One Small Sacrifice

by Hilary Davidson

  He used to go up there all the time, but he’d stopped after Cori died. There were a couple of rickety metal folding chairs that looked in danger of imminent collapse, though they’d been up there as long as Alex could remember. He went to the ledge. It was ridiculously low by safety standards, just a little ridge of bricks that came up to his ankle. It would be so easy to fall off the side and end it all. The temptation was there. It wasn’t far removed from his desire for drugs; they were both a quest for oblivion when reality became too oppressive. Yet he knew he couldn’t do it. Emily was missing, and he wouldn’t abandon her.

  He looked down at the street. At this distance, in the dark, it didn’t look that far away. What if Cori had jumped? Talking to CJ and Jayson had helped him, because neither of them took Will’s story at face value.

  He could have lied to you and to Emily, CJ had insisted. If the police actually investigated him, what would they find?

  That was true. Will had never even admitted that he was involved with Cori until Alex had confronted him—and threatened him. He was a skeletal, drugged-out spider, spinning a web of lies that fell apart when you looked at it in daylight. Was he that ashamed of being involved with Cori? And why hadn’t Cori told him . . .

  He heard the door creak open behind him and half turned to see who was there. As he did, a projectile shot past him and over the edge of the roof. Kevin Stanton stood in the doorway, holding what looked under the moonlight like a handgun. Only the long projectile that had whizzed past Alex hadn’t been a bullet.

  “Fuck,” Stanton said. “Literally nothing is going right tonight.”

  He fired again, and Alex dodged to the side, catching sight of a long, slim cylinder streaming past and over the edge. When Stanton fired again, Alex felt something dig into his shoulder. He pulled the dart out immediately and threw it on the ground.

  “You’re trying to kill me with poison?” Alex said.

  “That’s just a tranquilizer. It’ll render your body immobile but keep your brain alert. I want you to be awake for this.”

  Wavy lines were creeping into Alex’s vision, as if he’d suddenly entered a psychedelic tunnel. There was a dark spot in the center that was clear, and he focused it on Kevin Stanton’s furious face. “You’ve wanted to kill me since Cori died. What took you so long?”

  “It wasn’t enough for you to die. You had to suffer first. I wanted you to experience the agony I’ve lived through this past year.”

  Alex felt a strong urge to lie down and melt into the roof; he had to fight to stay upright. “I always told the truth,” he said. “I don’t remember everything that happened the night Cori died. I know I wanted to end my life. Cori wanted to kill herself too.”

  “Because of you. You’re the one who convinced her to die.”

  “You always denied that Cori was suicidal.”

  “Because the police wouldn’t understand,” Stanton answered. “If I’d told them Cori called me to say goodbye, they never would’ve investigated her death.”

  “She called you?”

  “Cori told me you two were going to kill yourselves. She didn’t want to die alone. Yet she died while you lived.”

  “Did you ever think why Cori tried to kill herself so many times?” Alex asked. It was getting harder for him to speak. His jaw felt wooden, and his tongue seemed swollen and gooey.

  “She was dramatic. She loved the attention.”

  As much as the drug messed with his senses, Alex’s mind was clear. “You sexually abused Cori after your wife left you,” he said. “She told me.” Cori had never uttered the word abuse, but Alex had understood the hints she’d dropped. It was part of the darkness she’d always carried with her.

  Stanton rushed at Alex with a bloody knife in his hand. Stanton thrust it at his neck, but Alex grabbed his arm and shoved it into the air. Stanton’s momentum knocked them both off their feet. They hit the macadam and rolled toward the tiny ledge.

  It shouldn’t have been so hard for Alex to pin the older man down and wrest the knife away from him, but his arms were like wet noodles; he could move them, but he couldn’t quite control them. With his tunnel vision, he could see himself flailing away.

  “Lie still,” Stanton said, slowly rising until he was sitting on the ledge, his craggy face looming over Alex’s. “Because if you don’t die tonight, Emily will.”

  “What?” Alex said. For the first time, he realized his mouth wasn’t cooperating anymore either. His lips were frozen, and the sound came out as Ut?

