The Wrong Man: A Novel of Suspense (18 page)

“And you are?” one of the cops asked.

“Kit Finn. I have an interior design firm here. She came for an appointment last night and never made it home.”

“Okay, we’re going to send for detectives,” she replied. “Someone will be with you shortly.”

Kit backed over the threshold into the entranceway but kept the door ajar. She watched the two cops slip into the stairwell.
What seemed like only moments later, an EMS crew arrived, and disappeared into the stairwell, too. There’s no one for them to save, Kit thought bleakly. About fifteen minutes afterward, the buzzer rang again and this time it was detectives. By now her stomach was in knots.

“I’m Detective Burke,” one of the two suited men said, when she greeted them at the door. He was white, mid-forties, with a slim, chiseled face and shaved head. He gestured toward a younger-looking black man whose thin mustache seemed almost fake, like something you’d glue on for a play. “This is my partner, Detective Wingate.”

Kit nodded and quickly explained what had happened. Burke’s gaze lingered on her face, unsettling her.

“Why don’t you step back inside,” he said finally. “We’ll have questions for you in a few minutes.”

Kit retreated back into the office, where she filled Dara in. She made them each a cup of tea and then joined her assistant at the table. Dara hadn’t made much progress on the list of what to transport from the office, so Kit scribbled items down, forcing herself to concentrate. She had her phone next to her and she kept checking the screen, willing it to ring. She needed to talk to Baby, and to Kelman. Oddly, even the office phones were silent.

Twenty minutes later, she heard a rap at the door. Kit jumped up and swung it open. Detective Burke stood there, alone this time. The stairwell door had been propped open and she could hear the sound of commotion coming from the floor below, a blend of voices and shoes scraping on cement.

“You said this is your office?” Burke asked, glancing over Kit’s shoulder at the setup.

“Yes, though my apartment’s next door.”

She stepped out of the way so he could enter and then introduced Dara, who had risen from the table.

“So which of you found the body?” Burke asked. His voice was totally flat, emotionless. Kit warned herself to be on guard.

“We found her together,” Kit said. “Avery’s assistant had called to say she was missing, that no one had heard from her since she was dropped off here last night. We were going out to make inquiries in the neighborhood, but before we got on the elevator, we heard a phone ringing from the stairwell. And that’s how we found her. I should tell you that I touched her hand. Her, um, left hand. I was trying to see if she was still alive.”

Burke glanced over at Dara.

“What’s your role here, Ms. Taylor?”

“I’m Kit’s assistant.”

“And were you both here last night when the victim left?” he asked.

Kit saw Dara swallow hard before answering, and it wasn’t hard to grasp why. Burke was the kind of cop, Kit thought, who could make you feel like you’d robbed an armored truck an hour earlier and had just been stopped for questioning at a roadblock.

“No,” Dara told him. “I’d left a few minutes before.”

“It was just me here at the time,” Kit said, and Burke returned his gaze to her. One of his eyes was slightly drooped and hooded more than the other, making it seem as if he was squinting from a waft of smoke, or maybe suspicion.

“My partner and I need to interview you each separately,” he announced. “So Ms. Taylor, why don’t you sit tight for a few minutes? Is there another room where I could speak to you privately, Ms. Finn?”

“Yes, we can talk in my apartment.”

He accompanied her through the doorway, directing her without saying a word toward the couch in her living area. There was an energy around him that was almost palpable, like something muscling her. Be careful, she warned herself again. She
couldn’t let him drive the conversation anywhere near Miami or Garrett Kelman.

They were barely seated when his partner, Wingate, entered the room and took the other armchair across from the couch. He seemed warmer, friendlier, but she was aware it could be that good cop/bad cop routine she saw at play in TV crime shows.

“Let’s start from the beginning,” Burke said, fishing a notebook from his suit jacket pocket. “What time did Ms. Howe show and what was the purpose of her visit?”

“She arrived around 6:45,” Kit said. “I was aware of the time because she was supposed to show up at 6:30, and I was watching the clock. As I mentioned earlier, she’s—she was a client, and she stopped by to pick up several fabric boards. They’re in the package lying near her body.”

“Does it surprise you that no one saw the body until this morning? Don’t tenants here take the stairs?”

“Well, people on two and three sometimes do. But generally not the ones on four or five.”

“Why do you think Ms. Howe took them, considering all she was carrying?”

