His voice flat beyond emotion, Krull recited the seven digits. It was my phone number.
We drove to my apartment in the unmarked police car that Krull had picked up at the station. It was beige, a few years old, American. It reminded me of Sal’s Cavalier, which reminded me of blood.
I was wearing the same outfit I’d had on the day before, plus Krull’s leather jacket to replace my ruined coat. It was the same one he’d been wearing when I’d first seen him at Sunny Side, and it felt good—protective, like strong arms around me. I wanted him to insist I keep it.
Art Boyle and a couple of squad cars were going to meet us outside the building. Then they’d either capture Mirror Eyes, or, at the very least, recover whatever evidence he’d left. The thought of his mouth on my receiver still made me cringe, but otherwise I was weirdly energized. I’m working with the cops, I kept thinking. “So am I an operative or an informant?” I asked Krull.
He didn’t reply.
Krull hadn’t wanted me to come with him, but I’d insisted. If he was angry about it, I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be alone again in his empty bedroom, worrying about what was happening to him outside.
The detective stared straight ahead with his teeth clenched, his jaw squared. I examined his profile. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and faint black stubble highlighted the strong bones in his face. His eyelashes were beautiful, I realized. Soft and lush and sweet looking—not like the hard stubble, not like the prominent bump at the center of his nose. “How’d you break it?”
“Break what?”
“Your nose.”
He looked at me. “I did something I shouldn’t have. Something that was not safe, that I had no business doing. If I had stayed where I should’ve stayed, it never would’ve happened.” I knew he was trying to sound stern and punishing, but he wasn’t doing a very good job of it.
“Oooh, what did you do? Get into a brawl with some skel?”
He let out a short, involuntary laugh. “Skel?”
“Yeah, you know. A skel. A perp. A jailhouse Johnny.”
“Where do you get these expressions?”
“Jailhouse Johnny come at you with a shiv?”
“Not quite, Mickey Spillane.”
“Some rat fink squealing punk wouldn’t give up the goods, so you had to leave the negotiating to Mr. Fist and his five little friends?”
“You have really been watching some crappy cop shows.”
I could tell he wasn’t angry anymore, so I put my hand on his thigh and squeezed it. “It ain’t easy being the Man, huh?”
He put his hand on top of mine. “You bet it ain’t easy, dollface,” he said. “But that’s not how my nose got broken.”
I looked at him. “Then what did you do that wasn’t safe?”
“I jumped off our roof when I was seven years old. I was pretending to be Superman.”
I smiled. “Ah.”
“Broke my leg too, but that healed better.”
We were about half a block away from my building; Krull pulled over to the curb. Through the rearview mirror, I watched a dark blue Impala slide in behind us, watched Art Boyle squeeze out of it and walk up to the driver’s side window. “Freakin’ car only gets AM radio, so I’m stuck listening to that freakin’ all-news station that gets everything wrong.”
“Since when do you say freakin’?” Krull asked.
“I’m a gentleman.” He smiled at me. “There’s five uniforms up in your apartment, Miss Leiffer, and they say nobody’s there.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” It wasn’t, really.
“I bet we find lots of trace,” Boyle replied, as if he’d been reading my mind. “You’d be amazed at what people leave behind, without even knowing it. Probably be able to get a full DNA sample from your phone.”
I got out of the car. As we walked toward my building, I turned to Krull. “Hard to think of him as having DNA.”
“Yeah, too human.”
Inside my apartment, I saw three of the uniforms standing near the door, and I realized one of them was Rosy Cheeks, the gay-paranoid cop from the previous night. “You might want to keep away from my CD collection,” I told him. “There’s a lot of Liza in there.”
“Huh?”
Near the coffee table, Krull and Boyle were speaking to two more officers—a Latin guy with an eagle tattoo on his arm and Rosy Cheeks’ redheaded partner, Fiona. “Miss Leiffer,” she said, “do you like your refrigerator? I notice it’s a Kenmore, and I’m thinking of getting one.”
