The Killer in My Eyes (16 page)

‘It’s for you.’

Jordan put the phone, still warm from Lysa’s skin, against his ear.

‘Jordan, it’s Burroni. I think it’s happened.’

‘What’s happened?’

‘I’m afraid we have our Lucy.’

‘Shit. Who is it?’

‘Chandelle Stuart. They found her in her apartment this morning.’

‘Where?’

‘The Stuart Building, on Central Park West.’

Jordan’s hands felt clammy, as if the dampness of the rain falling blindly on the windowpanes had somehow entered the room. ‘I was hoping that bastard would leave us a little more time.’

‘I’m on my way there now. Want me to pick you up?’

‘Sure. In this rain, I don’t think it’d be a good idea to use the bike.’

‘OK. I’m on my way. I’ll be there in five minutes.’

Standing in the middle of the room, Lysa watched him as he put on his leather jacket.

‘I’m sorry you got woken up, Lysa. I don’t know why they didn’t call me on my cellphone.’

‘It doesn’t matter, I wasn’t asleep. Trouble?’

‘Yes. Someone else has been killed, and it looks like there may be a connection with the murder of my nephew.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me, too. I only hope that this time we find something that helps us catch this madman.’

They stood facing each other in an apartment that didn’t belong to either of them.

‘Jordan, I’m not sure what to say in situations like this.’

‘You don’t have to say anything. It’s OK, Lysa. I hope you get some sleep. Good night.’

He walked out, closing the door behind him and deciding to go downstairs on foot rather than call the elevator. From the apartment below came the sound of music. Connor Slave, of course.

He got to the front door just as a Ford with Burroni at the wheel pulled up at the kerb across the street. Jordan ran out into the rain and, as he dashed across the road, he saw Burroni lean over to open the door on his side. He got in. The car smelled of damp carpet and imitation leather.

Through the windscreen, swept by the wipers, he looked up at the bright rectangle where, behind the glass, the figure of Lysa stood motionless against the light. A presence and an absence.

Burroni had followed the direction of his gaze to the lighted window. ‘Your apartment?’

‘Yes.’

Burroni didn’t ask any questions, and Jordan didn’t choose to say any more. As they moved away from the kerb, Jordan remembered waking up on the morning after the evening he and Lysa had met.

He had opened his eyes, and immediately smelled something he wasn’t used to smelling, at least in his own home: the aroma of coffee he hadn’t made himself. He had got up and put on jeans and a T-shirt. Before going to the living room, he had checked his appearance in the bathroom mirror. His face looked exactly the way he had expected it to look. The face of a man who had taken a few blows the previous night.

He had washed his face, left the bathroom and walked to the living room, and there she was.

Or there
he
was.

Thinking about that now, he felt as embarrassed as he had that morning. But Lysa’s face had borne no trace of the previous evening’s conversation.

Only a smile.

‘Good morning, Jordan. How are your eye and nose? I can see them, but how do they feel?’

‘I’m hardly aware of them.’

‘Good. Want a coffee?’

He had sat down at the table, which was laid for two. ‘This is quite a privilege. What have I done to deserve it?’

‘It’s the first day of my first time in New York. I also deserve it. How do you like your eggs?’

‘Do I get eggs, too?’

‘Sure. What kind of bed and breakfast would this be without eggs?’

Lysa had brought the plates to the table and they had eaten breakfast almost in silence, each absorbed in their own thoughts. But then Lysa had put an end to that little moment of peace and opened the door to the outside world.

‘They just talked about your nephew on TV.’

‘I can imagine. This case is going to create quite a stir.’

‘And what will you do now?’

‘Before anything else, find a place to stay. I don’t want to go to my brother in Gracie Mansion. Everyone would be watching me. I prefer to keep as low a profile as possible. There’s a hotel on Thirty-Eighth that—’

‘Listen, I have a proposition. Seeing as how my husband isn’t a problem any more . . .’

It was like a punch to the stomach. Jordan had hoped his reaction didn’t show on his face.

Lysa had continued as if everything was normal. ‘I’ve only just arrived in the city and I want to do a bit of sightseeing before I start looking for a job. In other words, I’ll be out most of the time. As for you, this business will surely be over sooner or later and you’ll be free to go. In the meantime, you can stay here, if you want.’

She paused and tilted her head to one side, with an amused, almost defiant gleam in her golden eyes.

‘Unless that’s a problem for you?’

‘Of course not,’ Jordan had replied, a bit too hastily, and immediately felt like a fool.

Lysa had stood up and started clearing the table. ‘Time to get going.’

‘Want a hand?’

‘God, no. I think you have more important things to do.’

Jordan had looked at his watch. ‘Yes. I’ll take a quick shower and then be on my way.’ He had started for his room but Lysa’s voice had stopped him.

‘Jordan . . .’

He waited.

‘They talked about you in that news item I saw on TV. They said you were one of the best police officers New York has ever had.’

‘They say all kinds of things.’

‘They also said why you’re not a police officer any more.’

‘. . . tonight by her bodyguard.’

Burroni’s voice brought him back to that rain-washed car and the streetlights and the reflections on the wet asphalt.

‘Sorry, James, I was miles away. Do you mind repeating that?’

‘I said she was discovered tonight by her bodyguard. He called Headquarters and I was the one who spoke to him. From what he told me, especially about the way the body was arranged, this could be it.’

‘Does my brother know?’

‘Of course. He was told immediately, just like he asked. He said to inform him if things really are the way they look.’

‘We should know soon enough.’

