F Paul Wilson - Secret History 02 (4 page)

           
Rob's mouth settled into a tight
thin line.

           
"Okay. But I warned you."

           
Kara held her breath as she followed
him down the fluorescent-lit hall, lined with gurneys, some empty, some not.
White sheets covered the latter. She kept her eyes down and counted the drains
evenly placed in the concrete floor. He led her through a set of steel double
doors into a room where a gaunt young black man who couldn't have been much
older than twenty sat at a small desk with a styrofoam cup full of coffee in
one hand and a cigarette in the other. The sports section of the
Post
was open on the desk in front of
him. Rob handed him a yellow slip of paper.

           
"Already been identified,"
the young man said after looking at the slip. "She's waiting for
pick-up."

           
Rob's voice was flat. "She's
going to be identified again."

           
The attendant shrugged and ran his
finger down a list. He stopped near the bottom.

           
"Seventeen-B," he said as
he rose from his chair.

           
He led them through another set of
double doors, heavier than the first, into a larger room where the temperature
was a good twenty degrees cooler. She saw a coarse concrete floor, white tiled
walls, and latched drawers. The far wall was a giant mosaic of latched drawers,
three high and too many in width to count. Big drawers. People-sized drawers.

           
Kara hung back as the attendant
headed for row seventeen. He reached for the handle on the second drawer down,
and pulled.

           
A seismic shudder ran through her.

           
I
can't do this
!

           
As the drawer slid out with a harsh
grating noise that echoed off the bare floor and tiled walls, she forced
herself forward. She
had
to do this.
There was no one else.

           
A body bag lay on the tray within
the drawer. Kara looked past it as stomach acid began to well up into her
throat.

           
This
can't be real. This isn't really happening.

           
She willed herself not to feel
anything. She would feel later. Now she would only look.

           
She stared at the attendant as he
pulled down the zipper and pushed back the plastic. Out of the corner of her
eye she saw Rob turn away. Fists clenched, jaw tight, she forced herself to
look down.

           
It wasn't Kelly. The caved-in cheek,
the skewed nose, the swollen forehead, the misshapen skull, the bulging eye,
the matted blond hair, the glass-slashed skin on her face and shoulders, the
huge, crudely sutured incision running from the base of her throat down between
her breasts and on downward, no, that couldn't be Kelly, it couldn't be Kelly,
but it was, oh dear God it
was
!

           
Kara turned away, reeling as the
floor began to tilt beneath her feet.

           
"You gonna be sick, lady?"
the attendant said.

           
Kara waved her hand back at him.
Shut up! Just shut up
!

           
" 'Cause if you are," he
continued, "there's a bathroom right over there."

           
She couldn't focus her eyes so she
didn't know where "over there" was. The icy room had somehow become
very hot and her skin was drenched with perspiration. She felt her knees
turning to liquid, sagging.

           
Suddenly an arm was around her
waist, lifting her.

           
"I've got you," Rob's
voice said at her side.

           
He guided her through a door into a
smelly little room lit by a naked 60-watt bulb and outfitted with a dirty sink,
a dirtier toilet, and a mop in a bucket. He steadied her as she leaned over the
bowl and lost the weak Penn Station coffee she'd had for breakfast. When the
retching finally stopped, he handed her a paper towel. She wiped her face and
mouth and then sagged against the wall.

           
Kelly
is dead. My dear, dear Kelly is dead!

           
She felt Rob's arm go around her
shoulders but she shrugged him off. She could handle this. She could have used
someone to hold on to now, just for a moment, but she had to be strong, had to
stand on her own. She searched for her voice and finally found it.

           
"Could you give me a couple of
minutes, Rob?"

           
"Sure. I'll be right
outside."

           
Once she was alone, the sobs began,
echoing up from an empty pit that had opened inside her, quaking through her
chest, making her whole body heave.

           
"Want another coffee?" Rob
said. "No thanks."

           
"Corn muffin? They're really
good here."

