Blood Red (16 page)

“I think it's healthy for you to move on, after . . .”

“Vanessa and I had both moved on,” Rick feels obligated to point out. “You know, long before she . . .”

“Died,” Bob supplies when he trails off.

“That's one word for it.”

“Rick, I know it has to be hard. You don't need to—­”

“It's not as hard as it could have been, though, right? She wasn't my wife, she was my ex.”

“Look, I get that. I have twice as many exes as you do, remember? That might make it slightly less complicated, but it doesn't make it easy. In some ways, it might even make it harder. You and Vanessa were together for a long time. I'm worried—­”

“Don't worry.”

Ignoring the interruption, Bob goes on, “I'm worried you're in denial. I know you loved her. She was the mother of your children. The way she died was horrific.”

Remaining silent, Rick reaches for a spoon and stirs his coffee.

Bob talks on, asking questions but not forcing the answers, and talking about the past; about all the positive things that had come out of his marriage to Vanessa. “For what it's worth, I always thought you guys were a solid ­couple.”

“And that is why you're a lousy detective. We were never a solid ­couple, unless you count the very beginning.”

“You mean the first night, or . . .”

“The first year after we were married, maybe even longer. But we weren't right for each other.”

“What about that woman—­your neighbor?”

“She's ancient history,” Rick says quickly. “Anyway, I'm talking about long before I met her.”

“So then . . . Look, I know it's none of my business, so you can tell me to go to hell if you don't want to talk about it.”

“No, it's fine. I haven't seen you since she's been gone, and . . . I can't pretend it didn't happen. It's probably good for me to get some of this out in the open, and I already told you I can't afford therapy right now, and there really aren't very many ­people in my life who want to listen.”

“I'll listen.”

There's a long silence.

“You're not talking.”

Rick shrugs. “I guess I'm thinking about things I could have done a little differently.”

“You mean before—­”

“When Vanessa and I were still married.”

“Like what?”

Rick thinks of Rowan. Thinks of how he told his wife, in considerable detail, how he felt about her. “I made a really bad decision on a really bad day.”

“Who hasn't?” Bob shakes his dark head. “Listen, I've made plenty of good decisions on good days and bad decisions on good days based on good information that turned out to be bad  . . .”

“And here I thought I was going to be the only one who was incoherently hung over today.”

“Hey, I may be jet-­lagged, but I'm not hungover. I'm trying to help you see that we do the best we can in any given moment. Don't beat yourself up because of what happened to Vanessa, Rick. It wasn't your fault.”

Rick says nothing, just stirs his black coffee, biting his tongue to keep from telling Bob that he's wrong about that.

Dead wrong.

G
azing down at the nude, violated corpse of a young female, Detective Sullivan Leary shivers as much from the grisly sight as from the bitter chill. She clasps her bare knuckles against her mouth, blowing on them, and her breath snakes misty wisps into the gloomy air.

“I told you that you should've grabbed your gloves.” Her partner, Detective Stockton Barnes, shakes his head. “It's colder than a witch's tit out here today.”

“Is that any way to talk in front of a lady?”

“I don't think she can hear me,” he replies with a nod at the dead woman.

That Barnes fails to consider Sully a lady, much less curb his tongue in front of her, can be attributed to the fact that they've been working together for quite a long time now. Longer than either of them worked with any other partner, and longer than the duration of both their failed marriages combined.

No one understands Sully the way Barnes does. No one makes her more frustrated, no one makes her laugh harder, and no one has her back the way he does. In many ways, they're like an old married ­couple.

Their relationship is far more productive and rewarding than the ones either of them shared with their ex-­spouses, but it's strictly platonic. So far, anyway.

Once in a while—­a very great while, usually when they've adjourned to the pub for a ­couple of whiskeys after a long, hard day on the job—­Sully finds herself wondering what it would be like to throw caution to the wind and let the man kiss her.

Assuming he'd even want to.

