Looking up at the dark building looming over Hudson Street, Brandewyne exhales a puff of smoke and comments, “This place still looks deserted.”
“Maybe not,” Rocky tells her, noting that light spills from the fourth floor windows where Allison Taylor lives. “Let’s go.”
She stubs out her cigarette as he opens the door with the key they duplicated from the set they found in Kristina Haines’s purse—under the circumstances, the only way they could ensure that they’d be able to come and go freely at the crime scene.
They take the stairs up, pausing on every floor to walk swiftly up and down the hallway, searching for signs of life, knocking on doors in the hope of finding another tenant home. No one answers, though, and they hear not a sound, see not a bit of light filtering from beneath the closed doors, smell not a hint of cigarette smoke or food cooking.
Not until they reach the fourth floor, anyway. A faint but distinctly savory, homey smell wafts in the air.
Rocky sniffs. “Smell that?”
“Smell what?”
“Your nostrils must be shot from all that smoke, Brandewyne. Not good for a detective to have only four senses, you know that? You should quit. I don’t understand why you don’t.”
“Yeah, and you should lose weight. I don’t understand why—”
“All right, enough.”
“What do you smell?”
“Someone made dinner tonight.” Rocky’s mouth waters slightly; he hasn’t eaten since the bowl of diner chili that gave him agita hours ago.
When he called Ange from the car on the way over here, she said she’d made stuffed pork chops—his favorite—and was keeping a plate warm for him.
“It’s going to dry out,” he told her. “Better put it into the fridge. I don’t know when I’ll get home again, but I doubt it’ll be anytime soon.”
After he hung up, Brandewyne, whose husband recently left her with two teenaged kids to support, asked if Ange gets frustrated by his long hours.
“Nah. She understands.”
“You’re a lucky guy, Manzillo.”
“Don’t I know it.”
No matter what happens on the job, he’s going to eventually go home to his wife. That’s what keeps him going, even on days—nights—like this.
“Where do you want to go first?” Brandewyne asks now, looking from James MacKenna’s closed door to Allison Taylor’s.
“Here. She’s the one whose lights were on.”
He goes over to Allison’s door and presses an ear against it, listening for movement or the hum of a television on the other side. He can’t hear a thing, of course. No paper-thin walls or doors in this old building; the apartments are surprisingly well-insulated here. Yet another reason whoever attacked Kristina Haines got away with murder.
So far, anyway.
Rocky knocks on the door.
There’s no answer.
He knocks again.
No answer again.
He clears his throat. “Ms. Taylor? Are you in there?”
She doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s sleeping.
He and Brandewyne exchange a glance and a shrug. He knocks louder, calls louder, “Ms. Taylor? It’s Detectives Manzillo and Brandewyne.”
Nothing.
There’s no answer to his knock on MacKenna’s door across the hall, either.
“What do you think?” Brandewyne’s tone is hushed.
“Let’s go upstairs. We’ve got to see if Taylor’s keys are there like she said.”
They return to the stairwell and take the steps up to the fifth floor two at a time. Rocky unlocks Kristina Haines’s door, then both he and Brandewyne pull latex gloves from their pockets and put them on.
They duck beneath the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the doorway.
“I’ll take the kitchen, you take the living room,” Rocky tells Brandewyne.
He searches every possible nook for the spare set of keys, conscious of the three words scribbled on the whiteboard hanging beside the fridge.
Anything is possible.
“They aren’t there,” Brandewyne announces from the doorway. “I’m going to check the bedroom.”
He nods, slamming a drawer shut and opening another. He should have gotten over here to look earlier.
A thought plays at the edge of Rocky’s consciousness, but he doesn’t want to let it in.
No. Don’t go down that road. Not yet.
He finishes the kitchen as Brandewyne comes out of the bedroom. “Nothing there, or in the bathroom. Maybe she kept them someplace else.”
“Like where?”
“Her desk at work?”
