Nightwatcher (25 page)

Allison pretty much kept to herself in her office, waiting for one of the locksmiths to call her back. She’d left messages for several.

She kept thinking about Kristina. And Mack.

Maybe Carrie had been one of the people who had been rescued. Maybe she’s coming home after all.

Allison fervently hopes that’s the case.

“So,” Erik says, rocking back on the heels of his alligator shoes, “if you want to clear out of here, go ahead. I’m going to.”

“I guess I might as well, too, then. What about tomorrow?”

“Take the day off.” Seeing her disappointed expression, he amends, “Or come in if you want. But I honestly don’t think business is going to be back to normal until Monday.”

Normal . . .

Monday?

Allison is certain it’s going to be a long, long time before anything feels normal.

She leaves the office, takes the subway back downtown to Union Square, trades her heels for sneakers, and walks the rest of the way home.

Without traffic, the streets are still eerily quiet down here in the frozen zone. Missing posters are taped to every available surface. Allison can’t bear to look at the faces smiling out from the photographs, suspecting that none of those people are ever coming home now.

Clusters of cops in orange vests and NYPD caps are posted on corners and at closed subway entrances. National guardsmen, armed and wearing camo, patrol the streets. The only civilian pedestrians are neighborhood residents who, like Allison, provided ID and were cleared at the police barricades at the northern boundary of the zone. They gather in somber little groups in front of buildings or scuttle along with their heads bent, as if they’re afraid of what they’ll see if they look up.

Unaccustomed to the gaping hole in the southern skyline, Allison, too, keeps her head down until she gets back to her building.

She’d been hoping she might find a police car parked in front, but there isn’t one.

Wondering if the building is as empty as it looks—and feels, even from here—she unlocks the door and steps inside. It closes hard behind her, and she jumps. Again.

No. Get over it. You’re fine. Everything is fine.

But that’s not true—not by a long shot. She can try all she wants to convince herself that she’s not in danger, but the truth is, her neighbor was murdered in this very building.

Okay, so everything isn’t fine.

But what is she supposed to do? Where else is she supposed to go? This is her home. Even if she had someplace else to go—someplace far away from here—how would she even get there? She doesn’t have a car, there are no flights, and for all she knows, no trains, either.

She’s stuck here, in this building. It is what it is.

Fine. So get moving.

You’ll feel better in your own apartment.

Walking across the empty vestibule and down the vacant hall to the elevator may not be the hardest thing Allison has ever had to do in her life, but it’s definitely on the list.

Her rapid footsteps seem to beat in time with her pulse, and she looks over her shoulder repeatedly, making sure she’s alone. Yes. Alone is good.

Reaching the elevator, she presses the up button. If the building has been empty since she left for the office earlier, then it should still be here, on the first floor, shouldn’t it?

But it isn’t.

Hearing the elevator begin its creaky, rattling, painstaking descent from the upper floors, she wonders if this means that someone is up there.

She forces herself to stand her ground and wait for it, but she keeps thinking about Jerry, remembering how he popped out of the stairwell the other night.

Had he just come down from Kristina’s apartment?

Had he spotted Allison standing there?

What if he knew she’d seen him? What if . . . ?

When at last the elevator arrives, she almost expects him to jump out at her when the doors open.

But it’s empty. Of course it is. The building is empty. Or is it?

She rides up to the fourth floor. Tempted to make a run for her own door, she makes a quick detour and knocks on Mack’s. No answer.

She doesn’t bother to knock again or call out to him. The sooner she’s behind locked doors, the better.

She opens her door, steps inside, and is about to lock herself in when she thinks better of it.

What if someone really did take the key from Kristina’s apartment and he’s in here? Waiting? Hiding?

What are you going to do, protect yourself with scissors again? Or the chef’s knife?

It’s still in her unmade bed, she realizes.

Taking her cell phone out of her pocket, she flips it open and dials a 9 and then a 1. Keeping her thumb poised over the 1, ready to press the button again if something happens, she moves quickly from room to room, checking to make sure she’s alone.

