Adrian

Kate stared at her phone. The time was 4:10 am but the ping of an incoming email had stirred her from her sleep and now that she had read the message sleep was no longer an option. She had been staring at the image on-screen for several minutes but still she continued to stare. She herself was there in the party photo, and she clearly remembered the night when it was taken just over a year ago - the various Halloween costumes, including Jacob ridiculously dressed up as Tekashi 69, rendered the mental recall process immediately simple -  although she really couldn’t remember posing for the pic at that time. But then again, there had been considerable levels of  consumption taking place at that party so this was not particularly surprising.

The image had arrived by email from an unknown Gmail address consisting of a seemingly random string of alpha-numeric characters and at first she had no idea who had sent it but the subject line quickly caught her attention. It read: Katiebear, please read and confirm this message right away!

There was only one person who ever called her Katiebear, and that was her old best friend and former roommate Alex, who she had not had any contact with in just over a year. She opened the message and read:

Dear Katiebear,

I’m sure you know who this is but I feel more comfortable leaving my real name out of this and would appreciate it if you would do the same in your reply, if you reply. (I will understand if you don’t but I felt that I had to send this message regardless of the danger. I should have sent it sooner but….it’s complicated.) 

I don’t want to come off as paranoid here, this being the first time you have heard from me since the night I left, but I have seen some things since that night, and the days that led up to it, that have left me more than just a little frightened and shaken. I feel the less I say the better, for a few reasons, but please understand that I am sending this to you as a helpful warning.

Please take a close look at the attached photo. Remember the party at Jay’s place in Greenwich Village that night last year? Two questions for you to consider. The first is how many of the people in that picture are still alive today? Assuming you’re reading this then the answer is two. Just me and you.

The second thing to consider might be a bit more difficult to wrap your head around at first, but consider this; Who is not in that picture? Who else was with us that night? I know you remember Luke’s new friend Adrian, from that fancy hotel in SoHo where he was working night shifts and staying at that time? Do you remember the conversation we had about Adrian that day? We started off laughing about it but there wasn’t much laughter by the end. I think we really were right about him but neither of us was prepared to come right out and say it. It would have seemed insane at that time.

Take a close look at Luke’s right arm. He’s standing there among the guys at the end of the second row of people in the photo, leaning forward with his left arm around Jacob’s shoulders, but why is his right arm positioned at a similar angle and just hanging there in empty space? How was he able to lean forward to mug for the camera like that without losing his balance? And why is there so much more blank space on that end of the row as opposed to the other side of the frame? I suppose it could just be a poorly shot photo, but I really don’t think this was the case.

I’m sure you get the point I am trying to make by now and I really hope you will take this seriously. I really do. Take a good look at the faces in that picture and think about how (and also when, specifically with regard to time of day) their lives all came to an end. 

I know this probably sounds crazy, but I really think you should just pack up and go right away. Right now wouldn’t be too soon, if that’s even remotely possible for you. Don’t tell me where you are going. I don’t want to know and I think it’s best if I don’t tell you my current location either, but I am moving around pretty often these days and trying not to leave many footprints behind me. I suggest you do the same, and travel by day as much as possible. I know this probably sounds mad, but if you had seen some of what I have seen you would understand that it might be mad to do anything else.

Good luck, Katiebear. I’m sorry and I miss you. Still friends, I hope?

The email ended there with no sign-off, not even a nom de plume. Kate had reread it after staring at the image for a while. Two rows of friends who had all met in college at Cornell, the girls hunching down in front and the guys standing up in the back, everyone smiling and dressed up in some kind of silly costume but all easily identifiable. Then her mind began to wander back to that conversation that she once had with Alex about Luke’s new friend Adrian on a Friday night when they sat down on their living room couch to eat some take-out sushi together.

They both agreed that Adrian had an undeniable sense of charisma about him, although he wasn’t particularly handsome in a traditional sense. He was dark-haired, tall and thin but with a tight, firm musculature and a distinct economy of movement. He dressed well and although he was capable of being perfectly charming at times, he also had an odd penchant for creepy looks and even creepier comments on occasion. Kate recalled the uncomfortable number of questions that Adrian had asked her friend Jennifer, whom he had never met before, about her fairly recent treatment for leukemia at a Lower East Side bar where they were hanging out one night, forcing Jen to make an unnecessary trip to the bathroom just to bring an end to it.

Jennifer had been in the front row of girls in that Halloween party photo, and Jennifer was found dead in a dumpster behind an old warehouse just off Canal Street a few days after the photo was taken. This was still an open homicide case with the NYPD, despite ongoing efforts by numerous members of Jennifer’s family to keep the pressure on the police by keeping the story alive in the local media.

She looked again at the rest of the faces in the photo. Kate herself, dressed up all in sexy goth clothing and make-up, was crouching down in the front row with Jennifer channeling the USA Olympic soccer player Megan Rapinoe on her left (she even chopped and dyed her hair for it) and Alex dressed up as a 1950’s-era diner waitress, replete with a pencil tucked behind one ear, on her right. Standing behind them in the rear row were Brendan, dressed as Derek Jeter (who he naturally resembled), Jacob with his face and hair all done up like Tekashi 69 and Luke, the only one who had flaked out on a real costume and just wore an old fedora with a scarf and told anyone who inquired about it that he was dressed as someone famous, never naming the same celebrity figure twice. (He had claimed to be Jason Mraz, Kevin Federline and a few others that Kate couldn’t recall.)

