70

Penny Fedderman lay alone in a king-size bed and stared at a fly walking on the ceiling, seeing things upside down. Or did the kind of eyes flies have automatically flip things right side up in their vision, the way cell phone screens and pads did? Was there an upside down, when it came to flies?

The question was like life, Penny decided. On the surface simple, but on a more thoughtful level, amazingly complicated.

She looked away from the lackadaisical fly, toward the dark window. She could see through the rain-distorted pane to the lights of the taller buildings in the next block. Now and then the tires of vehicles swished past on the wet pavement outside.

Here she lay in bed, angry with her husband, because he insisted on working a job that threatened the premature end of his life. Of their life together. But was she unreasonable to feel that way? She’d known he was a cop when they married. She simply hadn’t know all that that involved.

So here she was, warm and alone in bed, while he was away somewhere in a dangerous city, possibly in a place where it wasn’t safe, where he was wet and cold.

What were the odds on him coming home at the end of each shift? She’d looked them up and forgotten them, but she knew that only a small percentage of cops actually were wounded or killed on duty. A small percentage unless you were a cop. Or a cop’s wife.

Penny switched on the bedside lamp. She was going to read—a detective novel, no less. It would help her to get to sleep, because she knew that the odds were on the side of the detective in the novel, in this case a female PI. She would somehow not only survive any odds, but she would solve the case.

Penny had decided that she owed a certain fidelity to detective novels. They provided a different, safer world. Safer for the fictional detective, anyway.

She knew how life often imitated art, and found that reassuring.

Feds, where are you? Are you dry? Are you safe?

Weaver had managed to work her way onto her side, which gave her leverage as she kicked at the back of the BMW’s trunk, which was also the back of the backseat. She could manage to get only so much strength into her kicks, and the car, a 1995 model, was built solid as a damned brick.

Goddamned German engineering!

She’d known someone with this kind of car, and she knew that in this model the battery wasn’t beneath the hood; it was beneath the backseat and extended slightly into the trunk. She gave up kicking at the back of the seat, and instead began kicking at the carpeted floor up near the nose of the trunk’s interior. Over and over. In the same spot.

The tape over her mouth remained firm, and she couldn’t manipulate her bound body so that she could kick loud enough for it to be heard. She prayed that she could kick in the bottom of the seat back enough so that she might be able to move one of the battery cables. Kick it loose and perhaps bring about some condition that could be used to create noise. Maybe even set off a theft alarm.

But a part of her recognized that the rest of her was being foolish. She was bound head to toe with duct tape. Her possibilities had been reduced, if any had been genuine in the first place. Her battering bare heels could do only so much damage.

Her efforts were causing her nude body to twist around on the carpeted trunk floor so that she was no longer kicking the rear of the backseat. She was kicking with her bare feet the upholstered part of the trunk that housed the power source for the interior lights.

The trouble was that the lights drew current from circuitry that was no doubt connected by a thick wiring harness.

If I could just kick one of the damned battery cables loose!

Her heels ached. Her kicks were softer now, becoming feeble. She realized she was losing strength fast.

What she didn’t realize was that her kicks had finally dented the carpeted fitting, and done slight damage to the wiring.

Electrical current arced. She could smell its acrid scent.

But nothing seemed to have changed. No earsplitting horn blasting, no loud outside signals of theft or vandalism.

She couldn’t know that outside the trunk, the car’s taillights and one of the reverse lights were silently blinking regularly and out of sequence. Somewhere in the rear of the car, she had done enough damage to the wiring to create a repetitive spark.

But was that good? The car was no doubt parked in a desolate spot. Maybe even indoors. For all she knew, it was in the basement parking garage—or whatever it was—where they’d started from. There was no one around to notice the spark she had fought so hard for and finally attained. No one to see, hear or smell it.

Until that spark might ignite the gasoline fumes.

71

The killer had rented a small office in a building across the street from the Far Castle, telling the landlord he was going to set up a mail-order business. The landlord couldn’t care less, after the killer paid him six months’ rent and a generous security deposit.

From the office’s single window, the killer could see not only the outside dining area of the restaurant; he could see the hedge maze in the garden, and near it, the birdbath.

The concrete structure had a floral motif and was bulky enough to contain a smaller, more elegant statue. He found himself sitting and staring at it, imagining what might be concealed inside its rough surface. There was nothing about the birdbath that suggested grace or the magic of true art. It was exactly the opposite, overdone and rather awkward. Lacking an artful symmetry. Surely, the killer thought, the monstrosity couldn’t have been created to be itself. It must have some other purpose.

The other thing that particularly demanded the killer’s attention was the garden’s hedge maze. He sat for hours at the window, memorizing its every turn and angle. It became like a map in his mind.

And now the time to peel the concrete onion had arrived, layer after layer, until the beauty inside held sway, and the ugliness fell away forever.

The last thing on his mind was Nancy Weaver.

The killer knew the best way to do this was out in the open, clearly visible to anyone who would notice him. Not that anyone would pay particular attention to him. He had made himself into a common sight, even at night, in New York City.

His van was white, with “Consolidated Edison” stenciled on magnetic signs on each side. He had on workman’s clothes, including boots and a dented and dirty yellow hard hat. Noise was something he didn’t want. It might allow someone to approach him unseen. So he eschewed the air-driven jackhammer and stuck to his rusty pick and shovel. He gave himself plenty of light, running a thick wire from the truck’s small generator set up next to the rear bumper. It was very directed light, centered on the concrete birdbath, so it didn’t disturb his vision if anyone came at him from any direction. The compressor chugged away steadily; he could hear it and smell its exhaust fumes.

Keeping his attention narrowly focused on the birdbath, his senses tuned to his surroundings, he worked steadily with the air hammer and then, for finer work, with the pickax, chipping away concrete to reveal harder marble beneath. The more concrete he removed before trying to transfer the birdbath, the lighter it would be, and the less likely that it would be damaged. Concrete and marble weren’t the lightest and most manageable substances on earth. If he didn’t remove one while preserving the other, his task would be herculean as well as futile.

Even over the soft sound of the generator and compressor, he heard now and then the wail of a distant siren. The police were diverted, along with the FDNY. The public, as well as news wolves like Minnie Miner, would be occupied by a major fire, and maybe a dead cop. And the woman who knew too much to stay alive, Nancy Weaver, was most likely dead in the trunk of an old and untraceable BMW sedan.