Jerry didn’t. So Jamie told him all about it, about protecting Jerry when things got bad, and how one night, Mama hurt Jerry so badly that his head was smashed open, and Jerry started to remember.
“Is that why it always hurts me now?” Jerry asked, and Jamie told him that it might be.
“I went away after she did that,” Jamie said, “because I was afraid she would do the same thing to me if she ever found me.”
“Did she?”
“No. Never. But I found her,” Jamie said darkly.
“And me.”
“And you.”
“Don’t ever leave me again, Jamie.”
“I won’t. I promise.”
“And if Mama ever comes back, you can make sure she doesn’t hurt me.”
“She won’t be coming back, Jerry. I promise you that, too.”
“But what if she—”
“Trust me. She won’t.”
Jerry hopes not. He really does.
Now, as is his new habit upon coming home, he walks over to her bedroom door.
Mama always spent a lot of time in her room with the door locked. Sometimes, Jerry would hear her talking in there, but he never saw anyone go in or out.
“Mama?” he calls, and knocks.
No reply from behind the door.
He tries the handle, just to be sure.
Yup, it’s still locked, just the way she left it when she moved away.
Sometimes, Jerry thinks about trying to get it open, but Jamie told him not to.
“Why would you want to go in there?”
“It’s probably dirty. I should clean it.”
“It’s not dirty. Don’t worry about it, Jerry.”
But Jerry worries, because there’s a bad stink coming from Mama’s bedroom, and he’s afraid it will attract bugs and rats.
“Ms. Taylor . . . ?”
Seated in a small room at the local police precinct, Allison looks up to see a rumpled-looking, middle-aged man in the doorway.
He’s wearing a dark tie whose point rides a good inch above his belt, and a dark shirt under a dark sport coat that, should he ever attempt to button it, would most certainly strain over his potbelly. There’s about as much salt-and-pepper hair in his bushy eyebrows and mustache as there is on his shiny head. He has sharp, shrewd eyes, but they’re not unkind.
“Detective Rocco Manzillo.” He strides over, shows her a badge, shakes her hand.
A strong smell wafts in the air between them. The smell of smoke, and burning rubber, and . . .
And she doesn’t want to think about what else.
“Were you down there?” Allison asks him, and he looks taken aback.
Maybe she was wrong.
But he nods.
Of course. The smell is distinctive, burned into her lungs and her memory.
“I’m sorry,” she says, wondering how many cops were killed and whether he knew any of them. Every officer she’s encountered today, both here at the station and back at the building, and even earlier, on the street, has been professional and efficient, but they all seem to have a vaguely preoccupied demeanor.
Detective Manzillo gives a weighty nod. “And I’m sorry about your friend.”
Her friend. Allison swallows and clasps both hands, hard, around the paper water cup someone gave her earlier.
Kristina is dead.
Not just dead. Murdered.
Allison saw her there, on her bed, covered in blood . . .
She shudders, remembering.
“Ms. Taylor, I need to ask you some questions, okay?” Detective Manzillo is sitting across the table from her now, taking out a pad and pencil. With the thick accent of a native New Yorker, he launches into a series of questions, most of them routine—her full name, age, occupation, etc.
She already went through all this information with the other investigators, back at the scene. It’s necessary, she knows, but exhausting to relay it all again; she’s been answering questions from the moment she screamed and Mack came running.
He was the one who called 911.
Even now, she can’t stop picturing the grisly scene as she numbly answers Detective Manzillo’s questions, relieved he isn’t asking anything that requires considerable thought.
Until: “When was the last time you saw Kristina Haines?”
She already discussed this with the cops at the scene. Ordinarily, she might have recalled it with ease days later, but too much has happened since that lazy weekend afternoon. Now, the details of her last encounter with Kristina lie almost out of reach beyond a yawning chasm, all but buried in the rubble of a seemingly distant past.
She clears her throat. “I saw her on Sunday afternoon.”
“Tell me about it.”
“There’s not much to tell. I mean, she was in the laundry room, and I came in, and we chatted while we washed our clothes.”
“About . . . ?”
“Oh God, I’ve been trying to remember everything she said. It was just small talk, really. We talked about her new temp job, and her commute . . .”
Detective Manzillo scribbles on his pad. “What else?”
“Um, we talked about how hard it is to find someone to date in this city, and—I already told the other police officers this—she mentioned that her ex-boyfriend had taken her CD player when he moved out, and she said she missed having music around. Did the other officers tell you that?”
“Yes. Tell me exactly what she said about it if you can.”
She searches her memory and does her best to quote Kristina word-for-word, then asks Detective Manzillo, “Is there a CD player in her apartment now? I mean, obviously, there must have been, because I heard the music, but I didn’t see one . . .”
I only saw her.
Covered in blood.
Dead.
