Never Alone

by C. J. Carpenter

  “Excellent ploy, Nappa, redirecting the conversation back to me.”

  “No, seriously, I’m curious.” Nappa’s interest was sincere, but also a successful strategic move.

  “What did you assume the reason was?”

  “I figured because your father was a cop, he’d influenced you.”

  “I prefer to look at it as inspired rather than influenced. Influenced feels ugly to me, like he pressured me. I was never pressured to become a cop, though I did enjoy how it sent my mother through the roof.” She smiled. “My mother would have definitely preferred a stockbroker or lawyer. A home in Westchester, two grandchildren, a golden retriever, and me volunteering for the Junior League.”

  “Sure, I could see that.” Nappa conveyed his sarcasm with an eye-popping expression. He refilled their glasses before sitting back on the couch. The few times Nappa had met Rose before her health had gotten really bad recently, he took joy in watching the one person who could get under Megan’s skin. But he also saw the love they had for one other. It was as deep as the Mariana Trench, and just like it, you couldn’t touch the bottom, but you always knew it was there.

  “So, because my mom wanted me to do all those things, that’s exactly what I didn’t do. As for my dad, well, you’ve heard all the stories about how great a detective he was. I don’t think I’ll reach that level, but …”

  “You’re wrong. You’ll probably never see it, but you’re wrong. You’re a great detective.”

  “Thanks.” She could feel her face redden.

  “Oh my God. Detective Megan The Meganator McGinn is blushing.”

  “It’s the wine.” She sipped from her glass, feeling her face turn even hotter.

  He shook his head and whispered, “I don’t think so.” He lightly stroked Megan’s cheek. She closed her eyes trying hard to remember the last time she’d felt a man’s gentle touch. Sex had been recent, and rough, but a soft caress—that hadn’t happened for a very long time. She put her hand up to his, about to push it away; instead she leaned into him, allowing their lips to touch. It was a light, tender kiss until Megan ran her fingers through his black hair, pulling him closer. Their tongues met as she moved back on the couch, pulling him on top of her. His deep kisses moved from her lips down her neck. He stopped, straddled her while taking off his shirt, then removed hers button by button. He rubbed his palms over her chest, slowly moving each bra strap down her shoulders before unfastening it, tossing it to the floor. His mouth moved over each breast, sampling the taste and feel of her nipples in his mouth, softly between his teeth. She moved his hand toward her pants. He started to unbutton her jeans when their cell phones rang. He collapsed his head into her bosom in frustration.

  “Shit.” Megan buried her face into his hair. “Shit.” The phones continued to ring. “We have to get that.” Megan moved photos, files, searching for her cell. Nappa checked his jacket. Nothing. He let it go to voicemail by the time Megan located hers.

  “It’s Rasmussen.” She answered, doing her best to calm her breathing, “McGinn.”

  Megan knew fate had stepped in, but she was currently of the opinion that fate was a real bitch. She listened to the details from Rasmussen. “Yeah. Uh-huh.”

  Nappa put his shirt back on and picked up Megan’s bra. He stood behind her, brushed her hair to the side, slowly slipped the straps up each arm, moving the cups under her breasts, which moments ago he’d tasted.

  “What’s the address?” she asked. His soft fingers fastened each hook with delicate precision. His touch sent shocks up and down her body. “Hang on a second.” When she paused the conversation with Rasmussen, Nappa placed his forehead on her shoulder, his arm around her. She fell back into his touch, knowing that this could never happen again.

  He kissed her neck, then released his hold on her.

  Her tone turned overtly official. “The address?”