They said nothing more for the rest of the ride, each deep in thoughts they would have preferred to leave at home.

Jordan knew the Stuart Building, a slightly sinister edifice, some sixty storeys high, adorned on its upper levels with gargoyles reminiscent of those on the Chrysler Building. It occupied the entire block between 92nd and 93rd Streets on Central Park West, looking out on Central Park and the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. The name Stuart meant money, real money, lots of it. Old Arnold J. Stuart had ruthlessly amassed a huge fortune from steel in the days of the Fricks and the Carnegies. Subsequently the family’s interests had expanded into almost every field. When Chandelle Stuart’s parents had died in quick succession a few years earlier, she had found herself sole heir to a vast fortune.

When they got to the location, Burroni parked the car immediately behind the Crime Scene team’s van. He switched off the engine but made no move to get out.

‘Jordan, there’s something I think you should know, especially after what you told me today.’

Jordan waited in silence. He didn’t know what Burroni was about to tell him, but he sensed it was something that wasn’t easy for him to say.

‘You know, about this Internal Affairs business. I did take that money. I needed it. My son Kenny has—’

Jordan raised his hand. ‘It’s all right, James. I guess things have been hard for you, too.’

They looked at each other for a moment, their faces made spectral by the orange light of the streetlamps and the reflections of the raindrops on the car windows.

Then Jordan said, ‘Come on, let’s take a look at this shit.’

They opened their doors almost simultaneously, got out, and ran towards the entrance of the building in the rain.

The first thing the two men saw as they entered the apartment was the motionless female figure sitting by the piano – a shiny black Steinway grand that must have cost a fortune. She was sitting on a bar stool high enough to support her back against the curve of the instrument. Her elbows rested on the lacquered top, her hands dangling over the edge. Her face was turned towards the keyboard, as if she was listening spellbound to music only she could hear.

Her black dress was low-cut but sober, and they couldn’t make out her features, which were concealed by the long smooth hair that covered her face. Her legs were crossed, giving a glimpse of her bare thighs, and from her knees a shiny substance had run down her calf and smeared the material of her stockings.

Without realizing it, Jordan found himself speaking in a lower voice than he would normally have used, as if the malign spell of that silent concert was not to be broken. ‘Just like Lucy with Schroeder.’

‘Who’s Schroeder?’

‘Another character from
Peanuts
, a musical prodigy who’s crazy about Beethoven. Charles Schulz always draws him sitting at his toy piano. Lucy’s in love with him and she always sits in this position when she listens to him playing.’

They slowly approached the body. Burroni pointed out that the elbows had been stuck to the surface of the piano with a mass of glue. Glue had also been used to stick her dress to the back of the stool. The crossed legs had been kept in position in the same way, but so much adhesive had been used that it had dripped down.

‘She’s glued, just like your nephew. But this time our cartoonist really went to town.’

‘Who’d like to bet it’s the same brand? Ice Glue.’

Jordan put on the latex gloves that Burroni handed him, then lifted the victim’s hair to uncover her face.

‘Holy Christ.’

The victim’s eyes, staring at the keyboard, were held open by the same glue that her killer had used on the rest of the body. Jordan pointed out the bruises around her neck.

‘She was strangled, too.’

Jordan let the hair go and it fell like a curtain over those unnaturally staring eyes. He walked to the other side of the piano to see the body from a different angle. What he saw brought him up short. The lid of the piano was raised, and on the little flap where the music usually rested was a white sheet of paper with some handwritten words on it:

It was a dark and stormy night
. . .

A chill went through him. He knew all too well what those words meant. It was a famous line from
Peanuts
but, at the same time, it was a death sentence for somebody. Burroni came up behind him and looked over his shoulder.

‘What the fuck is that?’

‘It’s another warning. If we don’t find this son of a bitch in a hurry, we’ll soon be dealing with another poor dead bastard got up to look like Snoopy.’

Jordan walked away from the piano and at last took a look around. When the elevator doors had opened, he and Burroni had been drawn immediately to the chilling spectacle of the corpse. Now he was able to get a better idea of their surroundings. The apartment was furnished, at least the part of it they could see, in a minimalist style, with furniture in wenge and anodized aluminium, and couches and drapes in pale colours ranging from sand to tobacco. Everything around them spoke of wealth. There were paintings and art objects that told the long history of the Stuart family. The wall to his right was entirely occupied by a painting, and there was nothing to suggest that it wasn’t an original. It was a preparatory study for Géricault’s
The Raft of the Medusa
, the same size as the finished painting in the Louvre.

The presence here of that particular painting, it struck Jordan, was like an ironic twist of fate.

Géricault. Jerry Ko.

Two painters with similar-sounding names, their work united by the same violent despair. Each in his way had depicted life as a hopeless journey towards death. And now Chandelle Stuart’s soul was also adrift on that fragile raft.

As he walked towards the painting, he noticed a couple of things he had not spotted before. Strewn on the floor near the elevator were fragments of a vase that seemed to have been thrown against the door, to judge by the marks on the panelling. And around the living room were torn shreds of what appeared to have been an item of clothing.

Just then, the Medical Examiner appeared from beyond the wall occupied by the painting. When he came level with Jordan and Burroni, he replied immediately to the question he read in their eyes.

‘For now, I can’t tell you very much, except that the victim was strangled and that death probably occurred some time between nine and eleven.’

Jordan pointed to the fragments near the elevator and the pieces of material on the floor. ‘These would seem to suggest a struggle, even though there doesn’t appear to be any sign of it on the victim.’