By Blood Written

anything he’d ever seen. Then, dazed, she lowered her arm in front of her and flipped the phone shut.

“What?” Hank snapped. “Was it-”

Taylor Robinson swayed. For a moment, Hank thought she might faint. He stepped to her, put his hands on her arms to steady her.

“He said he’s going to kill me,” Taylor said, her voice so low he had to lean in to hear it. “He said I’ve betrayed him, and now he’s going to kill me. Just like the others.”

CHAPTER 38

Monday morning, Manhattan

Esmerelda Cardenas stepped off the bus at Twenty-third and Ninth Avenue and started up the block toward Twenty-fourth Street. The Monday morning Chelsea traffic was lighter than usual, she thought, as she adjusted the large tote bag on her shoulder so it wouldn’t pinch her weathered brown skin.

She turned left on Twenty-fourth and continued on down the half block to Senora Silverman’s house. Every Monday for the last nine years, she had taken a two-hour-long combination of subways and buses in from her apartment in Queens to clean the Senora’s brownstone. The commute was long, but compared to some of her other houses, the work wasn’t that hard. The Senora lived alone and had few visitors. She kept her house neat. It wasn’t a hard house to clean.

Esmerelda had let herself grow fonder of the Senora than she was of many of her customers. Five years earlier, Senora Silverman had given Esmerelda a key to the house so she wouldn’t have to come in so early. Now Esmerelda could sleep in until almost eight. The Senora was always at work by the time she got there. Esmerelda could take her time cleaning the house. The Senora had cable TV and let her make lunch. The Senora trusted her.

Esmerelda worried about her, though. She saw the enormous number of liquor and wine bottles that were thrown into the recycling bins. If the Senora lived alone and drank that much, she must be borracha every night.

Perhaps, Esmerelda often wondered, the Senora was lonely. Every woman, Esmerelda knew, needed a man.

She climbed the stairs to the front door and pulled a set of keys out of her tote bag. She unlocked the door and walked into the Senora’s house. To the right of the front door was a keypad for the burglar alarm. Esmerelda started to enter the code when she noticed the alarm wasn’t on.

Muy extrano, she thought. She hoped the Senora wasn’t ill. She locked the front door behind her, then walked through the living room and into the kitchen. She set her tote bag on the floor and looked around. The sink was full of dirty dishes, with dried, crusty food left out on both the counter and the kitchen table.

Esmerelda’s brow furrowed. “Senora?” she called out.

“Senora Silverman?”

Esmerelda heard only silence. She left the kitchen and walked back down the hall into the living room. At the foot of the staircase, she stopped and looked upstairs.

“Senora Silverman?” she called out again.

Worried, Esmerelda slowly walked upstairs, the creaking of the wooden staircase the only break in the silence. She got to the top of the stairs and looked around.

Nothing.

“Senora,” she said, her voice softer. Esmerelda flicked the hall light switch and continued on, her footsteps muffled by the carpeted runner that ran the length of the hallway. The Senora’s bedroom door was closed at the end of the hall. She stopped, put her ear close to the doorway and listened.

She knocked gently on the door. “Senora?” she asked again. “Senora Silverman?”

Then she reached out, took the doorknob in hand and twisted it. The door was unlocked. She pushed the door open.

The first thing she saw was a large letter-N-smeared in red on the wall above the Senora’s bed. Then she saw what was below.

Esmerelda Cardenas started screaming. She didn’t stop for a long time.

“I can’t stay here much longer,” Taylor Robinson complained as Hank Powell held up the coffeepot, offering her another cup. “And I sure as hell can’t drink any more coffee.”

“You have to stay,” Hank said. “It’s too dangerous for you.”

Then he smiled. “But you don’t have to drink any more coffee.”

Taylor paced around the small center room in the hotel suite she’d been in since the debacle at Grand Central Station Friday afternoon. Hank had spirited her away to a midtown hotel right after Michael’s threatening phone call, where she’d been under constant guard ever since. A team of NYPD officers had been with her around the clock, with frequent checkins by Joyce Parelli’s team from the FBI Field Office.

“It’s been seventy-two hours,” Taylor said. “I can’t live the rest of my life like this. I’ve got work to do.”

“All we’re trying to do is make sure you’re around to do it,” Hank said defensively. He shook a small packet of powdered creamer into his own coffee and stirred. “Look, Taylor, we can’t take any chances. NYPD’s front- burnered this big time. He can’t hide forever. Sooner or later, he’ll slip up.

And this time, he won’t get away. Why don’t we just order some lunch? I can hang around until two o’clock or so, then I have to catch the Metroliner back to D.C.”

Taylor stopped pacing and slid into a leather easy chair in the corner of the room. “I feel so damn helpless,” she said. “As though my whole life is out of control. Everything I do, everything I think, everything period, is controlled by this, this horrible thing that’s come into my life. I can’t even think of him as a person anymore.”

Hank sat down at the small table across from her and cradled the plastic cup of coffee between his hands. “I know this is hard, Taylor. For what very little it’s worth, I think you’re being incredibly courageous in dealing with this.”

Taylor laughed bittersweetly. “Me, brave? I’m scared to death. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”

Hank Powell’s cell phone went off. He pulled it out of his jacket pocket and flipped it open.

“Powell,” he said.

His eyes darkened and his jaw muscles tightened. “When?”

he asked. He reached into his jacket and yanked out a small notebook. Cradling the cell phone in the crook of his neck, he took out a pen and opened the notebook.

“Give me that again,” he instructed. “Okay, Twenty-fourth Street. Got it. Now where is that? Between Ninth and Tenth, right? Okay, I’m on my way.”

Hank closed the phone and slipped it into his pocket. He studied the page he’d just written on for a moment, then closed the notebook. He looked up. Taylor was staring at him, hard.

“Twenty-fourth between Ninth and Tenth,” she whispered, her eyes questioning.

Hank reached over, picked up the television remote, and pushed the power button. The screen flicked on instantly and he punched in the channel number for the local CBS

affiliate.

The midday news was on. The attractive, young, blond, anchorperson appeared on the screen just as the artwork behind her changed from a large bus with a red line drawn through it to the outline of a body on a sidewalk, with the headline below reading: BRUTAL CHELSEA SLAYING.

Hank raised the volume. “Police are at this moment on the scene of a brutally vicious murder in a quiet Chelsea neighborhood,” she said. “The body of a woman whose name is being withheld pending notification of kin was discovered just this morning by a cleaning woman, as WCBS’s Katie Jackson reports live from the scene.”

The station cut away from the studio to a live remote.

Taylor and Hank watched as the screen pictured the block of Twenty-fourth Street between Ninth and Tenth Avenues.