  “Young. Female. Upper East Side. Hundred-and-Eighth Street and Fifth.” She snapped the phone shut and quickly pulled her shirt back on. “Let’s go.”

  eighteen

  The next murder scene had the impressive Fifth Avenue address, but the neighborhood bordered Spanish Harlem, and at night, it also bordered safety. It was dangerous to go too far away from the avenue after dark, and even more dangerous to be in the area of Central Park that faced the building. On occasion, a floater would be found in the center of the Harlem Meer, the pond just inside the northeast corner of the park. A mugging or random stabbing was usually to blame, and there was certainly enough to consider that particular area of the Upper East Side less than safe. They’d ruled out a connection to their earlier unsolved homicide, but another murder so soon after Shannon’s would make the headlines.

  Detectives Palumbo and Rasmussen were waiting outside the apartment when Megan and Nappa got off the elevator.

  “There you are.” Palumbo closed his cell phone when he saw Nappa accompany Megan off the elevator.

  “Hey, guys.” Megan was anxious to get into the apartment. “What do we have here?”

  “Young, probably in her twenties. Caucasian, female,” Detective Palumbo answered.

  Megan didn’t wait to hear the remaining information. She walked into the two-bedroom apartment, assuming the body was going to be in the living room. A member of the forensics team alerted her, “Detective, she’s in the other room. The bedroom down the hall.”

  “Thanks,” she said.

  The young woman’s dead body lay naked with her face turned to the side. She had two nipple piercings and a tattoo of a rose on her lower abdomen. A sheet covered the rest of her. In the ashtray next to the bed was a half-smoked joint and next to that were two lines of cocaine on a small mirror.

  “Detective, this is getting to be a habit. We’ve seen one another twice this week,” Assistant Medical Examiner Jonesy said.

  “Well, I guess that means neither of us has a life because we’re always working,” Megan replied.

  Jonesy pointed his black pen down at the naked dead woman before him. “Well, we have more of a life than she does now.”

  “Looks like she was partying it up before she went.”

  “She went out with a bang, a puff, and a snort. I’ve seen worse,” he said.

  “Christ. Aren’t you too young to be this jaded?” Megan turned the woman’s head to check the marks on her neck.

  “She was strangled with this.” He pointed to the side of the bed. A long black scarf was crumpled up next to the bed.

  “Sex games?” Megan asked.

  “Yeah. She lost to autoerotic asphyxiation.” He continued making notes on a legal pad as he answered her questions.

  “Who found her?” Megan asked.

  “Roommate.” He flashed a look toward the door, indicating the roommate was down the hall.

  “Where is she?” Megan asked.

  “That would be a he, and he’s down the hall.” Jonesy flashed a skeptical look.

  Nappa walked in, looked over the scene, and commented, “Well, this is certainly a different setting from the last one.”

  “I’d say so. The roommate is down the hall.”

  “I was just with him. Palumbo and Rasmussen are speaking to him right now. They’re trying to find information on next of kin.”

  “What do we know about her?” Megan asked.

  “Her name is Eve Scott. She’s from Park Ridge, New Jersey, but she’s lived here for the last five years with the roommate,” Nappa explained.

  “Did she have a boyfriend that the roommate knew of ?” Megan asked, sounding more like Jonesy in her tone. She began looking through some of the dead girl’s personal things.

  “The roommate said they come and go at different times. He wasn’t up on her personal life.” Nappa looked around the bedroom. The drugs and a scarf were on the floor next to the bed.

  Jonesy piped in, “That’s an
understatement: come and go. Specifically, she went when she came.”

  Megan and Nappa looked at each other in slight awe of the cynical comment. “Jesus, can you be more specific?” Megan sarcastically asked.

  “She died as she orgasmed. The scarf was too tight,” he said.

  “Yeah, I understood that part, Jonesy. I was kidding.”

  “I’ve seen this before. A lack of oxygen makes the orgasm stronger, more intense, something along those lines.” Jonesy hadn’t looked up once from his note taking as he spoke.

  Nappa glanced at Megan and grinned. “Jonesy would know.”

  Megan leaned into Jonesy, making sure none of the other crime-scene investigators were currently in the room. “We need to ask you something. Has her vaginal canal been sewn shut?”

