Page 5 of Stay Awake
The manager announces the bar is closing in five minutes. As if in unison, all the stragglers sitting along the bar swallow what’s left of their drinks and trail out of the main doors to the street. I hang around talking to the bartender as the staff pile chairs on tables.
“How do you know so much about me?”
“You tell me all your secrets,” he teases.
“What secrets?”
In answer, he gestures toward the ballpoint letters above my knuckles that spell out the wordsSTAY AWAKE. I snatch my hands away in embarrassment.
“I sometimes write reminders to myself,” I explain, self-consciously. “It’s a bad habit. From when I was a kid.”
“You do it so you don’t forget stuff. Like this.” He points to writing on my hand that says:DON’T SLEEP!Below it, partly hidden by my sleeve, it says:WAKE UP.
“What do I have against sleep?”
“You’re afraid of what you do in your sleep.” He flips a white cloth off his shoulder and wipes a beer glass dry as his words sink in. “At least, that’s what you told me the other night.”
“What could I possibly do in my sleep?” I ask.
Then I remember the bloodied knife.
Chapter
Four
Wednesday 7:35A.M.
Darcy Halliday pushed through the crowd pressed against police barricades outside the entrance of an apartment building. A television crew was setting up a camera and sound equipment near a patrol car with its siren lights whirring. A reporter in pancake makeup paced nearby, rehearsing her lines.
Nobody paid much attention to Halliday as she moved toward the police tape. She wore navy running shorts and a pink Lycra tank top. Flushed and sweaty from her morning run, she looked like any other curious jogger stopping to find out what was going on.
“Move along. There’s nothing to see here,” ordered a cop manning a police barricade outside the building. Halliday pushed through a gap in the crowd and ducked under the police tape.
“Miss, I need you to step back,” the cop barked. He was about to block her way when he noticed the detective shield she held out.
She stepped around him and took the steps to the lobby. She’d been on her morning run to the precinct when a message popped up on theprecinct group chat about a homicide on East Fifty-Third. The captain had asked if any of his detectives were in the vicinity.
“I’m a block away,” she’d messaged back, even though she was more like three blocks away.
Still, that put her closer than anyone else. She sprinted past gridlocked traffic with the certainty she’d be the first investigator at the scene.
In the two months since Halliday moved to homicide on a six-month temporary transfer, she hadn’t once worked her own case. She didn’t even have a regular partner. She was the extra pair of hands assigned to help other detectives with their investigations. She knew the drill. It was all about paying dues. Two months into the job, she was done proving herself. As far as she was concerned, she’d already paid every due she ever owed. With interest.
Halliday had served in the military for six years with distinction, during which time she’d done multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. She joined the NYPD after her discharge. Her first two years were spent as a patrol cop, with occasional stints in vice, dressing as a hooker to act as bait. Halliday did a stint in forensics after she aced the detective’s exam and then five months in Major Case while she waited for an opening in homicide. It came in the form of a temporary position to replace a detective who’d gone on long-term sick leave.
Halliday had more than earned her badge. Yet her time in homicide felt like her first year as a beat cop, where she was treated as a wet-behind-the-ears rookie despite her military service and combat experience. So when she saw that she was in the vicinity of a homicide, she jumped at the chance to get in early on the case.
“What floor?” she asked the doorman, flashing her badge.
“Sixth.”
Halliday jogged up the stairs to avoid waiting for the elevators. On the sixth-floor landing, she unzipped her runner’s pouch and took out an NYPD zipped top and blue nylon warm-up pants that she kept for such emergencies.
She put them on and brushed her shoulder-length chestnut hair with her fingers before swinging the stairwell door open, coming out into a corridor where a cop was questioning a red-haired woman near an apartment sealed off with crime scene tape.
The woman spoke in broken English with a strong Eastern European accent. Halliday assumed she was the person who’d alerted 9–1–1 after finding the body.
“The cleaner’s name is Olga Kuznetsov,” the patrol officer told Halliday when she took him aside for a quick update. He mispronounced the name. “She says she arrived to clean just after seven. Found a dead man in the bed. Apparently, she cleans the apartment a couple of times a week. The owner stays some nights. The rest of the time he puts the apartment up on Airbnb or some other website.”
