No. The caller ID displayed a local area code.
“Hello?”
“Hailey?”
“Karen!”
“I’m so sorry to call you so late, but you said to call anytime if I needed you, and…I do. I’m so sorry…” Karen spoke the last three words on a sob.
“What’s wrong?”
“He has a new phone number on his speed dial, Hailey.”
“What?”
She didn’t have to ask who Karen was talking about. Of course it was James…again.
“He assigned it to number one, Hailey. I’m number three-after his mother. Number one used to be his voice mail.”
“Whose number is it now?”
“I’m not sure. I called it, and a woman answered.”
“Did you talk to her?”
“Are you kidding? I hung up, plus I blocked my number. I looked up the area code, though, and it’s for Tallahassee. Remember when James went to that conference in Florida a few weeks ago?”
“Yes. You think he met someone there?”
“I know he did. And I hired a private eye to find out who she is and what’s going on.”
Hailey gently spoke to Karen for almost fifteen minutes, working through conflicted feelings for a man she thought she loved.
A man who now had a twenty-three-year-old pharmaceutical sales rep with long dark hair as number one on his speed dial.
Finally, Karen yawned and said, “I’m exhausted. I think I can sleep now.”
“I hope so. For some reason, things always seem better in the morning. It’s getting through the night, sometimes, that’s the tough part.”
“I’m so sorry I woke you in the middle of the night, Hailey.”
“Don’t worry. Go to sleep.”
Hanging up the phone, she glanced at the book she’d dumped when the phone rang.
Instead of picking it up again, she turned off the lamp and burrowed her head under the pillows.
Like Karen, she was exhausted.
But instinctively she realized she wouldn’t sleep in the hours ahead.
All was not right in her world tonight. What was it?
She didn’t know how she knew, she just did.
32
New York City
AS HAILEY STEPPED OUT OF THE ELEVATOR IN THE LOBBY OF HER building on a cold February morning, Ricky, her favorite doorman, flashed a familiar grin. “Hello, Ms. Dean.”
“How are you today, Ricky?”
“Same as every day, just happy to be alive,” he replied. “How about you?”
“I’m great, thanks,” she replied, same as she did every day, and their morning ritual was complete.
She left him to his New York Post, folded so that most of the front-page headline was hidden.
Only the last four bold black letters were visible: R-D-E-R.
You didn’t have to be a genius to figure out that the missing letters were M-U.
Murder. Never a lack of crime to report. There was always a headline. Print reporters only had to wait overnight, the TV people got it instantly.
She stepped out into bright winter sunlight. Nine a.m., and Second Avenue was already tangled in a honking snarl.
She raised her arm to hail a cab headed downtown. Ordinarily, she’d start out walking the first few blocks in the morning air, but didn’t feel like it after no sleep the night before.
She had gotten home at eleven last night to find a message from Adam.
“Hi, Hailey. I’m leaving tomorrow morning on that ski trip, so I wanted to tell you Happy Valentine’s Day, and…I’ll see you when I get back.”
They kept running into each other at the mailboxes in the common hallway downstairs at work.
She had turned him down for a gallery opening they were both invited to, but he didn’t seem upset, and coincidentally, the two days she had actually left the office last week to go out for lunch, he’d shown up almost instantly at the same spot. It was just around the corner and had the best homemade soup in town, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a coincidence. They’d shared the same table and the same newspaper. It was pleasant and she couldn’t explain why, but Hailey found herself instinctively avoiding another chance meeting, staying in for lunch the rest of the week, ordering salads over the Internet that showed up twenty minutes later. Adam had appeared out of nowhere…and he’d probably disappear into nowhere the same way.
Why, then, had she had such a hard time sleeping last night, and woken feeling troubled again today?
Hailey felt her cell phone buzz in her pocketbook a second too late to catch the caller. Checking her messages, though, she heard her mother’s voice.
“Hailey, your dad’s feeling so good, we’re heading down to Cumberland for a few days. We’d love you to meet us down there. We’re driving but we could pick you up at the airport. I love you, sweet girl. Let me know.” The phone clicked off.
Cumberland Island was just off the Georgia coast, so extreme an opposite to Manhattan Island that they might as well be on different planets. Rustic and remote, with thirty miles of undisturbed Atlantic coastline, Cumberland boasted no TVs or phones, no cell pockets, no paved roads. Maybe a dozen residents, and even fewer homes and cars. Just natural beauty.
Looking out the window of the cab, she daydreamed briefly about going back home and meeting her parents at Cumberland. A nice dream, especially this morning. A bitter wind blew off the East River.
Hailey sat back and listened to the radio, glad it was tuned to 1010 WINS.
“All news, all the time. Give us twenty-two minutes and we give you the world,” the radio voice promised the backseat.
The local segment was recycling the discovery of a body. “NYPD this morning is investigating the discovery of a body at around midnight on the city’s East Side. The identity of a white female, estimated to be between twenty to thirty years old, has yet to be determined. Witnesses on the scene described her as small in stature.”
The news announcer’s voice gave way to a taped man-on-the-street account from a male bystander with a strong New York accent.
“We were all there when the ambulance came up, but it was too late. They covered her with a sheet and took her away.”
Back to the announcer. “Police investigating cause of death and matching the body’s description against missing persons in an effort to identify the victim. The victim had been both stabbed and strangled, according to sources within the NYPD.”
With that announcement, Hailey sat forward and frowned. Two causes of death? Strangulation and stabbing…that didn’t make sense…
Strangulation suggested a “sweetheart murder,” requiring close physical contact, even a struggle between killer and victim suggestive of sex or intimacy between the two in the past, or at the time of death.
Analyzing the MO, she lowered the window for a lungful of cold air off the East River, gazing at the glass-and-concrete landscape as the cab crept another block, approaching the United Nations.
Police were most likely holding back information from the public to avoid jeopardizing the ultimate jury trial. Even worse, too many details to the media could spin off a copycat killer.
1010 WINS had jumped to the weather-cold and sunny with potential for snow flurries tonight. Hailey barely noticed, still caught up in the murder of a total stranger.
The canned news report left out crucial details and sent her mind spinning.
Where on the East Side was the girl found? In the dark waters of the East River, where Hailey jogged every evening? Thrown from a car off the FDR? Dumped in an open area-if there was such a thing in this city? Or was she stabbed and strangled right there where she was found? If so, the crime techs at the scene could make or break the case by the way they handled the forensic evidence on and around the body.
Through force of habit, Hailey methodically began to fill in details. Friends and foes alike accused her of having a clairvoyant streak, but reading minds did not account for her ability to decode a criminal mind. That talent was hard-won, via ten years in the trenches of one of the busiest courthouses in the world…serial murders, rapes, child molestations, and arson all routine.