  “Maybe I should’ve led with this,” Stanton said, sitting up and staring at the blade of the knife. “If you love Emily, wouldn’t you be willing to die for her?”

  “Yes.” It was like being in a dentist’s chair, mouth open, able to form only caveman sounds. Esss.

  “It’s just one small sacrifice, when you think about it, because your life is worthless,” Stanton said. “I’ve set up everything perfectly. If I die, Emily dies. If the police arrest me, she dies. There’s only one way to avoid a tragic, painful, horrifying death for your girlfriend, and that’s for me to get exactly what I want. Do we have a deal?”

  You’ll never get what you want, Alex thought. Because that would involve Cori magically returning to life and suddenly adoring her father. He knew that both things were equally unlikely. Cori’s hatred of the man had burned deep.

  “You . . . won’t . . . hurt . . . Emily?” Alex asked. Choking out each word was an ordeal.

  “No. Only you.” Stanton almost smiled. He started to lift Alex’s right hand onto the parapet but dropped it suddenly, as if he’d had a change of heart. Alex realized it was only a fear of being too close to the edge of the roof when Stanton moved to the other side of his body. Then he jammed the knife into Alex’s left hand.

  The pain was electrifying. Alex’s scream was loud enough for the entire street to hear, but it blended into the dark melody of car alarms and traffic noise, broken glass and human shrieks. No one would hear a cry for help. It could be just another angry drunk rolling out of a pub.

  “Good luck using that hand again,” Stanton said, withdrawing the knife. “Oh, wait, you’re going to die at the end of this anyway, so it doesn’t really matter. Nothing does. I’ve learned that lesson this past year. Nothing takes your grief away or makes it better. It consumes you.” He leaned closer. “So many times, I wanted to kill myself. But I couldn’t let that happen, because I needed justice for Cori.”

  “Not . . . justice,” Alex whispered in a labored rasp. “Revenge.”

  “They’re the same thing,” Stanton said. “I’m out of time. My doctor says I have only months to live. I had to make my move now. Even if the police catch me—and I expect they will—it won’t matter. I won’t live long enough to serve a day in jail.”

  “What did you do to Emily?” Alex could barely get the sounds out, but he realized his symptoms weren’t worsening. His body felt slack, but his mind was sharp. How much of the tranquilizer had gotten into his bloodstream in that nanosecond before he pulled it out?

  “Does it matter? I guess it does, to you.” Stanton loomed over him, holding the knife in front of Alex’s eyes, as if deciding which one to pluck out first. “She’s trapped in a cage, like an animal. It seems only fair. She’s the reason you were never brought to justice for Cori’s murder. Emily deserves to suffer.”

  As he spoke, Alex realized that the deal Stanton offered—the right to torture and kill Alex in exchange for Emily’s life—was a lie. Stanton hated him, and that loathing extended to Emily. Alex’s death wouldn’t be enough for him; he would ultimately kill Emily too. That thought ran through his body like electricity, firing every synapse.

  “What will it be?” Stanton’s face was so close to Alex’s he could smell garlic on the man’s breath.

  Am I condemning Emily to death by taking this maniac out? Alex wondered. That thought was horrifying, but so was the idea of Emily being alive at Stanton’s mercy. Not your turn today, Maclean used to tell him. Not your
turn today, until one day it was. This was his day, Alex realized. This was where it all ended.

  That realization powered through him as Stanton crouched over him, raising the knife again. Alex knew he didn’t have much strength, but all he needed was some momentum. He reached for Maclean’s lighter in his pocket. Stanton turned his head, watching Alex fumble with it.

  “What are you going to do, set me on fire?” Stanton mocked. “Your fine-motor skills are gone.”

  “Don’t need ’em,” Alex muttered, dropping the lighter, grabbing Stanton, and rolling over the ledge. The knife sliced into his arm, but the pain didn’t register because both he and Stanton were spinning in midair, hurtling five stories down toward the pavement.

