Nightwatcher (31 page)

“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.

H
uddled 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.

V
ic’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.