“I’m coming with you.”
“It would be better to stay in the car.”
“No!” She looked at him pleadingly. “It’s my apartment. He’s not going to keep me out of my apartment!”
Although it was inconsistent with normal police procedure to allow a civilian to reenter the premises under these conditions before they’d been searched, Gurney was no longer a police officer and procedure was no longer the controlling issue. Given Kim’s state of mind, he decided it would be better to keep her with him than to insist that she remain alone in his car—locked or not.
“Okay,” he said, removing the Beretta from his ankle holster and slipping it into his jacket pocket. “Let’s check it out.”
He led the way the back inside, leaving both doors open behind him. He stopped outside the living room. The hallway continued straight ahead for another twenty feet or so, ending at an archway that opened into a kitchen. Between the living room and the kitchen were two open doorways on the right. “Where do those lead?”
“The first is my bedroom. The second is the bathroom.”
“I’m going to take a look in each one. If you hear anything at all, or if you call my name and I don’t answer immediately, get out through the front door as fast as you can, lock yourself in my car, and call 911. Got that?”
“Yes.”
He moved down the hall, looked inside the first room, then stepped in and switched on the ceiling light. There wasn’t much to see. A bed, a small table, a full-length mirror, a couple of folding chairs, a rickety armoire in place of a closet. He checked the armoire, checked under the bed. He stepped back out into the hall, gave Kim a thumbs-up sign, moved on to the bathroom, and repeated the process.
Next was the kitchen.
“Where did you see the drops of blood?” he asked.
“They start in front of the refrigerator and go into the back hall.”
He entered the kitchen cautiously, glad for the first time in six months that he was armed. The kitchen was a wide room. On the far right was a dinette table and two chairs in front of a window that faced the driveway and the adjoining house. The window brought some light into the room, but not much.
In front of him was a countertop with cabinets under it, a sink, and a refrigerator. Between him and the refrigerator was a small butcher-block island. On the island he saw a meat cleaver. As he stepped around the island, he spotted the blood—a sequence of dark drops on the worn linoleum floor, each about the size of a dime, one every two or three feet, stretching from in front of the refrigerator door over to the rear doorway of the kitchen and out into a shadowy area beyond it.
Without warning he heard the sound of breathing behind him. He spun around in a crouch, pulling the Beretta from his pocket. It was Kim, standing just a few feet away, the cliché deer in the headlights, staring at the muzzle of the little .32, mouth half open.
“Jesus,” he said, taking a breath, lowering the pistol.
“Sorry. I was trying to be quiet. You want me to turn on the light?”
He nodded. The switch was on the wall over the sink. It operated two long fluorescent bulbs mounted on the ceiling. In the brighter light, the blood drops on the floor looked redder. “Is there a light switch for that back hall?”
“On the wall to the right of the fridge.”
He found it, turned it on, and the darkness beyond the doorway was replaced by the buzzing, flickering, cold light of a cheap fluorescent fixture at the end of its life. He moved slowly toward the doorway, the Beretta pointed downward.
Except for a green plastic garbage barrel, the short rear hallway was empty. At its far end, a solid-looking exterior door was secured by a substantial dead-bolt lock. There was a second door in the right wall of this cramped space. It was to this one that the trail of blood drops led.
Gurney glanced quickly at Kim. “What’s behind that door?”
“Stairs. The stairs … to the basement.” Fear was creeping back into her voice.
“When was the last time you were down there?”
“Down … oh, God, I don’t know. Maybe … maybe a year ago? A circuit breaker cut out, and the landlord’s maintenance guy was showing me how to reset it.”
“Is there any other access?”
“No.”
“Any windows?”
“Little ones at ground level, but they have bars on them.”
“Where’s the light switch?”
“Right inside the door, I think.”
There was a drop of blood in front of the door. Gurney stepped over it. Standing flat against the wall, he turned the knob and pulled the door open quickly. The smell of dead, musty air filled the little hallway. He waited, listened, then looked down the stairs. They were dimly illuminated by the flickering fixture in the hall behind him. There was a switch on the wall. He flipped it, and a faint yellowish light came on somewhere in the basement.
He told Kim to turn off the hall fluorescent, to stop the buzzing noise.
When it was off, he listened again for at least a minute. Silence. He looked down the stairs. On every second or third step, he saw a dark spot.
“What is it? What do you see?” If Kim’s voice got any more brittle, it was going to crack.
“A few more drops,” he said evenly. “I’m going to take a closer look. Stay where you are. You hear anything at all, run like hell out the front door, go to my car—”
She cut him off. “No way! I’m staying with you!”
Gurney had a talent for projecting a calmness that increased in direct proportion to the agitation of those around him. “Okay. But here’s the deal: You’ve got to stay at least six feet behind me.” He tightened his grip on the Beretta. “If I have to move quickly, I’ll need some room. Okay?”
She nodded.
He began to make his way slowly down the steps. The staircase was a creaky structure with no handrails. When he reached the bottom, he could see that the trail of dark spots continued across the dusty basement floor toward what appeared to be a long, low chest in the far corner. On one wall a furnace stood alongside two oil tanks. On the adjacent wall, there was an electrical-service breaker box, and above it, almost touching the exposed joists, there was a row of small horizontal windows. External bars on each were dimly visible through filthy glass. The low light was emanating from a single bare bulb as begrimed as the windows.
