Little Girl Lost

Chapter 27

“You surprise me,” he said.

I kept walking, retracing the ambulance’s path, heading back toward Avenue D. “She attacked a friend of mine,” I said. “This friend may not survive.”

“I see. And now my methods don’t seem so… inappropriate?” he said. “Never mind, you don’t have to answer that. Tell me, Mr. Blake, does she still have my money?”

“It’s not in her apartment, or if it is, she’s hidden it well. But I’m sure she knows where it is, and I’m sure you’ll be able to get it out of her.”

“You make it sound so simple,” he said softly. “Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth.”

Did he think he was being funny? I felt my stomach twist. I forced myself to remember Susan’s bloody body in my arms and Miranda lying on the roof at midnight, half her face blown away by a pair of hollow-point bullets.

I gave him the address. “How soon can you get here?”

“It takes me forty-five minutes to get into the city,” he said.

“How about your son?”

“He’ll meet me there.”

“Well, I’m not waiting. I’m not taking a chance that she gets away while you’re driving in.”

“It almost sounds like you want her worse than I do,” he said.

“You can get back what she took from you,” I said. “I can’t.”

*

I thought about stopping by the office on the way downtown, but it would take too long to cross to the West Side and anyway, what was the point? Maybe if we’d had another gun – but the only guns we owned were now in the possession, respectively, of Little Murco Khachadurian and the 109th Precinct in Queens.

The blocks went by, empty and dark. I felt the cold on my face, but inside my jacket I was sweating. What if Jocelyn was already gone by the time I got there? She’d presumably headed home while I was running to the park, and since then she’d had almost two hours to grab her things and take off. Of course, if taking off had been her plan, she could have done it as soon as she took the luggage cart with the money out of Lenz’s apartment. She hadn’t, and there had to be a reason, though I couldn’t imagine what it was.

It wasn’t the only point that bothered me. There was the luggage cart itself, the one that first turned up in Lenz’s hands in the hallway outside Miranda’s apartment on the afternoon of the murder. It made sense as long as you assumed that Miranda had the money in her apartment and that Lenz had needed a way to get it out – but if Jocelyn and Lenz had the money all along, what the hell did he need to take a luggage cart to Miranda’s apartment for? The only thing Lenz had needed to do in her apartment was plant the torn paper band that would tie her to the burglary. You didn’t need a piece of luggage to carry that.

And what about that paper band? Could the police really have missed it lying behind the dresser? Sure, it was possible, cops missed things, especially if they didn’t look very hard – but Jocelyn and Lenz couldn’t have counted on their missing it. And the last thing they would have wanted was to run the risk of getting the police more interested in what was otherwise a relatively routine homicide. Yet that’s exactly the effect that finding a band from a stack of hundred dollar bills would have had. Murco was the one who was supposed to find the band and make the connection, not the police – which meant that the right time for Lenz to plant it would have been after the murder, after the cops had come and gone, not before. But in that case, what was Lenz doing in Miranda’s apartment before the murder?

I’d gone over these questions in my head countless times over the past few days, and the answers just didn’t get any clearer.

I crossed Fourteenth Street and passed an empty cab stopped at a red light. Did I have enough cash? I dug into my pocket, decided I did, and got in. This would give me a chance to catch my breath, at least, and get me past any encounters I might otherwise have in Alphabet City. Barring traffic, it would also get me there faster. “Avenue D and Fifth,” I said. We roared off as the light changed.

I tried not to think about what Murco would do when he got here. Jocelyn needed to be stopped, and more than that she needed to be punished, and Murco would see to both – but I didn’t want to think about it too closely.

What I thought about instead was what I would do. The sensible part of my brain was telling me to watch from the street, maybe from the doorway of one of the projects across the avenue, to follow her if she came out, but otherwise to stay where I was and not get involved. When Murco showed up, I should point the apartment out to him and then walk away.

But I had too many questions, too many things I needed to understand. I needed to face her, to look Jocelyn in the eye, to hear from her own mouth what had happened, how she could have killed someone we’d both loved.

I stopped the cab a half block early, paid and walked the rest of the way. The fire escape ladder was still down, and one of the windows in Jocelyn’s apartment was still dark. But the other window, the kitchen window, was brightly lit. My heart was pounding. There was no one coming from either direction. I took hold of the ladder, pulled myself silently up to the first rung, and started to climb.

I didn’t have the knife with me this time, but I also hadn’t closed the bedroom window all the way on my way out. There was enough room for me to get my fingertips under it and slowly raise it. The room was dark, but the light from outside was sufficient to show that the bed was still empty, the comforter pushed to one side exactly as I had left it. I stepped inside and quietly pulled the window closed. Through the bedroom door I could hear the sound of the television going in the living room. I couldn’t make out the words, but it seemed to be a news program, maybe CNN or NY1. Footsteps crossed from the living room to the kitchen. A glass was set down on the countertop, or maybe in the sink. Then I heard water running.

The TV on and water running – I wasn’t likely to have a better chance than that to open the door unnoticed. So I turned the knob carefully and drew the door back. I followed the hallway past the bathroom to the living room. The kitchen was on my right, a pair of narrow French doors flung open on either side. I crept up to the one closer to me.

She was at the sink, with her back to me. She was wearing black jeans and black canvas sneakers and a hooded grey sweatshirt with the hood draped down between her shoulders. A plate and a fork were set out to dry on a rubber tray next to the sink, and from the way her arms were moving, it looked like she was working on the glass.

“Don’t move, Jocelyn,” I said. “My name is John Blake, and I’m-”

I heard the glass slip and smash in the bottom of the sink. One of her hands leaped to her chest. “Jesus, you scared me,” she said, turning around. “You shouldn’t do that, John. Sneaking up on me like that, after all this time.”

And suddenly I was back where it all began, staring in blank confusion at a picture from the past. Because it wasn’t Jocelyn.

It was Miranda.