By the time he broke free of Stoney, Sue Burke had located the "bad girl" Stiegel had met two winters before in Roosevelt Hospital. Her name was Kirstin Reese.
Janek met Sue in front of Kirstin's building, a walk-up tenement on Ninth Avenue in Hell's Kitchen. There was a busy fish market on the ground floor; its smell filled the hallway. The stairs were covered with some sort of green industrial carpeting that was badly stained and had been worn through in patches to the wood.
As they made their way up to the fifth floor, Sue filled him in:
"I found her name in the hospital records. She gave an old address.
But with her Social Security number, I was able to track her through Welfare. I talked to her this morning for about half an hour. She's jumpy, Frank-fragile, too. It's like there's something wrong way deep inside. Reminds me of women I interviewed when I worked Sex Crimes.
The broken-sparrow syndrome, we used to call it."
"Still-she talks?"
"About some stuff, at least to me. But there's other stuff she won't talk about. The stuff we're interested in."
"Naturally," Janek said.
By the time they reached the fifth floor he was breathing hard. Also, the fish aroma wasn't fresh up there. It was as if the new smells downstairs were forcing the older ones upward, where they were heated to a condition of pungency by sunlight that poured in through the tent skylight above the stairwell.
"How much you think they get for a studio here?"
"Six-twenty a month, would you believe it?"
They looked at each other and shook their heads. Manhattan was crazy.
There were people in rent-controlled buildings paying that much for six rooms with river views.
Sue rang the buzzer, there was silence, then the sound of rapid footsteps moving in the opposite direction, another silence, steps approaching, then the snap of a security lock.
The door opened a crack and Janek saw a sliver of a woman peering out over a taunt link chain.
"It's Sue Burke. I brought the lieutenant," Sue said. Silence.
"What's the matter, Kirstin? You said I could bring him up."
"I changed my mind." The woman's voice was pitched with strain.
"Hey, come on," Sue coaxed. "You promised. Please."
For a moment Janek was sure the girl was going to shut them out. But then Kirstin unchained the door and stood aside. When Janek entered he saw a tall, young, blond woman with a slim figure and large ice-blue Nordic eyes. She wore jeans and a tanktop and there was a small blue tattoo of a crouching dragon on her right shoulder blade. She was attractive enough to be a model, he thought, except for the way she held herself and the zigzag scars on her cheeks. Her face had been slashed on both sides, and, he observed, not very carefully sewed up.
The studio was dark. The shades were pulled almost to the bottoms of the windows, allowing only narrow strips of light to break through. But the windows were wide open; Janek could hear the roar of the avenue, cars and trucks inching their way toward the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel.
Sue sat beside Kirstin on a brown corduroy couch, the kind that opens up and turns into a bed. Janek took a beaten-up leatherette easy chair.
There was a small wooden table set between the couch and the chair, bearing rings and spots where spilled liquids had eaten through the varnish.
He sat quietly for the first few minutes while Sue drew Kirstin out.
There was something grim about the girl, bitter and withdrawn, that made him think he'd do better to hold back. He needed her help; she was the only lead Stiegel had developed in two years of tracking the bad-girls ring. If she refused to cooperate, the odds of his finding the redhead would fall, he knew, to nearly zero.
"Things going okay?" Sue asked.
"So-so," Kirstin replied.
"I told you, I can get you some help. Think about it."
"Sure," Kirstin said.
"Kirstin's still got some savings, but Welfare doesn't know that," Sue explained. "I know someone might give her a waitress job, maybe even help her find a better place." "It's okay here," Kirstin said, looking around. She was avoiding eye contact. Then she grinned, embarrassed.
"The fish smell gets pretty bad sometimes."
"I've got an old air conditioner at home," Sue said. "Not too pretty but it works. If you want it I can probably get some of the guys to haul it up here." "That would be nice," Kirstin said.
She was, Janek observed, deeply depressed. Although pale, she didn't look ill, but it was clear she wasn't functioning well.
As Sue and Kirstin continued to talk, Janek glanced around the room.
There was a linoleum-topped table sporting a small TV, and two aluminum-framed porch chairs with green webbed plastic seats. On one wall was an old Pan Am calendar showing a view of the Eiffel Tower. On another wall he spotted a pair of cheaply framed reproductions of large-eyed waifs with cats. Most of the furniture looked like it had been collected off the street. Janek wondered how much Kirstin had tipped the super to carry the corduroy couch-bed up the stairs.
When there was a break in the conversation, he decided to ease himself in. He turned to Sue. "Why don't you show her the sketch?"
Sue nodded, pulled out the sketch of the redhead and handed it to Kirstin. Janek watched her closely. He was certain she recognized the girl. There was a small glimmer of excitement, barely noticeable, followed by a denial that was a little too vehement. After that Kirstin set the sketch facedown. There was no reason for her to do that.
"Are you sure you don't know her?" Sue asked.
Kirstin shook her head, then stared at the floor. Her lie was so transparent, Janek wondered whether she even expected to be believed.
Sue exhaled. "Why don't you tell the lieutenant about what you used to do?"
Kirstin turned and engaged Janek's eyes. It was the first time she'd looked straight at him. Her eyes, he noted again, were a ghostly shade of blue and astonishingly beautiful.
"What do you want to know?"
"Whatever you want to tell me," he said. In the pause that followed he decided not to elicit information. I need to open her somehow. "Did you enjoy the work?" he asked.
She smiled slightly. "Why wouldn't I? I made a lot of money."
"Still living on some of it," Sue added.
Kirstin laughed, a short, cutting private laugh meant only for herself.
Then she turned back to Janek. "Why'd you ask me that?"
"Whether you enjoyed it?" He shrugged. "I imagined there might be a certain amount of pleasure in the work."
"Yeah! Sure! It was really great!" The intensity of her bitterness told him he was getting through.
"You hated it, didn't you?"
"Sure"-she smiled-"that, too."
He could tell he'd awakened her. How long has it been, he wondered, since someone's shown interest in her feelings?
"What was the worst part of it?"
"The risk. I was scared the whole fucking time."
"Anything else?"
She shrugged. "Sometimes I felt sorry for the guys." She paused a moment, then undercut her small display of compassion with a tight, mean smile and a tough-girl remark: "But a girl's gotta make a living, right?"
They stared at her. There was nothing to say. A girl's certainly gotta make a living. But a girl didn't have to do it by drugging and robbing men. It took a special type to choose to make it that way, girls who didn't like men, who had it in for them, who wanted to humiliate them-perhaps to pay them back for violations suffered at their hands.
"Writing on their chests-whose idea was that?" he asked.
"Diana's."
"She was the boss?"
Kirstin nodded.
"How many were you?"
"Four or five. Girls'd come and go." Kirstin shrugged. "You know how it is."
More tough-girl talk, but Janek ignored it. He had roused Kirstin to the extent that she was no longer bothering to play a role. That was all he had wanted to do. It was time now to get some facts.