Chapter 4: The Rooftop Encounter
The wind on the rooftop was a living thing, a constant, whispering rush that snatched at their words and carried them away into the vast, open dark. It smelled of distant rain and the city’s perpetual exhaust, undercut by the faint, green scent of the potted herbs Emily kept in a crooked row by the access door.
She was there, as Flack said she would be, perched on a folded blanket with a large sketchbook open on her knees. The skyline glittered behind her, a jagged masterpiece of light and shadow. She looked up as the heavy metal door groaned shut, and a smile—warm, familiar, utterly devastating to the two men watching—lit up her face when she saw Flack.
“Don? What are you doing here?” Her voice was carried off by the wind, but the surprise was clear. Then her gaze shifted to Mac, and the smile softened into polite curiosity.
“Hey, Em.” Flack’s voice was too bright, the casual tone strained at the edges. He approached, hands shoved deep in his coat pockets. “This is my colleague, Lieutenant Mac Taylor. We, uh, we need to ask you a couple questions. Is that okay?”
Emily closed her sketchbook, a swift, protective motion. Her eyes, a warm brown Mac hadn’t seen in two decades except in dreams, darted between them. “Questions? About what?”
Mac felt the air leave his lungs. Up close, she was a mosaic of memory and new reality. Claire’s eyes, yes, but his own stubborn chin. The way she tucked a loose strand of dark hair behind her ear was so perfectly, painfully Claire’s gesture that his heart hammered against his ribs like a fist. He forced himself to breathe, to be the investigator.
“It’s a routine follow-up,” Mac said, his own voice sounding strangely formal in the open air. “A piece of evidence was recovered from a location. We’re contacting individuals who might have been in the area to eliminate them from consideration.”
He kept it vague, sterile. A procedure.
“Oh.” Emily nodded slowly, but wariness had crept into her posture. She pulled her sweater tighter around her shoulders. “What location?”
Flack took over, pulling out his notebook, playing his part. “A warehouse down near the Navy Yard. Four weeks ago. Ring any bells?”
“The Navy Yard? No, I don’t think so.” She frowned, thinking. “My work is downtown, but I don’t have any reason to be down there. What kind of evidence?”
“A hair,” Mac said. His gaze was fixed on her face, studying every micro-expression, every flicker in those familiar eyes. “It was submitted for DNA analysis. The profile came back with a familial match to a… to a missing persons case from some time ago.”
The wind seemed to howl a little louder. Emily’s frown deepened. “A familial match? To me?”
“The database flags potential relatives,” Flack explained smoothly, though his knuckles were white where he gripped his notebook. “It’s how we find John and Jane Does sometimes. It’s probably nothing—a coincidence, a system glitch—but we have to check. Standard procedure.”
She was quiet for a moment, looking out at the sprawling city. The lights reflected in her eyes. “What missing persons case?”
Mac had rehearsed this lie. It tasted like ash. “A child. Missing since 2001. The system pinged because you share some genetic markers. It’s unlikely to be directly related to you, but we need to confirm your whereabouts and rule out any connection.”
“2001.” Emily repeated the year, and her face went still. A strange blankness settled over her features, a distance that hadn’t been there a moment before. “That was a long time ago.”
“It was,” Mac whispered, almost to himself.
Flack shot him a warning glance. “So, you’re sure you’ve never been to that warehouse? Maybe for an art thing? A gallery shoot? Something edgy?”
She shook her head, the blankness receding, replaced by a faint, confused smile. “No. I stick to Chelsea and the Upper East Side. Safer bets.” She looked back at Mac, her head tilted. “You’re with Crime Scene, right? Don’s mentioned you. He says you’re the best.”
Mac could only nod. His throat was too tight.
“It must be hard,” she continued, her voice softening with an empathy that cracked something open in Mac’s chest. “Dealing with that kind of loss all the time. The ghosts.”
He couldn’t speak. He saw Flack shift his weight, ready to jump in, but Emily’s gaze had drifted back to the skyline, to the empty space where the towers once stood.
“I have dreams sometimes,” she said, the words almost lost to the wind. She wasn’t looking at them anymore. “Not about warehouses. About… ash. It sounds crazy. But I dream it’s snowing, and everything is gray and quiet, and the snow is warm. It sticks to your skin.” She rubbed her arms, a self-soothing gesture. “I always wake up and I can’t breathe. Don bought me a white noise machine. It helps a little.”
The confession, offered so casually, hung in the air between them.
Flack stood frozen, his script forgotten. Mac felt the carefully constructed wall of his professionalism shatter. The compartment where he kept Claire and Emily burst open, and twenty years of grief roared out, a silent tsunami that left him staggering. He saw it—not the skyline, but the cloud, the rolling, monstrous wave of debris, the suffocating gray blanket that covered everything. He felt the grit in his teeth, the burning in his lungs.
He saw his daughter, covered in warm ash.
A choked, raw sound escaped him—not a word, just a fragment of pain made audible.
Emily turned, startled by the noise. “Lieutenant? Are you okay?”
Mac took a step back. The city tilted. His blue eyes, usually so sharp and measured, were wide with a horror she couldn’t possibly understand. He looked at her—really looked—and saw the ghost of the little girl in the red sweater, superimposed on this graceful, unknown woman.
“I can’t,” he breathed. The words were meant for Flack, but they were torn away by the wind.
He turned abruptly, his movements stiff and unnatural, and fumbled for the heavy metal door handle.
“Mac—” Flack started, but Mac was already gone, the door slamming shut behind him with a final, metallic shriek that echoed across the rooftop.
Silence descended, broken only by the wind and the distant wail of a siren far below.
Emily stared at the closed door, then at Flack, her confusion blossoming into full-blown alarm. “What just happened? Don, what was that? Did I say something wrong?”
Flack forced himself to move, to close the distance between them. He knelt on the blanket beside her, his mind racing. “No. No, you didn’t do anything wrong. He’s… he’s got a lot on his mind. A tough case.”
“That was more than a tough case.” Her eyes searched his, and he saw the trust there beginning to fray at the edges. “He looked at me like… like he’d seen a ghost. And that stuff about the dream. Why would that upset him?”
“I don’t know,” Flack lied, the words bitter on his tongue. He reached for her hand, and she let him take it, but her fingers were tense. “Maybe it reminded him of something. He lost people. In the attacks.”
Comprehension dawned, a shadow falling across her face. “Oh.” She looked back toward the door. “The poor man.” Her empathy was immediate, genuine. It made Flack’s stomach clench with guilt.
She sighed, a shaky exhale, and leaned her head against his shoulder. “This whole thing is weird. A hair? A missing kid? And now your boss has a panic attack on my rooftop.” She gave a weak laugh. “You sure you’re not in some kind of trouble?”
He wrapped an arm around her, pulling her close, inhaling the scent of her shampoo. It was a comfort he didn’t deserve. “No trouble. Just a weird coincidence. I’m sorry we bothered you with it.”
They sat like that for a while, watching the city lights blur and swim in the night haze. But the ease was gone. A new, unspoken tension vibrated in the space between them, thin and sharp as a wire.
Down in the stairwell, Mac Taylor was braced against the cold concrete wall, his forehead pressed to the rough surface, his entire body trembling. The echo of her words—warm ash—reverberated in his skull, a key turning in a lock he’d sealed shut a lifetime ago. He had touched the ghost, and the ghost had spoken back.
Now he had to find a way to keep breathing.