Marty Fox’s Home
November 27, 2.05 p.m.
Marty Fox sat in his bedroom waiting for his wife to emerge from the bathroom. He’d set up a nice early lunch for them both in a quiet restaurant that he knew she liked and now they were going to do something they hadn’t done in about ten years — slip off into bed for the afternoon. Marty drank a few glasses of good wine with his meal and their conversation had turned all nostalgic — there was a time when the only woman he wanted was her, and somehow he’d remembered it as they sipped their red wine and talked about the years of struggle and good fun. Good years. Very good years. Just a little distant now.
Sitting alone, Marty was finding it difficult to concentrate. The photograph in the paper shocked the life out of him. Kitty Hunyardi, her name was, but Marty was sure it was the same girl that he’d seen on Nick’s cell phone. What the hell did it mean? He felt terrified by the prospect that Nick was involved in Kitty’s death somehow, but he kept on trying to convince himself he was mistaken. The last session with his patient, Nick had been too fucking weird. Maybe his memory was confused. Marty didn’t like weird. He liked categories so that he could file these things away, far away from his conscious mind. But he couldn’t file Nick. All that stuff about the girl called Chloe and her apparent murder. The photographs of Kitty. It was too much for Marty. Way too much. Fantasy or reality? Marty didn’t know. And then the reports of Kitty’s murder in the papers and on the news, and suddenly everywhere he fucking looked, he could see the news about a guy who stalked and followed women. A guy who was unstable. A guy who could be Nick.
Marty Fox stroked his forehead slowly. The word ‘coincidence’ was a very reassuring one in these circumstances. Yeah, he’d been running that same word around his head for a few days now. Sure, a coincidence: two unrelated events that seem connected but are only similar by chance. That’s all it was. An alignment of unconnected events. They must happen a million times a day. It was nothing at all to worry about. Nothing.
Marty started to yank off his socks. His feet had that yellowing look of a life spent too long in the dark. He looked up at the decor. Wallpaper borders of twisting roses and fake brass wall lamps. His wife’s taste was not his own, for sure, but he’d let her indulge herself. He’d passed on the responsibility. Maybe he shouldn’t have given up like that — let her have the house. Maybe that was where they began going their separate ways. Sitting there with his yellow feet, and the dizzy feeling of being overfed under the light of fake brass lamps, he felt like a failed car salesman having a bad day at a cheap motel.
Life had become a series of disappointments welded together with the hope of an affair. That’s what Marty had done to himself. Sure, for a long time he’d thought he was a smart ass to be getting so much off-limits sex, he’d even enjoyed fooling his wife, but all he was doing was pouring good old gasoline into a leaking tank.
He’d loved her so much, too. She’d been able to funnel the idiot inside him somewhere good. Without her, there was no way he would’ve got his qualifications let alone set up his practice in New York City.
Why had he thrown it away? Or, moreover, when had he thrown it away? The shock of Nick had made Marty melancholy. It’d also made him run to the one place he’d only ever wanted to be.
‘I never was good enough for you, babe,’ he said to himself in the room. ‘Maybe I just became the asshole I always thought I was.’
Marty wondered for a moment if anything in life was really and truly redeemable. If the betrayals could be undone, somehow, his failures and mistakes wiped away with a gleaming new beginning. He pulled off his trousers. He didn’t think so.
The worst thing was the fact that while his beautiful, far-too-good-for-him wife was refreshing herself in the bathroom, approaching their promised intimacy without bitterness or recriminations, all he could think of was Nick and a girl called Kitty.
Maybe Nick just happened to be around the same Kitty, maybe he wasn’t a psycho killer. Marty had even considered going to the cops. Yeah, and getting caught up in a whole world of shit he’d rather keep clear of. Instead of going to the cops, he did a little research. He wanted to know more about the girl called Chloe. He didn’t know whether Nick had somehow been involved in Chloe’s murder or if he’d grown up near to it and kind of fantasized about it. His curiosity had got the better of him, though. He’d spent a few hours looking up the case on the internet. He wished he hadn’t. It took him a while to track it down, but he found it in the archives of the New York Times. The story had hit the nationals it was so gruesome. And that was when the tension really started to get to Marty.
The murder of Chloe Mestella was real all right. She was a beautiful young West Virginian prom queen from a wealthy farming family and she’d been raped and murdered in her own bedroom while her parents entertained downstairs. It was a savage murder. Marty had read the details and winced. She was real. Chloe was a real girl, not a character from Nick’s imagination. She was real and she was dead and Nick was still not over it. Marty had to consider why that might be.
He tried to forget about it, but his curiosity and the media’s obsession with a rubber heiress called Kitty who was stalked on the day that Nick turned up with her photograph on his phone wouldn’t let him. He couldn’t get to grips with what he was thinking. Maybe, Nick had killed Chloe out of rage and jealousy. Maybe Nick had killed Kitty. He couldn’t be sure: Nick was a delusional paranoid — fantasy was his modus operandi. It was all just coincidence, right?
Marty felt better when Nick didn’t turn up for his session. But later even that got to him. What if Nick was watching him? Marty was a self-confessed, T-shirt-wearing coward. He wanted to run away and hide. He wanted to tell his wife. He wanted her to look after him again, to sort out the big problems.
His wife appeared from the bathroom. She was smiling as she struck a pose in her underwear. She was still gorgeous to look at — all dark eyes and lush dark hair. He’d just stopped seeing it. Somehow, the woman that all other men would still drool over had become too available to him. His eyes had glazed over.
He smiled up at her and put his arm round her waist. She moaned a little as he moved his hands over her soft skin. This was just what he needed, a little afternoon of relaxation. He kissed her stomach as she ran her fingers through his thinning hair.
She pushed him back on the bed. She wanted to please him. That had been her undoing. Wanting to please a guy like Marty. It had spoiled him, no question. She unbuckled his belt with a flourish and unzipped him. A minute passed and her expression changed from that of a sultry mistress to sadness and disappointment. Marty lay there feeling a sweat form on his brow. What the fuck is happening, he was thinking as he tried to bring to mind all the sexy things he’d ever thought, but all he could see was Chloe and Kitty Hunyardi. Fuck! This hadn’t happened before. Not ever! Fuck me, he pleaded, not with her, it’s not fair.
His wife raised her head. Her face was a picture of self-loathing. ‘I just don’t attract you any more, do I, Marty? I’m sorry.’
Marty looked at her in despair and shook his head. ‘You do, I promise you, you do. I’m just…’ He reached out to her and tried to hug her, but she pulled away.
‘I bet this doesn’t happen with your lovers, does it?’ She stared at him and he had nothing to say. The look of disgust on her face would remain with him for life.
Chapter Fifty-Nine
East Harlem, 7-Eleven
November 27, 2.23 p.m.
The air outside had dipped a few degrees and the sky had darkened. In the gloom, Harlem looked more deserted than ever. Only a few stragglers were about, propped up by steel fencing posts and drinking direct from the bottle.
Tom Harper and Eddie Kasper drove to the 7-Eleven. This was Lottie Bixley’s last known location. According to the statement of Lottie’s brother, she had left her two young children in the apartment while she went out to get cigarettes. It was only a five-minute walk on foot, through some dangerous territory if you were the wrong type of person or just happened to meet the wrong type of person. If Lottie Bixley had been in a hurry, she might have taken one of the many side alleys and who knows who she might’ve met.
‘What do you make of it, Eddie? How did Lottie’s killer take her? What’s his style?’ asked Harper, tapping on
