Page 90 of Kill For Me Kill For You
She tapped. Breathed. And put more chains around the oak chest.
Twenty minutes later, the chains had stopped rattling. Ruth took a sip of water and shook her head.
She should not be feeling this way. This was different from the last time. The sense of calm and power that normally followed the kill was not there tonight. The warmth of peace had diminished. Already, she could feel a presence outside. Somewhere in the city, Mr. Blue-eyes was alive and hunting her. She could sense him. Those blue eyes, searching for her. A chill brushed her neck and shoulders, causing her to shiver.
Ruth got out of bed and checked the windows. One of them was open. She closed it and scanned the street below. No one there. She went to her bag. Emptied it onto the bed.
Five cell phones. All of them connected to remote chargers. All five phones held messages for her. Some on text, some on WhatsApp.
The messages were not for Ruth, of course. Not really.
They were for Jenny, Rachel, Simone, Amy and Sarah. Her current identities. Five in all. Most of them were members of two or three support groups. All of the identities looked like Ruth, and all of them were grieving and bitter and angry at a lost love who had been cruelly taken from them by a killer. To help organize her various live identities, Ruth had stuck name tags to the back of the phones. Otherwise she would lose track. Jenny, for example, was in two online support groups for bereaved parents. Rachel had a trauma group meeting on Thursday afternoons in Harlem. Simone in Queens on Tuesdays. Amy’s groups were further apart, East Flatbush and Staten Island. Sarah was the busiest – four online groups and two physical – Wakefield in the Bronx and Bedford Stuyvesant, in Brooklyn. There were almost eight and a half million people in New York, and population density varied between twenty thousand and sixty thousand people per square mile. A perfect place for Ruth to hide. She was a red needle in a haystack of eight million. With all of the groups she sought out the same kind of person. A parent, a husband, a wife, a lover – who had lost a loved one to someone who had not paid the price. Sometimes they were hard to find. Other times, they were in the groups already – just waiting for her. All she had to do was tease them out.
Injustice and grief were her weapons, moulded from love, regret and sometimes even guilt. A few of her targets were already primed. Ready. Waiting. All she had to do was tell them the story of two strangers on a train.
She decided that in the morning she would go back into Manhattan. Into the streets she knew so well. Tomorrow was the parade. She could watch it, and try to enjoy it. The peace that came after the kill was fragile, and precious. She needed to grasp it, bask in it. While she could. It was dwindling already.
Ruth replied to the messages on the phones, turned them all off and went to sleep.
51
Farrow
It was getting late at the precinct. Two a.m. Early Thanksgiving Day.
The evening shift had clocked off two hours ago and the only light in the robbery homicide office was from Farrow’s desk lamp. The night shift were out pounding the streets, running down leads or working calls. Farrow liked to work at night, when it was quiet. The dark suited his mood, boosted his thoughts. The lamp shone a single light on the notebook in front of him, creating a halo of concentration. He sipped at his cold coffee and made some more notes.
The Quinn case was starting to become a lot more intriguing. There were too many pieces of it that just didn’t fit together.
Most murders were simple. The victims nearly always knew their attacker, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out the killer. It’s usually blindingly obvious. The exceptions were the robberies, and the serial killers – like Mr. Blue-eyes. But they were few and far between.
Drugs, alcohol, money, sex. That’s all there was to most murders.
He let the clicker on top of the pen sit on his lower lip as his mind wandered. Perhaps one of those motives was at work here and he didn’t know it. Money didn’t seem to be one of the factors, because whoever the limping woman was who had been in the house, she hadn’t taken the two rolls of cash.
‘What are you still doing here?’ said a voice.
He recognized it instantly. Hernandez. She should’ve been home by now, cooking one of her famous paellas with a glass of something cool and white in one hand. He’d been to her place a few times for dinner and a couple of bottles of Sauvignon Blanc. Usually when Hernandez had a new man in her life. It was like an unspoken test. If her boyfriend could get along with Farrow, then he had a shot. Plus, it helped settle the boyfriend’s nerves about Hernandez working with a male partner. Sometimes those evenings went well, with Farrow leaving in the small hours of the morning in a cab. Other times, the boyfriend got kicked out early and Farrow would leave shortly after. Farrow didn’t mind. The wine and the paella were always good.
‘I might ask you the same question,’ said Farrow.
Hernandez approached his desk, looked down at his notebook.
‘I might have guessed. This Quinn case is really bugging you,’ she said.
He took off his reading glasses and set them down on the page.
‘I took the case from Statler and Waldorf,’ he said.
‘Goddamn it, I knew you would. Actually, I don’t mind. I want to find that woman. I hate it when I lose somebody on the street.’
‘That why you’re still here?’
Picking up his reading glasses, he cleaned them with the fat end of his tie, held them up to the light and then slipped them back on.
Hernandez put her hands on her hips, then threw her head back and sighed.
‘It bothers me. You know it does. So how can I help?’ she asked.
