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  She had been no more than two or three at the time. She remembered few details, just that same awful sense of panic, of being abandoned—which was ridiculous, of course. She was no longer that child, and there were a dozen perfectly reasonable explanations why someone would miss a plane.

  The big clock on the wall told her it was twenty-five—no, twenty-six minutes now since Gail’s plane had touched down.

  In her eagerness to see Gail, Ellen had gotten here more than an hour early. She’d put in the time drinking coffee in the little coffee shop and scanning through the pages of People magazine. At last she’d stood with the others watching excitedly as the plane emptied, anticipating her first glimpse of Gail among the passengers descending the narrow metal steps. She continued to watch for her even after it was quite clear that Gail was not on the plane. Her expectant smile had died slowly, in keeping with the sinking sensation in her stomach.

  Bewildered, she’d watched friends and relatives quickly find one another. After a flurry of backslapping, teary hugs and exchanged holiday greetings, during which Ellen searched each and every face, hoping against hope she had somehow missed Gail, the room had cleared. Baggage claimed, some passengers drove off in waiting cars, while others piled into the taxis lined up in front of the building.

  Alone now, but for the few employees and one elderly gentleman sitting across the room, perched on the edge of one of the molded plastic chairs, puffing intently on a pipe. Like her, he seemed to be waiting for someone. Ellen’s disappointment was almost irrational in its intensity. She tried to think what to do.

  Out in the corridor, a white-haired black man pushing an empty luggage cart rattled past; he glanced in and gave Ellen a friendly, if mildly curious smile, making her acutely aware that she must look as lost and miserable as she felt.

  Hesitating briefly, she left the waiting room and hurried out into the corridor toward the stairs leading down to the baggage area. Amidst a lot of amplified static and crackling, a female voice paged Mr. Donald Ramsay, and Ellen found herself listening for her own name to issue from the sound system. Fancying again that she had somehow managed to miss Gail, who was no doubt at this very moment collecting her luggage and wondering where in hell her big sister was, Ellen broke into a half-run, her shoulder bag slapping soundlessly against her hip, the heels of her boots clacking down the wide marble stairs, faint hope buoying her spirits.

  At the bottom of the stairs, however, even as she looked frantically around, her heart sank even lower. There was no sign of Gail, as she’d known deep down there wouldn’t be. In an airport as small as this one, Gail would have had to be in deep disguise for Ellen to have missed seeing her.

  Gazing down at the empty, revolving carousel, it seemed strangely to mock her. On the verge of tears, she turned away, spotted a pair of pay phones beside a row of gray metal lockers, just past the gift shop. Why don’t you call her apartment? She might have gotten sick at the last minute, or maybe the Mustang broke down on the way to the airport; she’d been having some trouble with it lately. But Ellen made no move in that direction. Suddenly burning inside her parka, she unzipped it.

  She eyed the phones a moment longer, then, as if they posed some sort of threat, she turned away and went back up the stairs.

  ~ * ~

  "And what was the name again?" the pleasant young man in uniform asked, taking in the light auburn hair, the trim, sensuous figure under the off-white parka—a shade that gave her complexion a flattering glow, he thought, as that shade tended to do with certain skin tones. He knew he was staring, but it was next to impossible not to with those incredible eyes looking so beseechingly into his. Cheekbones to die for. God, this one could almost make him forget he was gay.

  "Morgan," Ellen said, stepping closer to the counter. "Gail Morgan. She’s my sister. She was supposed to be on flight 267 from New York."

  The man tapped the information into the computer, waited, while Ellen began fidgeting with her purse strap, twisting it into rope.

  A woman in high-topped sneakers and socks, wearing something purple tied around her hair, was half-heartedly pushing a broom across the floor, reminding Ellen of a Carol Burnett skit she’d seen on TV. Ellen had to execute a quick move to avoid the broom that came within inches of her boots.

  "’Scuse me," the woman mumbled.

  The young man rolled his eyes. "Bertha, really!" he admonished her.

  "I said, ’scuse me. Whadda ya want?" Pushing on, she stooped to retrieve a gum wrapper from under a chair, stuffed it into her sweater pocket.