“She didn’t even have a regular job with a desk of her own; she was a temp. And anyway, you keep your neighbor’s keys close at hand. That’s why you have them in the first place.”
“I know. Maybe we missed them. I’ll go check the living room again.” She disappears.
She’s not going to find them. Rocky knows it in his gut. They didn’t miss the keys because they’re not here. Not anymore.
There’s a strong possibility that whoever killed Kristina took Allison’s keys . . . then did—or is doing right now—to Allison what he did to Kristina.
I’ve got to find this guy. There’s got to be a way around the red tape.
Rocky reaches into his pocket and dials the phone number of the only person he knows can make something happen . . . now.
Huddled into his jacket, Mack walks past Washington Square Park, remembering the day he met Carrie. It was right over there, on the path near the stone arch.
He was walking through the park heading south, on his way to meet a couple of guys for happy hour; she was coming north—walking home from work, she later told him. They bumped into each other, quite literally.
Kismet. Isn’t that the way lovers always meet in movies?
It was an unseasonably warm March night. Mack had found out a few days earlier that his mother had six months to live.
He was between girlfriends. Carrie wasn’t conventionally pretty, but there was something about her . . .
So he asked her out. That was his style.
It wasn’t hers to say yes, she later told him over drinks at McSorley’s. That’s where he took her on their first date, not yet aware that Carrie isn’t—wasn’t—a McSorley’s kind of woman. He was certainly a McSorley’s kind of guy back then. Which is why it was even more surprising that she said yes to a second date.
“There was something about you that made me want to let you in. That made me want to know you,” she told Mack.
“My sparkling wit? My dashing good looks? What was it?”
He’ll never forget her answer to that question. It caught him off guard.
“You just felt safe.”
At the time, he thought it was an odd thing to say. He didn’t know yet about Carrie’s past. She told him only after they’d dated for a few weeks. The truth didn’t come easily, he knew. Maybe she sensed that he was getting frustrated by her issues, the ones that kept getting in the way of having a normal relationship.
She didn’t want to go to a basketball game with him because she didn’t like big crowds; she didn’t want to drink more than one drink because she didn’t like to lose control; she didn’t want to sit where she couldn’t see the door because she liked to have an escape route . . .
Even now, though, looking back, he remembers thinking that not all of those idiosyncrasies seemed directly tied to what happened in her past. But then, what did he know?
What does he know now, for that matter? He kept trying to convince himself that her awful mood swings were simply due to the infertility drugs, but on Monday night, as he was sitting alone out on the stoop, he admitted to himself that she’d always been that way. It wasn’t just the drugs. It was her personality: mercurial, reclusive, difficult.
He couldn’t continue to blame it all on the drugs, telling himself she’d make an about-face when it was all behind her. He couldn’t even continue to blame it on her past. After all these months of kicking himself for not having told his mother where Carrie came from, because it might have made a difference, he acknowledged that cutting her extra slack because of it might not have been the healthiest thing to do. It wasn’t for him.
Back when Carrie first told him, bizarre and unexpected as the revelation was, he found it to be a relief. It explained so much about her—though not everything.
He was, of course, incredulous, thinking it had to be a joke.
The witness protection program? Seriously?
But of course she was dead serious. Carrie wasn’t the kind of woman who kidded around—another trait he’d grown to resent over the years. He came from a family of mischievous imps who enjoyed their practical jokes almost as much as they enjoyed socializing and drinking beer—and that included his mother.
Carrie’s family, due to circumstances alone, couldn’t have been more opposite. He never did get all the details about what led up to their extraordinary vanishing act. She didn’t know—or so she said.
It had all unfolded when she was young, she said, too young to remember much other than being a little girl living with her parents in a city—she didn’t know which city, she said, or even which part of the country.
“Didn’t your parents ever fill you in?” Mack asked. “Later, I mean.”
She shrugged. “No.”
“You mean they refused to tell you?”
“I mean, I never asked. What did it matter? All I knew is that I had a normal life, and then one day, I didn’t.”