Kit shook her head. “I don’t know. There’s a chance the elevator was temporarily out of order. That happens sometimes.” She was about to add that it was working later that night, but that would necessitate mentioning she’d gone out just before nine. And she didn’t want to raise that fact if she didn’t have to.

“Did she seem okay to you? Not wobbly or anything?”

“Wobbly?”

“Could she have been drinking before she got here?”

“I doubt it. She’d come from an off-site brainstorming meeting for her company.” But as soon as Kit spoke the words, she forced herself to think back, replay the encounter. It would be just like Avery to celebrate the end of a daylong event with
wine or champagne, even a tray of margaritas. But from what she recalled, Avery had presented as a hundred percent sober.

“She was a little rushed, but otherwise fine,” Kit added. “She said she had a few other stops to make.”

“Was she alone?” It was Wingate, speaking for the first time.

“Yes—though she had a car waiting for her,” Kit explained. “That’s how her assistant knew to call here. The driver reported that she never went back to the car.”

“When she left, did you see anyone in the hall?” It was Burke again. “Or hear any noises afterward?”

So was he thinking foul play? she wondered.

“No, nothing like that.”

“Does she have a boyfriend, do you know?”

“From what she said, she wasn’t seeing anyone.”

Burke didn’t speak for a few moments, just glanced down at the notes he’d been taking and then back at her, leveling his squinty gaze and holding it there. It made her think of a cat hunched in the grass, watching a little bird bobbing along and calculating when to pounce. She had to fight the urge not to touch her hair or her face or to twitch in her seat.

“How about the two of you?” he said finally.

“Excuse me?” she asked. What was
that
supposed to mean?

“You and Ms. Howe. Everything good with the two of you?”

She almost gasped in surprise. Was he toying with the idea that
she’d
pushed Avery down the stairs? That they’d had a tiff over a fabric choice Kit had made or a charge on the bill, and it had turned physical?

“Yes,” she said, trying to keep her voice calm, not defensive. “I was decorating a cottage of hers on the Jersey Shore, and she was a very nice client to work with.”

Had it sounded forced? She couldn’t tell. Burke just kept staring.

“There’s something you should know,” Kit added in a rush she regretted. “My apartment was broken into last Friday night. Burglarized. The detective I dealt with is named O’Callaghan—from this precinct.”

When they touched base with O’Callaghan—and surely they would—he’d of course raise the Miami incident, but she wasn’t going to be the one to bring it up.

Wingate shifted his position ever so slightly. “So are you thinking the guy came back?” he asked. “That he was planning to hit another apartment in the building and then saw a different kind of opportunity when Ms. Howe came out of your apartment?”

“I wasn’t thinking anything specific—I just thought you should know, that you might even hear it from Detective O’Callaghan. And there’s something else. Avery was wearing my trench coat. She’d borrowed it because it was starting to rain.”

They both studied her, and she could sense them summoning a picture of Avery in their minds—her body type, her hair color—and comparing the image to her.

“You thinking someone assumed it was you?” Wingate asked finally.

“I don’t know. I just thought I should tell you.”

“You got a boyfriend yourself?” Burke said.

“No. No I don’t.”

“How about a disgruntled ex? Or even a disgruntled client? Anything like that?”

“Nothing like that, no.”

It felt as if they were moving around her in smaller and smaller concentric circles, inching closer and closer to the spot she didn’t want them to reach. She saw the next question coming before Burke had even opened his mouth.

“And you were here last night? At home?”

“I ran out—at around nine,” she said, her breathing growing shallow. “To take a walk. Just for an hour or so. And—and the elevator was definitely working then, by the way.”

She’d nearly tripped over her words. Could they sense she was concealing something? She wondered if they’d press her for more details, force her to out-and-out lie.

But the next question was for her phone numbers, and then Burke snapped his notebook shut, done at least for now. The two men rose in unison. She sensed that a message, indecipherable to her, had been telegraphed between the two of them.

“We’re going to talk to your assistant now,” Burke said. “Why don’t you wait in here and we’ll be back to you in a bit.”

“Okay, but what about Ms. Howe’s assistant? Is it okay for me to call her now and tell her the news?”

“Just give me the contact information,” Burke said bluntly. “We’re the ones who take care of that.”

As soon as they’d gone, Kit checked her phone. If it had rung from the kitchen island she would have certainly heard it, but she wanted to be sure. Nothing from Baby or from Kelman. Frustrated, she ran a hand through her hair. She left a second message for Kelman.

