Page 32 of Stay Awake
“Yeah, I’ve been trying to get hold of him,” said Lavelle. “His phone is off.”
“He’s probably still sleeping,” said the doorman. “He starts work at six. Come again tonight. He’ll be here,” he said, before rushing to the door to help a woman arriving with an armful of shopping bags.
After talking to the doorman, Halliday and Lavelle split up. He went to talk to the officer supervising the door knocking and murder weapon search, while Halliday went down to the basement to check out the building’s rear exits.
There were two service exits from the basement. Both came out into a narrow lane behind the apartment building. The first exit was where the garbage Dumpsters were located. There was also a rear exit at the bottom of the fire escape stairs. Black-fingerprint residue coated the metal door handles and light switches at both exits where the forensics team had taken prints.
Halliday pushed open the fire exit doors and stepped into an alley behind the building. Ten yards away was a street. On that street, directly facing the end of the lane was a liquor store. Halliday crossed the side street and went inside.
An elderly man with a drooping gray mustache hunched on a stool behind the counter manually checking an order book with a blue ballpoint pen. He looked up when Halliday approached, holding out her badge.
“How can I help you, Detective?”
“Do you have security cameras pointing out to the street?”
“We sure do. Had a robbery a few years back. They threw a brick into the store window, grabbed whatever they could, and drove off. We put up cameras after that.”
He motioned toward a bank of small screens behind the counter. They showed footage from different angles in and outside the store. One of the camera angles showed a clear shot of the end of the alley across the street. That was the killer’s likely exit route.
“Can I get a copy of the footage from that camera?” Halliday asked.
“My son knows how to do that. I barely know how to turn on a computer. He’s out right now. Leave me your number and I’ll get him to get right onto it as soon as he gets back.”
Halliday left her business card and then walked back to the main entrance of the building, where she waited for Lavelle. Across the street, people were milling around on the sidewalk, craning their necks to look up at the apartment where the murder took place.
“What’s going on over there?” Halliday asked a cop outside the building.
“The TV news ran pictures of the message on the apartment window. People are coming to take a look like it’s a tourist attraction.”
“Some tourist attraction!”
Halliday crossed the street and joined the group looking up at the window. Seeing it from this angle cemented Halliday’s view themessage was intended for the outside world. That’s why the killer had written it on the apartment window instead of on a wall near the body, or on the body itself.
A glazier was due to arrive shortly to cut out the entire pane of glass for analysis at the lab as Owen Jeffries had requested. It would be replaced with new glass. Within a day, the police barriers would be gone, along with the gawkers. Halliday knew from experience that in all likelihood the murder would be quickly forgotten in the shuffle of fresh news headlines.
While Halliday waited for Lavelle to return, she showed the onlookers the flyer of the female suspect leaving the elevator with the victim. Most shrugged blankly when she asked if they recognized anyone in the photo.
“Ma’am, have you seen this woman before?” Halliday handed a flyer to a fashionably dressed woman with a short asymmetrical hairstyle who’d joined the crowd after coming out of a high-end shoe store.
The woman took the flyer and studied it. Halliday noticed black-and-blue writing on the back of her hands. It struck her as strange that an otherwise smartly dressed woman would write on her hands like a schoolgirl.
Before Halliday could read any of the writing on the woman’s hands, the woman moved them away self-consciously and handed back the flyer.
“I haven’t seen her before,” she said. “I’m sorry that I can’t help you.” She turned abruptly and disappeared into a throng of pedestrians.
Chapter
Twenty
Wednesday 1:30P.M.
My gaze moves from the apartment window down to a female detective standing in front of me on the busy sidewalk. She’s the detective I saw earlier on the TV news.
She holds out a flyer and asks whether I recognize the long-haired woman in the photograph. I freeze when I see the photo. Even though the woman’s face is downcast, her long waist-length hair is distinctive. My hair was that long before I had it cut short this morning. The woman’s clothes look a lot like the ones I threw away after I was splashed with coffee at theCulturaoffice.
Running through my mind is the horrible thought that I’m the woman the police are looking for. I hand the flyer back to the detective, mumbling something about how I don’t know who it is, before I walk away as calmly as possible.
Once I’ve put some distance between us, I push up my sleeve and stare at the writing on my wrist. Just because the wordsWAKE UP!are written both at the murder scene and on my skin doesn’t mean I have anything to do with what happened. Does it?