Carrie didn’t know what had happened, exactly, to land her family in that position, but it involved her father. She told Mack she didn’t know whether he was involved in criminal activity himself, or had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, perhaps witnessed something he shouldn’t have.
Mack had a hard time buying that she didn’t know—maybe even on some subconscious level—whether her father was a good guy, or . . . well, a wiseguy.
Carrie claimed it didn’t matter to her. He had a hard time buying that, too.
She said that she loved her father until the day he died, and forgave him for the way things had turned out. That, Mack believed.
“We never lived a normal life,” she told Mack. “Even after we were settled into our new life, we had to pick up and move again, without any warning.”
“Why?”
“They were getting too close, I guess. That happened a few times. It was hard on my mother. My parents fought all the time. But they couldn’t separate.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure. I just know they always talked about how they were stuck with each other. I guess a separation would have meant one of them would have to leave and never see me again. So they stayed together.”
It made as much sense, Mack supposed, as any of the rest of it did. Her parents had chosen to put their love for their child before their own marital needs.
And Mack had chosen, on Tuesday morning, to put a child who doesn’t yet exist—a child who may never exist—before his own marriage.
When he told Carrie it was over, he didn’t give her the option to change her mind about having a baby. He didn’t want that.
He simply wanted out. He’d had enough. He didn’t want to live in isolation anymore with a woman who needed only him, and needed him desperately.
People don’t change. That was what he told her—not that she’d offered to change. But he said it anyway; told her that she couldn’t change who she was any more than he could change what he wanted out of life.
She didn’t argue, didn’t cry, didn’t even speak. She simply left.
He has no way of knowing what was going through her head as she went to work that last morning; no way of knowing whether, had the day unfolded in an ordinary way, she’d have come home that night wanting to talk things out with him, wanting a second chance.
But even now, he knows it would have been futile for her to ask for one. If he had to do it all again, he would make the same decision.
Maybe he’d already made it, subconsciously, even before she told him on Monday evening that she couldn’t go forward with the infertility treatments.
That was why he’d come home late from work. Not because he’d stopped for a beer with Ben, as he’d told Carrie. Ben hadn’t gone for drinks after work in years, not socially, anyway. Unless he had a business engagement to attend he was always too eager to get right home to Randi and Lexi.
That night, like countless others, Mack had stuck around the office playing computer solitaire long after his work was finished and everyone else had gone home. Unlike his colleagues, he wasn’t eager to be reunited with his spouse at the end of a long, hard day. He dreaded it.
Well, you’ll never have to deal with that again, will you? It’s over.
Cloaked in guilt, he walks on, thinking about Carrie, and about loss. Not about his own, because it was a loss he’d already accepted, a loss he’d chosen.
But Carrie—her loss that morning was monumental. She’d gone to her grave knowing he was going to leave.
You can’t blame yourself for her death. You didn’t kill her.
No, but maybe, if he hadn’t told her their marriage was over, she’d have somehow found a way out of that building. Maybe she’d have felt she had something to fight for, something to live for.
Tears stream unchecked down Mack’s cheeks as he walks uptown, past the barricades, past the policemen and soldiers, past other pedestrians. No one gives him a second glance; tonight, the bruised city is filled with publicly crying people. He’s just one more stricken face in the crowd; just another New Yorker whose life lies in ruins tonight.
Vic’s phone rings the moment his head hits the too-puffy—why the hell are they always so puffy?—hotel pillow.
As usual, he answers it immediately, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, instantly prepared to bolt.
But this call isn’t about the terrorists he’s been tracking; it’s Rocky’s voice that greets him.
“What’s up?” Vic asks, lying down again, phone pressed to his ear, welcoming a call from a friend. New York is his hometown, but it’s never felt so foreign. He thinks longingly of Kitty, and home, but it’s going to be a long, long time before he’s back there.
It could be worse, though. Much worse.
Every time he remembers that last conversation with O’Neill—remembers how John said, “My business is always a pleasure,” remembers all the years, all the laughs they shared—Vic is seized by a renewed urgency to nail the bastards who murdered his friend.