You never can tell with Stockton. He likes to tease her that he'd never be attracted to a “scrawny little white woman” like her.

“I like ladies who have a little meat on their bones,” he commented just the other day as they sat at the bar unwinding after attending the funeral of a rookie who'd been shot responding to a domestic disturbance. Ordinarily, they don't indulge in whiskey during the day, but the ser­vice had stirred Sully's grief for her beloved father, who'd passed away in September. Barnes was doing his best to cheer her up—­by busting her chops, as usual.

“And what would your daddy have said about you dating a black man?”

“What is this, Alabama in 1962? He might have had a problem with me dating a fellow cop, but he wasn't a racist.”

“He was a cop himself, and so was his father,” Stockton pointed out.

“And so were his brothers and uncles and grandfather and great-­grandfather, but . . .”

“But he wouldn't have wanted you dating a cop.”

“Listen, I'm a big girl. I make my own decisions.”

“So what are you saying, Gingersnap?” That's his pet name for her. Early on in their relationship, she asked him to stop. That did a lot of good. “You saying that you
want
to date a cop?”

“What, are you kidding me? I married one the first time around, and look how that turned out,” she said, and that was that. For the time being, anyway.

Someday they might find their way into each other's bed. That, or they'll be best man or maid of honor at each other's second weddings.

Sully shoves her hands into the pockets of her insulated navy blue coat and leans over the dead girl.

The body was found in a clump of shrubs between Twelfth Avenue and the Hudson River a little while ago, phoned in by a man who'd been chasing a terrier that had escaped its leash.

Now he protectively cradles the little dog in his arms, standing alongside the usual assortment of curious onlookers plus a ­couple of reporters and a television news crew, all clustered beyond blue police barricades. Within the perimeter cordoned off by yellow tape, a forensics team takes measurements and snaps photos. On a car radio somewhere nearby, Johnny Mathis is singing that it's beginning to look a lot like Christmas.

It isn't, but it might be true by nightfall. The forecast calls for the first snowfall of the season, though Sully isn't convinced it's really going to happen and in fact accepted a friendly little wager from Stockton as they were driving over here from the precinct.

“It hardly ever snows in Manhattan in December. That would be too perfect. It only happens in small towns and in movies,” she theorized. “In real life, the snow doesn't fall here until the holidays are over and there's absolutely nothing to look forward to but baseball and that's still months away. It's like, kick 'em when they're down.”

“The snow is like that?”

“It is.”

“Sadistic snow, is that it?”

“It's New York. What do you expect, Barnes? Kind, gentle snow?”

So now, if it does happen to snow within the next twenty-­four hours, she has to take the subway to Stockton's Bronx apartment in the morning and clean it off his car. If it doesn't, he has to wear a Mets cap to Yankee Stadium on opening day in April.

“Now who's sadistic?” Stockton muttered, parking the car as they arrived at the scene. “You're a Yankee fan, too. You hate the Mets as much as I do.”

“But not as much as I love seeing you squirm.”

They went from laughingly shaking hands on their bet to suitably somber the moment they stepped out of the car half an hour ago.

“This is a damned shame,” Stockton murmurs as they gaze at the dead girl.

She's lying on her back in the frozen mud, her fair, freckled skin spattered in her own blood and covered in multiple stab wounds. When found, she was covered in a sheet of dry cleaner's plastic: “shrink-­wrapped like a bodega cucumber” was Barnes's poetic description when they first saw her.

The plastic shroud is a peculiar signature, one they've never seen before. The forensics team stripped it away after taking countless photographs, leaving the girl's dead flesh exposed to the December chill.

Why was it there in the first place? She was stabbed, not asphyxiated. Was her killer trying to protect her from the elements? Was it some kind of fetish?

“She's not a junkie,” Sully comments, observing no sign of needle marks and noting that the victim is slightly built, but healthy and athletic-­looking as opposed to malnourished or emaciated.

“Nope. She could be sniffing, though.”

