Afterword · For readers who have finished
After the last page
This page talks about how the book ends. It does not name the killer.
Not finished yet?The foreword is the place to start, and it gives nothing away.
The book opens on a sentence a machine rewrote, and a reporter who spends almost a minute deciding whether to let the new version stand.
It closes with no machine in the room. In a basement restaurant on Barrow Street in New York, on Tuesday the nineteenth of January 2027, Rafael Olmedo, the New York State Police investigator who worked the case beside her, writes the time on the paper tablecloth with the pencil from his notebook. Then he turns the pencil round and hands it to Ines Calloway.
I.C.Her initials, under his time, as she once wrote them on the corner of an envelope.
Between those two pages the case is worked the way Chapter 16 shows it. A reporter’s notebook lies open beside an investigator’s. Fifty minutes of video from the night are stopped eleven times. At each stop, what each of them wrote down is checked against what the camera recorded, so that six seconds of a telephone being turned over are set against a man’s word that he never touched it.
The first sentence was hers. She kept it, and the last thing she writes in the book is her own initials.
Over dinner, Olmedo says that his daughter wants to know whether reporters are allowed to be nice. He tells her he will find out and put the time on it.
The book never gives his answer.
What would you tell her? And what happens next on Barrow Street, with the snow just beginning and his gloves still on the table between them?
Every building in this story keeps a record. So does every reader: the first clue you noticed, the person you suspected, the page where you changed your mind. Send yours, or write the rest of that evening.