  That question prompted Jonesy’s first glance up from the pad he’d been writing on. “You’re fucking kidding me.”

  Both detectives remained silent.

  “Okayyyyyy.” Jonesy lifted the bedsheet. Given the victim was spread-eagled underneath, it wasn’t too difficult to give them an answer. “No. And I do not want to know why you asked me that.”

  Megan’s attention was drawn to an item on Eve Scott’s desk. “Jesus.”

  “What?” Nappa asked.

  She used her pen to lift the key chain off the desk. An identification card in a plastic cover hung from the end. “Look.”

  “Oh great,” Nappa said.

  It was a Columbia University student ID.

  _____

  The crowd that had gathered outside the dead woman’s building began to scramble for cover when lightning flashed and thunder rumbled. Long, needlelike spears of rain broke over the pavement. “Let’s sit this out a little bit. What do you say, Nappa?”

  They sat down on the faux-leather sofa in the lobby, their backs facing the street and the press. “I don’t think the two are connected, but I’m worried about the fact two women from the same university have been killed in the same week.” Megan shook her head. “The media will ride this one hard.”

  “Of course they will. Gotta sell papers. Gotta get ratings.” Nappa stared down at the floor. “I think we should talk about what happened earlier.”

  “Sam … We will, but not now.” She raised her eyebrows. “The last few days have been a lot to take in. Can we just put it on ice for now?” She put her hands up in prayer. “Please.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, I would say there’s a few bigger things going on. Ice is fine for now.”

  “Thanks.”

  They sat in silence thinking of what had taken place on Megan’s couch. Megan cleared her throat moving closer to Nappa, “There’s something I think I need to explain,” she raised her eyebrows with a slight grin. “Earlier at my place when we were …”

  “Researching the case?”

  “Yeah, then. You touched a part of my lower neck.” Megan pointed to the covered scar. “I got this when I was seventeen. I visited a friend at her college upstate. We were at a keg party at one of the fraternities. Well, four beers later—hey, I was a lightweight then.” She stopped and stared out at the storm. “My girlfriend hooked up with some college hockey player and decided to stay at the frat house. She gave me the keys to her place and I started walking home. More like stumbled, I guess. Some guy took me from behind by my neck. He pulled me into this vacant house. It was disgusting. He was disgusting. There was garbage everywhere. Broken dolls, really sick shit.” Megan ran her hand through her hair looking up at the ceiling to gain composure. “He started to drag me up the stairs. Smashing my head down on each one. I thank God to this day I never lost consciousness. But then, he pulled out a knife.” She closed her eyes, picturing the knife. She’d never seen a knife so big, so close to her eyes before. “He started to run it across my chest.”

  She looked over at Nappa. He remained silent.

  “I don’t remember much after that. I don’t know how I got away, but I did. Never called the police, underage drinking and all.”

  “You were a young girl, you didn’t know any better.”

  “But you see, I was the lucky one; McAllister wasn’t. If this guy is anything like what I think he is, he’s lining up his next victim. We have to find him. I can’t let another woman go through something like what McAllister went through.”

  “And what you almost went through.” Nappa looked at Megan with even more respect than he already had for her. “I thought you were a pit bull cop to prove a woman could be great at the job. Turns out you’re a survivor.”

  “That’s funny, I never thought of myself as a victim.”

  nineteen

  The rain continued to pour down, holding them hostage in Eve Scott’s apartment lobby. “God, I can’t wait to get out of here.” Megan stood and grabbed her bag without realizing it wasn’t fully zipped. All the contents emptied out. Keys, pens, makeup, Moleskine notepads, a three-day-old banana, and The Catholic Times fell onto the lobby floor.

  “Now, that’s interesting.” Nappa picked up the newspaper. “I thought you said your were a lapsed Catholic.”

  “Nappa, I didn’t buy this. When I went to visit my mother yesterday, the old guy pushing the newspaper/magazine cart gave it to me.”

