Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(49)

But when you get into stuff like this—the seemingly symbolic mutilation, the killer taking a grisly trophy—you tend to lean away from crime of passion, and more toward something more . . . ritualistic.

Maybe he came in and out through the window.

Or maybe he let himself in with a key.

“Okay, we’re out of here,” Perez announces, as he finishes buttoning up his gear. “You guys gonna wait around for the M.E.?”

“Don’t have much choice, do we?”

“You could be here waiting all night,” Blake warns.

“What do you want me to do,” Rocky snaps, “go downtown and drag them away from the goddamned pile?”

The CSU guys fall silent. Shifting her weight, Brandewyne goes back to her notes. Rocky rubs his pounding temples with his fingertips.

Yeah. Everyone’s nerves are frayed; everyone’s exhausted.

Rocky passed four different delis on the way here—places where he ordinarily stops to get some caffeine to see him through a rough overnight—and they were all closed. He wishes he’d thought to grab a go-cup full of the battery acid that passes for coffee down at the station house.

“Hang in there, Rocky,” Perez tells him, heading toward the door.

“You too, Jorge.”

As Blake follows Perez past Rocky, Rocky pats his upper arm, a typical parting gesture. But his hand rests there a little longer than usual, offering an added measure of support.

He and Ange went to Blake’s wedding last spring down in Breezy Point, Brooklyn. Two of the groomsmen—including the bride’s brother—were with the FDNY. Rocky’s afraid to ask about them. Having glimpsed the gaunt expression in Blake’s eyes, he doesn’t have to.

“You take care of yourself, Andy,” Rocky tells him.

“You too.”

They disappear into the hall. He can hear them out there, talking to Green.

Left alone in the apartment with Brandewyne and the dead girl, Rocky walks over to the bed and surveys the body.

“You want to notify the next of kin?” Brandewyne asks. “Or do you want me to do it?”

“You can do it.”

“Why did I know you were going to say that?”

Rocky shrugs and hands her a folded slip of paper. “It’s not the parents—they’re both dead. She was an only child. She has an aunt and uncle who live in England.”

“It’s late there. Should I wait till morning?”

“Sooner the better.”

“Right. They’ll have to make travel arrangements.”

“They’re going to have to swim over if they want to get here anytime soon,” Rocky says darkly, before Brandewyne goes into the next room to make her call.

He looks at Kristina. “Who did this to you?”

Jerry the maintenance man is certainly a likely suspect, considering the fact that he’d likely have the keys to Kristina Haines’s apartment and was lurking in the hallway in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, right around the time she was killed. Was he a secret admirer? A stalker? It’s possible.

Anything is possible.

Those very words are scrawled on a whiteboard in Kristina’s kitchen.

Who wrote them? Kristina herself, alone in the big city, reminding herself to hope and dream?

Or was it her killer, sending an ominous message?

Point taken, Rocky thinks. Anything is possible.

He keeps reminding Brandewyne that this case might not be nearly as cut-and-dried as it seems. Seasoned detectives know that when it comes to homicide, things are not always as they appear to be. You have to look beyond the obvious.

Rocky ponders the series of burglaries reported in the building over the last month or so. Several tenants had reported that someone had entered their apartments while they were out during the day and stolen personal items—mainly costume jewelry and women’s clothing. Among the missing belongings listed on the police reports Rocky scrutinized: a black negligee that exactly matches the description of the one Kristina Haines was wearing when she died.

There were no signs of forced entry in any of the burglaries, according to the reports, indicating that the thief had either come in and out through an unlocked outside window, or through the door—with a key.

Were the burglaries a prelude to murder?

Had Kristina interrupted a burglary in progress in her own apartment?

Nothing about the elaborately staged crime scene would seem to indicate that, but Rocky isn’t ruling anything out.

Kristina Haines wasn’t even the first person to die in that building in the past few months. Elvira Ogden, the old lady who lived in an apartment on the floor below, had fallen and hit her head back in May. Rocky will take a closer look, but that death really looks like an accident. Anyway, very little about that death—aside from the location—had anything in common with this one.

Kristina was an attractive woman; chances are, Jerry isn’t the only guy who’d noticed. There must have been others. Rocky just has to find and question them.

Easier said than done. Right now, it seems no one in this city is where he or she is supposed to be.

Earlier, Brandewyne found contact information for Ray, Kristina’s ex-boyfriend, in her desk. But he lives down on Warren Street, near ground zero. The whole area has been evacuated.

Brandewyne couldn’t reach the building’s owner, Dale Reiss, either. A recently retired corporate accountant, he lives with his wife, Emily, in Battery Park City, and that’s also been evacuated. God only knows where he is tonight.