Gurney’s attention returned to the chest.
“I have a flashlight.” Kim’s voice came from the stairs. “Do you want it?”
He looked up at her. She switched it on and handed it to him. It was a Mini Maglite. Its little batteries were about due for replacement, but it was better than nothing.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. Last time you were down here, do you remember a box or a chest against the wall?”
“Oh, God, I have no idea. He was showing me the circuit things, the switches, I don’t know what. What do you see?”
“I’ll let you know in a minute.” He moved forward uneasily, following the trail of blood to the long, low box.
On the one hand, it appeared to be nothing more than a very old blanket chest. On the other hand, he couldn’t get the melodramatic notion out of his head that it was about the right size for a coffin.
“Oh, my God. What’s that?” Kim had followed him and was now standing just a few feet behind him. Her voice had dropped to a whisper.
Gurney put the flashlight between his teeth, pointed down at the box. With the Beretta in his right hand, he lifted the lid gingerly with his left.
For a second he thought there was nothing there.
Then, gleaming softly in the flashlight’s little pool of yellow light, he saw the knife.
A kitchen paring knife. Even in the weak, dirty light, he could see that the blade had been honed until it was unusually thin and sharp. On the point was a tiny drop of blood.
Chapter 5
Into a Tangle of Thorns
Despite
Gurney’s efforts to persuade her, Kim refused to call the police.
“I told you, I’ve called before. I’m not doing it again. Nothing happens. Worse than nothing. They come to the apartment, they poke around the doors and windows, and they tell me there’s no sign of any forced entry. Then they ask if anyone was injured, if anything of value was stolen, if anything of value was broken. It’s like if the problem doesn’t fit one of those categories, then it’s not a problem. Last time, when I called about finding the knife in my bathroom, they lost interest when they learned it was mine—even though I kept telling them that the knife had been missing for two weeks before that. They scraped up the little drop of blood that was next to it on the floor, took it with them, never said another word about it. If they’re going to come here and give me this look like I’m some hysterical woman wasting their time, then the hell with them! You know what one of them did the last time? He yawned. He actually, unbelievably, yawned in my face!”
Gurney thought about this, thought about the instinctive triage process every busy urban cop goes through when a new incident is tossed on his plate. It’s all relative—relative to whatever else is on his plate—relative to the other urgencies of that month, that week, that day. He remembered a partner he’d had many years ago in NYPD Homicide, a guy who lived in a sleepy little town in western New Jersey, on the far edge of commutability. One day the guy brought in his local newspaper. The big front-page story was about a bird bath that had gone missing from someone’s backyard. This was at a time when there were an average of twenty murders a week in New York City—most of which barely rated a one-line mention in the city papers. The fact was that everything depended on context. And, although he didn’t say it to Kim, Gurney understood how the discovery of her own knife on her own bathroom floor might not have seemed like the end of the world to a cop dealing with rapes and homicides.
But he also understood how disturbed she was. More than that, there was an obviously sinister quality to the intruder’s actions that he himself found disturbing. He suggested that it might be a good idea for her to get out of Syracuse, maybe stay for a while at her mother’s house.
The suggestion converted her fear into fury. “That fucking son of a bitch!” she hissed. “If he thinks he’s going to win this battle, he doesn’t know me very well.”
Gurney waited until she was calmer, then asked if she remembered the names of the detectives who’d responded to her previous calls.
“I told you, I’m not calling them again.”
“I understand. But I’d like to talk to them myself. See if they know anything they’re not telling you.”
“About what?”
“Maybe about Robby Meese? Who knows? I won’t know till I talk to them.”
Kim’s dark eyes searched his, her lips tightening. “Elwood Gates and James Schiff. Gates is the short one, Schiff is the tall one. Same jerk, two bodies.”
Detective James Schiff had taken Gurney into a spare interrogation room a couple of corridors away from the reception area. He’d left the door open, hadn’t brought a chair, and hadn’t offered Gurney one either. The man covered his face with his hands, struggled to stifle a yawn and lost the battle.
“Long day?”
“You could say that. Been on for eighteen hours straight, six more to go.”
“Paperwork?”
“You got that right, times ten. You see, my friend, this department is exactly the wrong size. Just large enough to have all the bureaucratic bullshit of the big city and just small enough to have no place to hide. So we had this raid last night on a crack house that turned out to be surprisingly crowded. Result is I’ve got one holding pen full of mopes and another one full of crack whores, plus a mountain of evidence bags that I need to finish processing. So let’s get to it. What exactly is the NYPD’s interest in Kim Corazon?”
“Sorry … maybe I didn’t make my position clear enough on the phone. I’m NYPD, retired. Got out two and half years ago.”
“Retired? No, I kinda missed that. So you’re what? A private investigator?”
“More like a friend of the family. Kim’s mother is a journalist, writes a lot of stuff about cops. We crossed paths while I was still on the job.”
“So how well do you know Kim?”
