Authors: Richard Hawke
The photographs told her nothing she didn’t already know. One a choking with the victim’s own scarf, the other a bashed skull and a knife to the throat. Megan sat with her elbows planted on the kitchen table, scissoring the pad thai with the red lacquered chopsticks she had given Helen for some occasion she could no longer recall. Her eyes trolled back and forth along the sets of photographs. As she seared the photographs into her brain, Megan found value in trying to imagine the killer in the moment before he quit the scene. The crime-scene photographer had taken shots from nearly every angle. At least one of these angles had to approximate the view of the killer as he looked down on his handiwork. Megan rose from her chair and stood over the photographs, casting her own shadow on them.
I’m the killer, she thought. I’m taking one last look at what I’ve done.
She stepped carefully around the photographs of the two slain women, sampling the different angles. Clutching the chopsticks in her right fist, she assumed a sense of being heavier than she was. Taller. With her free hand, she pushed her hair off her face and held it there, clutching it tightly, using the hair to pull her head back, exposing her neck. She looked at a close-up of Nikki’s left hand. Two of her sculpted nails were broken off. Megan placed her own short fingernails against her neck and pressed. She imagined a heavy guttural breathing, sharp grunts as the knife worked its way from one side to the other. She lowered herself to her knees and stared at the open eyes of Nikki Rossman. Then it came to her. The utter loathing for the person who had done this, the person whose actions she was aping in the privacy of her small kitchen. Megan caught her breath. She placed the tips of the chopsticks against her abdomen and pressed them there. Softly at first but then harder. The chopsticks were pressing into her skin. They were hurting. Hurt
him
, she thought. Let
him
feel what it’s like. And not a quick slashing cut, either, but something slower and deliberate. Something meaningful. Her hand was beginning to tremble with the effort, and Megan closed her eyes, trying to picture the killer. Faceless. A face in shadow.
Suddenly, as if a fork of lightning had ripped through her imagination, a face did appear. The Swede. Of course. The goddamn Swede. The broad brow. The large dull mouth.
Him
. She pressed the chopsticks even harder as she imagined Albert Stenborg and his large, oafish smile. She wanted to see blood seeping its way out of the Swede’s mouth. She wanted to see his heavy blue eyes freeze in sudden bewilderment, followed by the awareness. Hands-on this time. Not from a distance. Not with a handgun. So much more meaningful this way. Megan imagined she could move as close to his face as she wished. Close enough to feel his foul breath. Close enough this time to see her own reflection in his eyes, and to see in them the last thing on earth the murderous bastard was ever going to see.
Her.
The chopsticks snapped. The broken ends fell lightly to the floor, landing on the photograph showing a close-up of Nikki Rossman’s hand. The one nailed into her heart. Megan opened her eyes and looked down at her own belly. A tiny pink strip. A quarter-inch cut. In the scheme of things, nothing. On her hands and knees, she gathered up the photographs of the two murder victims, squared off the pile and placed it reverently on the kitchen table. There was enough pad thai in the container for two people. Or for a second meal. Megan finished it off. She took a shower, got into her faded robe and took the photographs into the front room, where she spread them out again on the floor, this time in front of the couch. She poured herself a small glass of bourbon and got onto the couch.
At twelve-thirty, Megan tried getting into bed. She made certain to drink several full glasses of water before she got under the sheets. There was a slight buzzing in her temples. She picked up the remote and turned on the television. Ever since Cynthia Blair’s murder, Megan had made it a habit to watch
Midnight with Marshall Fox
. She had never been a particularly huge fan of Fox, which she knew put her in the minority. She found his show oddly uneven. This one was a rerun. Megan realized that this was what she had tuned in tonight to find out. Was Marshall Fox going to stand up and make jokes in front of the entire country on the day when another young woman had been found murdered in nearly identical circumstances as his former producer? Megan was glad to see that the answer was no.
Megan watched the rerun for about twenty minutes, then turned it off. She shut off the light, wondering if this would finally be the night. Praying it might. Immediately, Nikki Rossman and Cynthia Blair climbed into bed with her. Next came Brian McKinney. He was followed by Marshall Fox. Megan flipped the light back on. Not tonight, then, dammit.
