Nearly an hour into the date, Brad finally took a break from his running legal commentary. “I’m sorry. I’ve been working so hard it’s tricky to turn it off sometimes. I should ask you about yourself.”
The brief glimmer of hope Amy allowed herself was dashed when he proceeded to make good on his perceived obligation. “So which publishing house do you work for?” he asked.
“Pardon me?”
“You’re an editor, right? Which house?” Her confusion must have been apparent. “Oh, right. No, you’re a…a fund-raiser. For the Museum of Modern Art, right? So how’s that going for you?”
It was going, she thought, much better than this date. The jerk had actually mixed her up with some other stupid woman he was duping online. The wine was good, and the view of the snow was wondrous, but nothing was worth this humiliation.
She selected her excuse and went with it. “I know I said I was up for a late night, but I took a painkiller earlier for this problem I’m having with my rotator cuff.” She rubbed her right shoulder for effect. “With the wine on top of it, I’m feeling a little loopy.”
“Let me walk you home,” Brad suggested brightly, clearly spotting an opportunity in her feigned high.
“No, really, I’m fine. I’m just around the corner,” she lied. She might be an idiot for signing on to this endeavor, but she knew better than to tell any of them where she lived.
Amy didn’t bother waiting once he signaled for the check. She yawned conspicuously and began to maneuver out of the booth as she pulled on her coat. Before Brad could rise for the awkward good-night peck, she shook his hand abruptly and thanked him for the wine he had yet to pay for.
Then, after a quick scramble down the narrow staircase, through the exit of the Japanese restaurant, she was out of there. She was alone, free of that lame excuse for a date. It struck her then that two or three times a week, for the last three weeks, she had reached the end of the evening with this same feeling. She had made a ridiculous pact with herself to “get out there,” to finally meet a man she could see for more than a month, to finally meet a man she could trust and even love. But, at the end of a night like this, she was always happier once she was able to get out of there. After an hour with Brad, the idea of watching snow from her fire escape didn’t sound half bad.
Amy walked through the East Village, smoking a Marlboro Light, with a new appreciation of her solitude. She was a thirty-one-year-old woman living in Manhattan. She had a painless enough job in a kick-ass museum. She got to see mind-blowing art every day. She had fifty-one different delivery menus in her kitchen drawer and really good hair. She had a big fat Persian cat named Chowhound. Tomorrow she would treat herself to some street shopping, where only in this city could twenty bucks buy you a seemingly authentic designer handbag. There were worse things in life than being on her own.
The snow was starting to stick by the time she reached the alphabet blocks on the Lower East Side. Amy’s father still didn’t approve of her choice of neighborhoods, but her parents had been overprotective ever since that problem back home. She kept telling him that times had changed since he formed his impressions of the city. Every location in Manhattan was safe now, and the Lower East Side was all she could afford.
She had her key ring in her hand and was already unzipping her coat when she heard the noise from the alley. Mew.
“Chowhound?” she called out, peering into the dark void between two buildings. She looked up at her fifth-floor window above, left open during the last cigarette before she walked out for the night.
Shit. I’ve got to quit smoking. She always made sure to lock the other window, the one by the fire escape. And it would take Jackie Chan to leap from the fire escape to her smoking window. But she forgot that big fat Chowhound was 50 percent fur and had the uncanny ability to squeeze himself through tiny spaces if he knew freedom awaited him on the other side. And Chowhound, in spite of his plumpness, was freakishly aerodynamic. When it came to a pounce to the fire escape, Jackie Chan had nothing on him.
“Come here, Chowhound. Come here, baby.” Amy could see she was going to have to tear him away from whatever disgusting thing he was eating next to the Dumpster. She looked up and down her street. There was no one within a block. She’d be quick.
As she reached down to grab the cat, the man pinned her from behind. She felt arms around her waist, then latex hands around her neck. She felt the frame of his body pressing against her and she knew it was happening. It was real. The moment Amy had always feared – that every woman, at some level, always fears – was happening.
Amy was strong. She fought back. She was not going to make it easy for this son of a bitch. She kicked and twisted, punched and clawed.
But everything she managed to grab – sleeves, coat, collar, gloves – only protected her attacker. Her range of motion was limited by her winter parka. The ground was growing slick now. She could not find the leverage she needed.
Please, God, no. He was no longer just squeezing her neck with those latex-covered fingers. He was crushing her throat. Her tongue was swelling. When he had forced the full weight of her body to the concrete, he placed his head next to hers and gazed into her face.
I know you.
Amy heard the words in her mind, but could not speak them. She knew she had enjoyed the last breath of air she would ever take. As she finally succumbed, she tasted blood, bile, and Barbera d’Asti. It was the taste of death.
With a gloved hand, her killer placed a single piece of paper in Amy’s coat pocket, satisfied with the puzzled and panicked look that had crossed her face in those final seconds. It was a look of recognition. It was a look of profound regret. It had been precisely as he had wanted it. He wondered if the others would flow so smoothly. How many more until they notice?
2
DETECTIVE ELLIE HATCHER WAS CERTAIN THAT SOMETHING WAS wrong with the victim’s story. She’d spent the last fifteen minutes in an interview room of the NYPD’s Midtown North Precinct working through the man’s report. He hadn’t wavered from his bogus story yet, but she knew she was getting close.
But now it appeared from a loud rap on the door that she had a different problem looming. She turned to find the towering bulk of her lieutenant, Randy Jenkins, filling the door frame. He beckoned her with an upward tip of his prominent chin.
“Hatcher, we need to talk.”
“I’ll be right in, boss.”
“Wrap it up.”
“Five minutes,” Ellie said. She looked at the man sitting across the table. He was still holding the pack of ice to the side of his head. “We’re just about done here, right?”
“Five minutes,” Jenkins emphasized before closing the door.
“They gave you one nasty bump, huh, Mr. Pandey?”
“I am sure that in your position you have seen others who faced far worse.”
“Not too many. I’m still pretty new to this.” Ellie smiled shyly, but then quickly tucked her expression away, pretending to look over the notes she had been compiling. “I’m sorry. Can you run over the timeline again – just to make sure I haven’t missed anything?”
As Samir Pandey related his story for the third time that morning, Ellie searched for the flaw. Car-for-hire drivers were rarely robbed – far easier for the bad guys to go after the yellow taxicabs that deal only in cash and stop on demand for the nearest waving hand. Tack on Pandey’s claim that a man in a ski mask popped out of nowhere, pulled open the back door, and conked him in the back of the noggin at six in the morning while he was driving on the West Side Highway, and the story was about as convincing and original an explanation as I don’t know. Some black guy did it.