  "We have to make allowances for Bertha. She had dreams of becoming a flight attendant. Is that the Gail Morgan? The singer?" He flashed her a toothpaste ad smile, his eyes lighting hopefully.

  Ellen said it was, and heard the clipped tightness in her words. Any other time would have found her warming instantly to the subject of Gail’s career, but right now it seemed almost trivial. Sensing her impatience, he returned to the matter at hand.

  "Ah, yes, here she is, all right. Gail Morgan. She was booked on flight 267, held a ticket for seat E5. Window seat." He tapped more keys, waited. "She never boarded, ma’am," he said, looking up at her. "The seat went unoccupied. And there’s no record of her canceling."

  The sound system crackled to life. "Would a Mr. Joseph Ingalls please come to the phone." Ellen watched as the elderly man with the pipe left his seat, took the call, and hurried off toward the corridor, soon disappearing, leaving Ellen feeling somehow betrayed by him.

  A memory was prodding her consciousness again, the way a tongue prods a loose tooth. She pushed it back. Beyond the window, a 747 was taking off. She watched it soar higher and higher until it was no more than a silver streak flashing in the sun.

  "Ma’am?"

  Ellen turned to see the young man frowning at her. "Yes?" The coffee she’d consumed earlier now seemed to have alchemized into a burning acid in her stomach.

  "Are you all right?"

  "I’m fine."

  "I was just saying you could probably call her in New York. Something must have..."

  "Yes, yes, I will. Thank you."

  "The telephones are—"

  He’d begun to point, but Ellen was already headed in that direction, cutting him off, thanking him over her shoulder for his help.

  "By the way," he called after her. "I think your sister’s just great. I just love her work. My friend and I saw her in—"

  Ellen missed where it was they saw her.

  ~ * ~

  Downstairs, Ellen picked up the receiver, and, trapping it between her neck and shoulder, rummaged around in her purse for change, when, in her peripheral vision, she saw the policeman coming toward her. Looking up, she saw that Myra was with him. The heaviness in their walks might have been enough—but it was the look of pure anguish on her friend’s face that laid a cold hand on Ellen’s heart and made the blood drain from her body.

  Seven

  Detective Steve Shannon of N.Y.P.D. stood in the alley just outside the window of the girl’s bedroom, knee-deep in snow—snow that had fallen during the night, but was undisturbed, leaving little reason to concern himself with obliterating telling footprints. Through a narrow strip of window, where the blind did not quite reach the bottom, he was able, by bending his knees and squinting, to see inside the room, to see all that the killer had seen. Twin beds, the chair, now toppled, which had been stacked with Christmas gifts, the blue leather suitcases standing at the foot of the bed awaiting a trip that would never take place. He wondered if her killer had found that bit of irony amusing.

  His gaze carefully avoiding the dead girl on the floor, he raised his eyes to the publicity photos of both girls on the walls, though fewer of the victim than of her roommate, Sandi something—a model. They were still trying to locate her.

  The bedroom door was open, leading out into a narrow hallway and through to the living room with its early Salvation Army furniture. His partner was still inside trying to calm the landlady, a Mrs. Bloom. She’
d found the girl.

  Shannon studied what was left of the wire meshing that had been nailed over the window. He figured a common pair of wire cutters had done the job. Enough rust to guess it was put on a couple of decades ago by some misguided soul who imagined it would offer adequate protection against an intruder. Well, maybe a couple of decades ago it might have, he thought. But not these days.

  A hole had been punched through the glass, just big enough to allow a man to put his hand through and find the lock. The window was closed now, a red tee shirt, probably the girl’s, stuffed into the hole so she wouldn’t feel a draft when she came into the room. From its shape, he could tell it was put there from inside the room.

  There were dried footprints on the carpet, just under the window. They went no farther. So, once inside, he’d taken off his shoes.

  He’d been hiding in the house, waiting for her.