She got out of bed and went into the bathroom, where she stared at her reflection for over a minute. After this many months, Megan hoped she’d have started to get accustomed to those eyes. But they were every bit as foreign to her as they were the first time she’d seen them, right after she killed the Swede. But maybe that was actually a good thing, she thought, the fact that she wasn’t acclimating to them. She didn’t like looking at them, but she felt she had no choice. She had to face them. They were the only real truth she knew these days, even if it was not a particularly pleasant truth. Helen was dead. Truth. Cold, hard truth. So was the Swede. But the one wasn’t making up for the other. Not like it was supposed to. The math was off. She had dispatched the Swede, but the pain was still there. If anything, it was still growing, not shrinking away into the past like it was supposed to do. And some nights it hurt so horrifically that Megan didn’t know what to do with it. Stay home, she told herself. This was all she knew, her single piece of advice to herself. It was no solution for the pain, but she did know it was the right thing to do. Those several months of crawling into the darkness after taking her leave of absence from the department had not been the solution, not by a long shot. They had hurt. They’d been dangerously harmful. She might have curled up and remained there in the dark places if not for Josh. Thank God for Josh.
Megan shut her eyes and instantly saw Helen’s still and battered form, curled at the feet of Albert Stenborg. Megan felt like a knife was slashing at her lungs. At that precise moment, she knew that she should step down from the investigations. Something unhealthy was at play here. Some murky math. Helen’s killer was dead and in the ground, but apparently that wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. Not one cheap life for one beautiful one. The evil of that bastard was still out there, even if the man himself wasn’t. That was the problem. That was what Megan hadn’t succeeded in obliterating—the evil. It slipped from person to person. It had slipped up on Cynthia Blair and on Nikki Rossman. Megan had killed the Swede but not the evil. Albert Stenborg was simply evil’s discarded skin. Irrelevant. It was still out there, on the hunt, reaching from the shadows and plucking victims whenever it pleased.
Megan went into the living room and fetched the photograph of Helen from the bookshelf. She took it to the coffee table and set it there, facing the couch. She lay down on the couch, pulling the thin blanket off the back of the couch and spreading it over her. Not for the first time—not by a long shot—she told herself that if this kept up, she might as well just sell the stupid goddamn bed, for all the good it was doing her.
NIKKI ROSSMAN HAD LAST BEEN reported seen by a neighbor in her building. A widow named Rose Campanella told the police that she had seen Nikki carrying a shoulder bag, climbing into a “big fancy car” on the night before her body was discovered. Mrs. Campanella’s various descriptions of the driver essentially neutralized one another. The driver remained behind the wheel; he got out and opened the door for Nikki. He wore a chauffeur’s cap and outfit; he was “dressed regular.” The driver’s height, weight, hair color—Megan Lamb calculated that the witness had created a minimum of four completely different people who purportedly spirited Nikki Rossman away from her Tribeca apartment some four to eight hours before her murder.
Megan walked Mrs. Campanella through her story close to a dozen times. Fact and fiction were so intertwined in the rendering that the detective despaired of culling anything at all useful. Megan conducted the interview in the elderly woman’s apartment, two flights down from where Nikki had lived. She could not identify the pungent odor that permeated the apartment; an uneasy blend of peppermint, vinegar and mildew was the best she could come up with. The Lord Our Savior Jesus Christ was heavily represented on the walls, the bookcases, the tchotchke shelves. The furniture was covered in flower-print fabrics. The lamp shades were the color of nicotine and gave off a sepia glow. Midway through the interview, a pillow on the couch where Mrs. Campanella was seated suddenly stood up and stretched. Not vinegar, Megan said to herself. Cat piss. By God, am I a detective or am I a detective?
Megan was ready to toss in the towel when Mrs. Campanella mentioned that Nikki had offered to throw away her trash for her. Megan pounced.
“Trash? You didn’t mention anything about trash before.”
“I don’t think you asked.”
“Your building’s trash cans are caged out front, aren’t they?”
“Yes.”
“So what do you mean,
throw
your trash away? Do you mean she offered to lift the lid so you could toss the trash in?”
