make swishing movements on the windshield. Wanda’s lips snapped into a rigid line. Damn. She shook her head vigorously. No.
No.
The man ignored her.
I am not going to be held up by these people, Wanda fumed, jamming her finger on the button that opened the passenger window. “I don’t want-“ She began to shriek. The rag was thrown against the windshield. The bottle of fluid pinged off the hood. A hand reached into the car. She watched her purse disappear.
A squad car was heading west on Fifty-fifth Street. The driver suddenly straightened up. “What’s that?” On the approach to the highway he could see traffic stopped, people getting out of cars. “Let’s go.” Siren blaring, lights flashing, the squad car lurched forward, skillfully weaving through the maze of moving traffic and double-parked vehicles.
Still screaming with rage and frustration, Wanda pointed to the pier a block away. “My purse. He ran there.”
“Let’s go.” The squad car turned left, then made a sharp right as they roared onto the pier. The cop in the passenger seat turned on the spotlight, revealing the shack Petey had abandoned. “I’ll check inside.” Then he snapped, “Hey, over there. Past the terminal. What’s that?”
The body of Erin Kelley, glistening with sleet, the silvery slipper flashing under the powerful beam from the spotlight, had been discovered again.
Darcy left Nona’s office with Vince D’Ambrosio. They took a cab to her apartment and she gave him Erin ’s daily reminder and her personal-columns file. Vince studied them carefully. “Not much here,” he commented. “We’ll find out who placed the ads she circled. With any luck, Charles North is one of them.” “ Erin isn’t the greatest record keeper,” Darcy said. “I could go back to her apartment and look through her desk again. It’s possible I missed something.” “That could help. But don’t worry. If North’s a corporate lawyer from Philadelphia, it’ll be easy to trace him.” Vince stood up. “I’ll get on this right away.”
“And I’m going back to her apartment now. I’ll leave with you.” Darcy hesitated. The light on the answering machine was blinking. “Can you wait just a minute till I check the messages?” Attempting a smile she said, “There’s always the chance Erin left one.”
There were two messages. Both were about personal ads. One was genial. “Hi, Darcy. Trying you again. Enjoyed your note. Hope we can get together sometime. I’m Box 4358. David Weld, 555- 4890.”
The other was sharply different. “Hey, Darcy, why do you waste your time answering ads and my time trying to reach you. This is the fourth time I’ve called. I don’t like to leave messages, but here’s this one. Drop dead.” Vince shook his head. “That guy has a short leash.” “I didn’t leave the answering machine on while I was away,” Darcy said. “I suppose if anyone tried to reach me in response to the few letters I sent myself, they probably gave up. Erin started answering ads in my name about two weeks ago. Those are the first calls I’ve gotten.”
Gus Boxer was surprised and not especially pleased to respond to the buzzer and find the same young woman who had wasted so much of his time yesterday. He was prepared to absolutely refuse to allow her to enter Erin Kelley’s apartment again but did not get the chance. “We’ve reported Erin ’s disappearance to the FBI,” Darcy told him. “The agent in charge has asked me to go through her desk.” The FBI. Gus felt a nervous tremor go through his body. But that was so long ago. He had nothing to worry about. A couple of people had left their names recently just in case a vacancy came up. One good looking gal said it would be worth a thousand bucks under the table if he put her at the top of the list. So if Kelley’s friend was able to find out something happened to her, it would mean a nice piece of change in his pocket.
“I’m just as worried about that girl as you are,” he whined, the unfamiliar sympathetic tone catching in his vocal cords. “Come on up.” In the apartment, Darcy immediately turned on all the lights against the impending dusk. Yesterday, the place had seemed cheerful enough. Today, Erin ’s continued absence was leaving its mark. A faint edging of soot was visible on the windowsill. The long worktable needed dusting. The framed posters that always gave brightness and color to the room seemed to mock her. The Picasso from Geneva. Erin had bought it on her one school trip abroad. “I love this even though it isn’t my favorite theme,” she’d commented. It depicted a mother and child.
There were no further messages on Erin ’s machine. A search of the desk revealed nothing significant. There was a new cassette for the answering machine in the drawer. Possibly Agent D’Ambrosio would want the old tape, the one that contained messages. Darcy switched the two.
The nursing home. This was around the time Erin usually called it. Darcy looked up the number and dialed. The head nurse on Billy Kelley’s floor came to the phone. “I spoke to Erin as usual on Tuesday night around five. I told her I think her father is quite near the end. She said she would spend the weekend in Wellesley.” Then she added, “I understand she’s missing. We’re all praying that she’s all right.”
There’s nothing more I can do here, Darcy thought, and suddenly felt an overwhelming desire to go home.
It was quarter of six when she got back to her own place. A hot shower was called for, she decided, and a hot toddy.
At ten past six, wrapped in her favorite flannel robe, steam rising from the toddy, she settled on the couch and pushed the remote control for the television.
A story was breaking. John Miller, the investigative crime reporter for Channel 4, was standing at the entrance to a West Side pier. Behind him in a roped-off area a dozen policemen were silhouetted against the cold waters of the Hudson. Darcy turned up the volume.
“… body of an unidentified young woman was just discovered on this abandoned Fifty-sixth Street pier. She appears to have been the victim of strangulation. The woman is slim, in her mid-twenties with auburn hair. She is wearing slacks and a multicolored blouse. A bizarre twist is that she is wearing mismatched shoes, a brown leather ankle boot on her left foot, an evening slipper on her right.”
Darcy stared at the television. Auburn hair. Mid-twenties. Multicolored blouse.
She’d given Erin a multicolored blouse for Christmas. Erin had been delighted.
“It has all the colors of Joseph’s coat,” she’d said. “I love it.”
Auburn. Slim. Joseph’s coat.
The biblical Joseph’s coat had been stained in blood when his treacherous brothers showed it to their father as proof of his death. Somehow, Darcy managed to find in her purse the card Agent D’Ambrosio had given her.
Vince was just about to leave his office. He was meeting his fifteen-year-old son Hank at Madison Square Garden. They were going to have a quick dinner, then take in a Rangers game. As he listened to Darcy he realized that he had been expecting this call; he just hadn’t thought it would come quite this soon. “It doesn’t sound good,” he told her. “I’ll phone the precinct where the body was found. Sit tight. I’ll get back to you.”
When he hung up, he called Hudson Cable. Nona was still in her office. “I’ll get right over to be with Darcy,” she said.
“She’ll be asked if she can identify the body,” Vince warned. He called the Midtown North precinct and was put through to the head of the homicide squad. The body had not yet been removed from the crime scene. When it reached the morgue, they’d send a squad car for Miss Scott. Vince explained his interest in the case. “We’d be grateful for your assistance,” he was told. “Unless this turns out to be an open-and-shut case, we’d like to have it run through VICAP.”
Vince called Darcy back, told her about the squad car and that Nona was on the way. She thanked him, her tone flat and unemotional.
Chris Sheridan left the gallery at ten past five and with long strides walked the fourteen blocks from Seventy- eighth and Madison to Sixty-fifth and Fifth. It had been a busy and highly successful week and he savored the luxurious freedom of knowing that he had the whole weekend to himself. Not a single plan. His tenth-floor apartment faced Central Park. “Directly across from the zoo,” as he told his friends. Eclectic in taste, he’d mixed
