She summoned the strength, willed the muscles in her arms to contract, and with a great upward thrust she sliced into the man’s body. Not aiming, just driving upward. The blade pulsed and tugged in her hands, like a fishing pole with a hooked fish. Greaves’s eyes opened wide. Then wider still. His mouth gaped. His face was contorted. The hands on her throat went slack.
With a sudden surge of strength, he threw her to the floor of the elevator, her arms pinned, grasping her shoulders with talon claws, a big cat pouncing on its prey. She screamed, swung her feet wildly, kicking at him. The man’s weight was heavy on her. But then his grip on her let up, and he collapsed, canting to one side, and she was able to wrench herself free. She gasped, deep and hard, choking for air. Her head was swimming.
When she looked at Greaves she saw that something had changed in her attacker’s eyes. The fury of his gaze had given way to something more like disbelief. His mouth had gone slack. He looked dazed. At first she wasn’t sure if he was dead or alive.
He was still. His blood pooled on the floor.
Maybe he was dead.
She struggled to her feet, and catching sight of the key in the elevator panel, she turned it. The elevator started moving.
It opened on the first garage level. The elevator doors opened. She stumbled out into the darkness, the cool air, the smell of gasoline.
She looked back at Greaves’s sprawled body, his staring eyes.
She pressed the elevator’s lock button to keep the car from moving.
Then she looked for help. She raced through the garage, low-ceilinged and dark, but saw no one. She saw an exit sign, flung open the door, ran up an echoey stairway, up two flights, came out into a Center Plaza building, dark and deserted, a dingy fluorescent cast.
She ran to the revolving door, then out onto the street. It was drizzling now, the sidewalk gray. No cops in sight. During the day you’d see plenty of police cruisers out here on Cambridge Street, in the vicinity of the courthouses and City Hall.
She crossed the street, no cars coming in either direction, onto City Hall Plaza, a great desolate campo paved in brick.
She descended the steps toward City Hall, a hulking concrete monstrosity, looking for a cop.
She had killed a human being.
It was only just sinking in.
She had killed a man. An attacker, yes. But she’d done this.
She was half out of her head. She’d just been almost strangled.
I killed a man.
She wondered what she looked like to other people, her hair matted and damp, her blood-spattered clothes astray. Panic in her eyes. She didn’t look like a judge, like an upstanding citizen. She probably looked like a crazy person out here in the middle of the night.
In the lobby of City Hall she found a guard, a black man of around fifty. “I need some help,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“A man is dead,” she said.
Before he could even get a word out, she continued, “In the Government Center parking garage.” She gestured behind her.
“Let me radio for an officer,” he said.
She waited for the response, crackling over his radio. She didn’t fully understand it, but it sounded like cops were coming.
About ten minutes later, a weary young cop arrived, presumably a beat cop. A handsome but haggard-looking guy with blue eyes and black hair.
She told him she’d just found a body.
The cop walked with her across the plaza and into the Center Plaza building. In the moonlight, the cool evening, everything had the smeary feeling of a dream sequence.
“He attacked me,” she said. “Did I already tell you that?”
“Yes, ma’am,” the cop said. His radio was crackling on his hip.
The leftmost elevator’s doors were closed. She pressed the button, and it binged and its doors came open.
The elevator was empty.
Empty.
No blood. No body.
Empty.
She stared in disbelief.
“He was — there,” she said.
“Yes, ma’am.” She noticed a real change in his expression. Almost an eye roll. “Looks like he left.”
“He was dead! I’m quite sure of it.”
“Uh-huh.”
She was certain it was the leftmost elevator, but what if — being so panicked, so near-hysterical — she was remembering wrong? She tried the other elevator, punching the button. It opened, empty.
“Can I ask — have you been drinking, ma’am?” the cop said.
“No!”
“Or are you on any substances, maybe?”
“That’s impossible!” she said. “He was here. If he was moved—”
“Okay, ma’am.”
What the hell was going on? She didn’t understand it: Greaves was dead. Why was his body gone? Could somebody have moved it? There was no way he’d gotten up and walked away.
There must have been a backup team or something that had come and retrieved Greaves, cleaned up the scene. What else could it have been?
“The man was dead,” she said. “This is where he attacked me, in this elevator. I killed him in self-defense. This is the crime scene.”
“Okay,” the policeman said. “If you want to file a police report—”
“No, he was right here,” she said. “Someone moved his body.”
“Okay then,” the cop said. “I’m at the end of my shift, so let’s keep things simple. If you want to file a police report, I’ll be glad to pass you on to one of my colleagues.”
Something clenched and unclenched in her gut. Because she finally understood. She understood the logic of the loose end. Greaves had failed.
That had turned him into a loose end.
The elevator doors closed, and Juliana steadied herself against a pillar. She shook her head. She was finally beginning to think clearly. She had no time to waste. She had to get out of there. She flashed on the prospect of spending hours to no avail in a police station, filing reports and answering questions.
“I’m— I’m sorry to waste your time,” she said. Her eyes were out of focus. She saw a trash receptacle and stepped over to it, and her head jerked down and she threw up. Hot acids scalded her throat. It was as if her body were determined to purge itself of some poison. She thought it would bring a sense of relief.
It didn’t.
76
She drove home cautiously, uncertain of her driving abilities after so long without sleeping. When she got home, she found the house dark. It was a little after three in the morning. Duncan was asleep upstairs.
But it was too late to go to bed, even though she desperately needed sleep. Instead, she made coffee and sat tensely in the kitchen checking her e-mail and working on exactly how she was going to play the next ten hours. There were just too many unknowns.
Her head kept throbbing.
A couple of hours passed. At five, she decided to wake Duncan, but first she made a fresh pot of coffee. She took her time and fixed it the way he liked it, with half-and-half and Splenda, just the right shade of tan, and brought the mug upstairs. He needed his sleep, but she really needed him to strategize with. Duncan was smart as hell and inevitably thought of an angle she’d forgotten.
She would tell him about what had happened in the elevator, but later.
She nudged him, and he slowly opened his eyes. “It’s time,” she said.
“I know. Oh, thanks.” He took the mug gratefully and took a sip. “Fantastic.”
“Will he see you?” she said.
She was talking about Arnold Coren, a professor of Russian history at Columbia who had been Duncan’s old mentor when he taught at Harvard.
“Arnie? Of course.”
“At his office in Morningside Heights?”
“He’s taking me to lunch at the Metropolitan Club,” he said. That was a private social club located in a magnificent Stanford White — designed mansion on East Sixtieth Street.