Well, that was out of left field. “I don’t keep a lot of things in it other than coffee and leftover Chinese food.”
“Mind if I take a peeksie?”
“This is a crime scene, not Macy’s,” Boyle said. “Go shopping on your own hours.”
A crime scene. “To tell the truth,” I said, “it feels kind of nice to talk about . . . kitchen appliances. It feels normal.”
Fiona looked at Boyle.
“Knock yourself out,” he said.
Krull put a hand on my shoulder. “Take your time. Look around, and see if anything seems out of place or different,” he said. “If it does, just point it out, we’ll collect it.”
I paced the area, looking at the phone stand, the bookshelves, the positioning of the couch, TV, stereo. Everything was where I’d left it, including the cordless receiver at the center of the dinette table, next to Krull’s business card. “That explains where he got your number,” I said, pointing to the card.
Krull nodded. “Good detective.”
I spotted the blinking light on my answering machine. “I didn’t have any messages before.”
“Let’s give it a listen,” Boyle said as Fiona moved towards the kitchen.
When he hit the button, I noticed the rubber glove on his hand, and it struck me as funny, this sterilized object in an apartment with dust bunnies under the couch.
The electronic voice said, “You have two messages.”
“Probably from my mother. She’s concerned I might be a drug addict.”
“Why?” Krull said.
I shrugged my shoulders. “She’s a self-help author.”
“Is your mother Sydney Stark-Leiffer?” said Boyle. “I saw her on Oprah.”
“New message. Three a.m.,” said the machine.
Next came a female voice, but it didn’t belong to Sydney. It was small and trembling and, if I’d ever heard it before, I couldn’t place it. “Hello . . . Samantha.” A sharp intake of breath. “You don’t know me, but you’ve . . . seen me. Your number was here, with your name. He wrote it. He only writes down numbers of people he . . . I need you to know I didn’t kill them. He did. I was afraid. I wanted to run away, but I couldn’t. Um, it’s early in the morning. Meet me by the river at . . . noon? At Shank’s. I want to help you. Please.”
“Shank’s Dredging and Construction,” I said. The woman in the red dress. Krull and I stared at each other.
The call had come in five hours after Sal had been shot, three hours after Yale and I had seen the man outside St. Vincent’s. “It was a new message—not saved. The only way he could have heard it is if he was in here when she called.”
“He probably didn’t,” Krull said. “We know he called you at seven. That’s four hours he would have had to—”
“New message. Six-thirty a.m.,” the machine interrupted. Again, the caller was female, but older this time, and angry: “Young lady. I am calling from downstairs and this is outrageous. I know you are in there, and I know you are awake because I hear your boots clomping on those hardwood floors.” Elmira. “If you do not take them off this moment, I am COMING UP THERE AND I MEAN IT!” I felt my jaw drop open.
Rosy Cheeks and the tattooed cop were pulling the couch across the room. And as it moved, the body that had been shoved underneath revealed itself like a sick, slow striptease: skinny legs first, then hips, chest, head. Elmira.
Krull said, “Turn around, Samantha.”
My eyes went to the feet, to th
e acid green mules.
“Shit, man,” said one of them. Rosy Cheeks, I think.
“Do not look!” Krull shouted.
I heard my own hollow gasp, saw blue-white skin, a torn green nightgown with a gaping dark bloodstain, a knife—my kitchen knife—submerged to the thick, pine hilt at the center of the stain. I saw eyes, wrenched open, pupils so huge and black that the whites were obscured. No . . . not pupils. Hollow, empty sockets.
“Shit, man, shit. My first corpse and it looks . . . looks . . . Help me . . .”
“Act like a man, for chris—”
“Sam, close your eyes!”
But I couldn’t respond, couldn’t move. Blackness crept into my field of vision, and I felt my knees start to buckle, saw the dusty wood floor rushing up to my face.
I was vaguely aware of a woman’s voice in my kitchen. “Found something!” it said, half shout, half scream. As I lost consciousness, I realized it was Fiona. She must have opened my refrigerator.
