, looking for something. ‘Fuck you! Come on, asshole!’
    ‘We’ve booked you into the Marriott Financial Center – that’s right down by Ground Zero, in Battery Park City. Figure that’ll be a good base, as we can get to mostplaces you might want to check out easily enough from there.’
    ‘Give you some atmosphere too,’ Dennis said. ‘It was badly damaged. All brand new now. You’ll be able to see the work going on at Ground Zero.’
    ‘You know they’re still finding body parts,’ Pat said. ‘Six years on, right? Found some last month on the roof of the Deutsche Bank Building. People don’t realize. They got no fuckin’ idea the force of what happened when those planes hit.’
    ‘Right opposite the Medical Examiner’s Office they got a tented-off area with eight refrigerated trucks inside,’ Dennis said. ‘They’ve been there for – what – six years now. Twenty thousand unidentified body parts in there. Can you believe that? Twenty thousand?’ He shook his head.
    ‘My cousin died,’ Pat went on. ‘You knew that, right? He worked for Cantor Fitzgerald.’ He held up his wrist to reveal a silver bracelet. ‘See that, it has his initials. TJH . We