  Steve wouldn’t know officially the time of death until forensic got here, but he’d seen enough in his twenty-two years on the force to make an educated guess. The landlady, who lived in the next apartment, had said the victim always got home by midnight or shortly after. She knew this because she’d be up watching the news and could hear her come in, could hear her key in the lock. Except for last night. Last night, as luck would have it, Mrs. Bloom had been visiting an upstairs neighbor.

  So Gail Morgan had probably been dead between ten and twelve hours. This he deduced not only from Mrs. Bloom’s statement, but from the condition of the body, and also because the snow outside the window had been undisturbed. He’d already confirmed with the weather office that it hadn’t stopped snowing until around 3:00 a.m., erasing the killer’s footprints.

  ~ * ~

  Back inside the small, slightly seedy apartment, Mrs. Bloom, an ample-bosomed woman with wispy orange hair and a kindly face, stood just outside the front door recounting to his partner what she’d already told Shannon. Sheryl was listening intently, nodding, making sympathetic noises from time to time.

  "...I just knew she wouldn’t have gone away like that and left poor Tiger in the apartment alone. Not when she asked me just last week to take him while she went to visit her sister in Maine. I told her I’d be happy to do it—I already have three cats of my own, you see. Could one more make a difference?" She was gazing down tenderly at the striped cat in her arms, her plump, liver-spotted hand stroking him as she talked. A widow of many years, Mrs. Bloom wore a wide, gold band on her finger.

  "Poor Tiger," she crooned, "when I heard you crying inside that apartment, I just knew something was terribly wrong. I just knew it." Her eyes filled as she looked up at Shannon. "Some say I have the gift, you know. Sometimes I just know things—ever since I was a child. Such a lovely girl she was—never had men in her apartment or anything like that. Neither of the girls did. Not like some I could name. When I went into her room and—and saw her like that—her poor face, oh..." She pulled a hanky from the cuff of her shapeless sweater and blew loudly. "I didn’t even know her right off. I—"

  "Did you have to use your key, Mrs. Bloom?"

  "My key? Oh, no, no. That was the other thing. The girls would never leave the door unlocked like that."

  So he had simply picked up his shoes, Shannon thought, and carried them right out the front door, probably putting them on in the hallway. Obviously not too concerned about being seen. True, it would have been well after midnight and this was a relatively quiet street, but still, this was New York.

  "Take Mrs. Bloom back to her apartment, Officer Mason," Steve said gently. "She’s had a terrible shock. Maybe there’s someone Officer Mason could telephone to come and stay with you, Mrs. Bloom—a friend or relative."

  She sniffed into her hanky. "There’s—there’s just Mr. Goldberg upstairs. That’s where I was when it must have happened. Else I would have heard the window break, wouldn’t I? I would have heard. We were having a nice, friendly game of gin, Mr. Goldberg and I. Poor man’s in a wheelchair now. His cronies who used to come and see him have all passed on. It was late when I came back down, like I said—nearly half past one. Yesterday was Mr. Goldberg’s birthday, you see. I took a small cake, nothing fancy. What can you do? So I missed my news. I don’t usually..."

  Which, unfortunately, removed Mrs. Bloom as someone who could testify to the time Gail Morgan got home last night. The tenant who lived in the apartment above the girls was, in Mrs. Bloom’s words, "deaf as a breadbox." She would have to be, Shannon knew, because from the look of this room, there had been one hell of a racket. The apartment across the hall was vacant. So, no one heard anything; no one saw anything. If Mr. Goldberg hadn’t chosen to come into the world precisely when he did all those years ago, Shannon thought, Mrs. Bloom would have been home, and, as she herself had stated, she would certainly have heard...

  Looking down at the near-naked girl sprawled on the floor, head lolling to one side so that he could see the ugly bruises on her neck, he wondered if Mrs. Bloom’s being home, or the neighbor not being deaf, would have made one iota of difference. People heard things all the time, and saw things, and looked the other way. No one wanted to get involved. Yet the landlady hadn’t struck him as that sort. Maybe he was just getting cynical in his old age.

  With a heavy sigh, the big, gray-haired detective knelt on one knee beside the body. New York turned up more than its share of dead girls, and the bastards who murdered them were multiplying even as he thought about it, coming up with newer and sicker ways of inflicting pain and humiliation and death.

