“It’s not the first time I’ve been called ‘stupid,’” Mike said. “I usually like to know why.”
“You actually think I might have had something to do with these killings?” she asked. “Or with my brother?”
Mike took his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Zoya. “Maybe so. Maybe that’s why you’re all clammed up.”
“You really think you can keep me here against my will?”
“That’s the last thing we’d want to do,” I said. “But the commissioner might direct me to get a material witness order.”
“What the F is that?”
I wouldn’t have a prayer getting one for Zoya Blunt at this point in time. “It means a judge would agree with us that you have information about your brother that’s too important to us to let you go.”
“Screw it. You can’t find a judge in the middle of the night,” she said, blowing her nose, as her mood went from tearful to defiant.
“I can’t tell you how good Detective Chapman is at doing just that.”
Mike pulled on the back of my shirt collar.
I let her take a few breaths before I went back to what she had said a minute ago. “Why shouldn’t we think you’d have something to do with your brother? Aren’t you close?”
“Nobody’s close to him.”
“When’s the last time you saw him, Zoya?” I asked.
She lowered her head and twisted Mike’s handkerchief into a ball.
“I haven’t seen Nik in more than a year, okay?”
“You remember when it was?” I asked, pressing her harder than she wanted to be pressed. “Do you remember if you’ve heard from him since then? We need to know everything about him we possibly can.”
“We need your help trying to find him,” Mike said. “There are dozens of cops out here looking for him. If you don’t give us a hand, he’s likely to get hurt.”
“You think that matters to me, Detective?”
The tears were flowing again.
“He’s your brother,” Mike snapped back. “I’m sure it matters.”
“Here’s why you’re stupid, Detective. I don’t give a damn if he gets hurt,” Zoya Blunt said. “The last time I saw Nik was the night he raped me.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Why don’t you leave us alone for a few minutes?” I said to Mike.
Zoya Blunt had put her head on the table and cried to the point that her shoulders shook.
“I didn’t mean to be so rough on you, Zoya,” Mike said, kneeling beside her to try to get her attention. “I-I didn’t know.”
“You couldn’t have known. I never told anyone.”
“I can get you all the help you need,” I said. “We’ve got counselors who deal only with this issue.”
She didn’t speak. I wanted to hold out the hope of psychological support but didn’t want to waste a minute of time in the search for Nik Blunt.
“Would you like me to do that?” I needed to get a conversation started with the suspect’s sister. I wanted to take her back up to the operations room with Yolanda and get her talking.
“There’s only one thing I need, and you can’t give me that.”
“What is it? I’ll certainly try.”
“I lost my family, Ms. Cooper. I lost my entire family because of Nik. You can’t do a goddamn thing for me.”
I walked away from the table, to the far end of the room.
“You’re right about your family. I can’t change that. But I can do things for other people, for people who don’t deserve to be damaged any more than you do.”
“Not my problem.”
“Would you mind getting one of the crime scene photos, Mike? I think the lieutenant has a folder of them. A picture of Corinne Thatcher is what I want.”
Mike nodded and left the room.
“I don’t want to see any pictures, okay?”
“No, it’s not okay with me, Zoya. I want you to look. I want you to pick your head up off this table and stop wallowing in your own misery. Tell us what you know about Nik and where he might be hiding. I’m not going to let go until you do that.”
“How would I know?”
“Have you ever met either one of the young women he killed?” I asked. “Or the young man? Did you recognize their names and their photographs in the papers?”
“I’m not interested.”
“Did you know any of them? Do you know if Nik knew any of them?”
“More stupid questions.”
“I’m going to keep asking them until I hit one you know the answer to. I’ve got friends out in this terminal. Great friends, who cover my back every day of the week. And I’m not going to let a single one of them get cornered by your brother.”
Mike returned to the room with three eight-by-ten photographs in his hand. I took them from him and laid them on the table just beyond Zoya Blunt.
“This is what we do for a living, Zoya. Day in and day out. We see people who’ve been violated in the worst possible ways, who’ve been butchered and battered and left for dead,” I said. “Take a look at this.”
She didn’t move.
I walked around her, so that her head-still resting on the table-was facing me. “Pick up your head, young lady,” I shouted in her ear.
Zoya’s head practically bounced off the table, but still she wouldn’t look at me.
“We know that Nik hears voices,” I said. I was hoping my bluff would work, counting on my intuition that the person Jean Jansen heard fighting with Lydia was Nik Blunt.
Her eyes opened and focused on me for the first time. My hunch was confirmed.
“Look at these photographs, Zoya.”
“No, no. You tell me what you know about the voices. How did you find that out?”
“We have a witness.”
“Then you don’t need me,” she said. “Tell me who the witness is.”
“Look at the pictures,” I said, grabbing the photos that showed Corinne Thatcher’s throat, sliced open from one side of her neck to the other. “Look at what Nik did to her.”
“I don’t want to look.”
I slammed my hand on the table, next to her ear. She sat upright. I wrapped one of my arms around her shoulder and held her in place, sticking the image directly in front of her.
Zoya Blunt gasped.
“We’re out of time,” I said, softening my voice. “What happened to the boy who loved to come to this terminal with his father, Zoya? How do we find him before he does this to someone else?”
She shook her head from side to side. “Nik could be anywhere. He doesn’t have a home.”
“Everything he’s been up to has been connected to Grand Central.” I didn’t need to point out that the bodies were piling up closer and closer to the main concourse to make my point. “If you tell me what you know about him, maybe that will help.”
She was silent.
“You say you want your family back,” I said. “What happened to everyone?”
“My father was an engineer, like his father before him. A hostler. You know what that is?”
“We just found out tonight.”
“We came here with him all the time, especially my brothers, but I loved it, too. More inside the terminal, and riding with my dad on the train. Not so much the tunnels and tracks.”
“I’m with you on that,” I said. “Tell me about your mother, Zoya.”
She exhaled and closed her eyes. “I’m named for her-Zoya. She-she had a lot of problems, too. Nik’s like her. A lot like her.”
“Was she from Russia?” Mike asked.
“What difference does that make?”
“Maybe none,” I said. “But one of the victims was an exchange student from Russia. Maybe there’s some-some cause that Nik believed in. That might have been the way they met each other.”
“No causes except himself. That’s always been Nik.”
“In what way is he like your mother?”
“I’m sure the men who worked with my dad will tell you anyway,” she said. “The mental illness. The voices. She heard them, too.”
I had handled cases with schizophrenics before, both as victims and as perps. I knew that in at least 10 percent of people with the condition, there is a first-degree relative-a parent, uncle, cousin-that the disease is most often inherited from.