  THURSDAY

  CHAPTER 48

  SHERYN

  It was one in the morning when Sheryn and Rafael met up at the crime scene. The stretch of West Forty-Eighth Street between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues was blocked off by squad cars. There was yellow police tape around the walk-up where Traynor and Teare lived. On the sidewalk directly in front of the building was a human form covered by a heavy white tarp.

  “What the hell happened here?” Rafael said.

  “We’ve got two dead males,” a uniformed cop from the Manhattan North Precinct answered. He was on the young side, but with a grave demeanor that made him seem like he’d already seen too much.

  “How did it go down?” Sheryn asked.

  “Far as we can put together, two men were up on the roof of the building,” the uniform said. “Kevin Stanton and Alex Traynor. They had a physical confrontation. There are knife wounds on both their bodies. They went off the roof together.”

  Sheryn walked over to the tarp and pulled a corner back. Kevin Stanton lay on the sidewalk. His head was turned to the side, but there was a knife sticking out of one eye. His other stared ahead, unblinking. His mouth was open. He must’ve been screaming when he died, she thought.

  “Where’s the other body?” Sheryn asked, covering Stanton up again. He wasn’t a good man, she reminded herself. Now, at least, he had a chance at peace. That thought wasn’t as comforting as it should’ve been.

  “Over there.” The cop pointed at a gurney with another tarp pulled over it. Sheryn stared at it while her partner stepped closer to take a look. Something about the body didn’t seem . . .

  “This is the building’s superintendent.” Rafael sounded stunned. “Bobby Costa. His throat’s cut wide open. What the hell happened to him?”

  “There’s a trail of blood from beside the staircase back to his apartment,” the cop said. “That’s why we found him so quickly. Yeah, he was stabbed in the throat and bled out.”

  “Where’s Alex Traynor?” Sheryn asked.

  “Bus took him over to Bellevue.”

  “He’s alive?” Rafael asked. “The guy fell off a five-story building, right?”

  “Yeah, right onto a pile of garbage and recycling with a mattress and box spring on top,” the uniform answered. “He’s one lucky bastard. Stanton might’ve survived the fall, too, if that knife hadn’t gone into his head.”

  An eye for an eye, Sheryn thought, and shuddered. “What shape is Traynor in?”

  “Hard to say. He was unconscious.”

  Sheryn nodded. It was too much to hope for a miracle that Traynor would be able to tell them what had happened that night.

  “Are you going inside?” the uniform asked. “Because it’s a bloodbath in the super’s apartment. There’s a little blood up on the roof, too, but it’s not bad. We found a couple of these.” He held up a clear plastic bag with a needle-topped cylinder inside.

  “That’s a tranquilizer dart,” Rafael said. “The kind you take down a tiger with.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t laugh. When I started on the force, it was in San Diego,” Rafael answered. “You know who they call when a critter escapes the zoo? You can fire these out of a pistol or a rifle.”

  “Gotcha,” Sheryn said. “Stanton was a vet, so it’s not hard to figure how he got animal tranquilizers. You think he used this on Traynor?”

  “Sure looks like it.”

  “We also found this,” the uniform added, holding up another baggie. Inside was a silver lighter. ELIAS MACLEAN was engraved on one side, with a date and what she took for an army service number. She recognized it immediately, even though the last time she’d seen the lighter was the night Cori Stanton died.

  “This belongs to Alex Traynor,” she said. “Can I take it?”

  “It needs to be logged into evidence,” the uniform said, taking it back.

  Of course it did. She knew that.

  “The thing is, why would anyone kill the super?” Rafael asked.

  They both turned to stare at the shrouded remains of Bobby Costa.

  “That man had his hands folded over his chest postmortem. His phone was placed underneath them,” the uniform said. “The last number dialed was 911. But he told the operator his kid dialed the number by mistake.”

  “Bobby Costa doesn’t have any children,” Sheryn said. “I’d like to hear the recording of that call.”

  It took only a couple of minutes to get it. Sheryn listened, then passed the phone to her partner. “That’s Stanton’s voice,” she said quietly. She turned her eyes on the uniformed cop. “I guess it’s too early for any forensics?”

