Chapter 32

A WOMAN WITH glasses on top of her head and carrying an armload of scripts was the first living person I saw in the corridor. She took one look at me, her eyes bugged out in horror and she started shrieking. I couldn’t blame her. My hands were covered with blood, there was blood on my clothes, and there was a body lying behind me.

Drawn by her screams, people were coming at us from all directions. It was chaos. I noticed an actor I had a passing acquaintance with—Jack something. He was standing in the gathering crowd, staring at the body on the floor as though in a trance, holding a coffee mug, unaware that he had tilted it and coffee was spilling onto the floor. “Jack.” I spoke to him sharply to break through his dream state. “Call nine-one-one. NOW, JACK! Call nine-one-one!”

The commanding tone of my voice woke him up.

Accustomed to following directions, he sprinted for a phone.

Then I caught sight of Anthony Howell, one of Trauma Center’s directors. He had directed some of our episodes when we were caught short; he was a good man in a crisis. “Tony, have some of your crew block the doors,” I said. “Nobody’s to leave here until the police say so.” Tony sprang into action and began herding people away from the door to the fire stairs and used the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt to summon his technical team.

I took two steps back to the landing and scanned the floor until I spotted what I had touched (besides Serena) when I was trying to stand up in the dark. It was indeed a thick athletic sock, bulging with something rounded like a cylinder. It might have been a short length of pipe, or . . . rolls of quarters? I bent down close, but didn’t touch it again. I kept myself from looking at Serena.

And then there were three.

FIRST ON THE scene were uniformed officers. They relieved Tony Howell’s crew, secured the floor and calmed the Trauma Center people down.

A few minutes behind the blue wave, Detectives Phoenix and Flynn arrived on the scene, accompanied by other plainclothes detectives from the Twentieth Squad. With all that had happened in the past few weeks, I was beginning to think of the Twentieth as my precinct. It’s one of two police precincts known collectively as Midtown North, and its territory encompasses the three most important addresses in my life: the Global Broadcasting building, the Dakota and the building where Nancy lives and Damon Radford died.

Soon, members of the Crime Scene Unit arrived. They were all over the fire stairs, doing their meticulous photographing and spraying and hunting for fibers. I watched one of them bag Serena’s hands in plastic, to preserve any possible evidence of her attacker. Two other detectives from the Twentieth were “doing the canvas”—as they called it—to find out exactly who had been where at the relevant time. According to the medical examiner, Serena had been dead only a short time when I found her.

Detective Flynn called me to join him and Phoenix in Trauma Center’s makeup room. As the lead detectives on the case, they had commandeered it for their on-site interrogations. I had the honor of being the first interrogatee.

“What were you doing on that landing?” Phoenix had not been thrilled to learn I had discovered Serena’s body.

“You messed with the crime scene,” added Detective Flynn.

“Not intentionally,” I said. “I’ve already explained what happened.”

“You talked to the uniforms,” Flynn said, “not to us.”

“We’d like to hear your story firsthand,” said Phoenix.

My story?

Briefly, I told them about going to see Kitty Leigh, how I wanted to go up to our floor to talk to Tommy Zenos about Kitty’s role, and to check on how Cybelle was doing. “This is her first day back in the studio,” I said.

“So what were you doing on the fire stairs?” Phoenix asked.

“I always take stairs. Unless where I’m going is higher than the sixth floor.”

Flynn grunted with distaste. “You got some kind of phobia?”

“No,” I said. “Taking stairs, and walking as much as possible—that’s my exercise. The more I walk, the less I have to worry about what I eat. Unfortunately, I forgot that the fire stairs lock automatically from the inside.”

“Except down on the ground floor,” said Phoenix. “That door is kept unlocked.”

“Obviously,” I said. “The stairs are for emergency exit.”

“So,” Flynn said, “a person can go up the fire stairs from the ground floor, or down those stairs and out of the building, but they can’t get onto any of the floors unless somebody opens the door from the other side.”

“Yes,” I said. “But—did you see the folded matchbook cover on the floor? I think it was used to keep the door from locking.”

Flynn narrowed his eyes to slits as he looked at me. “Sounds like you got a theory of the case.”

“The beginning of a theory,” I said. “I think Serena went into the fire stairs to meet someone—and used the matchbook cover to keep from getting locked in. And that someone killed her, maybe with that sock that looks like it’s full of quarters. He—or she—couldn’t have left through the door that Serena had kept from locking, or the matchbook cover would have fallen out and I wouldn’t have been able to open the door.” I paused, to see if they were still following me. They were. “Now, the killer might have wedged open the door to another floor in the building, but I think that would have been too big a risk. They didn’t want to be seen, right? So my guess is that he or she walked down to the ground floor and slipped out through the heavy foot traffic in the lobby.”

“Where’d you get the quarters?” Flynn snarled.

“What?” I asked.

“The three rolls of quarters taped together in the sock. Did you roll them yourself, or did you get the rolls from a bank?”

“I didn’t put quarters in that sock.”

“Then how’d you know what was in it?” Flynn demanded

“It felt round, like rolls of quarters, and it was heavy.”

Phoenix was galvanized by my admission. “You picked it up? When?”

“In the dark. Accidentally. Come on, guys, you can’t think that I—”

“We’re going to have to take your clothes,” Phoenix said.

I responded with a lifted eyebrow. I thought he was joking.

His tougher-than-thou façade cracked and he blushed. “Fiber evidence,” he said, a little louder than necessary.

“I told you I fell over Serena! Of course you’re going to find her fibers on me. And mine on her. So what do you need fibers for?”

“G.G.,” Phoenix ignored me, “find a female officer to take her clothes and check her body for scratches or any other marks that might indicate a struggle.”

My mouth dropped open.

Flynn grunted and left.

Phoenix quickly closed the door and turned to me. His voice was low and urgent. “Get yourself a lawyer, quick,” he said. “We found the vehicle that almost ran you down; we were able to trace it through the paint it left when it side-swiped the parked car. It was stolen—no surprise—but I had the lab boys go over it for anything they could find. Just before the call came to come here, we got the report. There was only one print on the inside of that car that shouldn’t have been there. It belonged to Serena McCall.”

I felt my eyes go round as an owl’s.

“She’s the one who tried to kill you, Morgan,” Phoenix said.

As though that was not a big enough shock, he threw another one at me. “After the policewoman checks you over and takes your clothes,” he said, “we need you to come to the Twentieth to give us a formal statement.”

“And you want me to do this . . . naked?”

He almost laughed, but he managed to stop himself. “I saw a room here that’s as big as an apartment and it’s full of clothes.”

“It’s Trauma Center’s wardrobe department.”

He smiled as he said, “I bet you’d look cute in a nurse’s outfit.”

I didn’t return his grin.