His ears were getting numb, his eyes watering, and he was furious with himself for drinking so many Sharp’s. As Terri’s building came into view, he noticed her apartment lights were on, the drapes drawn, and a marked car was parked in front. Marino imagined the cop sitting inside the apartment, securing the scene until Berger decided to release it. He imagined the poor guy bored out of his mind. What Marino wouldn’t give to borrow the bathroom, but you don’t borrow anything at a crime scene.
At the moment, the only public bathroom was the great outdoors. Marino kept his scan going, looking for a good spot as he walked closer to Terri’s building. He noticed that the lanterns at either side of the entryway were on, and recalled from Morales’s report that they had been off last night when the police had arrived shortly after six.
Marino thought of Oscar Bane again. It made no difference if anyone had seen him well enough to identify him later. He was Terri’s boyfriend, had keys to her building, and he was expected. If the outside lights weren’t on when he arrived, then why not? By five p.m., when he allegedly arrived, it would have been completely dark out.
Marino supposed it was possible that the lights had been on when he’d arrived, and for some reason, he’d turned them off as he’d entered the building.
Marino stopped half a block away from the brownstone, staring at the entrance on East 29th. He imagined himself the killer, imagined what it would have been like to approach Terri’s apartment building. What would he have seen? What would he have felt? Yesterday had been cold and damp, and extremely windy with gusts up to twenty-five miles an hour, making it very unpleasant for people to be out walking, about as unpleasant as it was right now.
By three-thirty in the afternoon, the sun was below the buildings and trees, and the entryway would have been cast in shadows. It was unlikely the lanterns would have been on that early, whether they were on a timer or not. By mid-afternoon, anybody inside the apartment building probably would have had his lights on, making it obvious to a predator which tenant might be home.
Marino hurried to the playground. He was relieving himself against the dark front gate when he spotted a dark, bulky shape on the brownstone’s flat roof. The shape was near the faint silhouette of the satellite dish, and then the shape moved. Zipping up his pants, he reached into his coat pocket for his gun and crept around to the west side of Terri’s apartment. The fire escape was a narrow ladder, straight up, and much too small for Marino’s hands and feet.
He was sure it would pull away from the building and send him plummeting backward to the earth. His heart pounded, and he was sweating profusely beneath his Harley jacket, his Glock forty-caliber pistol in hand as he climbed, one rung at a time, his knees shaking.
He never used to have a fear of heights but had developed one after leaving Charleston. Benton had said it was the result of depression and accompanying anxiety, and had recommended a new treatment that involved an antibiotic called D-cycloserine, just because it had worked on rats in a neuroscience research project. Marino’s therapist, Nancy, said his problem was “an unconscious conflict,” and he’d never determine the exact nature of that conflict unless he stayed sober.
Marino had no doubt about the source of his conflict. At this very moment, it was a goddamn narrow ladder bolted to a brownstone. He pulled himself onto the roof, and his heart lurched and he grunted in surprise as he found himself eye to eye with the barrel of a gun held by a dark figure lying on his belly in a sniper’s position. For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Mike Morales holstered his pistol as he sat up and whispered furiously, “You stupid fuck! What the hell are you doing?”
“What the hell are you doing?” Marino whispered back. “I thought you were a fucking serial killer.”
He scooted on his butt until he was a safe distance from the roof’s edge.
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot your fucking head off,” Marino added.
He tucked the Glock back into his coat pocket.
“We just had this conversation,” Morales said. “You don’t get to run around and not tell me what the hell you’re doing. I’m going to get your ass fired. Berger’s probably going to do it anyway.”
His face was almost indistinguishable in the dark, and he wore dark, loose clothing. He looked like a homeless person or a drug dealer.
“I don’t know how I’m going to get back down from here,” Marino said. “You know how old that ladder is? Probably a hundred years old, that’s how old. Back then when people were half the size they are now.”
“What’s the matter with you? You trying to prove something? Because the only thing you’re proving is you ought to go work security in a fucking mall or something.”
The rooftop was concrete, with a boxy HVAC and the satellite dish. In the building across the street where Marino had been earlier today, the only lighted windows were those of the second-floor neighbor’s apartment, and the drapes were drawn across them. Across the street from the back of Terri’s building, there were more people home, and two of them seemed to assume that nobody could see them. An older man was typing on a computer, clueless that he was being watched. One floor below him, a woman in green pajamas was sitting on her living room couch, gesturing as she talked on a cordless phone.
Morales was chewing out Marino for screwing up everything.
“The only thing I’m screwing up is you being a Peeping Tom,” Marino retorted.
“I don’t have to peep to see whatever I want, whenever I want,” Morales replied. “Not saying I wouldn’t look if there’s something to look at.”
He pointed at the dish antenna, angled up about sixty degrees and facing south of Texas where somewhere high in the night sky was a satellite that Marino couldn’t envision.
“On the mounting foot’s a wireless camera I just installed,” Morales said. “In case Oscar shows up. Maybe tries to get back inside her apartment. You know, the old returning-to-the-scene-of-the-crime shit. Or if anybody decides to drop by, for that matter. I’m keeping an open mind. Maybe it’s not Oscar. But my money’s on him. My money’s on him killing the other two.”
Marino wasn’t in the mood to relay his conversation with Bacardi. Even if he weren’t on top of a roof and extremely unhappy about it, he wouldn’t be in the mood.
“The officer securing her apartment know you’re up here?” he asked.
“Shit, no. And you tell him, you’ll find out what a long way down it is, because I’ll throw your ass off the roof. Quickest way to fuck up a surveillance is to tell other cops about it. Including you.”
“Occur to you his marked unit’s right in front like a billboard ad for the NYPD? Maybe you should have him move it, if you’re hoping the killer will come sneaking back here.”
“He’s gonna move it. It was fucking stupid to park there to begin with.”
“Usually the bigger worry is regular people and the media thinking they can poke around. But no marked car? Okay. There goes your deterrent. Have it your way. You got any idea why the entrance lights weren’t on last night?” Marino said.
“I only know that they weren’t. It’s in my report.”
“They’re on now.”
Gusts of wind hit them like invisible waves of a stormy surf, and Marino felt as if he was about to be washed off the roof. His hands were stiff, and he pulled his sleeves over them.