“No, no, my legs give me trouble. You see how I walk? It will take me an hour to go where you can go in a minute. I am so slow. The sweet pretty girl. She says she will take my trash downstairs for me and throw it out.”
“Take the trash
downstairs
?”
“Yes.”
“From where? Where was she when she said this?”
“Outside my apartment. In the hallway.”
Megan dug her nails into her palms. To Mrs. Campanella, she continued to show a patient, friendly face. “So then this conversation didn’t take place in front of your building. This wasn’t right before you saw Ms. Rossman get into the fancy car.” To herself, she added: with the tall, short, blond, brunet driver who was and wasn’t wearing a chauffeur’s outfit.
“Yes. It didn’t. This is right here. The girl is coming down the stairs.”
“But Mrs. Campanella. If you encountered Ms. Rossman right outside your door, on the third floor, how could you then see her getting into the car in front of your building? I’m assuming Ms. Rossman walked faster than you do.”
“A newborn baby walks faster than I do, honey. When I was younger, I could dance, I could stay on my feet all day and night if I wanted. You have no—”
“Mrs. Campanella. If you saw Nikki outside your door and she headed downstairs, how did you also see her downstairs getting into a car? Are there windows in the stairwell?”
“No window.”
“Did Nikki accompany you down the stairs?”
“No. That is not what happened. She is dressed to go out and have fun. Not to waste her time with an old woman like me.”
Megan silently implored the blue-eyed Jesus on the wall behind the woman. Help me. “So okay. Nikki would have reached the ground floor well before you got there. And there was no window in the stairs. Was the car not yet there and waiting for her? Is that it? Was Ms. Rossman still waiting for it when you got downstairs?”
“No. Not that. She says she is forgetting something. When she sees me on the stairs, she says she is forgetting something, and she goes back up to her apartment.”
“She goes back upstairs,” Megan said evenly. “You forgot to mention that the other times.”
“Did I? Well, I am nervous. This pretty girl in my building, you saw what happened to her. It is horrible. How can I feel safe?”
“Of course. I’m not criticizing you. You’re doing fine. Let’s just get this straight. Ms. Rossman went back upstairs to her apartment to get something she forgot. Did she mention what it was?”
“No.”
“You proceeded downstairs with your trash?”
“Yes.”
“And when Ms. Rossman appeared downstairs—”
“She had it.”
Megan leaned forward, twining her fingers into a single fist. “It.”
“The envelope.”
Megan hoped her smile didn’t look as weary as she felt. “I don’t think I’ve heard anything about an envelope, Mrs. Campanella.”
“A blue envelope. A square blue envelope.”
“You mean like a birthday card?”
“Maybe.”
“I’m not asking if it necessarily
was
a birthday card, Mrs. Campanella. But that kind of card? The kind of card you buy for someone’s birthday?”
“I don’t know what kind of card it is. It is an envelope. Blue. Like the sky.”
“She didn’t happen to mention that she was going to a birthday party or some other sort of celebration?”
“Not to me she doesn’t.”
“But you think this is what Ms. Rossman went back up to her apartment to fetch? This sky-blue envelope?”
The woman made a clucking noise. “You are the detective, not me.”
Megan jotted down in her notebook:
Card. Blue. Occasion
?
“Thank you, Mrs. Campanella. You’ve been very helpful.”
Megan climbed the stairs to Nikki’s apartment. Ryan Pope was sitting at the kitchen table, eating an apple. In his other hand was a small circular plastic case.
“Are you on the pill?” Megan asked.
“Somebody was.” He offered the case. Megan took it from him and opened it. “Night before last. We can assume she was meaning to come home.”
There were footsteps on the stairs, then a knock on the doorjamb. “Dead lady live here?”
It was Rodrigo, one of the department IT guys. Rodrigo came into the apartment carrying a slender metal attaché case, and Megan directed him to a table in the front room. A computer was sitting on the table. The chair in front of it was a miniature armchair. It had one of those beanbag pillows on it, the kind you sometimes see people bringing with them on airplanes. This one was hot pink. The chair looked to Megan like the kind a person would settle into, spend some time in. Megan was curious about the computer.