“Not well. I’m just trying to help her out with a journalism project, something about unsolved murders, but we ran into a bit of a complication today.”
“Look, I don’t have a lot of time here. Maybe you could be a little more specific?”
“The young lady has a stalker in her life, not a very nice one.”
“That so?”
“You didn’t know?”
Schiff’s gaze darkened. “I’m getting lost. Why are we having this conversation?”
“Good question. Would you be surprised if I told you that right now in Kim Corazon’s apartment there’s fresh evidence of an unauthorized entry and some very freaky vandalism, with a clear intent to intimidate?”
“Surprised? I can’t say that I would be. We’ve been up and down that road with Ms. Corazon quite a few times.”
“And?”
“Lot of potholes.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
Schiff picked some wax out of his ear and flicked it on the floor. “She tell you who she thinks is responsible?”
“Her ex-boyfriend, Robby Meese.”
“You ever talk to Meese?”
“No. How about you?”
“Yeah, I talked to him.” He checked his cell phone again. “Look, I can give you exactly three minutes. Professional courtesy. By the way, you got any ID on you?”
Gurney showed him his PBA card and his driver’s license.
“Okay, Mr. NYPD, quick summary, off the record. Basically, Meese’s story sounds as good as hers. Each one of them claims the other one is angry, unstable, reacting badly to their breakup. She says he got into her apartment three or four times. Bunch of silly crap—loosened doorknobs, moved things, hid things, took the knives, put back the knives—”
Gurney interrupted. “You mean, put a knife on her bathroom floor along with a drop of blood. I wouldn’t call that ‘putting back the knives.’ I don’t see how you could ignore—”
“Whoa! Nobody ignored anything. The initial stuff, doorknobs, crap like that—that was all responded to by uniformed patrol. Did we run out and dust the loose knobs for fingerprints? We’d have to be nuts to do that. We live in a real city here with real problems. But procedures were followed. I’ve got the incident reports in the case file. The later blood complaint was referred to us by patrol. My partner and I took a look, samples to the lab, knife to fingerprints, et cetera. Turned out the only fingerprints on the knife were Ms. Corazon’s. Tiny drop of blood on the floor was beef blood. You know? Like steak.”
“You questioned Meese?”
“Of course we questioned Meese.”
“And?”
“He isn’t admitting to anything, and there’s zero evidence of his involvement. He’s sticking to his story that Corazon’s a vindictive bitch who’s trying to get him in trouble.”
“So what’s the current theory here?” asked Gurney incredulously. “That Kim is crazy enough to be doing this stuff herself? So she can blame her ex-boyfriend for it?”
Schiff’s stare seemed to communicate a willingness to believe exactly that. Then he shrugged. “Or some third party is doing it, for reasons yet to be discovered.” He glanced at his cell phone for the third time. “Got to go. Time flies when you’re having fun.” He started moving toward the open interrogation-room door.
“How come no cameras?” asked Gurney.
“Say again?”
“The obvious response to repeated trespass and vandalism complaints would be to install hidden security cameras on the premises.”
“I made that suggestion strongly to Ms. Corazon. She refused. Characterized it as an intolerable invasion of her privacy.”
“I’m surprised she’d react that way.
”
“Unless her complaints are bullshit and a camera would prove it.”
They walked in silence back to the reception area, past the desk sergeant, to the main door. As Gurney was about to exit, Schiff stopped him. “Didn’t you say a few minutes ago that you’d discovered fresh evidence in her apartment that I ought to know about?”
“That’s what I said.”
“So? What was it?”
“You sure you want to know?”
There was a flash of anger in Schiff’s eyes. “Yeah, I’d like to know.”
“There are drops of blood leading from the kitchen to a chest in the basement. There’s a sharp little knife in the chest. But maybe that’s no big deal, right? Maybe Kim just squeezed the juice out of another steak, dripped it down the stairs. Maybe she’s just getting crazier and more vindictive by the minute.”
Gurney’s drive home was an uncomfortable one. He kept hearing the echo of his own sarcastic parting shot at Schiff. The more he turned it over in his mind, the more it appeared to fit a pattern—the pattern of petty combativeness that had dominated his thinking and behavior since his injuries.
He’d always had a habit of challenging the prevailing wisdom in any situation, as well as a talent for detecting discrepancies. But slowly he was becoming aware of something else going on inside him, something less objective. His intellectual bent for testing the logic of every opinion, every conclusion, had been infused with hostility—a hostility that ranged from a cranky contrariness to something verging on rage. He’d become increasingly isolated, increasingly defensive, increasingly resistant to any idea not his own. And he was convinced it had all begun six months earlier with the three bullets that had nearly killed him. Objectivity, once an asset he took for granted, was now a quality he needed to strive for. But he knew it was worth the effort. Without objectivity he had nothing.
A therapist had told him long ago, “Whenever you’re disturbed, try to identify the fear beneath the disturbance. The root is always fear, and unless we face it, we tend to act badly.” Now, taking a cool step back, Gurney asked himself what he was afraid of. The question occupied him for most of the remaining trip home. The clearest answer he could come up with was also the most embarrassing.