She glanced around her apartment. She’d toughed it out here since the burglary, but there was no way she could stay after today. It would be back to Baby’s, she decided, grateful that the offer still stood. After grabbing a duffel bag from the closet, she began to toss in clothes and items to cover her for the next few days. Nearly finished, she glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes had passed. What was taking the cops so freaking long? She wondered how poor Dara was faring.

As she was stuffing a bottle of shampoo into her toiletry bag, she heard a knock on the doorframe. Returning to the living area, she found Burke emerging through the door from the office.

“When you found the body, you just touched the hand?” he asked.

“Yes.” Why was he asking that?

“So you never saw the face?”

“No, but I—I’m sure it’s her.”

“The investigator from the ME’s office is going to need you to come back in the stairwell and make an official I.D.”

Inside she groaned in protest. This was crazy. At the rate things were going, identifying corpses was going to become a full-fledged hobby of hers.

She nodded solemnly and followed Burke, this time leaving through her own apartment door. There was now a strip of bright yellow caution tape strung across the stairwell doorway and Burke lifted a section with his jacketed forearm so she could duck underneath. On the landing below was a man, dressed from head to toe in white, examining the wall.

As she took her first step on the stairs, a burst of light startled her. Another followed two seconds later. She realized that someone must be photographing the scene. From farther down, on the fourth floor, she could hear people talking in low tones, their words indistinguishable. And then, as if a switch had been flipped, there was silence. She sensed people waiting, expectant. Instinctively she froze in place, one foot hovering above a step. An unseen woman began to speak.

“I’m sure you noted that she fell head first,” she said, her voice echoing a little against the stairwell walls. “And it’s
very
hard to do that without somebody’s help.”

So that was it then, Kit thought, fear gushing through her. Avery had been shoved down the stairs.

Kit didn’t budge, just stayed there with her foot raised, straining to hear what came next, but the speaker’s words were quickly engulfed by the murmuring of other people’s voices, everybody talking at once again.

“Here we go,” Burke said, his grip on her elbow urging her down the steps. She let him guide her, because all she could concentrate on was what she’d just overheard. Avery hadn’t tripped. She’d been pushed. One of the investigators had practically said so. But
why
? Or had the person really meant to hurl
her
down the stairs?

She and Burke reached the fourth floor. Detective Wingate was there, as well as a man taking pictures. Crouched next to Avery’s body was a woman, also dressed in one of those white crime scene suits. Kit guessed she was the investigator from the ME’s office and clearly the person she’d overheard.

“I’ll only need you for a second,” the woman said to Kit. “Just to make an official I.D. for me, okay?”

As the woman stepped to the side, Kit saw that Avery’s body had been turned over and her face was now in view. The skin was mottled with reds and purples, just like her hands were, and on the left temple was an ugly gash, with dark red blood puckered
and congealed around the edges. Her eyes were closed. Kit felt a crushing wave of grief.

“Yes, that’s Avery Howe,” Kit said.

“Thank you,” the investigator replied. “I’m sorry for your loss.”

As Kit nodded in reply, the door from the corridor pushed open and two people in navy blue coveralls came into sight, holding a stretcher trolley. Behind them was one of the female patrol cops and Kit could hear her talking to someone who was obviously a tenant.

“You need to stay in your apartment for now, ma’am,” the cop said. “We’ll be coming by door to door to make inquiries.”

It was going to turn into a total zoo, Kit realized, and there would surely be press, too.

“You ready for us?” the guy with the stretcher asked the investigator.

“Give me a couple more minutes.”

Burke grasped Kit’s elbow again and piloted her back up the steps. She felt a sudden wave of nausea—from the smell of sweat in the stairwell, from the thought of Avery’s mottled, lifeless face.

“Are Dara and I free to go now?” she asked when she and Burke reentered the corridor on the fifth floor. “I’d prefer not to stay here right now.”

“Yes,” he said, studying her again, making a silent evaluation. “But we may need to speak to you again as the investigation unfolds.”

She nodded and gratefully watched as he retreated once more into the stairwell. Back in the office, Kit found Dara standing with a phone pressed to her ear and three big shopping bags at her feet, two of them already brimming with files.

“Baby,” Dara mouthed. Kit motioned for the phone.

“Dear God,” Baby said. “Do you think she tripped? That’s what Dara said might have happened.”

