“Thanks, Sal. I gotta go now. Other phone’s ringing. Anything else?”
“I might decide to murder Harold.”
“Fight the impulse, Sal.” Quinn broke the connection.
Vitali returned to the car. Mishkin had used a company card to pay for the gas at the pump and was already ensconced in the passenger seat. The car’s windows were up and the air conditioner was laboring.
Vitali steeled himself and got in behind the steering wheel. He looked both ways, pulled back out into traffic, and accelerated fast so they could beat a tractor-trailer angling onto the highway from a cloverleaf ramp.
Mishkin looked over at him. “Anything, Sal?”
“Quinn says they hit a few places on the Internet that sell the knife we’re looking for, but there’s no record of any going to someone who’d be a suspect.”
“It wouldn’t surprise me, Sal, if we might be hitting the same places. Duplication of effort.”
“Taxpayers would be pissed off,” Vitali said.
“Like being back in the NYPD,” Mishkin said.
They drove for a while.
“Doughnut holes, Sal. That make sense to you?”
“Not to me, Harold.”
“A hole is like… nothing.”
“Yeah.”
“How’s something like that get started?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s an oxymoron. Like jumbo-”
“Pass me one of those doughnut holes, Harold.”
66
Tanya Moody emerged like a casual queen from the Breaverson Arms on East Fifty-fourth Street, wearing her navy blue shorts, armless blue T-shirt, blue and white sneakers, and carrying her sky-blue gym bag. She began perspiring as soon as she stepped from the cool lobby into the morning heat. She squinted and brushed a lock of her long brown hair back from her face. Today, she decided, was going to be even hotter than yesterday. After drawing a pair of Gucci knockoff sunglasses from an outside pocket of the gym bag, she began walking toward her subway stop at Fifty-third and Lex.
As she strode along the shaded side of the street, Tanya drew attention. She was five-foot-ten and lean and muscular. With each step her powerful thigh and calf muscles flexed. Her breasts were large, but too firm to bounce as she took the curbs. She was covering ground fast with her long, graceful strides.
Down the stairs to the subway platform she went, causing a man looking back at her to stub his toe painfully on a concrete step. Tanya heard the guy yelp and glanced back, amused by what had happened. He was gripping the tip of his shoe and glaring at her as if his mishap was her fault.
Tanya ignored him, fished her MetroCard from her pocket, and headed for the turnstiles. She was well aware of the effect her appearance had on men and on some women, and was pleased by it. In her business, as a self-employed personal trainer, she was her own best advertisement.
She’d just left a fifty-year-old wealthy widow who still flaunted a fashionably trim figure. The woman had lost ten pounds and firmed up wonderfully since employing Tanya two months ago, and was especially pleased because Tanya planned and instructed physical workouts at her clients’ homes. Most clients, encouraged by their initial progress, purchased their own exercise equipment-at a discount-from a company that gave Tanya a generous commission. All in all, Tanya was pleased by how her business had grown during the past few years.
She’d left the trim widow preparing herself for the dating scene, now that her husband had been dead over six months. She was doing wide-armed bench presses on a home weight machine, an exercise that built up the pectoral muscles that supported the breasts. Three sets of ten with moderate weights, every third day, had already added an inch to the widow’s bustline.
Tanya was one of the first to board the train after the subway passengers exited. She found a seat near the back, where it would be easier to get out if the car became crowded as the train made its way downtown. As she settled in with her gym bag on her lap, the train jerked and squealed away. The motion caused her to glance to her left, and there was the man who’d been following her the past week or so.
Of course she wasn’t positive he’d been tailing her. At least not sure enough to confront him. Besides, she was used to men sort of latching on to her presence and paying her particular and obvious attention. Some of them were married men, or men too shy to speak to her. If they were on more or less the same schedule, these men would appear on her periphery often. Only now and then would one approach her. Tanya knew they meant no harm. And in truth she was flattered by their presence.
But there was something about this guy that didn’t fit the mold. He wasn’t feigning disinterest and then sneaking glances at her, like most of her anonymous admirers. Instead he either completely ignored her or stared right through her, as if he could see her in outline and transparent, like one of those airport scanners, but she was about as important to him as an inanimate object. There was something creepy about that stare.
Other than the unsettling stare, he was an average-looking sort of guy. He always had a hat of some sort on, and seldom wore the same one two days in a row. As if he thought that by changing hats he was altering his appearance and making himself unnoticeable. Today he had on a Milwaukee Brewers baseball cap. Tomorrow he might be wearing a beret. She did pick up that she saw him mostly on weekends, when she did much of her work because her clients were free from their offices. So maybe he had some other job during the week. It was, she thought, smiling slightly, at least nice to be attracting men who were employed.
Thank God the man didn’t look like Tom Stopp. Stopp was the man Tanya had mistakenly identified as her rapist ten years ago, not long after she’d moved to New York. Tanya had been at a club, drinking too much, with people she didn’t know, and she passed out. She had never done that before and was amazed. Then suspicious. She didn’t know whether someone had slipped a date-rape drug into her drink, or she’d simply not been used to so much alcohol in such a short period of time.
She had woken-or regained consciousness-the next morning with a man on top of her. She came alert and furious instantly, fought her way out from beneath him, and ran toward the door. Somehow she managed to snatch up her Levi’s and blouse as she ran, and in the elevator managed to yank and work her clothes onto her body. The physical action alerted her that she was sore where she shouldn’t have been. She immediately knew what had happened.
My God! Was he the only one?
She scrolled through her memory and found blank spots. Vaguely, she recalled the three men and two women, her “new friends” she’d been drinking with at Arthur’s Lounge on Sixth Avenue. Or was it Seventh? Her mind was playing tricks on her. Not natural.
A woman carrying a small brown dog got on the elevator when the door opened at lobby level. She’d looked at Tanya and said simply, “You’ve got no shoes, dear.” The elevator door slid closed and Tanya made her way toward the street door. She heard hurried footsteps on the stairs and assumed Tom Stopp was coming after her.
Tom Stopp. I do remember his name.
In the street, she waved her arms wildly and a cab separated itself from traffic and came toward her. At the same time, Stopp broke from the apartment door, saw her, and started yelling and running toward her.
She could see the cabbie yammering in his radio as the taxi pulled up next to her. She threw herself into the backseat and pulled the door shut.
Stopp was there immediately, tugging at the cab’s door handle.
“Doors, window, everything locked,” said the cabbie in an accent Tanya didn’t know.
Stopp started to beat on the window. For some reason the cabbie didn’t drive away. He simply sat calmly behind the steering wheel, only now and then glancing over to be sure Stopp’s efforts were in vain.