Ah. If only it were that simple.
“I need help,” Rocky tells him. “Official help. Well, unofficial, because I don’t have time to jump through hoops right now and you guys are all about protocol, I know.”
You guys. Vic sighs inwardly. Us, and them.
“What’s going on?”
He listens carefully as Rocky fills him in on the case he’s working, concluding with “And this is where you come in.”
“Where? You lost me.”
“Brandewyne and I are overwhelmed here, Vic, and most of the squad is working the terrorist attack . . .”
Yeah, Vic thinks, who isn’t?
“Okay, so what do you need from me? I mean, I’ll help you if I can, but you know—”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. First things first—we’ve got to find this guy Jerry.”
So now “you guys” have melded into “we.”
If things weren’t so grim, Vic might have to grin at that.
“I’m headed over to one of the other buildings Dale Reiss owned to see if I can track down Reiss somehow,” Rocky tells him, “but I know you’ve got access to computers that can find anything—and anyone—faster than I can ask a question.”
Vic hesitates. Rocky is right. But—
“Can you see if you can find this guy?”
“Reiss or Jerry?”
“Both. And the other thing I need,” Rocky continues without missing a beat, “is a rush on the DNA results.”
“That, I can’t do,” Vic says promptly. “Not now, of all times, Rock.”
“If it weren’t now, of all times, I wouldn’t have to ask.”
“Listen, I’ll do what I can with the computer records. I’ll make some calls and see what I can turn up. At least that’ll be a starting point for you.”
“Thanks, Vic. I owe you one.”
Vic snorts. “You owe me a lot more than one, pal. But don’t worry—I’ve been keeping count for years.”
“I’ll bet you have.” Rocky’s tone is light, but when he exhales, Vic can hear the weight of the world in his barely audible sigh.
“Listen, I’m on it.”
“Thanks, Vic. I mean that.”
“You’re welcome, Rock. What are friends for?”
Just off West Broadway, the only open bar in the immediate neighborhood is jammed with people looking for a reprieve. There are no open tables or bar stools, so Allison and Lynn MacKenna have spent the last hour leaning against the back wall and talking, sipping Amstel Light from cold brown bottles.
When Allison first went downstairs to meet Mack’s sister—an attractive woman with a long brown ponytail and Mack’s light green eyes—at the front door of the building, she fully intended to send her on her way without giving her any information. She had no idea how much Lynn knew, and she didn’t want to be the one to deliver the bad news.
But she took one look at the woman’s tearstained face and realized she must already have heard about Carrie.
She was right; Lynn said Mack had told her over the phone earlier.
“I got my ex-husband over to watch the kids, jumped into my car, and drove into the city,” she said, adding that she’d been forced to leave her car uptown.
“How did you get down past Union Square without a local address?” Allison asked.
“I just showed them my Jersey license and said I was going to help my brother whose wife worked at Cantor Fitzgerald. They let me go.”
“I’m surprised.”
“Why? Do I look like a terrorist to you?”
Allison didn’t respond to that; didn’t tell her that looks can be deceiving.
Lynn was a frazzled wreck by the time she’d walked down to her brother’s apartment, only to find him gone.
“I’m sure he’s all right,” Allison told her with a confidence she didn’t feel. “I was with him when he got the news, and he held up pretty well under the circumstances.”
“You were with him? Are you a friend of his, then?”
Unsure how to answer that, Allison nodded.
“Really? I mean—don’t take this the wrong way, but I didn’t think my brother had many friends anymore. He and Carrie—well, they kept to themselves. I didn’t really think they were hanging out with the neighbors.”
“They weren’t,” Allison said hastily. “I just got to know him the past few days with . . . everything going on.” She’s definitely not going to mention the murder investigation, which, in light of the MacKennas’ family tragedy, seems almost insignificant.
“All I did was check in on him a few times, and put up some missing persons posters and . . . I made chicken soup,” she adds lamely.