13
Area Unsafe
“She’s dead.”
“Naw, look at her.”
“I am lookin’ at her and she ain’t moving.”
“She’s just out, is all.”
The first voice was male, the second female, and I didn’t recognize either. I thought they were probably talking about Elmira, and I wanted to say, Are you crazy? Didn’t you see what was done to her? But all that came out of my mouth was a groan.
“See, I tol’ ya,” said the man’s voice. Slowly, I opened my eyes and let them adjust to bright lights. I felt big, gentle hands on my face, figured out they were attached to John Krull. “You okay?” he said.
“Sure, she’s okay,” said the voice of the man who stood over Krull’s shoulder. He was thin and weathered with large dog eyes. A small, pale woman stood next to him. “We thought you was dead, honey,” she said, and I recognized them as my next-door neighbors, the Schultzes—or the Schwartzes, I still wasn’t sure—to whom I’d barely said anything more than hi during four years of living here. “Uh . . . Hi.”
I realized we were in the lobby of my building. Someone must have carried me down—presumably Krull. I was on the floor, my head and shoulders propped up on his knees.
My eyes went to the vaguely familiar people who stood staring behind the Schultz/Schwartzes—people whose names I’d never heard; people I sometimes nodded at, maybe exchanged forgettable remarks with, but only about the weather, only if we happened to be sharing the elevator and only if the weather was in any way remarkable. Looking up at them now, I felt overexposed and kind of silly. “What happened?” I asked Krull.
“You passed out. I took you out of there.”
“That I could’ve guessed.”
He turned to my neighbors. “She’s fine, everybody. Move along.”
As the small group dispersed, I recalled the open mouth, the vacant, bloody sockets. I looked up into Krull’s warm black eyes and shuddered. “Elmira . . .”
“I know.”
“He just . . . scooped them out.”
“Ssssh. Don’t think about it.”
I struggled into a sitting position and stared at him. “A woman’s eyeballs were in my refrigerator! You can’t not think about that.”
“I know. But for now, you’ve got to try and focus on other things.”
“Where were they, the butter tray? The fucking crisper? Jesus . . .”
“Let me take you down the street, buy you a cup of tea.”
“A cup of tea,” I repeated stupidly. I wanted to say more, but my thoughts were moving so quickly . . .
Graham, Sarah, the girl in the footlocker. Elmira, barely bigger than a child herself . . .
More little corpses. Then little you.
I was on my feet, pushing the glass lobby door open and running outside, past the cluster of police cars, past the small group of gawking pedestrians, past the scaffolding on a neighboring building and then directly under a ladder, the first time I’d ever done something so blatantly unlucky. Keinahora. Fuck that. You can’t get rid of the evil eye once it’s here, and it’s here. It’s in the refrigerator.
I kept running to the edge of my block, out into the avenue and in front of cars, with their horns blaring and their tires screeching as I stood at the center of one of New York City’s clogged and dangerous arteries, thinking, Go ahead and kill me. Run me over and kill me, and then I’ll be the last little corpse.
Somebody yelled, “Get the fuck outta the fuckin’ street, ya fuckin’ psycho!”
I heard Krull’s voice calling my name and then I felt his arms around me, pulling me back onto the sidewalk and holding me there as I struggled, body trembling, breath cutting through my lungs like that thick-handled knife.
Krull pressed me to his chest. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said. I could feel his chin moving on top of my head, the curve of his warm neck, his heart beating as hard as mine through his heavy coat.
“He’s going to kill one of my kids.”
“He won’t. I promise.”
I pulled away, looked up at his face. “What if I had called the police Friday night as soon as I got back to the box office? You’d have caught him. Sal wouldn’t have gotten shot. Elmira would still be alive, and so would that little girl—”
“You think they would’ve sent out even one squad car because you said you saw two people dropping an ice chest in the river—one of them a disappearing guy with mirrored eyes?”
“If I’d insisted enough.”