She sees the knife still lying on her bed. About to pick it up and carry it with her, she thinks better of it and tucks it underneath the pillow. She has other knives in the kitchen. It’s probably a good idea to keep one close at hand at night, just in case.

Mission accomplished, she returns to the door, triple locks it, and exhales at last.

Now what?

Get busy. Stay busy.

She checks her answering machine. No messages.

Checks her e-mail. No messages.

She calls several locksmiths back and leaves more messages. Why isn’t anyone picking up? She needs more numbers to try. She’ll have to look for some on the Internet. She doesn’t even have the Manhattan Yellow Pages.

She changes her clothes, boils water for tea, takes out a mug . . .

Busy, busy.

Don’t let fear win.

She makes toast with the heel of a loaf of whole grain bread that’s verging on stale, and considers going out to get some groceries. It would give her something to do—something constructive.

But she didn’t notice any open stores on her walk home from Union Square. And even if she were to come across one nearby, how fresh would the food possibly be? With no traffic in this frozen zone these last few days, restocking neighborhood markets must be impossible.

Chances are, she’d have to walk all the way back up to the supermarket on Fourteenth Street to find an open store, let alone one with decent food. And then she’d only be able to buy as much as she could carry all the way home on foot.

While she really has no desire to stay locked in her apartment all day, she doesn’t have the energy to venture far from here, either. Not when errands that were once no-brainers are now fraught with complications.

She paces restlessly through the apartment, and nearly jumps out of her skin at a rattling sound in the kitchen. On its heels, though, is a high-pitched whistling.

The tea kettle.

As she pours hot water over a tea bag in the mug, her hand shakes so badly that water sloshes over the rim.

She really could use some fresh air. Not because she’s too frightened to stay in.

No, of course not.

You don’t let terror win.

She just wants to find someplace where she can breathe fresh air for a while, that’s all . . .

She wants to breathe easily . . .

Just
breathe
.

W
ith Brandewyne at his side clutching an unlit cigarette—no smoking at the crime scene, Rocky was compelled to remind her—he stands in the doorway, surveying the carnage beyond as Alicia Keys sings “Fallin’ ” on a CD player by the bed. It’s set to keep looping the same song over and over, just like the one in Kristina Haines’s apartment.

The victim—Marianne Apostolos, age thirty-three—lies curled up on her side in her blood-soaked bed.

This, he knows, is what her brother saw when he came over to check on her. His mother had sent him over here with Marianne’s spare key after Marianne missed her morning check-in call.

“Thank God Ma didn’t go over there herself,” the broken man kept saying when Rocky and Brandewyne talked to him down at the precinct a short time ago. “It would have killed her.”

Rocky nodded grimly, knowing that George himself will have to live with this scene branded into his soul for the rest of his life.

It’s one thing to lose someone to natural causes—old age, illness. But when someone slaughters a defenseless woman in her own home . . .

And for what? Kicks? Revenge?

Andy Blake is kneeling beside the corpse, gathering forensic evidence as Jorge Perez snaps photos of the scene.

“Jesus,” Rocky mutters, stepping closer. “This is a bloodbath.”

“I know, brutal, right?” Blake shakes his head. “What the hell do you think she did to deserve this?”

Rocky knows Andy doesn’t actually believe anything Marianne could have done warranted this violent ferocity. But he’s feeling short-fused after too little sleep and too much stress, and it’s all he can do not to make a harsh response to that inane comment.

Nicotine-deprived Brandewyne’s filter is obviously not working as effectively; she snaps, “If you actually think anyone deserves to die like this, Blake, then you’re a real—”

“Take a chill pill, sweetheart, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Sweetheart? I’m not your sweetheart.”

“You got that right.”

Ignoring the two of them, Rocky strides over to the victim and takes a closer look.

