Three-Day Town

CHAPTER

27

Indeed, one hardly knows what New York would do if the police were not on hand to keep the lawless and the violent in restraint.

—

The New New York

, 1909

Frustrated and enraged, it was all Dwight could do not to grab Sidney Jackson by the scruff of his scrawny neck and shake him till he answered.

“Easy, Bryant,” Sam Hentz said. “We found him, we’ll find her.”

“Hey, Lieutenant!” Vlad Ruzicka rushed down the hallway from the break room. “Come quick. She’s in here! Jani almost sat on her! Hurry!”

Sigrid immediately started down the hall, but Dwight pushed his way past her. At the far end of the long room, they saw a startled Jani Horvath staring at what had been concealed behind the tumbled covers on the bottom bunk bed next to the wall. It looked like a silver-gray cocoon, a cocoon that wriggled. With the hood of her parka still over her head, Deborah lay bound in duct tape from her mouth to her toes. In his haste to get out to the curb before the sanitation workers discovered Corey’s body, Jackson had evidently used a full roll of tape to keep her immobile while he made sure he was the one to toss Corey’s body into the truck.

As Dwight gently turned her over, he was relieved to see blue eyes implore him and to realize abruptly why she wasn’t struggling harder.

“Somebody get me some scissors,” he called. Without waiting, he pushed back the strip that partially blocked her nose. “Better?”

She took a deep breath and nodded.

Scissors were produced and he carefully cut the tape on both sides of her face where it wound around the hood of her coat. She made impatient sounds that it was taking him too long. “Wait a minute, shug. You don’t want me to cut your hair, do you?”

A moment later he had eased the tape off her lips and then cut enough to free her arms and legs. She looked like a mummy festooned with tattered wrappings, a beautiful mummy come back to life when he feared she was lost forever.

She insisted on standing, but moaned when he touched her head. “Ow! That hurts like the devil.”

“Where?” Dwight pushed back the wool-lined hood and gently examined the spot she had touched. “You’ve got a goose egg there, but no blood.”

“What the hell did he hit me with?”

“Whatever it was, you were lucky you had that hood on,” Sigrid said.

She instructed one of the uniformed officers to take the Bryants to the nearest hospital and to wait until she was either released or kept overnight for observation. To her surprise, Deborah did not protest.

When they returned three hours later, patrol cars were still thick around the service entrance and a cop remained by the lobby door to check IDs.

“Mrs. Bryant!” the new elevator man exclaimed. “You’re okay? Shouldn’t you be in the hospital?”

Deborah gave him a dazzling smile and looked at the shiny new brass name tag pinned to his neat brown jacket. “I thought you were going to be Jim here.”

“Yeah, I forgot to tell them, so go ahead and say it.”

She laughed. “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses!”