Nightwatcher (19 page)

“Give it here.” Rocky holds out his hand.

Wordlessly, Green puts the tape into it.

Brandewyne disappears into the apartment.

“Any word from the medical examiner’s office?” Rocky asks Green as he winds the tape.

“They’re still trying to get someone over here. They’re pretty overwhelmed, though—I don’t know when it’ll be.”

“Pretty overwhelmed,” Rocky echoes, shaking his head. “That’s one hell of an understatement, Green.”

“Yeah? Here’s another one for you, Rock: this has not been a good day for anyone.”

“Yesterday was worse,” Rocky returns. “For all of us.”

“Yeah, well . . . definitely for her.” Green gestures with his head toward the bedroom, where the victim awaits transport to the morgue.

Ordinarily, the M.E. would have been here already—and ordinarily, you’d have an army of detectives working the scene, the witnesses, the computers and labs . . .

The NYPD always taps into its significant supply of manpower to quickly solve an ugly murder like Kristina Haines’s.

But today, every available guy is down on the pile, or working to secure and protect the city, or to catch the mass murderers who brought down the towers.

Today, Rocky is juggling multiple duties and reminding himself that he owes it to Kristina and her family—if he ever manages to find any family—to give this case his full attention.

He hands the crime scene tape back to Green. “Here you go. Hang in there, kid. Things will get better.”

“You think? Really?”

“They always do, don’t they?” Rocky walks into the apartment, thinking about his own three boys, praying they’ll never have to see the things their father has seen today, thankful that he hasn’t had to endure what other fathers have today.

There are guys down there on the pile digging frantically for their own kids. Murph, with his brother who’s like a son to him, is one of them.

How do you survive something like that? How do you go on?

He pushes the thought from his mind. He has a job to do.

In the bedroom, he finds Brandewyne scribbling notes, and Andy Blake and Jorge Perez, the CSU guys, packing away their equipment. Kristina Haines lies dead on the bed between them.

Dead. Slaughtered.

Brown, dried blood is spattered and smeared everywhere—on the walls, the ceiling, the bed—all over Kristina herself.

She’s curled up on her side as if she’s asleep in the middle of a blood-soaked floral comforter, wearing silky black lingerie.

When Rocky first got to the scene, the song was still playing and the room was lit only by candlelight. There were candles all around the room, on every surface. Some had melted away and gone out; others still flickered around the bed, like fire surrounding a sacrificial altar.

Brandewyne looks up from her notes. “That sick son of a bitch really did a job on her.”

Another understatement. Beyond the savage knife wounds, Kristina’s right middle finger is missing. Missing—as in hacked right off her hand.

“Did the finger turn up yet?” Rocky asks the CSU guys.

“Nope. Guess he took it with him.” Perez shakes his head. “Something to remind him of the romantic evening.”

At first glance—judging by the victim’s clothes, the music, the candles—this looked like a late night date gone horribly wrong. Rocky guessed that the killer had come in through the door, invited by Kristina, and then, after he snapped and killed her, went out through the window and down the fire escape, as indicated by the traces of blood that were found there.

But when you get into stuff like this—the seemingly symbolic mutilation, the killer taking a grisly trophy—you tend to lean away from crime of passion, and more toward something more . . . ritualistic.

Maybe he came in
and
out through the window.

Or maybe he let himself in with a key.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Perez announces, as he finishes buttoning up his gear. “You guys gonna wait around for the M.E.?”

“Don’t have much choice, do we?”

“You could be here waiting all night,” Blake warns.

“What do you want me to do,” Rocky snaps, “go downtown and drag them away from the goddamned pile?”

The CSU guys fall silent. Shifting her weight, Brandewyne goes back to her notes. Rocky rubs his pounding temples with his fingertips.

Yeah. Everyone’s nerves are frayed; everyone’s exhausted.

Rocky passed four different delis on the way here—places where he ordinarily stops to get some caffeine to see him through a rough overnight—and they were all closed. He wishes he’d thought to grab a go-cup full of the battery acid that passes for coffee down at the station house.

