Georgia dropped Marenko off at the subway station to catch a train back to his apartment in Manhattan. He forced a brave smile as he leaned over and gave her a warm, soulful kiss.
“You sure you don’t want to tell me what you discussed with the chief?”
She smiled. “So that’s what the kiss was for—a bribe.”
“Not a bribe.” He grinned like a little boy caught in the act. “A…uh…show of faith.”
“Let me think about what I’m going to do, okay?”
“Okay.” He nodded. “I trust you.” He put a hand on the door latch. “One day, maybe you’ll say the same about me, huh?”
She laughed. “When pigs fly.”
He got out of the car and gave her a wink as he closed the door. “I’m working on it.” As soon as he left her, his demeanor turned somber. By the time he trudged down the steps to the subway, his whole body looked as if two concrete blocks were nailed to his shoulders.
Georgia watched him disappear. It felt like a brick to her heart. She still had no sense of what happened last night. And she had to know. It was the only way she could hope to find Connie. She tried to picture Connie’s apartment now. Everything in the place was white or turquoise. White rug. Turquoise drapes. White couch. Turquoise pillows. Big white conch shells on the glass coffee table. A big turquoise mother-of-pearl bowl on top of the wall unit.
But there was something flat and static about these images because the apartment Georgia was picturing was no longer there. Now, it was a blood-splattered crime scene. If I’m going to find her, I’ve got to face the truth about her last hours there. I’ve got to see the place myself.
Connie’s apartment was part of a complex of three buildings, each ten stories high, styled in what, years from now, historians will cite as a perfect example of 1960s space-age architecture. The windows were round like portholes on a spaceship; the lobby had a strange, curved ceiling like a space module. Tubular steel, mirrors and white concrete predominated. Connie, never one for understatement, loved the place. But then again, she thought the 1964 World’s Fair Unisphere in Flushing Meadows Park was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
On the drive over, Georgia’s emotions seesawed a million times. One moment, she couldn’t imagine Marenko hurting any woman, much less one he’d been attached to. She pictured him in her basement, shooting pool with her mother, or on their driveway, tossing around a basketball with Richie. But the next moment, she’d get an image of him in the kitchen of Charles Dana’s house—callous, hot tempered and demanding. She couldn’t help wondering whether this was the real Mac, the one she wouldn’t allow herself to see.
Georgia walked into the lobby and opened the door to the fire stairs. Randy Carter was trudging up the first set of steps. Their eyes locked for one speechless moment.
“What are you doing here, girl? This could be misconstrued as compromising an investigation.”
“And you aren’t?” she replied, bounding up the stairs to meet him.
“I was going to tell you about it, later.”
“Well now you don’t have to.” Georgia surveyed the stairwell above them. “How were you planning to get in?”
“I’m not sure,” he admitted. They climbed the stairs in silence. At the third-floor landing, Carter cracked open the fire door. Halfway down the hall, Georgia could see Connie’s front door. Yellow crime-scene tape was strung across the entrance. A baby-faced Latino police officer was slouched against the wall near Connie’s door, smoking a cigarette and talking to a teenage girl who appeared to be taking out the trash. The officer’s black duty holster was so stiff and shiny, Georgia felt certain he was brand-new to the job. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-two years old.
“Just follow my lead, okay?” said Carter. With that, he threw open the door to the fire stairs and barreled down the hallway.
“You there,” Carter boomed in his best ex-drill sergeant’s voice. He flashed his gold shield at the young cop, then quickly put it away before the cop could tell he wasn’t NYPD. “You call yourself a police officer, son? I’ve seen Brownies writing parking tickets who conduct themselves better.”
The officer’s baby face paled. He opened his mouth to speak while the girl inched away. Carter looked the kid over. His nameplate said “Mercado.”
“This ain’t no dating game, Mercado. Put out that cigarette. Straighten your cap. Wipe that stupid look off your face. My partner and I have work to do, so you will stand by this doorway and not let anyone in until we’re through. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Detective,” Officer Mercado mumbled.
“I didn’t hear you,” said Carter in a loud sing-song voice.
Mercado lifted his chin and saluted. “Yes, sir.”