“The cops aren’t divulging anything,” Kit said grimly. “Let
me wait and take you through everything in person.” She wanted to share the troubling comment she’d overheard in the stairwell but not in front of Dara, not yet anyway. “Are you still okay with me crashing at your place—and can we run the business from there for a bit?”

“Of course. Come as soon as you’re able.”

“I’ll head up there shortly then. I want to be long gone from here before any reporters descend.”

“Speaking of press,” Dara said after Kit disconnected, “we’ve already gotten one call. From Channel 7. They seemed to know that Avery was here last night—maybe they heard it from her assistant. I told the woman I wasn’t familiar with any details. I figured that was better than, ‘No comment,’ which sounds like you know stuff but have been told to keep your mouth shut.”

“Good girl,” Kit said. She paused, thinking. She wanted to know what Burke had asked Dara but a little voice in her head warned her to not come across as overly eager, that it might make Dara uncomfortable. “Did everything go okay with the detectives?”

“Yeah, I guess. I mean there wasn’t much I could tell them. They wanted to know what time Avery was expected, what time I split—and whether the elevator was working when I left. I said it was.”

“I’m sure she came up in the elevator—she would have mentioned it to me if she’d had to trudge up the stairs. And it was working when I went out two hours later.”

Dara grimaced. “There’s some other stuff they were asking about—they wanted to know if I talked to you last night after I left here and whether you said anything about your meeting with Avery when I showed up this morning. It was creepy, Kit. They can’t possibly think you had anything to do with Avery falling, can they?”

“No, no,” Kit said. “They’re just being cops, covering all their bases.” But she harkened back to Burke’s question—“You and Ms. Howe. Everything good with the two of you?” Had they sensed she’d been withholding information and thus become suspicious?

“Oh, I told them about the burglary, too,” Dara said. “That was the only other thing we really discussed.”

“Yes, I included that, too.” She thought suddenly of the call last week from Detective Molinari and wondered if Dara had mentioned that to Burke. Kit guessed that for now at least she hadn’t. Dara would err on the side of discretion.

“It seems you’re all packed up,” Kit added. “Just give me a few minutes to grab my stuff and then we’ll split.”

As Kit threw the last items into her duffel bag, she tried to piece together what little info she had. For some reason Avery had taken the stairs and then, from the sound of it, been attacked there.

A name came to her with sickening clarity:
Ithaka
. She recalled the two men whom Kelman had mentioned, the ones behind the illegal trade. If they were behind the break-in, they—or whoever they’d hired—might have returned, intent on silencing her this time. And then killed Avery by mistake.

She thought of the error she’d made over the phone with Molinari, hearing words like red hair and blue eyes and just surmising it had to have been X lying in the morgue. It would have been easy for someone in the dim light of her stairwell to see Avery from behind and assume, because of the hair, and the body shape, and the trench coat, that it was her instead.

Avery’s killer had probably been hiding on the steps up to the roof and descended as soon as he saw her emerge. It would have taken a few seconds to reach her and that would explain why she was pushed from the landing between the fifth and fourth floors.

But that didn’t make sense, she suddenly realized. How would
someone know Avery would take the stairs? So maybe the person had actually accosted Avery by the elevator and forced her into the stairwell. Kit tried to summon the moments just after Avery had swept out of her office. She’d been preoccupied then, her attention immediately turned to the meeting ahead with Kelman. And yet if there’d been any kind of altercation in the hallway, she certainly would have heard it. Maybe the assailant had used a gun. A paid killer would have been armed, which would also explain why the wrong person had been targeted—he’d have been working with a photograph or a description. But then why throw his victim down the stairs rather than fire a bullet into her head.

She shuddered, overwhelmed by both remorse and dread. She’d spent the past few days determined to obtain answers, confident she could dig herself out of the hole, but the old questions had been replaced by even scarier ones. Would the killer return once he realized his mistake? Was there any way at all to save herself? It felt as if she’d been sucked into quicksand and was struggling futilely to heave herself above the muck.

She wondered why the hell Kelman hadn’t called her back. Though it seemed unlikely that he was the killer—she could still picture the expectant look on his face when she’d arrived at Jacques—there might be other wrongs on his conscience causing him to retreat back into the shadows now. She felt a wave of fury toward him. He’d set it all in motion two weeks ago and now Avery was dead.

But that wasn’t the full picture, was it? She’d set it in motion, too, by saying yes to his invitation, by going to bed with him, by picking up a pen that didn’t belong to her.

