Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
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.
A
llison 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.
She locks the dead bolt . . . the same precaution Kristina might have taken before someone got in anyway and killed her.
Or was he already inside her apartment, waiting for her?
Did he climb in from the fire escape after she was sleeping?
Heart pounding, Allison goes straight to the living room, to her own window that overlooks the fire escape. It’s locked. So are all the others.
And there’s no one hiding under the bed, in the closet, behind the shower curtain . . .
Okay.
Okay
.
Breathing a little easier, she takes off her sneakers and jacket, finds a bottle of Poland Spring and an apple in the fridge, and carries both to the living room. She’s not really thirsty or hungry, but she has to do something.
Years ago, she learned that going through the motions of ordinary activity—eating, drinking, sleeping, working—can work wonders in the midst of a catastrophe.
Everyone keeps talking about how important it is to move on, to go about business as usual. Anything less, people say, would be letting terror win.
Allison has never let terror win—not even when she was a child who feared the worst every day, and then saw the worst come to pass.
For years before her mother’s suicide, Allison was aware of Brenda Taylor’s desire to take her own life, knowledge that came courtesy of several harrowing, deliberate overdoses.
She would come home from school or her part-time job at the Convenient Mart to find her mother unconscious, having swallowed a handful of sleeping pills. Sometimes Allison was able to rouse her, or force her to vomit.
Once, she actually had to call 911, but that was a last resort. After that, her mother was sent away to a treatment facility, and Allison had to live in foster care for months. When her mother was “cured,” the two of them were allowed to go back home together.
But Mom had fooled the authorities, fooled the staff at her rehab center—fooled everyone but Allison.
She was still using; she was still going to die. It was inevitable.
That Allison would be left alone didn’t matter to Brenda, or perhaps didn’t even occur to her. She wanted to escape so badly that she was willing to abandon the child she loved to the cold, cruel world she despised. Weakness was her weakness. She wasn’t strong enough to fight for Allison, or for her own life.
So, yes, Allison lived with terror, but she didn’t let it get the best of her. She got herself out of bed every day, and went to school, and came home and did her homework and ate and slept . . .
She forced herself to keep on going, and in the end, terror did not win.
Tonight, she’ll set the alarm clock, and tomorrow, she’ll go to work. If the office is open, that is.
Please, let the office be open.
She sits on the couch and sips some water, listening to the hum of the refrigerator and distant sirens in the night, and thinking about the past.
She can’t help it.
Memories are good for nothin’
, her mother’s voice echoes back to her, but Allison shakes her head.
Memories are good for
something
, Mom. When you lose yourself in them, you don’t have to think about what’s happening in the here and now, or what might happen tomorrow.
But then, you had your own way of ignoring all that, didn’t you, Mom? You had your own way of making sure you wouldn’t have to deal with the future.
Allison puts aside the water bottle and the untouched apple and wonders if she should have checked in on Mack when she got back. His door was closed; she doesn’t know if he’s in there or not.
Still unsettled by the questions Detective Manzillo asked about him, Allison forces herself to put aside emotion and think about it with pure logic.
Could Mack have been romantically involved with Kristina and covered it up when Allison asked him about her?
Yes.
Could he have killed Kristina?
It’s such a preposterous assumption, that a man who had just gone through what he’d gone through, a man who seems so normal, would be capable of—
Logic, Allison.
All right.
Yes.
Yes, he could have killed Kristina.
Allison doesn’t want to believe that he did—really, she has no reason to believe that he did—but he
could
have.
That’s the question she asked herself.
And that’s the honest answer.
B
ack when they were newlyweds, Ange used to worry about Rocky spending long hours on the case with female detectives.
“You might be tempted,” she would say.
“Trust me, Ange, these are no Charlie’s Angels.”
These days, Ange is much more secure, and Rocky usually works his cases with Murph. But if his wife could see Detective Lisha Brandewyne, who’s working the Haines murder case in Murph’s absence, she’d certainly have instant peace of mind.
In her mid-thirties, with close-cropped dark hair, a stocky build, and nicotine-stained teeth and fingers, Brandewyne is no Charlie’s Angel. She’s not even a Cagney or Lacey.
But Rocky’s not that shallow. His main problem with her—aside from the fact that she’s a chain-smoker—is that she isn’t Murph.
He misses Murph, and he’s worried about him, and about Luke.
For the time being, though, he’s got to focus on the case, with Brandewyne’s help. She’s not inept, but she was only recently promoted to detective, and she’s still got a lot to learn, as far as Rocky is concerned.
Back at the scene of the homicide, they find Timmy Green stretching yellow crime scene tape across the doorway of Kristina Haines’s apartment. His last name suits him. He’s younger than Brandewyne, even younger than Rocky’s youngest son; he’s been on the job for less than a year.
After greeting him, Rocky ducks under the yellow tape. Brandewyne starts to follow suit, but her head grazes it. Green lets out a monster curse as the spool flies out of his hand, rolling down the hall, unfurling tape as it goes.
“Oops—sorry,” Brandewyne says.
Green growls something as he goes to retrieve the spool.
It’s not like him. Ordinarily, he’s a mild-mannered kid.
For a moment, Rocky and Brandewyne watch him attempt to rewind the tape. It keeps twisting. Green curses again.