“That’s so sweet of you. Thank you. I’ve been so worried, I kept thinking of him here, all alone—I’m glad he wasn’t. It wasn’t easy for me to get to him, and . . . well, I couldn’t really tell if he wanted me here. We used to be close—he used to have all kinds of friends, and we have a big extended family, too—but Carrie kind of alienated everyone. Oh—I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead,” she added, and crossed herself. “I’m sorry.”
Remembering yet again what Mack had shared about his own feelings for his wife, Allison told her, “That’s okay. I don’t—didn’t—really know your sister-in-law at all.”
“I’m sure that was her choice, not yours. Listen, do you want to go get a drink? I don’t want to drive all the way back to Jersey until I’ve seen my brother, and my nerves are shot. I could use a beer.”
Allison opened her mouth to invite Lynn up to her place, but thought better of it, remembering that Kristina Haines might very well have invited her own murderer to cross the threshold.
It wasn’t that she thought the woman was a cold-blooded killer—but really, how did she even know Lynn was who she said she was?
Are you serious? Look at her. She looks just like her brother!
All right, so maybe she was, quite obviously, related to Mack.
Still . . . how much did Allison really know about him? What if they were a pair of killer siblings and this was all just an elaborate setup concocted by the two of them to lure her into a trap?
You’re crazy, she told herself.
But better crazy—and perhaps overly cautious—than dead, right?
“I passed a bar that was open a few blocks away,” Lynn went on. “We can go there. I mean, I can go alone, but I’d rather have company. Will you come?”
“Sure,” Allison said impulsively, and here they are.
She’s glad she came, even though she’s certainly not dressed to be out—though in her old jeans and T-shirt, she seems to fit right in with this crowd. The cash she had in her pocket, left over from the grocery store, was enough to buy a round of Amstels, and Lynn bought another.
Allison never realized that ice-cold beer from a tall bottle could taste quite this good. For the first time in days, she feels herself relaxing, relieved of the burden of suspecting that Mack is a potential killer. It’s obvious, from Lynn’s account of their parents and childhood, that they were raised in a close-knit family, the kind of family Allison herself secretly longed to have. Not that she’d admit that to Lynn. She has, however, found herself opening up far more than she typically does when she meets someone new.
Mack’s sister is so easy to talk to, easy to listen to, that Allison keeps forgetting about all the disturbing things that have happened. Somehow, despite the dark circumstances of their meeting, the conversation meanders along from food to fashion to music to Lynn’s children. She has three—two boys and a girl—and tells Allison that she wishes they could see more of their uncle.
“When he’s around the kids, he just lights up, and so do they,” she says, tearing at the label on the neck of her brown bottle. “But he only sees them on birthdays and holidays—and sometimes, not even then. I keep telling the kids that it’s not him—you know, that he’s just too busy to see them more often—but I don’t really believe that myself. If your wife doesn’t want to be a part of things, come alone, you know? Don’t turn your back on your family. It’s like he’s always making excuses for her, protecting her. I don’t get it.” Lynn shrugs. “Do you?”
“I don’t really even know him well enough to get it,” Allison tells her, knowing better than to say a word about what Mack confided in her about the state of his marriage.
“Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anymore, does it?” Lynn shakes her head. “I can’t believe she’s dead, can you?”
Lynn has a habit of throwing the conversation back into Allison’s court with every comment, making her feel as though she matters when really, she doesn’t. She just met Lynn, and she barely knew Carrie, and Mack . . .
Poor Mack. What is he going to do now?
Allison thinks about dead Carrie . . . and dead Kristina . . .
Suddenly, she feels a little light-headed—and dangerously emotional. Maybe it’s the beer, or her own exhaustion, but she has to get out of here. Right now. Before she starts crying. Or talking.
“I think I should go,” she tells Lynn, looking around for a place to set down her half-full beer. It’s her second—or maybe her third.
“Don’t you want to finish that?”
“No, I can’t. I really need to get home. Do you want to come, or . . . ?”