“Yeah, there’s a CD player. The song that kept playing in her apartment,” Detective Manzillo says, “did you recognize it?”
“It was ‘Fallin’ ’ by Alicia Keys. I know the song, but—I mean, I’d never heard Kristina play it.”
“Do you know if the song might have had any significance to her?”
“I don’t know. It’s popular. I hear it all the time on the radio.”
He nods, scribbling on his pad. She notices that his pencil point is worn down to a nub. That bothers her. Some people can’t tolerate fingernails on a chalkboard or squeaking Styrofoam. Allison has always gotten chills when the wood of a dull pencil scrapes against paper.
“Tell me about Kristina’s ex-boyfriend.”
She drags her attention away from the pencil. “His name was Ray. I don’t know his last name, but—”
“We’ve got it. We’re already checking him out. Did she have any contact with him lately?”
“Not that I know of. But—I mean, it’s not like I talk to her all the time. We’re just neighbors, really.”
“Not friends, then?”
“Kristina is the kind of person who talks to everyone about anything and everything, so . . . it’s kind of hard not to be friends with her.”
She watches Detective Manzillo write something on his pad. The damned pencil lead is almost flat. Fixated on it, she shudders.
“How long have you known Mr. MacKenna?”
Startled by the shift in topics, she looks up. “A few months—ever since he moved into the building—I think that was May or June. But I didn’t know him well at all until the last day or two.” She explains about Mack’s wife; about how she’s been trying to give him support.
The detective writes it all down as if he’s hearing it for the first time, but she doubts that’s the case. The first officers to arrive at the scene separated Allison and Mack. They called for backup, then ushered Allison into her apartment to be questioned and Mack into his.
&
nbsp; She has no idea where he is now. If they brought him down to the precinct, too, she hasn’t seen him.
“How would you describe Mr. MacKenna’s behavior today?”
“What do you mean?”
“You spent time with him this afternoon. How did he behave?”
Her temper flares at the absurdity of the question—unless no one told him about Carrie, which seems unlikely.
“You know his wife is missing, don’t you?”
“I know. How did he behave when you were with him?”
“How do you think he behaved?”
The detective is silent, watching her, waiting.
“He was upset,” she tells him, not bothering to hide her irritation. “That’s how he behaved.”
“Upset.”
“Yes.”
More silence. Clearly, he’s waiting for her to elaborate.
“You know—upset—distracted, and worried about his wife.”
“Did he mention Kristina at all?”
Grasping where he’s going with this—disturbed and perturbed by where he’s going with this—Allison shakes her head. “Mack never brought her up. I did. I was worried because I hadn’t heard from her and I asked if he had.”
“Why would you think he might have?”
“You mean why would he have heard from her? Because they’re neighbors. We’re all neighbors. You check in on your neighbors when something like this happens.”
Something like this . . .
Nothing like this has ever happened before. Who’s to say how people can be expected to behave in the aftermath of a terrorist attack of this magnitude? This is uncharted territory.
Which means you probably shouldn’t assume anything, Allison tells herself. About anyone.
Earlier she had speculated that there might be something going on between Mack and Kristina. Now she wonders what Mack told the cops about their relationship and whether there was, indeed, anything to tell?
But of course, no matter what happened between them, he had nothing to do with her murder. Allison is a hundred percent certain about that.
A hundred percent? Really? Why? Because he seems like a great guy? Because you feel sorry for him?
What if her instincts about him are completely off?
For all she knows, he’s a cold-blooded murderer in disguise.
A murderer whose wife happened to fall victim to a terrorist attack just yesterday? And then, what? He just snapped and killed his mistress?
Anyway, Kristina wasn’t his mistress. Allison had dismissed that theory when she got to know Mack today.
Yes, you know him so well. You got to know him in . . . what? A couple of hours in the middle of a crisis?
Assume nothing, Allison. If you’ve learned anything in the past few days, it’s that nothing in this world is ever one hundred percent certain, ever.
“What did Mr. MacKenna tell you when you asked if he’d heard from Ms. Haines?” Detective Manzillo asks.
“That he hadn’t. That was pretty much it.”
“Pretty much?”
This guy is relentless.
Well, of course he is. That’s his job. Allison wants him to do his job and find Kristina’s murderer, doesn’t she?
“That was it,” she clarifies. “That was all he said about Kristina.”
Although . . . was it? She thinks back, wishing she’d been paying more attention to the details. But her concern about Kristina wasn’t exactly the primary topic of her conversations with Mack today.
“Was she seeing anyone now, do you know?”
“Seeing? You mean dating? I have no idea.” Allison hesitates. “If she was, she didn’t say.”
“Then you never talked about your love lives?”
“No, we did. But there wasn’t really anything to say.”
He rests his chin on his fist and stares hard at her. “What is it that you’re not telling me?”
