Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(66)

Rocky knows Andy doesn’t actually believe anything Marianne could have done warranted this violent ferocity. But he’s feeling short-fused after too little sleep and too much stress, and it’s all he can do not to make a harsh response to that inane comment.

Nicotine-deprived Brandewyne’s filter is obviously not working as effectively; she snaps, “If you actually think anyone deserves to die like this, Blake, then you’re a real—”

“Take a chill pill, sweetheart, I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Sweetheart? I’m not your sweetheart.”

“You got that right.”

Ignoring the two of them, Rocky strides over to the victim and takes a closer look.

Like Kristina Haines, she’s wearing lingerie—a white satin nightgown trimmed with lace. Like Kristina, she’s been savagely stabbed all over her body. And like Kristina, she’s missing a middle finger.

Rocky can’t see the evidence of that at the moment—her hands are already bagged to preserve the evidence. But the finger is gone—sawed off while she was still alive, according to the CSU guys.

That detail of the Haines case was never released to the public—not that anyone in the press was paying the slightest bit of attention anyway. Everyone was consumed with the much larger story; Kristina’s murder didn’t even make the papers.

Still . . . if it had, there would have been no mention of the missing middle finger.

Only the cops working the case—and Kristina’s killer—could have known about that.

Now a second body turns up, also missing the middle finger of her right hand?

“She fought pretty hard,” Perez comments. “We found some skin scrapings under her nails, and there was some hair tangled in her fingers.”

“Tangled?” Rocky is taken aback. Both Allison Taylor and James McKenna had described the prime suspect, Jerry, as having a crew cut.

“Yeah, a few strands of it,” Perez tells him.

“Strands?” Having traded the cigarette for a pen, Brandewyne scribbles something on her notepad. “So it was long hair?”

“Yeah.”

“How long?” Brandewyne asks.

“Pretty long . . . we’ll measure, but—”

“Could it be her own hair?” Rocky cuts in impatiently.

“Nope. Hers is shorter and curlier and reddish.”

“What color was this?”

“Looks like dark brown.”

Before Rocky can ask another question, his cell phone rings. He steps into the next room to answer it, glancing at the window near the couch and noticing the iron grillwork of a fire escape just beyond the screen. Looks like the CSU team dusted the sill and sash for prints.

So this guy—the guy they’re calling the Nightwatcher down at the station house—climbs up fire escapes and slithers into his victims’ apartments in the dead of night. He must know them well enough to be sure they live alone . . . among other details.

He snaps his phone open. “Yeah, Manzillo here.”

“Rocky, it’s Tommy. Get this: that building? The one where the Apostolos girl was killed?”

“Yeah . . . that’s where I am right now. What about it?”

“Who do you think the owner is? Go ahead, take a wild guess.”

“What is this, Jeopardy?” he snaps, not in the mood for games. “Who?”

“Dale Reiss,” comes the reply, “and guess who works there as a handyman?”

When Allison first came out to sit on the stoop earlier this afternoon, the sun was shining. Now the sky is overcast and the wind has shifted in this direction, carrying the acrid scent of burning.

Maybe she should go back inside . . .

But there’s nothing to do there.

Nothing to do out here, either; no one to talk to, nowhere to go . . .

She’s spent the better part of the last hour sitting on the stoop, leafing through an issue of Vogue in the warm September sunshine.

But now the sky is growing overcast and the wind has shifted. How can she focus on the magazine’s glossy glamour? All she wanted to do when she came out here was sit and read and breathe, but now her every breath is tainted with death fumes from the fire still burning farther downtown.

Maybe she should give up and go back inside. But the thought of being back in her apartment, behind all those locks . . .

Locks that may be useless if Kristina’s killer stole her key . . .

Better to sit out here just a little longer, inhaling bad air and brooding, inexplicably feeling as though she’s survived something horrific only to face something even worse looming on the horizon.

It’s because of what happened to Kristina, she knows.

Or maybe it goes all the way back to her mother.

Every time Mom tried to kill herself and failed, Allison was left with a growing sense of impending doom. She used to mentally rehearse what she would do when it actually happened—when her mother finally succeeded in taking her own life.

She always assumed it would be afternoon or early evening, because that was how the trial runs had unfolded. But she was wrong.

She didn’t come home at dusk one day to find that Brenda Taylor had OD’d again. No, she was right in the house when her mother finally killed herself. In the house, but sound asleep. Helpless.

Why, Mom? Why did you do it when I was there, in the next room? Why didn’t you at least wait until I was gone, so I wouldn’t feel as though there must have been something I could have done if only I’d gotten up sooner?