Icarus

'Of course she did,' Jack told the sergeant. 'She had to.'

'I'm here because while somebody was shooting at you on the street, the guy in that apartment there' – McCoy jerked her head across the hallway – 'came outside to go to work and saw this shit in here.' Now her head nodded at Samsonite's blood-soaked apartment. 'Somebody else reported the shots and we had a car in the vicinity.'

'She had to have called you,' Jack said. 'I don't understand.'

'I don't understand either,' McCoy told him. 'But I think you'd better give me her address and phone number.'

'There's a reason she didn't call,' Jack insisted. 'She didn't do this. It's not possible.'

'There's a lot of things I didn't think were possible just a few days ago,' McCoy said, shaking her head. 'So just give me the info. I want to find her immediately. Because if she's not the killer then there's a pretty good chance whoever is is gonna try to turn her into another corpse.'

Jack nodded, solemnly repeated Grace's name, and gave McCoy the address. He couldn't remember her phone number but she told him not to worry about that, they could find it. She excused herself, disappeared for a moment into the apartment, and Jack could hear her give the information to one of the cops. Moments later, they both emerged. McCoy stopped to stay with Jack; the other cop kept going down the stairs.

'He'll find her,' McCoy said. 'One way or the other.' She saw him stare after the cop who'd just left and she knew Jack wanted to go, too, to check on the woman he called the Rookie, but she told him to keep talking, to tell the rest of his story. 'It's the only way we're going to finish this,' she urged. 'The most helpful thing you can do now is talk.'

So Jack kept talking. He backtracked, told her everything he could remember about the Team. About Kid's world and his Slashes. She asked to hear more about Grace and he said that he thought she'd become the new Destination and he told her about Kid's romantic notion that Rome was a destination. He told her about the Mistake, a woman from Kid's past who'd appeared again, and how Kid had seemed shaken by both the past relationship and the current one. He told her about the break-in at his apartment, then worked his way back to Samsonite, told McCoy about finding her at the after-hours club and recounted how he went to her apartment, the things he'd learned about her – her stealing money from the club, Kid loaning her the five thousand dollars he'd borrowed from the Entertainer. It was a jumble of information to him now, hard to sort through, especially as new flashes began to come back to him: the things Samsonite told him she'd learned from Kid.

I know all about you, she'd said to Jack. Your stupid red-meat crematorium. Your fantasy apartment…

He told McCoy how he began to feel dizzy. At first he'd thought it was exhaustion, then the stifling atmosphere of the tenement apartment. Only as he stumbled did he begin to realize that he'd been drugged.

… The whaddyacallit, the balcony that you're terrified of…

He told McCoy what she'd said about the drugs: I know why you're here. I know what you want me to say. I figured it out, too. But when he came to buy the fucking acid, I didn't know what it was for. I didn't know what he was going to do with it…

'What did she figure out?' McCoy asked.

'I don't know. I think she meant she figured out who killed Kid.'

'How come everyone seems to have figured it out except us, goddamnit? And who came to buy the acid? Kid?'

'That's what it sounded like,' Jack said. 'But I don't know for sure. I don't know anything for sure.'

There was more but Jack couldn't dredge it out of his memory. His body was giving out now and his brain was not far behind. McCoy saw him fade and she told him he'd done more than enough, that she'd give him a ride home.

I'm missing something, Jack thought. What the hell am I missing?

In the ride uptown, McCoy tried to make sense of what he'd told her but she wasn't having much better luck than he was. 'We'll check into Kid's background,' she told him. 'See if we can dig up anything from his past that might help. Get his college records, even high school. I'll go talk to Ms. Migliarini again, too.'

'I think she's the one,' Jack said.

'No. I don't think so,' McCoy told him. 'I'm certainly going to discuss that possibility with her. But there's one thing that doesn't fit.'

'What's that?'

'Why would she let you live? If there's one thing your Mortician knows, it's not to be careless or sentimental. If it's her or somebody who works for her, it doesn't add up. You're the one who confronted her in the first place. You're the only one who's put the various pieces together. You're the one who tracked down all the other women – and let's assume that whoever it is we're looking for killed those women because they knew something, because they could've led us to where we want to go. Well, the person who's got the best chance of leading – you – was right there for the taking. Doesn't make sense. Especially for someone like little Eva. Why kill Samsonite and leave you there to keep hunting?'

Jack didn't have an answer to that. But McCoy did.

'You know something, Jack. You know something you don't even know you know. You're the point man, there's some kind of connection between you and whoever's doing this.'

'No,' Jack said, shaking his head. 'I don't know any of these women. I never heard of them until Kid told me about them. I never met them until I started finding them.'

'You don't know that.'

'I do. I've met-'

'You've met them all except two, possibly three.'

'The Murderess and maybe the Destination. And the Mistake.'

'You don't know who they are,' McCoy said. 'You never saw them, you don't know their names, so how the hell do you know there's no connection?'

'I think if we find the Murderess we'll have the killer.'

'We got good news and bad news on that one: most of the others have been eliminated. Your instincts have been pretty good so far, Jack. Mine have pretty much sucked but you're in my territory now and I'm telling you that Kid is the key. And you knew Kid. You knew him well enough to know he didn't kill himself, didn't you?'

Jack nodded.

'Then you know something else, too,' McCoy said. 'Your job is to try to figure out what the fuck it is.'

– '-'-'THE FIRST THING Jack did when he got home was to call Grace. There was no answer, just a message on her machine saying she wasn't available. 'It's Jack,' he said after the recording instructed him to talk. 'Call me so I know you're all right.'

He took a steam, made it as hot as he could stand. Didn't press the off switch until he couldn't take it any longer. Then he turned the shower on and let icy-cold water run down over him. Toweled himself off and got dressed. He was dreading what he was going to do next. He didn't know why, exactly, except something inside of him knew that it was leading him somewhere he didn't want to go. But he knew he had to go there. If he wanted the horror to end, if he wanted the killing to stop, he understood that McCoy was right – he knew something and now it was time to dig it out of himself.

You're the point man, McCoy had said. There's a connection.

But what the hell was it?

What did he know? What was the secret?

And how far back did it go?

That's what scared him, Jack realized. He didn't know why, but he did know it was what was holding him back, what was blocking his mind.

How far back did it go?

Jack went to his computer, called up the file he'd made on Kid.

He studied the information he'd put in. As he studied, his mind flew to anything relevant he'd picked up from the women on Kid's team or from Bryan. What he had learned since he'd typed in these notes.

Kid had spent three years at St. John's quarterbacking the football team. He'd left after his junior year and he and Caroline had never gotten to the bottom of it. There seemed to be some connection to his teammate who had been injured on the practice field, had been hit hard enough to paralyze him, but what was it? And what else had happened that made him leave?

Question number one: The football accident was tragic, yes, but what was it that affected Kid so greatly? Why