The Night Crew

me?’’
    His voice was a baritone, without the gravel of the voice on the phone. But the gravel, Anna thought, could be the product of sexual excitement, or aggression.
    ‘‘We’ve got a really serious problem,’’ Anna said.
    The kid didn’t hear her; instead, he babbled on, his hands jumping around, awkwardly, nerdlike. ‘‘God, you can’t believe the TV shows I’ve been on,’’ he said. His fair skin was going pink with excitement. ‘‘I had a couple of agents calling me . . .’’
    ‘‘Shut up, Charles,’’ Anna snapped.
    He stopped. ‘‘What?’’
    ‘‘No more bullshit. We know you set up the whole show with Jason and the animal rights people, that the whole thing was a fake.’’
    McKinley seemed to pull inside himself, and the nerd positively disappeared. ‘‘Shoot,’’ he said. Then he shrugged and grinned at her, and said, ‘‘Good run while it lasted.’’
    Harper was off to one side, and Anna glanced at him. He shook his head, a quick one-sided horizontal move, but she read in the shake what she was thinking: Not this guy .
    ‘‘You know Jason’s dead?’’
    ‘‘What?’’ He was startled, and again, it seemed real enough.
    ‘‘What are you studying?’’ Anna asked suddenly. ‘‘Are you in theater, or something like that?’’
    ‘‘Yeah,’’ he said. ‘‘That’s how I met Jason. What happened to him? Christ, I was supposed to call him but I couldn’t ever get him.’’
    ‘‘Because he was already dead,’’ Anna said. ‘‘Murdered. The same night as the raid. We thought you might know something about it.’’
    ‘‘What?’’ He looked quickly at Harper. ‘‘You can’t . . . are you the police?’’
    ‘‘The cops’ll be coming around,’’ Harper said. ‘‘But the guy who did the killing is stalking Anna, here. We’re trying to get a name: and your name came up.’’
    ‘‘My name? How’d my name come up?’’
    ‘‘Because whoever is stalking Anna probably picked her out that night—and the only thing she did that night was the raid, and a . . . suicide.’’
    ‘‘And I didn’t talk to anyone at the suicide,’’ Anna said.
    ‘‘Well, I’m not doing it—I mean, I’ve been in New York.’’
    ‘‘New York?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. I was on the ‘Today’ show. I didn’t get back until this morning. That’s what we’re doing tonight, we’re celebrating.’’
    ‘‘Celebrating what?’’
    ‘‘Well, you know . . .’’ he gestured, meaning, I’m a hero . ‘‘They’ve had all these animal rights people on, and all these other weirdos, and so now they decided to get me on. I’ve been on like six shows . . . He was murdered? How was he murdered . . .’’
    ‘‘Listen, your friend Molly . . . Can you buzz her, ask her to come down. How many people are up there?’’
    ‘‘Six. No, seven.’’
    ‘‘Ask them to come down.’’
    McKinley went to the mailbox, pushed the call button, and Molly answered.
    ‘‘Uh, Molly, could you and the guys come down here? Something’s come up. Yeah, we’ll tell you when you get down. Right now . . .’’
    Anna was thinking furiously: ‘‘How’d you set us up? Whose idea was it?’’
    McKinley shrugged: ‘‘Jason’s, I guess. I’d seen him around, and mentioned I’d gotten a job feeding the animals up there at night. And he already knew Steve Judge with the animal rights group. I mentioned feeding the animals, and like, the next day, he was back with this idea.’’
    ‘‘So it was you and Steve and Jason,’’ Anna said.
    ‘‘And Sarah.’’
    ‘‘Sarah?’’
    ‘‘Yeah. You know, the Bee. She was the brains of the group; Steve was basically the jock who carried shit around for them.’’
    McKinley had a few more details about the raid: ‘‘If you think somebody was stalking you, you oughta look at that guard, everybody calls him Speedy. He’s a goofy sucker.’’
    ‘‘The guard at the medical center?’’
    ‘‘Yeah, the one with the crew cut. He’s some kind of Nazi.’’
    Anna shook her head: ‘‘Didn’t even see him.’’
    A stairway door popped open, and a woman with deep blue hair stepped into the lobby; six more people, three women, three men, all in their early twenties, trailed behind.
    ‘‘What’s going on?’’ the blue-haired woman asked.
    ‘‘Charles can tell you,’’ Anna said. ‘‘We have a very serious situation: a woman’s been kidnapped, and all we need to know is if Charles has been here for a while.