After breakfast, she allowed Walt to walk her back to her hotel. Although she couldn’t identify what it was, something felt different. Maybe it was the slowly filling sidewalks and the sense that the mass of people coming back to the city were stealing the tranquility she had found over the last couple of days. Or maybe it was the uncertainty about how she and Walt would continue after they finished working together.

Whatever it was, she felt uneasy after she kissed Walt good-bye and walked into the Lowell. She stepped into the elevator and pressed the button for the eighth floor. As she waited for the doors to close, Avery saw Walt on the sidewalk outside. He lifted a hand and waved to her just as the elevator doors came together and reflected her image back at her. An eerie feeling rippled from the pit of her stomach, strange and foreign. She tried to chalk it up to the reality that their weekend was over. An hour later, though, she still couldn’t suppress the feeling that something was wrong.

CHAPTER 52 - Manhattan, NY Monday, July 5, 2021

CHAPTER 52

Manhattan, NY Monday, July 5, 2021

WALT DROVE THROUGH THE QUEENS-MIDTOWN TUNNEL AND ACROSS the East River. Forest Hills was a small community in Queens where he had tracked down the man he was looking for. Walt was not only surprised that Dr. Jarrod Lockard—the pathologist who performed the autopsy on Cameron Young—remembered him, but that the doctor was eager to meet. Twenty years before, Jarrod Lockard was known as the Wizard for his ability to take apart a corpse and magically find the clues it left behind. Walt imagined the doctor now, two decades later, as a stooped-over elderly man who lived alone, never able to marry because so many of his days had been spent so close to death that meaningful connections to the living were impossible. The pit of Walt’s gut buzzed with nervous butterflies at the prospect of seeing the Wizard after so many years, but he could think of no one else who could better answer the question he had formed while reviewing the lost Cameron Young files.