Page 25 of Stay Awake
The newsreader moves on to another story. I turn away and accidentally bump into a young woman holding a mug of coffee. It spills all over my clothes.
“I am soooo sorry,” she says, looking mortified. “That was totally my fault. I was watching the TV instead of looking where I was going.”
“It’s not just your fault. I wasn’t looking where I was going either,” I reassure her, dabbing my wet clothes with a napkin to get rid of the stains. My clothes are ruined.
“Coffee stains are the worst,” calls out Claudine, the magazine stylist, who has just finished eating her lunch. “Come with me, Liv. We’ll find something in the closet for you to wear.”
The closet is where the magazine keeps all the clothes and accessories we use for photo shoots. Most of the garments have been given to the magazine as freebies from brands hoping to get a plug in one of our issues.
I follow Claudine into a large rectangular room with huge windows. In the middle is an enormous table covered with bolts of fabric and color swatches. It’s surrounded by long chrome racks of clothes pressed against the walls. The mood boards of color palettes presented at the meeting earlier are propped up against a window.
Claudine slides hangers along the rack noisily as she pulls out a few pants and tops and tells me to choose an outfit. I opt for a pair of dark skinny jeans and a loose navy cashmere sweater.
The changing room is little more than a booth with a black curtain for privacy. Inside are a stool and a full-length mirror. I pull off my coffee-stained clothes and drop them on the floor.
I’m about to put on the clothes that Claudine brought me when I catch sight of the reflection of my near-naked body in the mirror. My forearms are covered with scribbles in ballpoint pen that reach up tomy elbows. There’s so much writing that it looks as if I have tattoo sleeves. Some of the messages are washed out and illegible. Others are incomprehensible rants that strike me as paranoid and delusional.DON’T TRUST ANYONEandDON’T ANSWER THE PHONEare some of the more comprehensible ones.
Claudine reaches into the changing room to hang another garment on a wall hook for me to try on. “This will look great with that outfit. How are you going in there?”
“Good,” I say absently, staring at myself.
My gaze moves down my bra and rib cage to the top of my abdomen. It stops abruptly at what I presume is a lipstick smudge on the mirror. I lean forward to wipe the red mark off the mirror. The stain remains. That’s when I realize the red mark isn’t on the mirror, it’s on my skin, just below my rib cage.
I look down curiously to examine it with my fingers. It’s not a mark. It’s an ugly clump of puckered red scar tissue that I’ve never seen before.
Chapter
Sixteen
Wednesday 12:08P.M.
When Detective Darcy Halliday came out of the meeting with the captain, she found a padded envelope lying on her desk. Inside was a black hard drive that had been couriered over by the surveillance company responsible for the CCTV cameras in the apartment building where the murder had taken place.
Halliday plugged the hard drive into her computer. There were dozens of files. Each file contained footage from a different security camera. The building was wired up with surveillance cameras on each floor, as well as in all the elevators and at all the entrances and exits.
Halliday clicked on the footage from the camera on the floor of the murder scene. The camera angle that appeared on her computer screen showed the corridor leading to the elevator doors. The video was in color, but the hues were washed out. Halliday wasn’t looking for Hollywood production quality. All she wanted was a clear photo of the suspect’s face.
The medical examiner had said the victim was likely murdered six to nine hours before he’d examined the body. That gave Halliday a rough band of time to focus on.
Halliday rewound the footage until she found the time code of the video taken before midnight. The corridor lights were off. Nothing was visible in the darkness. Halliday fast-forwarded through the dark footage. Eventually, a few minutes after twoA.M., Halliday noticed a change in the dim light in the vicinity of the apartment doorway. The teenage neighbor had told her he’d heard a door banging shut at around that time.
A hint of movement was noticeable as the front door opened and then closed. Halliday re-played the video on slo-mo, pausing to freeze the frame every few seconds. Someone had surreptitiously left the apartment and gone into the stairwell in the middle of the night.
“You think that’s the killer?” asked Lavelle, looking over Halliday’s shoulder at a freeze-framed shot of a silhouette on her computer screen.
“It’s very likely,” Halliday said, trying to enhance the silhouette. “I can’t get it clearer than this,” she said in frustration. “We need to go through footage of all the exits. There has to be a clearer visual of this person leaving the building. Right now, all we can see is a shadowy blob.”
“Rosco and Tran will follow up,” Lavelle said. “We need to get going soon. Forensics called. They’re ready to walk us through the crime scene.”
Halliday was about to unplug the hard drive to give to Rosco when she remembered something important. “Give me a second. I want to see if we have a visual of that couple coming out of the elevator yesterday morning.”
She quickly found the footage she was looking for, at 10:08A.M.the previous morning.
Halliday recognized the older woman with short hair walking toward the elevator. That was the neighbor she’d talked with earlier. When she reached the elevator, the neighbor pressed a button and waited. Twenty seconds later, the elevator doors opened and a man and a woman stepped out.
Halliday paused the video. She was certain the man was the victim. He was roughly the same height and build as the stiff she’d found in bed at the crime scene that morning. The man in the video also had tawny hair, just like the victim, and he had the same distinctive dimples permanently indented into his cheeks.
The man’s hand rested on the long-haired woman’s lower back as they came out of the elevator, but it wasn’t a romantic gesture. It looked as if he was propping her up. She wore jeans and a long cable-knit sweater. All Halliday could see was a curtain of hair obscuring her face.