“Hang on. Let me see if Mack’s there yet.” Lynn pulls a cell phone from her pocket, dials, and holds it to her ear. After a minute, she shakes her head and hangs up. “He’s still not home. I’ll stay here until I reach him.”
“Are you sure you don’t mind if I leave, then?”
What else can Lynn say but “Um, no. Go ahead.”
Allison realizes she probably expects an invitation back to Allison’s apartment, and she’s tempted to extend one. But really, that wouldn’t be a good idea. Not because she fears for her safety, but because in this frame of mind, having company isn’t a good idea.
Out in the cool night air, she immediately feels better. Not well enough to turn back, but at least her head feels clearer.
As she walks toward home, she tells herself that she did the right thing.
But when she turns onto her block and sees her building looming, she isn’t so sure. It would be a lot easier to walk into that empty apartment with company than it will be alone.
Well, get a grip. You are alone, and that’s how you wanted it, remember?
She walks closer, glad that at least she left the lights on when she went downstairs to meet Lynn. She even locked the door behind her.
Now, taking her keys from her pocket, she realizes, belatedly, that she never heard back from Detective Manzillo about whether he’d found her spare key in Kristina’s possession.
It’s all she can do to make herself unlock the door and walk into the building.
Strength is your strength.
She rides the elevator up to the fourth floor.
Strength is your strength.
She considers knocking on Mack’s door to see if he’s there, but Lynn just called him from the bar less than fifteen minutes ago. Either he’s still out, or he doesn’t want to talk to anyone.
Just leave him alone, Allison tells herself, and goes past his door to her own.
Strength is your strength.
Unlocking it, she steps inside.
As always, everything appears to be just as she left it.
See? You’re home, safe and sound. You can relax now.
She locks the door behind her, still feeling a little woozy from the beer. She isn’t used to drinking much, but Lynn ordered more beers without asking her if she wanted another.
Wait—should she have locked herself in before she checked to make sure no one is here, lying in wait for her? Isn’t she supposed to do that part first?
She turns back to unlock the door, then stops. That’s not a good idea, is it? What if she walks away and then forgets to lock it again?
Just do a quick check. I’m sure it’s fine.
She looks into the kitchen. Not a thing out of place, and really, not a single spot where someone could be hiding. In the living room, as she checks behind the curtains, she wonders what she would possibly do if someone jumped out at her.
You’d be helpless, wouldn’t you? So a lot of good this searching does.
With the building empty and the windows closed up tightly, no one would even hear her scream if something happened.
You should have grabbed a knife when you were in the kitchen, like you did before.
Her heart begins to pound. She peeks into the narrow space between the couch arm and the wall, and the shadowy corner near the armoire. So far, so good.
As she walks toward the bedroom, her gaze falls on the answering machine, sitting on the end table beside her art books. The message light is flashing.
She presses play.
“Ms. Taylor, this is Detective Manzillo. Give me a call as soon as you can. We checked Kristina Haines’s apartment for your keys, and they aren’t there. Be careful, and like I said . . . call me as soon as possible. I need to speak to you about . . . a new development in this case.”
Rattled by the news that her keys have apparently gone missing, Allison instinctively reaches for one of the granite bookends on the table. It’s so heavy she can barely lift it with one hand, heavy enough to be a weapon.
All she has to do is check the bedroom and the bathroom. Then she can put down the bookend and breathe easily as she returns the detective’s phone call.
Crossing into the bedroom, she glances around and is caught off guard by the unmade bed. She never—
Oh, that’s right, she’d been just about to—
Suddenly, she remembers: she was standing here with the chef’s knife when the buzzer rang earlier. She tossed it onto the bed and went to answer it.
Allison takes a step closer to the bed, her eyes searching for the knife.
It isn’t there.
But that can’t be right.
She left it there, it has to be there . . .
Dear God, where is the knife?
Someone moved it.
Someone took it.
She has to get out of here, before—
Out of the corner of her eye, Allison sees a figure looming.