“Is there anyone else in the apartment?” he said.
“I don’t know.”
The cop moved forward, his gun still at the ready. “Dispatch said there’s a body?”
She nodded and pointed down the hall. “In the bedroom on the right. Under the bed.”
CHAPTER 22
Sitting in a hard plastic chair next to a cop’s desk with a scratchy wool blanket around her shoulders, Sage wrapped her hands around a paper cup filled with stale coffee. Not that she drank any or she was cold, but the cup was warm and kept her hands from shaking. The 121st Precinct station was actually hot and humid, with a sweaty, sour smell that hung in the air like the inside of a men’s locker room. Still, she couldn’t stop shivering. And it seemed like she’d been there for hours—first waiting to talk to someone, then answering a million questions while the image of Alan’s horror-filled face flashed over and over in her mind. The cop at the desk gazed at her with doubt-filled eyes, his pen poised over the report he was filling out.
“So you’re saying you were just released from Willowbrook State School and your twin sister was murdered there?” he said.
She nodded. “Yes, she was killed the same way Evie Carter was killed. Evie was a secretary at Willowbrook and they just found her body. You must have heard about her.”
He wrote something in the report.
“Did you call Detective Nolan yet?” she said. “He can tell you what’s going on. He knows I’m telling the truth.”
“Yes, they did,” a man’s voice said behind her.
She turned in the chair, and sagged in relief. Detective Nolan was heading toward them.
“Thank God you’re here,” she said.
The cop at the desk got up to let Nolan take his chair.
“I just came from your apartment,” the detective said.
“And?”
“It looks like whoever killed Rosemary and Evie might have killed your stepfather too.”
“Might have?” she said. “It had to be the same person! His neck and . . . and the lipstick and—”
“I know, I know. It looks like the same MO, but we can’t be one hundred percent sure.”
“Have you found Wayne yet?”
He shook his head. “We found his address and went to his residence, but he’s disappeared. Neighbors haven’t seen him in a few days.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “He must have broken into my place and killed Alan while I was sleeping.”
Detective Nolan shook his head again. “There was no sign of forced entry. And Alan’s been dead for a while now. A few days at least.”
Her eyes widened. How was that possible? Then she remembered the rank, sour odor when she first arrived, how she’d searched for the source but couldn’t find it. Now she knew. The smell had been coming from Alan’s corpse. Her stomach clenched. “Why would Wayne want to kill him? I mean, he was an asshole, but—”
“Tell me what happened,” he said. “Give me every detail.”
She told him everything she could remember: how she had been getting the spare key out of her mother’s jewelry box so she could give the other one back to the super, how she decided to look for money, how she stepped in blood and saw more on the bed skirt, how she found Alan under the bed.
“I woke up early because I thought I heard Eddie leaving for work,” she said. “Then I found Alan and I wondered if what I’d heard was the person who killed him. I was terrified because I didn’t know if he was still in the apartment. But if Alan has been dead for a while, it must have been Eddie leaving after all.”
Detective Nolan raised his eyebrows. “Did you say Eddie?”
She nodded. “Yeah, he came by after Officer Minor dropped me off. I’m not sure what time he got there, but he was waiting outside when I left to go to the store. He wanted to buy me breakfast, so we went to the Top Hat to get something to eat, then he slept on the couch because I was scared to be alone and—”
“Are you talking about Eddie King from Willowbrook?”
“Yes,” she said. “I know I probably shouldn’t be hanging around with him, but he was the only one who would listen to me. If it weren’t for him . . .”
Detective Nolan pinched the bridge of his nose and squeezed his eyes shut as if stricken by a sudden headache.
“What?” she said. “You don’t believe me?”
“It’s not that,” he said. “It’s just—”
“What is it then?” she said, on the verge of tears again. “Did something happen to Eddie? Is he dead? Did Wayne kill him too?”
He took the notebook out of his coat pocket and grabbed a pen from the desk, his frown lines growing deeper. “No, he’s not dead. What time did you say he was at your apartment?”
“It was a little after one in the morning when I went outside and he pulled up beside me. I was walking to the store to pick up a few groceries, but he offered to take me to breakfast.”
He wrote down the information. “You said he pulled up beside you?” he said.
She nodded.
“In what?”
“A red Mustang. I was surprised because it looked brand new. I didn’t think he could afford it working at Willowbrook as a janitor. But he said his family is rich. His uncle works there, too, so that’s how he got the job.”
Nolan kept taking notes, his face unreadable. “And he took you to the Top Hat?”
She nodded.
“Did you see anyone you know at the diner? Talk to anyone?”
“Just the waitress, Iris. She said Alan told everyone I was visiting his sister out on Long Island. That’s why no one was looking for me when I was at Willowbrook. But Alan doesn’t . . . didn’t have a sister.”
“When did Iris talk to Alan?”
“She didn’t. She overheard my friends talking about it. She thought Eddie was my cousin.”
“Any idea when your friends might have talked to Alan?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a few days after I went to Willowbrook? Iris didn’t say when they were there, and I didn’t ask.”
“Do you know Iris’s last name?”
“No.”
“I need your friends’ names and addresses.”
She gave him Heather’s and Dawn’s information. “I’m not sure who else was with them, but they’re the ones who would have asked Alan about me.”
“So there was no one else in the diner when you were there?”
“There was an old guy eating pie, and the cook, but he never came out of the kitchen. Oh, and a young couple I didn’t recognize.”
“What time did you leave?” he said.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. We weren’t there that long—maybe forty-five minutes?”
He scribbled something else down, then ripped the piece of paper out of the notebook, stood, and looked at a group of cops on the other side of the room. “Hey, McNally!” he shouted. “I need you to check something out for me.”
A thin, baby-faced cop hurried over and eagerly took the paper from him.
“Go to the Top Hat diner and ask for a waitress named Iris. Ask her if she remembers seeing Miss Winters there last night with a young, dark-haired guy named Eddie. I need to know what time they were there, what time they left, and what they were driving. Find out what she said to Miss Winters about her stepfather, Alan Tern, too.”