Authors: Richard Hawke
At First Avenue, he veered to his right. Son of a bitch. There’s a residential complex called Waterside Plaza at Twenty-fifth Street and the FDR. An angled walkway crossing over the highway leads to the complex. Ratface hit the walkway at full speed. I was losing him. Fear is a mighty fuel, and he was burning it well. I pounded up the cement walkway, which spilled onto a large plaza. I saw my quarry leaping down a short set of steps to a narrow walkway that fronted the river. It also led to one of the complex’s apartment towers.
I pulled my gun and stormed forward, nearly tumbling down the short flight of stairs to the lower plaza. My vision was starting to play games with me. There was a large glass entranceway to the apartment tower. It seemed the only place he could have gone, and I headed for it.
I never made it.
The son of a bitch had ducked behind a stone support pillar opposite the entrance. I saw his reflection in the glass just as he lunged from his hiding spot and hit me full force, his lowered shoulder connecting with my ribs. He drove me sideways all the way to the low cement wall overlooking the river. I hit the wall hard, my gun rattling to the pavement. What little oxygen I had in my lungs left me. Ratface was still with me, still down low. The sparks returned to my vision, and my arms came down on the man’s head and neck as uselessly as if they belonged to a rag doll. When I felt a grip tighten around my ankles, I knew exactly what he had in mind.
As he rose, he brought my legs up with him. I saw his face for just an instant. His cheeks were hot red. Frothy saliva was overflowing his mouth. Then my arms were pinwheeling, and my head whipped backward. I spotted the Huxley Envelope sign upside down across the river, then looked down at the bruise-colored films of ice along the shoreline below me. Ratface let out a powerful grunt.
I saw my feet. They were above me. Then they were below me. In the air. I was falling. The burning in my lungs this time was my own voice crying out into the cold air as the river ice rushed forward. The last thing I remember—funny—was my cell phone vibrating again. My world went black even before I hit.
NIKKI ROSSMAN SLID down farther in the tub, to the point where the water was just touching her chin. She lifted her right foot and gently eased her big toe into the faucet so that it was snug and secure. She took a shallow breath and held it. She wanted to still the water completely. Her body appeared rubbery beneath the water, like something manufactured in a factory. Nikki recalled a movie she had seen a few years back, a high-tech Pinocchio-like story that had included a large workroom featuring thousands of white rubber torsos hooked on a seemingly endless hanging conveyor belt. The marble-white torsos had produced an inexplicably erotic feeling in Nikki. They were genderless. Breasts would later be added to some; to others, subtle six-pack stomachs and a solid rubber package where the legs came together. Nikki had wondered at the time why it was she found the torsos so disturbing and compelling. She had imagined lifting one of them off its hook and pressing it against her own body, embracing it with all her strength. In her imagination, the artificial torso had proved malleable, a pliant rubber that, in response to her own body’s warmth, would begin to conform to her contours, molding itself around her as she squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.
Nikki looked at her pale body rippling under the water. She was still amazed at the marvels of modern science. Or was it modern medicine? Both. Under the water, her slender legs zigzagged like some sort of cubist rendering. Her tiny waist appeared magnified and liquid. Her flat tummy undulated. Calories burned, calories avoided, a love affair with her gym, plus the lucky draw of petite genes. Now, still feeling so new after nearly six months, the beautiful, perfect swell of these fantastic marble-white breasts.
She touched one of them. Pliant. Just as promised. She pinched it, and then she stroked it and cupped it. Then again. Pinch, stroke, cup. Her lustrous hair floated on the surface of the water like an island of golden sand. With her other hand, she reached lower. The toe was snug in the faucet hole. It felt almost stuck there; she could imagine that it was. She lifted her free foot and set it against the tiled wall, as far up as she could manage. She flexed her toes as forcefully as she dared, backing off when she sensed the low flinch of her calf muscle wanting to cramp. The toe in the faucet really did feel stuck now.
He likes it when I can’t move. He likes it a lot.
Arching her back, she tilted her head to the point where the water lapped at the V of her hairline. Her torso rose while her hand stirred and wandered. Bathwater slapped rhythmically against the sides of the tub.