“She could. But she's not a working girl, either. Look at her makeup and earrings.” She's wearing very little eyeliner and no mascara to enhance her sandy lashes, and her earlobes are adorned only with tasteful studs set in silver.

“Those are diamonds, though,” Stockton says. “Maybe she's a high-­class call girl.”

Sully holds a magnifying glass up to one of the earrings, studies it for a moment, and shakes her head. “Not the real thing. They're cubic zirconia.”

“How can you tell?”

“No inclusions,” Sully says briefly, not bothering to explain that real diamonds of this size wouldn't be this flawless.

“I'll take your word for it. But these days, even a high-­class call girl might have fake diamonds.”

“Yeah, but she'd still get a manicure—­not to mention a pedicure.” Leaning in to examine the victim's feet, she adds, “Those heels have never been touched by a pumice stone.”

“Again, I'll take your word for it. Is that a tat?”

Sully follows Stockton's pointing finger back up to the torso. At first glance, the small tattoo perched between the gashes near the victim's collarbone is almost entirely camouflaged by blood and freckles. It's a deeper shade of red, though: a ladybug.

“They're supposed to bring good luck,” Stockton says as she moves the magnifying glass in for a better look.

“Guess it didn't work for her.”

Somebody's daughter, somebody's friend . . .

Right now, somewhere in the city, someone might be wondering where she is. Sooner or later, with any luck, she'll be reported missing.

Until then, without clothing or ID, she's a Jane Doe.

There's no clue to her identity other than the tattoo. That and the fact that she's completely bald.

“What do you think?” Stockton asks. “Chemotherapy or fashion statement?”

“Neither.” Sully's breath puffs white in the air as she leans in, spotting something.

“What makes you say that?”

“I think whoever killed her shaved her head,” she says, staring at the clump of long, red hair tangled amid the dead leaves on the ground.

A
fter finishing their pancakes, Rowan unpacks the decorations Jake carried down, and he dispatches Mick to get the other box of Christmas lights from the attic, which—­predictably—­results in a flash-­fire argument.

As she unwraps the snow globe the kids chipped in and bought her years ago at Vernon's Apothecary, she can hear Mick stomping around the attic and Jake stomping around the kitchen. She winds the key in the bottom of the snow globe to hear its tinkling rendition of “Winter Wonderland.”

Jake sticks his head in. “I'm going to walk Doofus. Tell Mick not to disappear. I'll be back in five minutes.”

“Why don't you tell him?”

“Because every time I tell him anything he gives me an argument.”

When Mick comes down carrying more boxes, she relays the message, and adds, “Can you please try to get along with your dad? For me?”

“I try, but he always yells at me.”

“He says the same thing about you. Try harder.”

She heads into the living room to hang five stockings by the fireplace and arrange the porcelain crèche on the mantel, shoving aside a bunch of framed family photos to make room. She should probably put them away until January, but she likes to look at them.

A few minutes later, she hears Mick and Jake laughing good-­naturedly about something as they head outside together.

Leaving the rest of the decorations in the hall, she goes straight to her study, closes the door, and dials her sister's cell phone number.

Now, as before, it rings a few times and goes into voice mail.

“Hey, it's me again. I hope everything is okay there. Listen, I need you to call me back, okay? It's kind of important. Call my cell.”

She dials Noreen's home phone and is relieved when someone picks it up on the first ring. It's her niece, Sabrina.

“Oh, hi, Aunt Ro.”

“How are you, kiddo?”

“Good, but I thought you might be my friend's mom calling. She's supposed to pick me up for tennis and we're late.”

“Tennis? In December?”

“I play at the club.”

Club—­as in the North Shore country club Noreen and Kevin joined years ago, which didn't thrill Dad when he found out.

He'd long disapproved of Hudson Chase, the local country club, which for years wouldn't consider Irish Catholics, among others, for membership. “You can bet your sweet keister that changed when JFK got into the White House,” Dad used to say. “And do you think I joined that country club after I was allowed to?”