“Hang in there, Rocky,” Perez tells him, heading toward the door.

“You too, Jorge.”

As Blake follows Perez past Rocky, Rocky pats his upper arm, a typical parting gesture. But his hand rests there a little longer than usual, offering an added measure of support.

He and Ange went to Blake’s wedding last spring down in Breezy Point, Brooklyn. Two of the groomsmen—including the bride’s brother—were with the FDNY. Rocky’s afraid to ask about them. Having glimpsed the gaunt expression in Blake’s eyes, he doesn’t have to.

“You take care of yourself, Andy,” Rocky tells him.

“You too.”

They disappear into the hall. He can hear them out there, talking to Green.

Left alone in the apartment with Brandewyne and the dead girl, Rocky walks over to the bed and surveys the body.

“You want to notify the next of kin?” Brandewyne asks. “Or do you want me to do it?”

“You can do it.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?”

Rocky shrugs and hands her a folded slip of paper. “It’s not the parents—they’re both dead. She was an only child. She has an aunt and uncle who live in England.”

“It’s late there. Should I wait till morning?”

“Sooner the better.”

“Right. They’ll have to make travel arrangements.”

“They’re going to have to swim over if they want to get here anytime soon,” Rocky says darkly, before Brandewyne goes into the next room to make her call.

He looks at Kristina. “Who did this to you?”

Jerry the maintenance man is certainly a likely suspect, considering the fact that he’d likely have the keys to Kristina Haines’s apartment
and
was lurking in the hallway in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, right around the time she was killed. Was he a secret admirer? A stalker? It’s possible.

Anything is possible.

Those very words are scrawled on a whiteboard in Kristina’s kitchen.

Who wrote them? Kristina herself, alone in the big city, reminding herself to hope and dream?

Or was it her killer, sending an ominous message?

Point taken
, Rocky thinks. Anything
is
possible.

He keeps reminding Brandewyne that this case might not be nearly as cut-and-dried as it seems. Seasoned detectives know that when it comes to homicide, things are not always as they appear to be. You have to look beyond the obvious.

Rocky ponders the series of burglaries reported in the building over the last month or so. Several tenants had reported that someone had entered their apartments while they were out during the day and stolen personal items—mainly costume jewelry and women’s clothing. Among the missing belongings listed on the police reports Rocky scrutinized: a black negligee that exactly matches the description of the one Kristina Haines was wearing when she died.

There were no signs of forced entry in any of the burglaries, according to the reports, indicating that the thief had either come in and out through an unlocked outside window, or through the door—with a key.

Were the burglaries a prelude to murder?

Had Kristina interrupted a burglary in progress in her own apartment?

Nothing about the elaborately staged crime scene would seem to indicate that, but Rocky isn’t ruling anything out.

Kristina Haines wasn’t even the first person to die in that building in the past few months. Elvira Ogden, the old lady who lived in an apartment on the floor below, had fallen and hit her head back in May. Rocky will take a closer look, but that death really looks like an accident. Anyway, very little about that death—aside from the location—had anything in common with this one.

Kristina was an attractive woman; chances are, Jerry isn’t the only guy who’d noticed. There must have been others. Rocky just has to find and question them.

Easier said than done. Right now, it seems no one in this city is where he or she is supposed to be.

Earlier, Brandewyne found contact information for Ray, Kristina’s ex-boyfriend, in her desk. But he lives down on Warren Street, near ground zero. The whole area has been evacuated.

Brandewyne couldn’t reach the building’s owner, Dale Reiss, either. A recently retired corporate accountant, he lives with his wife, Emily, in Battery Park City, and that’s also been evacuated. God only knows where he is tonight.

The tiny basement office—which houses the surveillance camera footage of the building’s public areas—can’t be searched without a warrant. Rocky requested one from the assistant district attorney, but he has a feeling it’s going to be a long wait with the office in chaos. The
city
in chaos.

Kristina’s neighbors—people who might have known something, seen something, heard something—weren’t evacuated. But like thousands of lower Manhattan residents, they fled anyway.