Half an hour later, Nikki got out of the tub. Rain was splattering against her window. She dried herself off and smoothed lotion over her arms, her thighs, her breasts. She removed the tags from the new plaid skirt and fastened it with the oversize safety pin around her waist. She modeled the purchase in the mirror, folding her arms over her breasts and swiveling this way and that, making the thin wool pleats swish. Do schoolgirls still wear these? she wondered. When he had asked her to buy it—giving specific details and insisting on giving her the money—he had told her precisely what he had in mind for the next time they got together.
And he had told her not to forget a change of clothes.
Nikki folded a loose cotton skirt into her bag. She chose the black V-neck pullover that she had decided not to throw out after the augmentation.
It had been one of her favorites. The nurse at the clinic had clued her in: “Don’t throw away the old stuff just yet, honey. It might find an all-new life.”
The nurse had been right. The black V-neck pullover was nice and tight. Even more of a favorite than before.
“Wicked,” she said to the mirror. Then she expertly applied her makeup, ruffled her damp hair—she was going to let it dry on its own into a tangled mane—and fastened the chain with the special pendant around her neck.
“Wicked,” she said again.
And off she went to die.
MEGAN LAMB SLAPPED a two-pound cut of flank steak onto her cutting board and went at it with her large knife. She recalled the old anti-drug campaign: This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.
As she hacked at the meat with her too-dull knife, she reworked the slogan: This is your brain. This is Brian McKinney’s brain…on my cutting board!
A cord of bluish gristle required some sawing before Megan was able to sever the beef into two pieces. With a modified
Psycho
swing, she planted the knife into one of the pieces and let it remain there. She placed the other piece in a metal bowl of mustard and teriyaki marinade. The simple move triggered an image from several months before, not one that Megan welcomed. The image was that of Albert Stenborg’s brain being lifted from its skull casing and settled onto a metal pan to be weighed. Joe Gallo, among others ( Josh, to be sure), had urged Megan not to attend the Swede’s autopsy, but she had ignored the pleas. She’d needed—or so she’d felt—to see the monster disassembled. She had hoped for some catharsis in hearing firsthand the medical examiner’s dispassionate litany of damages wrought by the hail of bullets from Megan’s service weapon. When the time came to extract the brain, Megan had inched closer to the table, determined to take a hard look. Only several hours later, seated in the dark corner of Klube’s, had she realized that the answers to why Albert Stenborg had been the man he’d been and done the things he’d done weren’t located in the spongy grayish pulp weighing three pounds, five ounces. For answers to those questions, the issue was more a matter of the monster’s heart and what it was about his life that had damaged that tender organ so horrifically. These were answers that would never come.
Megan glanced out her small kitchen window at the wedge of a river view her place afforded. The call was for heavy evening rain—a classic April dousing—but nothing had started yet. The low clouds gathered over the river were gray and milky, belly-lit from Manhattan’s excessive wattage. Across the Hudson, a series of silent lightning flashes was illuminating the scant skyline of Hoboken. Staccato blasts making it look as if the small city were suffering through a bombardment.
MEGAN OPENED a bottle of pinot grigio and poured half a glass. As early as a month ago, she would have poured a second glass and set it on the coffee table in front of where Helen usually sat. Megan had had no clue she was in possession of such a maudlin streak, but life is about discovery, isn’t it? Sweet Helen. Megan went into the living room and looked at the framed photo on the bookshelf. It was the last photo that had been taken. Helen holding forth in this same room on New Year’s Eve, waving her champagne glass as she presented her laundry list of resolutions, angling for “the perfect year.” After Helen’s murder at the hands of Albert Stenborg, Megan had put the picture in the frame and tried out dozens of different locations around the apartment. None had satisfied her, and she had seriously considered taking it to the photo shop on Greenwich and having them make multiple copies so she could display Helen’s infectious laugh throughout the apartment. The shrink the department was sending her to didn’t think that was such a good idea. Megan had made the mistake—she thought of it as a mistake—of telling the shrink about her practice of pouring the extra glass of wine and placing it where Helen usually sat. The shrink hadn’t thought that was a good idea, either.
Today would have been Helen’s birthday. Tonight. Now. Josh had promised to come directly from the airport, even though Megan had insisted she’d be fine. But he’d called several hours ago from the tarmac in Memphis. His phone breaking up.
Heavy rains. Delays. Not sure. Will call back
.
