The echo was loud inside the garage, drawn out, but Ash doubted anyone outside of it would take notice.
Kevin was dead before he hit the floor.
Ash moved fast. He placed the gun in Kevin’s right hand and pulled the trigger, firing a bullet straight into the ground. Now there would be gunpowder residue on the hand. He pulled the phone out of Kevin’s back pocket and used Kevin’s thumb to unlock it. Then he quickly scrolled through and found his wife’s contact information.
Courtney’s name was typed into the contacts with two hearts before and after her name.
Hearts. Kevin had put hearts next to his wife’s name.
Ash typed up a simple text: I’m sorry. Please forgive me.
He hit Send, dropped the phone on the workbench, and headed back to the car.
Don’t rush. Don’t walk too quickly.
Ash figured that there was probably an 80 to 85 percent chance the suicide scenario would hold. You had a gunshot wound to the head — to the victim’s right temple, the way a righty might do it if the wound was self-inflicted. That was why Ash had made note of which hand Kevin was holding the screwdriver in. You had a suicide text. You had gun residue on the hand. The extra bullet would probably look like Kevin had tried once and chickened out and then steeled himself for the real deal.
So the suicide scenario would probably be a buy. Eighty, eighty-five percent — maybe more like 90 percent when you added in that Kevin was out of work and probably depressed about it. If some cop was super aggressive or watched too much CSI, he might find some stuff didn’t add up. For example, there hadn’t been enough time to prop Kevin up before firing the second shot, so if some crime tech really spent the money to study the bullet’s trajectory, he might notice the shot originated from near the floor.
Someone might even spot Ash right now, or the car, and that might raise a few eyebrows too.
But that was all doubtful.
Either way, he and Dee Dee would be long gone. The car would be wiped down and abandoned. Nothing would track back to them.
Ash was good at this.
He got into the passenger side of the car. No curtains on the block had moved. No doors had opened. No cars had driven by.
Dee Dee said, “Is he...?”
Ash nodded.
Dee Dee smiled and started the car down the road.
Chapter Eight
Ingrid met Simon at the door when he arrived home. She threw her arms around him.
“I’d just crashed in bed,” Ingrid said, “when the police arrived.”
“I know.”
“And suddenly the door buzzer kept going off. It took me forever to wake up. I figured it was a delivery, except they always protect me from that stuff.”
By “they,” she meant the doormen in the building. Ingrid worked one overnight shift in the emergency room per week. The doormen knew that meant she slept during the next day, so if there were any deliveries, they were to leave them for Simon to bring up when he got home at six thirty.
“I threw on some sweats. This cop comes up. He actually asked me for an alibi. Like I was a suspect.”
Simon knew, of course. Ingrid had contacted him as soon as the doorman told her why she was being buzzed. Hester then had sent a colleague from her firm to be with Ingrid for the police questioning.
“And I just got a call from Mary in the ER. The cops actually went to the hospital to double-check I was there. Can you believe this?”
“They wanted an alibi for me too,” Simon said. “Hester thinks it’s just routine.”
“I don’t understand though. What happened exactly? Aaron was killed?”
“Murdered, yes.”
“And where is Paige?”
“No one seems to know.”
Laszlo the dog started pawing Simon’s leg. They both looked down and into the dog’s soulful eyes.
“Let’s take her for a walk,” Simon said.
Five minutes later, they crossed Central Park West at Sixty-Seventh Street, Laszlo pulling hard on the leash. On their left, in plain view yet somehow slightly hidden, was a tiny playground bursting with color. A lifetime ago, and yet not that long ago, they used to bring Paige, then Sam, then Anya here to play. They’d sit on a bench, able to watch the entire playground without so much as turning their heads, feeling safe and secure in the midst of this enormous park in this enormous city, less than a block from their home.
They headed past the Tavern on the Green, the famed restaurant, and turned right to head south. A group of schoolchildren in matching yellow T-shirts — easy to spot on field trips — filed past them. Simon waited until they were out of earshot.
“The murder,” Simon said. “It was gruesome.”
Ingrid wore a long thin coat. She dug her hands into her pockets. “Go on.”
“Aaron was mutilated.”
“How?”
“Do you really need the details?” he asked.
Ingrid almost smiled. “Strange.”
“What?”
“You’re the one who can barely stomach the violence in R-rated movies,” she said.
“And you’re the physician who never so much as blinks at the sight of blood,” he finished for her. “But maybe I understand better now.”
“How’s that?”
“What Hester told me — it didn’t gross me out. Maybe because it’s real. So you just react. Like you with a patient in the ER. On the screen I have the luxury of looking away. In real life...”
His voice just faded away.
“You’re stalling,” Ingrid said.
“Which is dumb, I know. According to Hester’s source, the killer slit Aaron’s throat, though she said that’s a tame way of putting it. The knife went deep into his neck. Almost took off his head. They sliced off three fingers. They also cut off...”
“Pre- or post-mortem?” Ingrid asked in her physician tone.
“What?”
“The amputations. Was he still alive for them?”
“I don’t know,” Simon said. “Does it matter?”
“It might.”
“I’m not following.”
Laszlo stopped and did the butt-sniff greeting with a passing collie.
“If Aaron was still alive when they cut him up,” Ingrid said, “someone may have been trying to get information out of him.”
“What kind of information?”
“I don’t know. But now no one can find our daughter.”
“You think...?”
“I don’t think anything,” Ingrid said.
They both stopped. Their eyes met and for a brief moment, despite all the people walking by, despite the horror of what they were going through, Simon fell back into her eyes and she fell into his. He loved her. She loved him. Simple but there you have it. You both have careers and you raise kids and there are victories and defeats and you just sort of coast along, living your life, the days long, the years short, and then every once in a while, you remember to pull up and look at your partner, your life partner, really look at the one who travels down the lonely road right by your side, and you realize how much you are in this together.
“To the police,” Ingrid said, “Paige is just a worthless junkie. They won’t look for her, and if they do, it will be to arrest her as an accessory or worse.”
Simon nodded. “So it’s up to us.”
“Yes. Where was Aaron murdered?”
“In their apartment in Mott Haven.”
“You know that address?”
He nodded. Hester had given it to him.
“We can start there,” Ingrid said.
The Uber driver drove up to two concrete barriers, set up on the street like something you’d see in a war zone. “Can’t go no further.” The driver — named Achmed — turned around and frowned at Simon. “You sure this is it?”