Even so, the area around the demolished building was surrounded by cheap wire fencing that any schoolboy could scale, and closed by a gate with a two-bit combination lock. It looked like a war zone in a third world country.
She was beyond it, though, and she hurried; the gaping hole in the landscape seemed alive, mocking her for her fear of darkness and shadows.
Now she cursed Bobby Walden. Megastar—jerk!
So, maybe, she had been too easy, too wide-eyed and too hopeful. But he’d really been into her during the shoot; he’d whispered such cool stuff to her between takes that day. She was ready; she knew how to get her name in the paper, and how to move ahead. In film, in the real world, perception was everything. She wasn’t a fool; she didn’t expect a happy-ever-after with Bobby Walden. Just a date—or a night in his hotel room, a place she could pretend to slip out of while being sure that she was spotted by the media. That was all she needed. Her picture on Page Six, maybe. People would start talking about her, and it would make it worthwhile that she’d slept with the pimple-faced assistant at the casting agency to get the job as an extra—a down-and-out historical hooker—for the movie. And, she should still be glad, because she’d wound up with a few lines, enough to quality for her SAG card.
B movie. That was okay. Many a star had gotten his or her start as an extra-suddenly-given-lines. It took something like being singled out by Bobby Walden to get noticed.
“Hey! Hey, Sammy!” she called, walking back toward the site and Sammy. But Sammy didn’t appear from behind the trailer that was just about two blocks away now. He had to have heard her, but even if she ran, she’d never catch him. “Sammy! You fat ass!” she muttered.
Sammy was gone. Probably down in the useless-to-her Whitehall subway station already.
She thought she saw a man; a different man standing by the trailers. He must have been an actor; he seemed to be wearing a stovepipe hat and a long black all-encompassing coat. Whoever it was would be in big trouble with the costume department.
The moon shifted; there was no man standing there. She was making herself bizarrely nervous; it was simply because she’d never imagined that anywhere in New York could become so devoid of people.
She turned and retraced her steps. If she reached Broadway and started running …
She was almost at the corner when she heard the noise again. Click-click-drag.
Was it coming from behind her? Or before her?
She turned the corner and screamed; there was a man standing there. He looked dazed. He was in dirty jeans, a dirtier denim jacket. He hadn’t shaved in days, and his hair was tangled and greasy.
“Hey, lady, you got a dollar? Just a dollar—or some change? Anything—a quarter?” He took a step toward her with his hand outstretched, and she suddenly knew the direction from which the click-click-drag had come. She could smell him; he was absolutely repulsive.
“No!” she cried. “Get away!”
“Lady, I’m just a vet—”
“You’re just an alcoholic or a junkie—and you’re disgusting! Take a bath!” she said. She didn’t even want to touch him to shove him in the chest, but she did so. She was desperate to get past him.
He fell against the wall of the building she was passing. She didn’t look to see what type of office it was; she hurried on for a block, turned around. The ratty old homeless man was gone.
She leaned against a railing where she had stopped, panting, to stare back hard. She wanted to make sure that he was gone—really gone. She needed to get a hold of her fear. As soon as she got a little bit farther up Broadway, she’d start to see people. Ha! Stalked by a derelict who would fall down in a breeze. Well, the louse-ridden bastard was gone now. She kept looking down the street, making sure.
It was amazing; she could hear the traffic on West Street, albeit in the distance. Battery City was no more than a few blocks away. Wall Street was mobbed with cutthroat brokers during the day, and tourists thronged Trinity and St. Paul’s. But now the streets were dead, as dead as those rotting in the old graves and tombs of the city’s churches.
Yes, the derelict was gone, too. She turned to hurry on up Broadway. She hadn’t heard a thing; she hadn’t suspected anyone might be in front of her—she had been looking behind, back to the dark abyss of the site.
Her turn brought her directly into his arms. Before she could open her mouth, his hand clamped over it, and he twisted her viciously around until she was flat against his body.
She tried to scream, but the sound was muffled by the gloved hand. She strained to see, to kick to fight …
She barely even felt the knife across her throat; the blade was that sharp and the slice he made was swift and hard and sure. She was aware that, as the blood began to flow, he dragged her. She saw the lights of the street.
Seeming as pale as old gas lamps. As she died, the world growing dark and cold, she was dimly aware once again that it was all a matter of perception. Blood was rushing from her throat, and she was dying. She was even aware of the irony—that she might become really famous at last.
Somewhere, not far, car horns blared, neon illuminated the city and millions of souls worked, played and slept.
But to Virginia Rockford, the world beyond was no longer of any consequence.
Her last vision was that of a shadow-man. A man in a long black cape wearing a stovepipe hat. A shadow-man, coming at her again with the long wicked blade of his knife.
But she felt no more. Death became a gentle blessing.
1
One great thing about New York City—tourists.
And residents who behaved like tourists, every time he came to the scene of a murder.
Jude Crosby flashed his badge to the officers on duty and ducked beneath the yellow crime scene tape that was stretched across lower Broadway.
The murder site had acquired more onlookers than a movie premiere. Traffic downtown had grown to a snarl that was just about impassable even with the extra traffic cops manning the detour, and the sound of cursing drivers threatened to drown out the sound of their horns.
Fortunately, it was only just dawn; most finance workers weren’t even on their way in yet.
He made his way to the circle of men around the body. He was glad to see that the medical examiner who had been on call was Wally Fullbright, a man in his late fifties with ruffled white hair and big-rimmed glasses; he looked like an aged Beaker, from the Muppets. He was, in Jude’s mind, the finest in his profession. Yet, he never considered his own expertise as the zenith of knowledge, and was known to probe to the depths of any anatomical mystery.
“Crosby!” Fullbright said, acknowledging Jude without looking up. He knew he had a distinctive height, and in his off-hours he practiced at the ring. Pounding away at punching bags helped him release the tension that often bubbled up after dealing with some of the more bizarre crimes that plagued the city.
Even then, he had to make his way through more men; officers had formed a curtain of bodies, hiding the corpse from the view of the crowd that looked on.
He quickly saw why.
“Lord,” he said quietly, hunkering down across the body from Fullbright.
He’d seen a lot as a homicide detective in New York City. Dead drunks, prostitutes, drug addicts, mob hits and victims of domestic abuse. He’d seen the derelicts who had died in Dumpsters, in alleys, atop mountains of trash and he’d seen the floaters who had popped up in the East River and the Hudson.
He’d never seen anything