The rain began during Megan’s second glass of wine. This time a full glass. The book on Cynthia Blair’s murder was on the coffee table. Woefully thin for a ten-day-old murder. Cynthia Blair had last been seen alive at approximately four-thirty on the afternoon of April 15 by the Korean woman where Cynthia took her laundry to be done. Cynthia had returned to her apartment with two bundles of folded laundry in a Crate & Barrel shopping bag; she’d opened one of the bundles, rifling through it while leaving the other untouched. Details. Megan had ordered a chemical check on the clothes that Cynthia Blair was wearing when she was murdered, to determine which piece of newly laundered clothing she had opted to don before heading out later in the evening. Was it the pants? The blouse? The underwear? Socks? Or—least likely—was it the scarf that had been used to tie off her windpipe for the several minutes required to guarantee her death? It had proved to be the blue-and-white-striped underwear. Conclusion to be drawn? Nothing. Zero. Or at least nothing that Megan could come up with. She felt dulled, as though her instincts were numb. Her mind felt clumsy, and she wished Joe Gallo had never assigned her this homicide. Cynthia Blair was now a week in her grave, and her murder book was still thin.
And Brian McKinney was an asshole.
“I hear your vic put on fresh panties before she died,” McKinney had needled that morning, pressing his hands on her desk as if keeping it from floating off. “Good work, Meg. Have you tracked down where she bought said panties? Might crack this whole case open in no time.”
They say that everybody has somebody who loves them, but to Megan this merely meant that in McKinney’s case, somebody was loving an asshole. She knew at least some of the reasons he was such a jerk to her. But he was
such
a jerk, she figured there had to be even more reasons than just the obvious ones. This time he had gone too far. Megan had been tipped off. Tomorrow’s
Post
was going to have a scoop under Jimmy Puck’s byline.
Unnamed sources confirm that Ms. Blair was in her third month of pregnancy at the time of her murder
.
Great. Just fine. One more cat out of the bag. Rusty bucket. Leaky bag. Oh, what the hell. Megan finished her wine and poured another glass. She supposed she should be grateful for getting a full ten days into her investigation with the information of Cynthia Blair’s pregnancy remaining under wraps. Cynthia Blair wasn’t McKinney’s case, he didn’t have anything to lose in handing a goodie like Cynthia’s hitherto unreported pregnancy over to Jimmy Stupid Name Fat Butt Puck. Megan knew that the smirk would be firmly in place on McKinney’s face when she walked into the station the next morning. And she knew what Joe Gallo would tell her:
Don’t take it personally
.
But she wasn’t taking it personally. Not this time. It was Cynthia Blair’s parents Megan was thinking about. They’d be the ones taking it personally. Megan had been in Joe’s office when the Blairs had arrived directly from the airport, the two nearly drained of the ability to speak, imploring Joseph Gallo with tear-reddened eyes to end the bad dream right now and present their daughter to them, alive and vibrant. The Blairs took the news of their daughter’s pregnancy as if they had just been told she was composed entirely of green jelly beans. They couldn’t take it in, and they had made Gallo repeat the information three times. Four times, actually, though at that point Joe had turned the chore over to Megan. Maybe it would be better coming from a woman. Megan had felt her skin begin to crawl as she detected the Blairs latching on to her. She was only a year older than Cynthia, and at least to the naked eye, she was a competent, capable young woman in a high-stress environment in the overwhelming city of New York. Just like Cynthia. Only she was still alive. Megan thought that Mrs. Blair in particular was more than ready to go quietly unhinged, take Megan by the hand and tell her, “Pack your things, honey, we’re going home now.” Megan had led the questioning—pro forma, she knew it from the get-go—about Cynthia’s personal life, and did the Blairs have any indication from their daughter that she was seeing anyone in particular? Both Megan and Gallo knew that the questioning was a hollow exercise. People who knew Cynthia much better than the pale couple from Tucson and Cynthia’s close friends and recent work colleagues had all responded to similar questions and offered up nothing except that they’d all thought Cynthia Blair had been too ambitious to have a personal life. That was the general rap. Her life had been her career. Or vice versa. The Blairs offered nothing beyond their full-scale wonder, consternation, and inability to process how the both of them had entered into this surreal dream together and how in the world they would find a way out of it. Joe Gallo had promised them that the information about Cynthia’s pregnancy would remain private. “It’s part of the investigation. But beyond that, it’s nobody’s business but yours.”