God, she hated being like this, hated the tears of frustration that prickled behind her eyes. Why couldn’t that damned cat just come in?…
‘PUFF, COME HERE!’
And at last, Puff did. He trotted up to his mistress as if he’d just noticed her presence for the first time, tail flagging in a cheerful greeting. Rose scooped him up into her arms, cooing admonishments as giddy tears of relief splashed onto his fur. Once she retreated into the safety of her bright, cozy kitchen, her silly tears dried and she poured a dish of cream for him, a glass of sherry for herself.
The phone rang as she was settling into a sofa almost as old and lumpy as she was. It was her son-in-law – not the brightest fellow on the planet, and a lousy dentist, she’d always thought – but he was a good husband to her Lorrel, and Rose supposed a mother couldn’t ask for much more.
‘Hello, Richard. Yes, I’m fine. I suppose Lorrel is working late again? Of course I remember tomorrow night, I haven’t lost my mind yet, Richard. Five o’clock. Kiss the girls for me and tell them I can’t wait to see them. I baked cookies.’
Rose smiled as she hung up the phone, and was still smiling as she clicked on the TV, coaxed Puff onto her lap, and started to doze. Her granddaughters were home from college, and tomorrow night they would all go out for dinner.
Rose woke up much later, disoriented and aching from her arduous day of gardening. Puff had deserted her lap, but she could feel his fur tickling the back of her neck. He’d retreated to his favorite perch on the back of the couch, where he liked to sit and look out the window. She reached behind to pat him, but her hand froze in midair.
Puff was growling.
She groped for the remote and eventually found the mute button. ‘What’s wrong, kitty?’ After a few moments of silence, she heard a faint rustling coming from behind her, outside in the bushes.
Juncos in the arborvitae, that’s all it is, she told herself. At night the little birds sheltered in the soft evergreen, making fluttery noises as they hopped from branch to branch.
But this wasn’t a fluttery noise, exactly. It sounded… bigger.
Someone is out there.
Rose felt it in those good senses people never pay attention to until it’s too late: the little hairs standing up on the back of her neck, the goose bumps rising on the loose, checkered skin of her old arms, and when the low rumble of Puff’s growl jumped in pitch, she knew…
… Someone is out there, on the other side of the glass, looking in at me.
She turned her head slowly, slowly, and then she saw a pair of eyes hanging there in the dark just outside the window, staring in at her.
There was a brief moment when her body reacted the way it was supposed to – when her heart leaped and started to hammer, when the blood rushed from her brain to her legs in an ancient preparation for flight, leaving her face cold and clammy. But it was over almost as soon as it began, and Rose simply turned her eyes back to the muted television screen and sat there quietly, waiting to wake up from this very bad dream.
It isn’t a dream.
The rustling stopped and a few minutes later, when she’d finally summoned the courage to turn around again, there was nobody at her window.
She didn’t breathe until her lungs screamed for air, and by then, she was feeling a little silly, because it probably had been just a dream. The mind always played tricks on you in that twilight netherworld between sleep and wakefulness; especially old minds.
And then the front door rattled in its frame and Rose started shaking so badly, she feared her old bones might shatter like glass.
Call the police.
She reached for the phone on the table beside her, but her hand wasn’t working the way it was supposed to, no, not at all, and there was nothing she could do but watch helplessly as the useless appendage spasmed and flailed and twitched and knocked the phone to the floor.
The noise at the front door finally stopped, but the silence was much worse, because she was terribly afraid that she might have forgotten to lock the back door, and even more afraid to get up and look.
She sat frozen on the sofa, a pathetic old woman deluding herself into believing that if she remained perfectly still, if she didn’t breathe, whatever was coming would simply pass her by. In the next instant, she heard the back screen door open, then close with a click, and still, she couldn’t move.
The heavy inside door closed, sucking a little air from the room.
Rose never turned to look at him, so he walked into her line of sight and waited for her eyes to rise to his. When they did, he pulled a large handgun from his jacket pocket and pointed it at her.
Oh, God. It wasn’t going to pass her by; this time it was going to kill her.
In that dreadful moment of realization, she became young and strong and fearless again, and she vaulted upward at the precise moment the bullet left the muzzle, ruining his killing shot. Fire tore into her stomach instead of her heart and Rose looked down to see a blossom of red spreading across the front of her little-old-lady dress.
‘Goddamnit,’ he said, and shot her again.
10
Chief Malcherson was one of those tall, well-built Swedes with thick white hair, lake-ice eyes that made him look mean, and a hangdog face that made him look mournful. Sort of like a homicidal basset hound. He was wearing pinstripes this morning – for him, a daring foray into edgy fashion.
‘I like the suit,’ Gino pronounced, flopping into a chair next to Magozzi. Magozzi shot him a warning look, but Gino was oblivious. ‘It’s real zippy. Kind of a mob look.’
Malcherson froze in the middle of taking off his suit jacket and closed his eyes. ‘Not exactly the kind of image I was hoping to project, Rolseth.’
‘I meant it in a good way.’
‘That’s the frightening part.’ Malcherson settled behind his desk and tapped one manicured finger on a stack of two bright red file folders. He always kept his copies of open homicides in red folders, probably because this ultraconservative man found the color almost as offensive as the crime. Magozzi hadn’t seen one on his boss’s desk in over four months. ‘The media would like to know why our senior citizens are being tortured and murdered.’
Magozzi’s brows shot up. ‘Someone actually said that?’
‘An intern from Channel Ten.’ Malcherson waved a pink phone message slip.
Gino snorted. ‘That is such bullshit. This is what happens when you do your job and you don’t have a homicide for a while. The minute two guys get offed in one night some idiot in the media tries to scare the hell out of the city by talking spree, or serial killer, or some such Hollywood crap. Besides, only one of them was tortured, and it wasn’t ours. Morey Gilbert was dead before he hit the ground, and he didn’t have a mark on him except for that one little bullet hole.’
‘So there’s no reason at all to suspect a connection between the two murders.’
Magozzi shrugged. ‘If there is one, we can’t see it yet. They were both old, they lived in the same neighborhood. That’s about it. Arlen Fischer’s name didn’t ring any bells with the Gilbert family or employees; neither did his description, and I’m guessing they’d remember a three-hundred-pound ninety-year-old man.’
‘Good. We can quash the serial rumor, then. We’re going to get enough pressure on the Gilbert murder the way it is. The desk logged over three hundred calls last night and this morning.’
Magozzi raised his brows. The number was unreal. Twenty calls on a case were enough to make the brass nervous; three hundred could break careers. ‘On Gilbert, or the train track guy?’