Only Allison Taylor and James MacKenna seem to have stayed in the building overnight. But when it comes to tracking down Jerry the maintenance man, neither of them even knows the guy’s last name.

“He kind of comes and goes,” MacKenna said. “As far as I know, he doesn’t have regular hours—but I’ve never paid much attention to him, and I’m hardly ever home on weekdays.”

MacKenna was cooperative when Rocky talked to him, but he seemed edgy and distracted—understandably so. The guy’s wife worked in an investment firm close to the top floor of one of the towers, just beneath Windows on the World. As far as anyone knows, no one made it out alive from that part of the building. The escape routes were cut off; that’s where most of the jumpers came from.

Rocky’s questioning was thorough, of course, but he found himself wanting to go easy on MacKenna, who didn’t have much to say anyway. He didn’t seem to know Kristina Haines well enough to shed any new light on the investigation.

Or so Rocky believed—until he saw the way Allison started squirming around when he asked her about men Kristina might have been seeing.

Allison Taylor had told him that Kristina didn’t have a boyfriend and, as of Sunday, wasn’t even seeing anyone. Not as far as she knew, anyway.

But there was something about the way she behaved when Rocky started down that line of questioning that made him wonder if she was telling him the whole truth. She was visibly squirming in her chair at one point.

Does she know more than she’s telling about Kristina’s love life?

Maybe he misread her, and she doesn’t.

Maybe there’s nothing more to know, and Jerry the maintenance man is Rocky’s guy.

But when Rocky thinks about the way Allison fidgeted and shifted her weight when he spoke to her . . .

It’ll be necessary to keep close tabs on both her and MacKenna right now. And with the decreased manpower and disrupted communications systems, that’s going to be yet another challenge.

“But don’t you worry,” Rocky tells the dead girl. “I’m going to find out who did this to you, and I’m going to make sure he gets what’s coming to him.”

Him . . . or her.

W
hen Mack gets home after being questioned, the building is crawling with cops.

Two uniformed officers are posted outside on the street, another is stationed on the ground floor by the elevators, and judging by the squad cars and vans parked at the curb, there must still be a couple of guys upstairs, too, in Kristina’s apartment.

He slides the dead bolt, and leans against the door for a minute. His heart is pounding hard, as though he’s just run all the way home chased by the devil, rather than catching a ride back from the precinct with a police officer.

Get a grip, Mack. Get a grip.

With an icy hand, he flips a couple of light switches, making sure everything looks . . . right.

It does. How can it, when everything is wrong?

The way Detective Manzillo looked at him, and questioned him . . .

He was just doing his job. But Mack has watched enough television crime shows to know that the person who discovers the body is always a potential suspect.

Technically, Mack didn’t discover the body. But he’s the one who reported it.

A chill slips down his spine. He doesn’t need this right now. He really doesn’t.

His gaze falls on a few stray missing fliers lying on the table.

It’s crazy, like one of those movies where the action keeps escalating until it goes too far and you don’t buy into it anymore, because it could never really happen. Not like that.

Yeah, well, truth, as they say, is stranger than fiction. This is really happening.

Mack goes to the kitchen, fills the teakettle, sets it on the burner, and turns on the flame.

Then his eye catches the bottle of Jack Daniel’s still sitting on the counter from the other night. He turns off the flame and pours himself a stiff bourbon.

Standing there, he downs most of it in a few gulps. It burns his throat and weakens his knees, but it warms him from the inside out, banishing the chill better than tea ever could.

He tops off the glass and carries it into the living room, turns on a lamp, and sits on the couch.

Now what?

What do you do when life as you knew it has ceased to exist?

You search for something, someone familiar, that’s what you do. You reach out to someone who knows you well and will stick by you no matter what happens.

No matter what.

As a haze of bourbon settles over him like a heated blanket, Mack dials the phone.

R
ounding the corner onto Sixth Avenue, Jamie sees that the bodega, run by an affable dark-skinned man named Mo, is open. Good. Most of the other shops and restaurants along the four-block walk over here were closed, and have been since Tuesday afternoon.