“That’s better.”
“That was quite a show you put on out there,” Georgia whispered to Carter when they got inside Connie’s apartment.
“Yeah, well.” He sighed. “I wish it was for something more positive than this. Keep your gloves on and don’t move or remove anything, you hear?”
The entrance hall looked undisturbed. So did the galley kitchen, which didn’t surprise Georgia. Connie probably turned the stove on once a year. On the counter sat a small, silver ashtray with some ash in it. Connie didn’t smoke. Georgia knew who the cigarette ash belonged to.
She let Mac smoke in her apartment, thought Georgia, an odd defensiveness coming over her. Georgia made Marenko smoke outside.
They walked past the kitchen into the living room. Georgia knew what was coming and yet she flinched anyway when she saw the eight-by-twelve-inch voids in Connie’s white carpet. The police had cut the rectangles for evidence. Georgia didn’t need to be told what was on them. The remaining checkerboard of carpet carried traces of the dark red stains. She could still smell the musky, coppery odor of blood in the apartment. She pictured Connie lying on this rug. Was she frightened? Was she unconscious? What about now?
“You see Marenko yet?” Carter grunted, his voice as sudden as a firecracker in the perfect silence of the room.
“Yes.”
“He confess?”
“He says he didn’t do it. He says he doesn’t know what happened.”
Carter said nothing. He simply walked over to a wall unit where Connie’s compact discs of jazz and salsa were lined up along the stereo. There were black powder marks everywhere in the room from where the Crime Scene unit had dusted for fingerprints. There were pinhole marks along the edges of certain splatters suggesting that the police had run string between the pinholes to photograph the splatters’ trajectory and dimensions.
On top of the television, Connie’s blue binder of materials for the sergeant’s exam lay open to the very page she and Georgia had stopped on on Monday night. Georgia’s heart twisted like a dishrag to see Connie’s pencil scribbles in the margins—some sort of “to do” list she’d put together since their last meeting:
Shampoo…Lipstick…Dry cleaning…Bridgewater…B-day card for Joanne…
Georgia knew who the “Joanne” was: Joanne Zeligman, an older woman and the closest thing to a mother Connie had ever had. Georgia was certain the police would have already gone through Connie’s address book and spoken to her. She worked as a Tae-Bo instructor at a gym in Chelsea. She would be devastated by Connie’s disappearance.
Georgia’s eyes passed over the list a second time. The words were etched deeply into the page. Connie regularly broke pencil tips and caused ballpoint pens to rupture. She always pressed too hard. Only that wasn’t what made Georgia stare at the page now. It was the fourth entry that gave her pause: Bridgewater.
“Randy, does the word Bridgewater mean anything to you?”
“There’s a Bridgeport in Connecticut.”
Georgia gestured to the binder. “Connie scribbled what looks like a list of errands sometime during the last twenty-four hours she was in this apartment. ‘Bridgewater’ was one of her errands. When I spoke to Seamus Hanlon the other night—about that safety report in Dr. Rosen’s files—he told me it had to do with a fire on Bridgewater Street in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Do you think Connie was referring to the same Bridgewater?”
“Even if she was, it’s just a street.”
“Connie was working on the Dana/Rosen case. Maybe she found out something and…”
“—Skeehan.” Carter cut her off. His voice was harsh and shaky. The crime scene was getting to him, too. He rubbed a hand across his face and walked over to the white couch that now sported two bullet holes and a splatter of blood that looked like barbecue sauce. There was a smear on the wall behind the couch. Carter couldn’t take his eyes off it. Georgia walked up behind him, stared at the smear and choked back a note of alarm. It was a bloody handprint—too delicate and long fingered to be Marenko’s.
“The door was locked,” Carter mumbled. His voice was hoarse and quavering. “The fingerprints are all Marenko’s or Connie’s. Crime Scene said so. And the blood—it’s Connie’s too, matched against her personnel records.”
“Oh, God,” said Georgia. “No, no.” She felt lightheaded and nauseated. Her hands shook. “It can’t be, Randy. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.”
“Skeehan.” Carter turned to face her. “He did.”