He shook his head. “Anyone you spoke to would have tried to humor you like I did.”
“It’s my fault.”
“No. It’s mine.”
“Give me a break.”
“Do you know why I came to your classroom with Genovese and his dog puppet?”
“Because you were interested in community service.”
He looked into my eyes long enough to make me feel uncomfortable. “Two years ago, our unit caught that other case—the boy in the Tenth Street Dumpster,” he said finally. “He was such a small kid for six. His name was Graham, which is my younger brother’s name. My brother used to be small for his age too, and I was big, so I was always sticking up for him at school. I’d scare off some bully, and Graham would say, ‘You saved my life, Johnny,’ because he’s always been kind of melodramatic like that . . .”
A guy on a cell phone passed us. “Whatever, we don’t do magazine events!” he shouted into the tiny piece of machinery, gesturing so emphatically that he knocked Krull in the back. I pulled him closer.
“My brother became a scientist like our dad.”
I watched him swallow to smooth out his voice, and I could almost hear the words as they entered his mind: What can you become in six years?
“I told Graham’s family we were going to find the murderer. Staked my life on it. Amanda said it was stupid to say that, and she was right—”
“You tried.”
“I went to your classroom with Genovese because I wanted to look into the faces of some of the kids I’d let down.”
I moved closer, bringing my hands up to his face, running them lightly against the beard stubble, across the nose he’d broken playing Superman.
His eyes glistened slightly, from the cold or from emotion, or from a combination of the two. “We did discover one thing about Graham. He’d been sneaking onto Internet chatrooms, using his older sister’s account. It could be where he met the killer.”
“He was young to be doing that.”
“He was advanced. Spent all his time on the computer and putting together these intricate model airplanes. He wanted to be an engineer. At six. His parents said he’d tested as a genius.”
I swallowed hard, thinking of Sarah Grace Flannigan—half Graham’s age and too young to have tested as anything. What can you become?
“I called Graham’s folks when I went back to the station this morning, to double-check the screen name. His sister had gotten a new address after he was killed. But when I l
ogged on with her old password, I saw that it was still open, still receiving mail.”
I stared at him.
“ER425160. The numbers are jersey numbers—hers and her two best friends’—from junior varsity basketball. ER stands for the team name, the Edison Royals.”
“John,” I said. “Can we please just nail this fucker?”
I was relieved to hear that Krull had called in absent for me, placed Sunny Side under surveillance and given Terry my temporary NYPD cell phone number so he could call me in case of emergency. It was one less thing to worry about on a dauntingly long list.
Near the top of that list—just under my butchered neighbor—was the wire. I was about to be fitted with one—a real, FBI-style listening device, which I would wear to meet the woman who had called me. Meet me by the river at noon, she’d said. I want to help you.
Well, sweetheart, you are going to help me. You’re also going to help some NYPD detectives catch your freaky boyfriend, whether you want to or not.
In less than two hours, I would meet a blond murder accomplice at an abandoned construction site, wearing a wire and a bulletproof vest. It was so over-the-top B movie, I had to say it out loud.
“You going to start talking about skels again?” asked Krull.
“Skels,” Boyle snorted. I was sitting in the back of a disguised police van (“Gordy’s Plumbing” was painted on the side) with Krull and Boyle, plus one other detective unit of three, finishing up the coffee and bagels that the friendliest of the new detectives, Munro, had provided. Munro was around Boyle’s age, but more or less his physical opposite—thin and sinewy with sharp, serious features, his silver hair tied back in a ponytail.
“Some of the DAs use that expression—skels,” Munro said. “Makes ’em feel like tough guys.”
“I’ve never heard it,” said Krull. “They probably say it around you because you look like Clint Eastwood and served in Vietnam.”
“You really think I look like Eastwood?”
“Lotta people tell me I look like Nick Nolte,” said Boyle.
One of the other detectives chuckled. A short, laconic guy named Pierce. “Yeah, and I look like Cher.”
Hide Your Eyes Page 16