Virginia stiffened; there was movement downstairs.
The sound of the sliding glass door onto the deck opening…She could hear the metal slide down the floor groove and then catch. A pause, then the door was slid shut again. She heard the glass door’s lock click back into place.
They were back.
They must know she was still in the bedroom. They must think she was still alive. She looked wildly around the room for an escape…other than down the stairs and directly into the path of her attackers.
The only other way out was the bedroom window. Better to jump from the second story and risk a broken arm or leg than the alternative.
She caught Sidney’s eye.
Please, please don’t start barking… just this once…
Sidney seemed to get it…that he had to remain silent…
She couldn’t stand, so with her heart pounding frantically, Virginia started to crawl toward the window.
They must know she was still in the bedroom. How much time did she have? Not enough.
She rounded the bed, her body screaming in agony. She inched herself past the bed…then just a few feet more to the window…
She was there! She’d made it!
Now, to lift herself up, unlock, raise the pane, stand, and get out…
It was impossible.
No, it isn’t. You have to save yourself. It’s the only way.
Struggling, she pulled up on the sill and reached for the lock, stretching…stretching…
All she had to do was open the window. She could try and scream. Maybe the neighbors would hear…Someone…Anyone…
The pain, so acute it took her breath away…No scream escaped her lips. It was futile anyway, her house was set apart from the others; her neighbors would be sealed into their air-conditioned houses, insulated from the day’s heat. Her voice would be drowned out by the surf.
She silently reached to unlock the window. Straining for the lock, she stopped, tried again. She managed to reach it, turn it.
Wincing in pain, she began to raise it, just enough to get her torso out, then fall to the ground twenty feet below.
She gazed out the window, and when she looked down, the ground was swirling, her vision blurred from the beating.
Concentrate. You have to keep going…
The window was up.
Now…if she could get her leg up and out, the rest of her could follow…
It was too late.
Two hands grabbed her shoulders, pulling her back, away from the window.
The pain was so intense. She couldn’t fight anymore. Where was Sidney? What did they do to Sidney? The room disappeared in black.
64
New York City
HAILEY HUNCHED FORWARD INTO THE COLD WITH HER ARMS crossed over her chest, moving quickly up the street toward her own apartment.
Her own apartment.
It seemed like months had passed since she’d been home.
Ricky was there, manning the front door, holding it open for her, and she stepped into the familiar warmth of the lobby.
Habit carried her through the lobby, nodding good-night to the snoozy second doorman manning the desk, past the mailroom hidden behind the elevators.
Now, finally, she slipped into the elevator alone, humming its way up. She leaned back against the wooden panel and focused on the one thing that had consumed her for the past three hours.
Her silver pen.
Now, years after she had lost the memento of one of her most famous murder trials, it turned up again. Not in an old trunk or trial file, not crammed to the back of her underwear drawer where she often put letters and cards she wanted to keep, but in the hands of the NYPD, lifted as evidence off the dead body of one of her own patients.
When the elevator’s muted bell rang to a stop at her floor, Hailey stepped off and headed down the carpeted hallway to the end of the hall to her corner apartment. It seemed amazing to her to take out her key, open the door, and find everything as it had been when she’d left. The light still burning over the stove, the window still cracked slightly in her bedroom to let in cool, fresh air, her clogs still sitting at the edge of her bed, as if nothing had changed.
But it had. It had changed horribly.
Home. Home at last.
She could hear her own footsteps in the quiet of the apartment, stepping back to the bathroom attached to her bedroom to fill the tub with hot water.
Leaning over to plug the stopper, her thoughts raced. She was clearly the cops’ chief suspect. They’d be out for blood now that she’d trumped their theory from behind bars. They’d want to nail her on this no matter what. They’d never admit they were wrong, especially after she’d humiliated Kolker. Plus, if she wasn’t the killer, they’d be screwed at trial. How could they testify under oath to a jury they were positive they had the killer, when a few short months before, they’d been were positive she was the killer? They couldn’t. They were locked into her, and they’d make the evidence fit.
She knew it. She felt trapped.
Hailey turned abruptly, leaving the bath water running. She went into her closet and kicked off her boots and socks, leaving them there on the closet floor. Barefoot, she went silently across the hardwood floor into the kitchen.
The pen. That’s what they had against her, that, the hair match, and a few pieces of circumstantial evidence. They’d be working the case against her now harder than ever. They wanted her at all costs. She was going down. They’d find a way to do it…unless she could figure it out before she was re-arrested.
She robotically went through her cabinet until she found the tea she wanted. Filling the kettle at the sink, she wondered…
The pen had never been in her apartment or her office here in the city; she was certain of that. That ruled out Hayden lifting it by accident. It hadn’t happened that way, but for the very first time, Hailey had lied to police. To save her own skin.
Standing there in her kitchen waiting for water to boil, her lips curved up wryly on one side. The shoe was finally on the other foot.
How many dozens-no, hundreds-of times had she shredded criminal defendants and their lawyers in open court when they had been caught in a lie to cops after a crime? And when defendants were foolish enough to take the stand, she carefully dissected their every word, twisting them, slicing them, slowly roasting them until sometimes they broke down and cried. Sometimes they had confessed…and sometimes they lunged at her across the witness stand. Unsuccessfully.
The stillness of her apartment was disconcerting compared to the sounds of the city, so alive outside, far below, even at this time of night. The water was heating and she walked from room to room, innately seeking some sort of comfort from the things around her. She glided back across the hardwood floor onto the cold slate kitchen floor.
The only sound was the hot water running on high in the bathtub. She stopped at the den window beside her mother’s piano and leaned against the built-in heater, staring out at the Empire State Building. She was hundreds of miles away from the old life full of murder, rape, gun violence, child molestation, and drug lords. She thought she’d left it all back in Atlanta to come here, to start over lost in crowds where nobody knew her name, where every time she ate out, she wasn’t surrounded by a potential jury pool.
But tonight, she was right back where she started.
Images of Hayden and Melissa appeared in her mind’s eye, then suddenly blurred with the dead and decomposing bodies of the murder victims she represented for so many years. They all blended together.
Shaking it off, she turned away from the window and walked back through her bedroom to the bath. Reaching across the tub to twist off the hot-water tap, she was relieved, once again, to see that all was as she had left it.