Allison bites down hard on her lower lip to keep it steady and forces herself to look him in the eye as she shakes her head.
“Ms. Taylor, this is a murder investigation. You’re a key witness.”
Key witness to a murder, on top of everything else. How much stress can she possibly handle before she breaks?
Come on, now, Allison. You’ve been through worse. Get a grip.
Worse. Yes. She’s definitely been through worse. This wasn’t like before, with her mother.
But then, she’d been prepared for her mother’s death. And though it was hardly from natural causes, it wasn’t at the hands of a homicidal maniac.
“You have an obligation,” Detective Manzillo is saying, “to tell me everything you possibly can about what happened the last time you saw the victim, whether or not you think it’s relevant.”
“I know, I’m just . . . I’m trying to remember what she told me about her love life and how she said it, exactly.”
“Do your best.” His blunt pencil is poised over his notepad.
Looking away so that she won’t have to watch him write with it, she recounts what Kristina said about married men being the only available guys in this city.
He nods, making lengthy notes.
Did she just incriminate Mack? In an extramarital affair, if not a murder? If something like that were exposed now . . .
She thinks about Bill Kenyon’s wife, Stephanie; about how she was hoping, just a little while ago, that Stephanie will never find out about her late husband’s roving eye.
She thinks about Carrie MacKenna. If it turns out Mack really was sleeping with Kristina Haines, and it all comes out in the aftermath of her murder, then it’s a blessing that his wife will have died without knowing the truth.
You don’t know that, though. You don’t know that there was an affair, you don’t know that Carrie wasn’t aware of it if there was one, you don’t even know that she’s dead . . .
You don’t know anything, do you?
Detective Manzillo thinks she does, though. She can’t even come right out and tell him that she honestly doesn’t believe anything was going on between Mack and Kristina, because that will only confirm that she’s considered the possibility. And then he’ll think she’s hiding something.
“Was anyone else in the laundry room while you and Kristina were there?” he asks.
“No. I was surprised about that, because sometimes all the machines are full and you have to wait, but it was nice out that day so people were probably out doing— Wait!” Suddenly, she remembers. “Yes, someone else was in the room.”
Detective Manzillo regards her with interest, as though he senses she’s about to reveal something important.
“The building maintenance man—he was there.”
“In the laundry room?”
“Yes, and—oh my God, I can’t believe I didn’t think about this until now.” Her pulse quickens. “He was in the first floor hallway, too, when I got home late on Tuesday night—or Wednesday morning, actually.”
“You saw him there?” the detective asks sharply. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. It was kind of dark, and I was a little bit out of it, but . . .”
“Out of it?”
Should she tell him about the Xanax?
No. He might discredit what she’s saying, and she knows what she saw.
“I had just walked all the way home, and I was exhausted,” she says, “and—you know, shell-shocked. Like everyone else.”
“What time was it?”
She shakes her head. “I don’t know. I’m sorry. Late. I didn’t look at my watch that I remember, and when I got home, all my clocks were flashing because the power had gone out.”
“Okay. What was he doing when you saw him?”
“He was on the first floor, coming out of the stairwell, and he went right out into the
alley.”
“Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
The detective nods, writing everything down. “What’s his name?”
“It’s Jerry.”
“What’s his last name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where does he live?”
“I have no idea. I’m sorry. He’s just always kind of hanging around the building, fixing things. On Sunday, when we were in the laundry room, he was working on a washing machine but Kristina said she didn’t even think it was broken.”
“Do you think she was right?”
“I don’t know—I wasn’t really paying much attention to him, I guess. But Kristina mentioned that he gave her the creeps, and I did see the way he looked at her . . .”
“How?”
“You know—like he was interested.”
“Leering?”
She considers that. “I wouldn’t say leering. It was kind of more . . . I don’t know, innocent. There’s something wrong with him, mentally—he’s kind of slow or something. More like a boy than a man, is how I would describe it.”
“Is there anything else you can tell me about him? Anything at all?”
She searches her memory. “I can’t think of anything—other than that Kristina thought he might have been responsible for the burglaries that happened over the last couple of weeks. Did you know about that?”
“Yes. Why did Kristina think he was responsible?”
“She just didn’t trust him, I guess. I told her I thought he was harmless.” Allison swallows hard. “Do you think he killed her?”
Detective Manzillo looks her in the eye. “What do you think?”
“I honestly don’t know.”
She’s just glad she’s back to being certain—well, ninety-nine-point-nine percent certain, anyway—that it wasn’t Mack.
Chapter Eight
Allison closes the door behind her, shutting out the squawk of a police radio coming down from the fifth floor.
Before they parted ways in the elevator just now, Detective Manzillo told her they’d have cops around all night, working on the case.
Maybe that should make her feel safe.
It doesn’t.
It means the monster who killed Kristina is still out there somewhere.
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