Center, walk inside and start talking before she can stop herself.
She puts on her navy wool parka. In her right pocket she slips her Buck knife. In her left pocket is her pepper spray.
Keeping the lights off, she crosses the apartment, tiptoes through the small foyer, sidles up to the door. She checks that the security chain is on, the deadbolt turned. She looks through the peephole: just the fish-eye view of the hall, exactly the way it looks every time she gets paranoid and peers through it. Quiet, empty, monastic. She puts her ear to the door, listens. Nothing. Not even the hum of the elevators. She looks through the peephole again, then takes a step back, turns her deadbolt to the left and silently rotates the knob, opening the door an inch.
She is alone.
She steps through the door, locks it, eases her way to the stairwell, cringing at the sound of the squeaky hinge. A few moments later she steps into the small, deserted Cain Manor apartment lobby. Earlier, she had come home to find a pair of men working on the front doors. They told her that, due to the recent murder in Cain Park, they were putting in new, high security locks. The thought had made her feel a little better, but only a very little.
Now it no longer matters.
She glances around the empty lobby, then floats silently down the corridor and out into the rear parking lot.
The first thing she notices is the deep lavender moonlight on the snow. As she approaches her parking space, the light on her car returns a greenish cast to her eye, a color that makes her pause for a moment, disoriented, thinking it may not be her car. A glance at the license plate. It is her yellow Honda. Right where it is supposed to be. Then why is She stops in the middle of the thought, her mind tripping over an image that her heart doesn’t seem to want to process. She cannot understand why someone is sitting in the passenger seat of her car. She cannot understand why this person looks so familiar.
She cannot understand why Isabella is sitting in the passenger seat of her car.
It is Bella’s tam-o’-shanter, her round face, her dark curly hair. Yet, although most of her daughter’s face is obscured by shadow, one thing is clear to Mary, and that is this:
Her daughter is not moving.
“Bella!”
Mary sprints to the car, slipping on the ice, fumbling with the keys, a spike of raw terror in her heart. It seems like a full minute before she can get the key in the frozen lock, the frosted window now clouding with her breath, concealing her daughter’s tiny form.
She whips open the door and grabs her child from the front seat. Too hard, too light, not a child not a child not Isabella not Isabella The world stops. Relief washes over her in a huge hot wave, taking her legs out from under her. She falls to her knees.
It is not her daughter.
It is Astrid, her daughter’s big doll, the one she herself had sent by UPS for Isabella’s last birthday. Astrid wearing Isabella’s old clothes.
Release, first. Then confusion.
Then, a reprise of her fear.
Because there, in the plum-colored moonlight, pinned to the doll’s coat, is a directive that Mary has no trouble at all understanding, a square of white paper bearing a simple message:
Go back.
60
The blue Saturn turns the corner for the third time. It has the look of a car well maintained, the imperious sheen of a vehicle that is the very first automobile ever purchased off a showroom floor after a series of beaters. And, although things like road salt, cinders, slush, and goopy carbon by-products abound on such a winter night, as the blue Saturn passes I can see the occasional streetlamp reflected off its smooth, muscular lines in starry patterns.
The woman at the wheel looks left and right, left and right, searching for a parking space, a block or so south of Carnegie on East Eighty-fifth Street. She finds one, squeezes the Saturn in expertly, then exits the car, moves to the trunk, opens it. As I approach I see her reach inside and remove a camera case. She is wearing a long double- breasted coat, a knitted red scarf.
She has courage. I will give her that. By the way she is skulking around, I can tell she isn’t supposed to be here. I guarantee that Jack Paris has told her not to come to his apartment.
I have no hatred for her, but she will certainly get in my way.
At the last second, the crunch of snow beneath my feet alerts her to my presence. She spins around, looks into my eyes. And remembers.
Just like a reporter.
“Hola, chica!” I say. “Buy you a fruity cocktail?”
61
As soon as Bobby said the word midnight, Paris knew that it was not going to be enough time. He also knew that it was a favor he would probably never be able to repay, one for which he had not even presumed to ask. Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole are both in possession of conclusive forensic evidence in a capital murder case and are willfully delaying the submission of these facts to their superior officer. This is obstruction of justice at the very least, not to mention the violation of a truckload of other laws.
Serious jail time.
At midnight, Bobby Dietricht will have no choice but to place the file on Randall Elliott’s desk. And at that time, Captain Elliott will have no choice but to issue a warrant for the arrest of John Salvatore Paris.
“You all right with this?” Paris asks.
“Wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t,” Bobby Dietricht says. Greg just nods.
Paris had told them everything. Rebecca. Mike Ryan. Jeremiah Cross. Demetrius Salters. It had come out in a steady stream, the tension with it. He could deal with someone setting him up.
But, by midnight?
The problem is that they could not get a search warrant for Rebecca’s apartment without cause, and cause could not be established until the lab reports were submitted. Besides, there is nothing physical tying her to the jacket. To search Rebecca’s apartment, legally, would be to implicate Paris.
Bobby Dietricht and Greg Ebersole will work Rebecca D’Angelo’s apartment on their own time. Starting right now.
Bobby adds: “Besides, I’m married, Jack. I ain’t fuckin’ dead. I saw her at the Cleveland League party. You don’t have to explain a damn thing.”
“You don’t think I-”
Bobby holds up his gloved hand, stopping him. “I don’t know a cop in this city who would.”
Paris immediately regrets every negative thought he’d ever had about Detective Robert Dietricht. “I don’t know how to thank you two.”
“Three,” Greg says.
“Three?”
“Yeah,” Greg says with a wink. “I guarantee you Mike Ryan’s working this detail.”
Paris heads upstairs, opens his apartment door, sees a FedEx envelope on the floor. “Do Not Bend: Photos” a label says on the outside. The photographs Mercedes’s brother took. Paris is not exactly in the mood to look at himself. He tosses the envelope on the table, pours himself coffee, gulps a cup. Twenty minutes until he has to be at the Westwood Road house. Bobby and Greg are off to the Heights.