  “If you’re wondering about the weapon used, there’s only one we’ve recovered. That knife.” He jutted his head in the direction of Stanton’s body.

  “It’s possible Bobby Costa got in Stanton’s way,” Rafael suggested. “He’d kicked him out of the building before.”

  Sheryn felt her heart squeeze inside her chest. “We showed Mr. Costa a photo of Stanton this afternoon,” she said. “Maybe he was just trying to do the right thing.”

  “You want to head inside?” the uniform asked. “We’ve got cops posted on every floor.”

  “I’m going to head to the hospital to see Alex,” Sheryn said. “You coming, partner?”

  CHAPTER 49

  ALEX

  Alex wasn’t sure if he was alive or dead. When he’d flung himself and Stanton off the roof, he was certain he was going to die. Their trip to the ground lasted only a second, but in Alex’s mind, it felt like a lifetime passed. He had held on to the thought of Emily, to his love for her. Don’t let her die, his mind shouted; that was as close to a prayer as he’d gotten since his mother had passed away. If he could’ve traded his life for hers, he would have in a heartbeat.

  But instead of dying, he’d landed on top of Stanton, and the knife they’d been wrestling with had gone right into Stanton’s head. Alex wished he could claim credit, but it felt like he owed a debt to gravity. They’d rolled to one side, sliding down a pile of trash until they hit the pavement and Alex blacked out.

  As he came to, he realized his entire body was in searing pain. Is this supposed to be hell? he wondered. There were voices all around him, crowding his head and his thoughts and making him want to scream.

  “Alex.” Through the bedlam, he heard a low, gentle voice and felt a cool palm resting against the side of his face. When he opened his eyes, he saw Detective Sterling peering down at him. “It’s okay,” she said. “Do you know where you are, Alex?”

  “No.”

  “We’re at Bellevue Hospital. They don’t have a bed for you yet, which is why you’re in a gurney in the hallway. The nurse told me they’ve given you a few drugs.”

  “Everything is on fire.” Alex’s eyelids fluttered.

  “They told me that’s a good sign. Means there’s no spinal damage. Maybe that’s not much of a consolation right now.”

  “Stanton took Emily.” Alex’s mouth was so dry that moving it to speak made it feel like his lips were cracking. He remembered something and tried to sit up.

  “Whoa, there. Let’s take this slow,” cautioned a man, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. Alex hadn’t noticed him before. His name floated through Alex’s
head and vanished. Sterling’s new partner, that was the only part he could grasp.

  “He said she’s still alive, but for her to live, I had to die,” Alex said. “I was going to let him kill me. Then he said Emily deserved to suffer. He was going to kill her no matter what.”

  “Did he tell you where she is?” Sterling asked.

  “In a cage. That’s all he said.” His breathing got rapid; his heart fluttered like a bird in his chest. “He said if anything happened to him, Emily would die.”

  “Was there anything else he told you?”

  “He said he was sick,” Alex murmured. “He was going to die. That’s why he did this.”

  The detective’s phone rang. She glanced at the screen and handed it to her partner. “Could you take it?”

  The man did, moving down the hallway.

  “We’re doing our damnedest to find Emily,” she said. “Now that we know who took her, we’re going to put this together. I promise you we’ll do everything we can.”

  “I know you will,” Alex said. His eyes closed again and his breathing deepened. He was fighting to stay awake. In the distance, he heard the partner’s voice. “Sheryn, you are never going to believe who just resurfaced.”

  “Try me.”

  “Emily Teare,” the detective said. “She’s turned up at a bed-and-breakfast near Greenwich, Connecticut. We’ve got to get out there now.”

  CHAPTER 50

  SHERYN

  “I don’t like this,” Sheryn said. “It doesn’t feel right.”

  “What are you talking about?” Rafael shot her a curious look. He had been driving when they left the city, but they’d switched places near Mount Vernon, and now Sheryn was at the wheel of his black Mercedes. It was five in the morning, and neither one of them had had a moment’s rest that night. “This is an amazing ride.”

  “I wasn’t talking about your car. Duh.”

  “Good. Because if you were, my husband would be offended.”