And Alex was right. Luke was leaning well forward in the photo, a clearly inebriated smile on his face, and his right arm was just hanging there awkwardly in the air at a right angle with nothing at all keeping him balanced on that side of his body. Why? How?

Brendan was found dead in his bed at his condo up in Westchester about three months after Jennifer’s body was found. At first there was a lot of speculation that Brendan had died in a homoerotic episode gone wrong, fueled by some vague and irresponsible initial comments about “the state and positioning of the body” by the local police assigned to the case. But within a few days they corrected this statement and were forced to admit that they had no meaningful leads at that time. This was another open homicide case.

About two months after that, Alex’s boyfriend Jacob simply disappeared one night shortly after he left work following a long day at the office. His body was never found so this was being treated as a missing person case and not a homicide, but on the night he went missing Alex had quietly come home in the early morning hours, packed up her valuables along with about half of her clothes and then disappeared into the darkness. Kate had not seen nor heard from her even once since then and was forced to find a new roommate about two months later when she never returned. Her family had not heard from her at that point either and she was considered "a person of interest" by the NYPD in the case of Jacob's disappearance.

Kate highly doubted that Jacob had just gone missing on his own accord. He was working his ass off at Goldman, on the brink of a major promotion, and he seemed like the happiest person that Kate had ever known. He and Alex had just started talking around the outskirts of the possibility of an upcoming engagement. Alex was technically a missing person case with the NYPD as well, although under the circumstances Kate found this much easier to believe. Aside from the missing items from her bedroom, Kate had seen Alex briefly that same evening and there was a palpable sense of fear and something bordering on panic in her eyes and in the tone of her voice.

Luke, who was the last of them, was a similar story but Kate had seen that one for herself just a few months ago. Luke’s only living family members were his father (who was very close to dying of cancer in a Minneapolis hospital) and his older brother (who he had lost to heroin addiction and the streets a few years earlier) and his last official place of residence before unofficially moving into the SoHo hotel where he worked had been Kate and Alex’s apartment, where he had crashed on the couch and got his mail for a while after breaking up with his girlfriend and moving out of her place on the Upper East Side.

And so the police showed up there at Kate’s apartment when his body was discovered behind the hotel where he worked on that gloomy September morning. Kate was immediately hesitant and instinctively hedged at first, asking a few questions and thinking up excuses before finally, and morosely, agreeing to go downtown with the officers to identify Luke’s body.

She remembered just staring at the corpse in shock and horror.

“Why does he look like that?,” she asked the medical examiner, a small, balding man in an oversized white lab coat.

“Well, it appears that he was…exsanguinated in some fashion. It’s a fresh case so I assume the detectives don’t have all the details just yet. Nor do I, I am afraid to say,” the man replied quietly and then went mum, looking down at the floor between his feet.

Kate didn’t know what to say to that so she simply said nothing at all, and then she took the ride back up to her apartment in Murray Hill in the back of the unmarked police car in silence as well, just trying to make some sense of it all.

The phone in her hand chimed again and a message popped up to alert her to another email coming from that same cryptic Gmail address with the same subject line. She opened it and read:

Hi Katiebear,

Look, I didn’t and I still don’t want to get into a whole lot of details as I’m very much trying to fly under the radar right now, but I realize you probably need more info in order to be able to take this threat seriously.

So let me tell you this much. I have seen Adrian three times in the last year. The first time, in Las Vegas, I thought it was just a coincidence. I barely made him out in the midst of a large crowd leaving the MGM Grand after a big boxing match one night. My blood ran cold and I almost peed myself, but I don’t think he ever looked in my direction. Still, I left town immediately. The second time, a few months later in Austin, I spotted him walking by himself on the opposite side of the street through the window of a burger joint down on Red River just around midnight one Saturday, and that’s when I really started to worry. By the third time, which took place just a few hours ago in the domestic terminal at LAX, I was certain he was there for me, but I watched with great relief (and from a safe distance) as he headed down the ramp to board a redeye flight out of town. 

There’s just two things left for me to tell you.

The first is that I have never, and I am pretty certain that you have never, seen Adrian in the light of day. The deaths and disappearances of our friends also, without exception, all happened at night. Does that seem a little odd to you? Maybe it does. Maybe not.

But the other thing I need to tell you is that the redeye flight Adrian boarded was bound for JFK and it is scheduled to touch down in New York around 4:55am. I just checked the weather app on my phone and I see that the sun is set to rise at approx 6:45am there today.

There’s no way to know where he’s headed or why, or if any of this is truly real or if I have simply gone crazy, but I would leave if I were you. I would honestly just leave right now. Good luck, Katiebear.

Kate just stared at her phone for a while longer as she thought about a good number of different things, and then she got up and began packing her belongings. She could send a reply back to Alex from somewhere else when she had a little more time.

THE END