Like Kristina Haines, she’s wearing lingerie—a white satin nightgown trimmed with lace. Like Kristina, she’s been savagely stabbed all over her body. And like Kristina, she’s missing a middle finger.

Rocky can’t see the evidence of that at the moment—her hands are already bagged to preserve the evidence. But the finger is gone—sawed off while she was still alive, according to the CSU guys.

That detail of the Haines case was never released to the public—not that anyone in the press was paying the slightest bit of attention anyway. Everyone was consumed with the much larger story; Kristina’s murder didn’t even make the papers.

Still . . . if it had, there would have been no mention of the missing middle finger.

Only the cops working the case—and Kristina’s killer—could have known about that.

Now a second body turns up, also missing the middle finger of her right hand?

“She fought pretty hard,” Perez comments. “We found some skin scrapings under her nails, and there was some hair tangled in her fingers.”

“
Tangled?
” Rocky is taken aback. Both Allison Taylor and James McKenna had described the prime suspect, Jerry, as having a crew cut.

“Yeah, a few strands of it,” Perez tells him.

“Strands?” Having traded the cigarette for a pen, Brandewyne scribbles something on her notepad. “So it was long hair?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?” Brandewyne asks.

“Pretty long . . . we’ll measure, but—”

“Could it be her own hair?” Rocky cuts in impatiently.

“Nope. Hers is shorter and curlier and reddish.”

“What color was this?”

“Looks like dark brown.”

Before Rocky can ask another question, his cell phone rings. He steps into the next room to answer it, glancing at the window near the couch and noticing the iron grillwork of a fire escape just beyond the screen. Looks like the CSU team dusted the sill and sash for prints.

So this guy—the guy they’re calling the Nightwatcher down at the station house—climbs up fire escapes and slithers into his victims’ apartments in the dead of night. He must know them well enough to be sure they live alone . . . among other details.

He snaps his phone open. “Yeah, Manzillo here.”

“Rocky, it’s Tommy. Get this: that building? The one where the Apostolos girl was killed?”

“Yeah . . . that’s where I am right now. What about it?”

“Who do you think the owner is? Go ahead, take a wild guess.”

“What is this,
Jeopardy
?” he snaps, not in the mood for games. “Who?”

“Dale Reiss,” comes the reply, “and guess who works there as a handyman?”

W
hen Allison first came out to sit on the stoop earlier this afternoon, the sun was shining. Now the sky is overcast and the wind has shifted in this direction, carrying the acrid scent of burning.

Maybe she should go back inside . . .

But there’s nothing to do there.

Nothing to do out here, either; no one to talk to, nowhere to go . . .

She’s spent the better part of the last hour sitting on the stoop, leafing through an issue of
Vogue
in the warm September sunshine.

But now the sky is growing overcast and the wind has shifted. How can she focus on the magazine’s glossy glamour? All she wanted to do when she came out here was sit and read and breathe, but now her every breath is tainted with death fumes from the fire still burning farther downtown.

Maybe she should give up and go back inside. But the thought of being back in her apartment, behind all those locks . . .

Locks that may be useless if Kristina’s killer stole her key . . .

Better to sit out here just a little longer, inhaling bad air and brooding, inexplicably feeling as though she’s survived something horrific only to face something even worse looming on the horizon.

It’s because of what happened to Kristina, she knows.

Or maybe it goes all the way back to her mother.

Every time Mom tried to kill herself and failed, Allison was left with a growing sense of impending doom. She used to mentally rehearse what she would do when it actually happened—when her mother finally succeeded in taking her own life.

She always assumed it would be afternoon or early evening, because that was how the trial runs had unfolded. But she was wrong.

She didn’t come home at dusk one day to find that Brenda Taylor had OD’d again. No, she was right in the house when her mother finally killed herself. In the house, but sound asleep. Helpless.

Why, Mom? Why did you do it when I was there, in the next room? Why didn’t you at least wait until I was gone, so I wouldn’t feel as though there must have been something I could have done if only I’d gotten up sooner?