Finally she tugged the zipper on her duffel bag closed and stuffed her new laptop into its carrying case. She threw the bolt on the main door to the apartment and then checked the living space. This was her sanctuary, she thought mournfully, and she was being expelled from it.

When she and Dara emerged from the building, they found that a small crowd of people had already congregated outside, drawn out of morbid curiosity to the official vehicles lined up along the curb and the two patrol cops guarding the front. Miraculously, a free cab sailed by the moment they stepped on the sidewalk and Kit shot her hand up for it. At the other end of the crowd, a guy with a lanyard and name badge around his neck—probably a reporter—spotted them and darted in their direction, running along the perimeter of rubberneckers. But they were in the cab and moving before he could reach them.

They barely spoke on the ride. Dara had withdrawn again, silenced by her bewilderment. The most telling indication of her distress was that she hadn’t protested when Kit had volunteered to drop her first and then head to Baby’s apartment on her own. Under any other circumstances, Dara would be insisting on helping Kit lug the bags up to Baby’s.

“I’ll call you in a little while, okay?” Kit said when they pulled up in front of Dara’s building. She was trying to sound reassuring but she knew her voice was strained.

“Thanks, Kit,” she said, reaching for the door handle. “Oh, by the way, one client called when you were packing, someone I guess you’re in the process of signing. Sasha Glen.”

That was a surprise. After the abruptness of their meeting last week, she’d suspected she might never hear from Sasha again.

“Did she say why she was calling?”

“Just that she wanted to set up another meeting. I told her you’d be in touch.”

“Thanks for letting me know.

But better to leave that one alone. She needed to keep her distance from anything to do with Ithaka.

It took another fifteen minutes to reach Park and 89th Street and by then Kit was ready to jump out of her skin.

Baby hugged her as soon as she’d set all the bags down in
the foyer. It felt good to be comforted and yet at the same time Kit couldn’t help but detect a stiffness in Baby’s arms. Maybe, she thought, it was simply Baby’s nerves betraying themselves, but Kit was still worried that it could actually signal the first inkling of impatience with the nightmare she’d been dragged into. Baby had a brilliant reputation, one she’d burnished over decades, and, despite her imperturbability—her ability to remain unbothered by lying vendors or lard-ass contractors or even a client in the throes of a massive hissy fit—she’d never allow that reputation to be besmirched. A break-in was one thing; a client dying violently at the office was in a category all to itself. There was a good chance this new development would bite them both in the ass, and Baby might not be up for that amount of trouble.

“I sensed you didn’t want to say much in front of Dara so tell me everything now,” Baby said. She led Kit into the living room, where they both collapsed onto the sofa.

Kit spilled out the story, including the remark she’d overheard from the medical investigator and the fact that Avery had been wearing her trench coat.

“I could have been looking at myself lying there,” Kit said, still so distraught at the memory. “And Dara noticed it, too.”

“Dear God. So you think someone actually meant to attack
you
?”

“Yes, maybe, and poor Avery ended up dead instead. I mean, it makes no sense that someone would come to the building intent to kill
her
.”

Baby’s face tightened even more in concern and she tapped her fingers a few times, as if she were urging her thoughts to form.

“Did you end up meeting with that man last night—Garrett Kelman?” she asked after a pause.

“Yes, at around nine, and what he told me plays into Avery’s
death somehow, I’m sure.” She briefly described her conversation with Kelman—the claims he’d made about insider trading at his company and his supposed intention of going to the authorities later in the week.

“I just don’t know whether I can believe him,” Kit added. “At certain times he seems credible, and yet he’s given me no proof that anything he’s said about Ithaka or his role in the situation is true. But if he
is
being honest, it means that an Ithaka employee could have killed Avery or sent someone to do it.”

“How did he seem to you last night?”

“Weary. Shaken by the news that his pal Healy might have been on the wrong side. I just can’t evaluate whether it’s the real him or he’s putting on an Oscar-winning performance because he needs access to what I know.”

“But was he—rattled at all? Frantic?”

“Frantic?” Kit said, at first not understanding, and then she got it. Baby was wondering if Kelman was Avery’s killer.

“I know what you’re suggesting,” she added, “and I’ve considered it, too. But if he believed he’d just shoved me down a flight of stairs, why hang around in the restaurant for me?”

“To give himself an alibi? He might have assumed you’d told someone you were meeting with him. If the cops tracked him down, he’d be able to say he was waiting for you but you never showed.”