He stopped at the door and held it open for an elderly Indian woman. The hunched woman walked in a shuffling gait. She looked up and smiled a thank-you. He nodded and helped her inside.
Ott merged into the line, putting a couple of people between him and the librarian. He glanced up at a TV bolted to the wall, where his murders led a quick newsbreak.
He wasn’t the only one paying attention to the screen. Virtually everyone in line, including the hunched-over Indian woman, looked up at the newscaster. Ott waited to hear if his latest taunt had been discovered. There was coverage of Elaine Anastas’s recent murder but nothing about his messages—neither the ones he’d left at the scenes nor the one he’d sent via email.
The snobby intern was garnering more attention dead than she had in her entire life. That made Ott smile. He wasn’t sure what emotion it was he now felt bubbling up inside him. Then he realized: it was a sense of power. Every woman who saw that newscast was afraid of him.
As the report ended and the news moved on to the weather, Ott found himself a foot away from the librarian—only a waist-high metal rail between them.
She turned and looked directly at him.
Daniel Ott was caught between excitement and fear. This was the moment of truth. He decided to meet her gaze.
She looked directly at him, then turned back to the menu plastered high on the wall behind the cashier.
Ott stood there for a moment. She’d shown no recognition whatsoever. He had been invisible to her.
That has to stop.
Chapter 26
The following morning, I stepped out of my bedroom dressed for work. Even though I’d slept a little during the night, I could feel the stress and pace of the investigation catching up to me. At least the sight of my children getting ready for school gave me some energy and made me smile.
Eddie was scribbling some sort of notes about a computer program he was working on. Fiona was reading a book about a kid in middle school. Brian was already dressed, but Jane and Juliana, the two older girls, were still getting ready. Everyone else was chatting as they ate breakfast around the long table.
I grabbed a bagel breakfast sandwich. No one made these as well as Mary Catherine. She mixed garlic and a splash of hot sauce into the eggs, which struck me as more Latin than Irish, but regardless, it was the best way to start the morning.
I slid into the chair between Mary Catherine and Brian. Brian had a small duffel bag at his side, another habit I knew he’d picked up from prison: always keeping the things you need most with you at all times.
I asked casually, “What’s in the bag, Brian?”
Brian slid his chair to the side and reached for the duffel to open it.
I said, “You don’t have to show it to me. I was just curious.”
Brian shrugged and set the duffel bag back down. “Just a change of clothes.”
A few minutes later, everyone was in the final stages of getting ready for their day. Brian and Juliana had already left. Mary Catherine and I had a quiet moment alone at the breakfast table.
She gave me one of her classic looks for a beat, then said, “I’d have opened the bag and looked in it.”
I nodded and said, “Yes, I know.”
About thirty minutes later, as I was pulling into a parking spot outside my office, I got a call that there’d been a homicide on Staten Island. When the dispatcher told me the detective at the scene thought I should come, I knew exactly why—and it gave me a knot in my stomach.
I turned the car around and headed for Staten Island.
Staten Island has a special status among the five boroughs of New York. Some joke it’s actually part of New Jersey. City workers are well represented in the borough’s population, especially NYPD and FDNY. Many cops and firefighters rejoice if they’re assigned to Staten Island.
The crime scene was in an apartment building in Emerson Hill, just off Interstate 278. Almost as soon as I stepped out of my car, I saw a familiar face and knew she must be the lead detective who’d called me in. I waited while she directed a couple of patrol officers to push the media back. I couldn’t believe the number of TV trucks, until I remembered this murderer was starting to attract a lot of attention.
Detective Raina Rayesh turned to me and smiled. She was a little older than me and preferred lifting weights to running. Her dark hair had streaks of gray in it now, and I noticed more laugh lines on her face. She’d probably say the same about me. But she was the same funny, smart Rayesh, among the sharpest minds in the NYPD.
She gave me a giant hug and said, “I really hope I can find a reason to dump this on you.”
I laughed and held up my hands. “I have two homicide cases of my own.”
“That’s why I want you to take a look at this one.” Rayesh reviewed some notes. “Marilyn Shaw, twenty-six. Worked at a hedge fund in Midtown. No known current boyfriend. No one can think of anyone she ever upset.”
“Elaine Anastas’s mom said the same about her daughter. A young woman enjoying life in the city. No enemies. No boyfriend.”
Other than Billy Van Fleet, we hadn’t heard about anyone with even a whisper of motive for wanting to hurt Chloe Tumber either.
Rayesh pressed on. “This one looks similar. Like your guy.”
I groaned. “First of all, please don’t call this sicko my guy. Second, we don’t know if he selects his victims at random. I have no third point, but it always sounds better if there are three things to bring up.”
Rayesh laughed at my tired old joke. She said, “I’d still like you to take a look at this crime scene and give me your thoughts.”
“Is it bad?”
Rayesh shrugged. “There’s a dead girl inside. That’s always bad. But I’ve seen worse.”
That surprised me. The murder cases we were investigating all had shocking crime scenes, all the same kind of blood-soaked mess, which was part of why they all pointed to being the work of a single killer. But after I followed Rayesh through the checkpoints to Marilyn Shaw’s second-floor apartment, I agreed that this one could have been worse. Yet she was also right about the similarities.
The body of a young woman with blond hair lay on the floor near the front door. She’d been stabbed in the chest. The entire front of her white blouse was stained a rust color.
“Looking at the body, it appears the killer stabbed her as soon as she opened the door. Then he stabbed her again in the eye,” Rayesh said, pointing to the woman’s right eye. “It has to be the same guy.” A small pool of blood and fluid had dried on the hardwood floor where the victim’s disfigured face rested.
I looked around the apartment. The murderer’s MO ticked the same boxes, but the scene seemed…off. It was too clean, too undisturbed. It was clear that the killer had spent a lot of time at all the other scenes—this one felt more perfunctory. Had he been interrupted?
It would take time and forensics to compare all of the evidence, but my gut was telling me something was wrong here. “I don’t know, Raina. Something about the scene as a whole feels different,” I told her. “I’m not sensing the method behind the murder. There’s no blood spread on the walls. I don’t see anything else disturbed. This killer I’m tracking, he’s deliberately messy. He’s into grotesque displays, throwing around a lot of blood, the dramatic way he always stabs all his victims in the left eye, and so on. This seems almost tidy by comparison,” I said, shaking my head.