Nightwatcher (Nightwatcher #1)(81)

“Here. She’s the one whose lights were on.”

He goes over to Allison’s door and presses an ear against it, listening for movement or the hum of a television on the other side. He can’t hear a thing, of course. No paper-thin walls or doors in this old building; the apartments are surprisingly well-insulated here. Yet another reason whoever attacked Kristina Haines got away with murder.

So far, anyway.

Rocky knocks on the door.

There’s no answer.

He knocks again.

No answer again.

He clears his throat. “Ms. Taylor? Are you in there?”

She doesn’t reply. Maybe she’s sleeping.

He and Brandewyne exchange a glance and a shrug. He knocks louder, calls louder, “Ms. Taylor? It’s Detectives Manzillo and Brandewyne.”

Nothing.

There’s no answer to his knock on MacKenna’s door across the hall, either.

“What do you think?” Brandewyne’s tone is hushed.

“Let’s go upstairs. We’ve got to see if Taylor’s keys are there like she said.”

They return to the stairwell and take the steps up to the fifth floor two at a time. Rocky unlocks Kristina Haines’s door, then both he and Brandewyne pull latex gloves from their pockets and put them on.

They duck beneath the yellow crime scene tape stretched across the doorway.

“I’ll take the kitchen, you take the living room,” Rocky tells Brandewyne.

He searches every possible nook for the spare set of keys, conscious of the three words scribbled on the whiteboard hanging beside the fridge.

Anything is possible.

“They aren’t there,” Brandewyne announces from the doorway. “I’m going to check the bedroom.”

He nods, slamming a drawer shut and opening another. He should have gotten over here to look earlier.

A thought plays at the edge of Rocky’s consciousness, but he doesn’t want to let it in.

No. Don’t go down that road. Not yet.

He finishes the kitchen as Brandewyne comes out of the bedroom. “Nothing there, or in the bathroom. Maybe she kept them someplace else.”

“Like where?”

“Her desk at work?”

“She didn’t even have a regular job with a desk of her own; she was a temp. And anyway, you keep your neighbor’s keys close at hand. That’s why you have them in the first place.”

“I know. Maybe we missed them. I’ll go check the living room again.” She disappears.

She’s not going to find them. Rocky knows it in his gut. They didn’t miss the keys because they’re not here. Not anymore.

There’s a strong possibility that whoever killed Kristina took Allison’s keys . . . then did—or is doing right now—to Allison what he did to Kristina.

I’ve got to find this guy. There’s got to be a way around the red tape.

Rocky reaches into his pocket and dials the phone number of the only person he knows can make something happen . . . now.

Huddled into his jacket, Mack walks past Washington Square Park, remembering the day he met Carrie. It was right over there, on the path near the stone arch.

He was walking through the park heading south, on his way to meet a couple of guys for happy hour; she was coming north—walking home from work, she later told him. They bumped into each other, quite literally.

Kismet. Isn’t that the way lovers always meet in movies?

It was an unseasonably warm March night. Mack had found out a few days earlier that his mother had six months to live.

He was between girlfriends. Carrie wasn’t conventionally pretty, but there was something about her . . .

So he asked her out. That was his style.

It wasn’t hers to say yes, she later told him over drinks at McSorley’s. That’s where he took her on their first date, not yet aware that Carrie isn’t—wasn’t—a McSorley’s kind of woman. He was certainly a McSorley’s kind of guy back then. Which is why it was even more surprising that she said yes to a second date.

“There was something about you that made me want to let you in. That made me want to know you,” she told Mack.

“My sparkling wit? My dashing good looks? What was it?”

He’ll never forget her answer to that question. It caught him off guard.

“You just felt safe.”

At the time, he thought it was an odd thing to say. He didn’t know yet about Carrie’s past. She told him only after they’d dated for a few weeks. The truth didn’t come easily, he knew. Maybe she sensed that he was getting frustrated by her issues, the ones that kept getting in the way of having a normal relationship.

She didn’t want to go to a basketball game with him because she didn’t like big crowds; she didn’t want to drink more than one drink because she didn’t like to lose control; she didn’t want to sit where she couldn’t see the door because she liked to have an escape route . . .

Even now, though, looking back, he remembers thinking that not all of those idiosyncrasies seemed directly tied to what happened in her past. But then, what did he know?

What does he know now, for that matter? He kept trying to convince himself that her awful mood swings were simply due to the infertility drugs, but on Monday night, as he was sitting alone out on the stoop, he admitted to himself that she’d always been that way. It wasn’t just the drugs. It was her personality: mercurial, reclusive, difficult.