  “As a hint?”

  “Funny.”

  Another shock of lightning and thunder smashed over the sky. The lobby felt as if it were moving through a car wash; the rain pounded down without break.

  “Looks like we have time. Let’s take a look.” Nappa started to flip through the free newspaper. “Bingo this Saturday?”

  “I’m busy.” Megan smiled.

  “Father Joseph McCann is being honored.”

  “Pedophile party?”

  “McGinn, please. Now we’ve hit the mother lode: the obits.”

  “Um, what do we need to read that section for?”

  “It’s next to the personals—”

  “Nappa, close your mouth when you read. You look like you should be playing a banjo on a porch somewhere.” Megan grabbed the paper.

  “Second column, middle of the page.”

  It was a small paragraph: Shannon M. You Have Been Returned. The date of Shannon’s murder was written underneath the heading. She turned to the front page of the newspaper to check the date. “Nappa, this paper is for this week. This can’t be right. It can’t be the same Shannon M.”

  But neither detective believed in coincidences. Megan turned the paper back and forth from the obituary section to the publication date on the front of the newspaper.

  “If this is what we think it is, the killer submitted it to the paper nearly one week before he killed her. Motherfucker,” Megan said.

  “When should we call the lieutenant?”

  Just as he asked the question, Megan’s cell phone rang. She glanced down at the caller ID. “Looks like right now.”

  “McGinn,” Megan answered.

  “Please tell me this murder is in no way connected to the McAllister case.” Walker had a way of getting to the point when exasperated.

  “I don’t think it is.”

  “Thank God.”

  Been a lot of thought of the Holy Father in the last few minutes. “But …”

  “But what?”

  “This vic was a student at Columbia. We found her university ID among her things.”

  “She couldn’t have gone to NYU?” Walker griped.

  “If it helps, the crime scenes are in complete contradiction. On this one there was rough sex, drugs involved, and she was strangled with a scarf, not by hand.”

  “I’m not sure that’s going to help, but it’s something. Was her snatch sewn shut?” Walker did have a way with words sometimes.

  “No.”

  “Good. Mrs. McAllister is coming to the office in the morning for her daughter’s personal effects. You know she’ll pr
obably have questions. Are you prepared?”

  “I spoke with her earlier. I told her I’d be there.”

  “Good.” The lieutenant hung up without a goodbye.

  Megan looked at Nappa. “Just when we were really starting to connect, she ends the call.”

  “You didn’t mention the paper.”

  “No. Let’s check it out before we bring it up as a lead.”

  “You’re meeting with Mrs. McAllister tomorrow. I’ll check it out first thing.”

  They both sat quietly staring out onto Fifth Avenue. “I guess it’s time to face the other part of the storm,” Megan said, motioning toward the camera crews and the reporters clustered around the building.

  “I’ll keep it brief,” Nappa insisted.

  Lightning flashed again, followed by a smash of thunder strong enough to send a slight vibration through the room.

  “No time like the present,” Megan added.

  twenty

  As I sit in this overpriced coffee house, people come and go, many with the newspaper shoved under one arm as they pour cream and sugar into their fancy drinks. I can’t help but feel a coy smile brewing between my lips—I’m enamored by the morning’s headline.

  _____

  The big black letters of the morning paper could hardly be missed as Megan walked past the kiosk on her way to work: The Tailor Strikes. It stopped her in her tracks.

  “What the fuck?”

  The article bared all the information of the suturing of Shannon McAllister’s genitalia. There was no mention of the gold ring. She flipped open her cell and dialed Nappa.

  He answered immediately, “I know. I saw it.”

  “Who the hell could have leaked this?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “I’m on my way in now. Call Dr. Max; this had to have come from his office.”

  “Already done. I’m waiting to hear back from him.”

  “What the fuck is wrong with the media? ‘The Tailor’?”

  “No mention of the ring, thank God.”