           
They were seated by the front window
of a tiny luncheonette on East Thirty-third. The noontime rush was still half
an hour away so they had the place almost to themselves. The rich, heavy aroma
of chicken soup filled the air; the peppery tang of hot pastrami wafted across
their table.

           
"No. Thank you." A sudden
thought broke through the haze that enveloped her. "They're 'good here'?
You recommend them?"

           
"Yeah. Could use a touch more
sugar, but they're almost as good as mine."

           
A fond memory forced its way through
the gloom— Friday nights in Rob's apartment as he buzzed around the kitchen,
heedless of how his amateur chef act clashed with his tough cop image, watching
him follow a recipe just so far and then deciding he could improve on it,
usually with disastrous results.

           
"You really ought to have
something to eat."

           
"You sound like my
mother."

           
"Fine. Listen to your mother:
Eat something."

           
Kara allowed herself to smile.
"Buzz off, Mom."

           
"Okay. You still smoke?"

           
"No. I quit years ago."

           
"Mind if I do?"

           
"Yes. I'm surprised you're
still puffing those things. They're poison."

           
"Buzz off, Mom," he said.

           
Kara smiled and surrendered to the
memory of how she had fallen for Rob soon after she'd arrived in the city. They
met in a room full of men, in McSorley's Old Ale House, a formerly men-only
tavern that had recently been forced by the courts to serve both sexes. Kara
had been braver and less wise then—the
Central park
incident was a long way off. She'd led
Kelly down to one of the toughest parts of the Bowery just so she could have a
beer in that old bastion of male exclusivity. After a long wait they each were
served two mugs of porter—McSorley's sold them only in pairs. Some of the men
present made some rude comments, but most just stared, as if she and her sister
had crawled out from under a rock. One of the starers was Rob.

           
Even amid all those other men, Rob
stood out. He wasn't in uniform, and it had nothing to do with size, although
his six-two, tightly muscled frame didn't exactly blend in with the paunches
around him. It was something else. Even when there were bigger, more physically
imposing men present, something about Rob subtly but undeniably announced to
any room he entered that a
man
was on
the premises. He maneuvered himself to their table and, despite the catcalls
from his friends at the bar, sat with them.

           
The three of them left together, but
it was Kara who fell so hard for Rob. It was Kara and Rob from then on. At
least until Kara ended it.

           
She gazed out at the street where
people hurried through the stark cold sunshine. Through the fog of condensation
on the window they were motley blurs, actors on a tv with a bad tube. Kara was
glad she couldn't see their everyday faces as they scurried by, going about
their lives as if nothing terrible had happened. For Christ sake, Kelly was
dead! Didn't they
know
? Didn't they
care
?

           
God, how she hated this city. And
all the people in it, too.

           
One of them had killed her sister.

           
"Who did it?"

           
"We don't know."

           
"Not even a suspect?"

           
"Not a one."

           
"Great detective work!"
Kara said and instantly regretted it. "Sorry. That was a cheap shot. But
you must know
something
."

           
Rob nodded. "We know that
somewhere around
one A.M.
she
left the Oak Bar with two men in their mid-thirties. We have descriptions of
both and a good set of prints off one of the glasses in the room—you have no
idea how many sets of prints you can find in a hotel room—but no ID as yet. We
don't think they were registered in the Plaza. Shortly after
two A.M.
she came through a twelfth floor
window."

           
Kara closed her eyes and shuddered.

           
"Was she conscious?"

           
"Witnesses say they heard her
scream."

           
"Oh, God."

           
The coffee turned rancid in her
mouth. Again she felt her stomach heave, but she forced it down. There was
something else she had to know. She couldn't bring herself to look at Rob as
she asked it.

           
"Was she… was she raped?"

           
There was a long pause. Finally she
opened her eyes and looked at him. His face was tight.

           
"You're not going to like
it."

           
"Tell me!" she said, the
rage within her tearing at the surface of her control, screaming to break
through and strike at someone. Anyone. "
Tell me
!"