  Suddenly bone-weary right down to the marrow, and feeling every second of his fifty-three years, the detective reached out his hand with their wide, blunt fingers and, blatantly disregarding the rules, gently drew down the girl’s half-slip to cover her nakedness. The camera boys would be here any minute.

  Her torn bra and panties lay beside one still, childlike foot. He looked back at her face and wished to hell he could wash that shit off before anyone else saw her, but of course he couldn’t.

  "That was nice, Shannon," came a female voice from the doorway. He looked up to see Sheryl smiling fondly at him. "What you did just then. You’d get the book thrown at you, of course, put your pension in jeopardy, and you’re old enough to know better—but still, it was nice." Stepping farther into the room, she surveyed the mess. "Christ! She sure put up one hell of a fight for a small girl, didn’t she?"

  Steve’s gaze followed her own—to the telephone table that lay on its side on the floor, receiver knocked from the phone’s cradle, the cup and saucer a brief distance away, the cup still intact, bearing a coral lipstick print, probably the victim’s. A dark tea-stain had spread on the beige carpet. The vanity was swept clean of its contents—bottles, jars, brushes strewn in every direction. The lamp cord was plugged into the wall socket, the lamp still on, dangling upside down, making a pale circle of light on the carpet.

  One of the twin beds was neatly made up. The other, next to where Shannon knelt, had its dusty rose bedspread yanked out of place, one of its corners hanging just short of the victim’s upturned hand. She must have clutched onto it at the end, in those final, desperate moments of her life.

  After she was dead, the killer had gone to the trouble of painting her face up to look like a clown’s. Shannon recognized the smell of greasepaint from his high school drama days. They actually called that shade of white "clown white."

  He looked quickly past the wide blue eyes staring blankly up at him out of drawn, black triangles, to the silver, high-heeled sandal lying on its side beside her blond hair. The other sandal was under the bed, probably kicked there in the struggle, tangled in a pair of pantyhose. He tried to ignore the familiar burning pain in the pit of his stomach.

  "The packages all say to ‘Ellen’," Sheryl said, bending down beside the up-ended chair with its scattered Christmas gifts. Something blue spilled from an unwrapped package on the floor. Sheryl hooked a finger under the cover and raised it to get a better look. "Great taste," she said.

  "That woul
d be the sister in Maine," Steve said, getting to his feet, grunting a little with the effort. Had to lose twenty pounds, lay off the beer and grease. He glanced down at the packed suitcases that weren’t going anywhere. "She knows by now," he said to no one in particular. Merry F-ing Christmas, Ellen, he thought.

  He didn’t envy the poor bugger who’d been tagged with the job of breaking the news to her, but he was damn glad it wasn’t him. He was getting too old for this business. Well, three more weeks, he consoled himself, and the only thing you’ll have to worry about catching is fish. Just twenty-one days until he retired. It couldn’t come too soon.

  Taking a handkerchief from his pocket, the detective carefully, so as not to disturb any possible prints, hung up the phone. The calls he’d needed to make he’d already made from the landlady’s phone.

  On the floor, beneath where the receiver had lain, was a three-strand rhinestone earring. It winked obscenely at him in the light from the dangling lamp.

  Eight

  Voices drifted up to her from downstairs, hushed voices, the sort people used when sitting in a room where the dead lay. Don’t listen to them! Shut them out! A terrible sorrow pushed at her consciousness. Ellen squeezed her eyes shut, tried to will herself back to sleep, to sink back down into the safety of dark oblivion. It was no use. Something heavy was pressing down on her chest. She couldn’t breathe.

  And then she remembered. Her parents were dead. They’d been returning from an all-night party, both still drunk. No one told her that, but she knew.

  Her father at the wheel. "They struck an embankment," an ashen-faced Miss Layton told her. Ellen’s teacher had been summoned from the classroom by Mr. Reid, the principal, and Miss Layton, had, in turn, called Ellen out into the hallway, closing the door on the rows of raptly curious faces.