The 6:20 Man

CHAPTER

58

THEY RODE BACK TO NEW York. Devine pulled in front of the walk-up, and Montgomery climbed off and passed him the spare helmet.

“Can you come up for a little bit? Now that it’s fully hit me that I was the unwitting messenger for a criminal syndicate, I don’t want to be alone. I might slit my wrists.”

“Don’t joke about that,” said Devine.

“I’m not joking.”

They went upstairs, got beers, and returned to the roof and sat in the deck chairs.

“Now, you said you met Cowl about a year ago. But I imagine Area 51 has been going on a lot longer than that.”

“So how did they work the signals before me? Did he just use a different method?”

“He built the house that the train overlooks three years ago. And now I guess I understand why he allowed a gap between the tree canopies and the wall. So the person on the train could see. So maybe that method of communication dates to back then.”

“You know, one morning while I was there I couldn’t sleep and got up early. I looked out the window and Brad was raising the umbrella at one of the tables by the pool.”

“Red or green?” asked Devine.

She thought for a moment. “Red. I thought it was odd. I mean, it was so early. And I think the train came by a few minutes later.”

Devine looked thoughtful. “There was a guy on the train who said he saw another woman by the pool, before you hooked up with Cowl. She was a brunette and she wore a bikini early in the morning sometimes, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

She sat back, looking perplexed at first, and then a look of understanding came into her eyes. “I thought Christian was helping me by introducing me to Brad in Italy. But maybe Brad was looking for a new messenger girl and Christian was really helping him.”

“I think you might be right. Hey, do you think this ‘brunette’ might have stayed in this building, too?”

Michelle suddenly became rigid. “When I was moving some things into my bedroom here, I found a credit card slip that had fallen behind a drawer.”

Devine perked up at this. “Do you remember the name on the credit card?”

“I do actually because it was so unusual. Dominique Deveraux. Very alliterative. I mean, it sounds fake.”

Devine took out his phone and searched the name.

“Okay, Dominique Deveraux was a character on the TV show Dynasty. Both in the original series back in the 1980s and then on the reboot on the CW.”

“Maybe it was an alias, then.”

“Hold on, here’s another Dominique Deveraux.” He clicked on a link and read down the page. “Age twenty-four, originally from California. And—”

He stopped speaking and stared at the screen, his look troubled.

“And what, Travis?”

He glanced up at her. “Deveraux killed herself nearly one year ago, by jumping into the East River.”