Three P.M. Friday afternoon. Twenty-nine hours before 8 P.M. Saturday night. Sky had finally cleared and turned that crystalline blue that marks bitterly cold winter days in Boston.
The brightness hurt my eyes, encouraged me to keep my head down and my shoulders hunched, when I should’ve been walking shoulders back, eyes straight ahead, taking constant inventory of the world around me. Trees cast skeletal shadows on the white snowy ground. Corners were mushy with slush and filled with blind spots caused by heaping snowbanks.
What if the killer had gotten bored with January 21 as the annual day to murder a young, defenseless woman? Maybe he’d realize there was more opportunity on the 20th, when his third victim, namely me, wouldn’t be expecting it yet. Eight P.M. was also an arbitrary time, a rough average between two approximate times of death in two separate homicides. Maybe morning was better for the murderer this year. Or later Saturday night or even Sunday morning. A lot could happen in a year. The killer could’ve moved, gotten a new job, maybe fallen in love, had a child.
He or she could be following me. Right now. Maybe he/she had started a week ago. Or a year ago: Officer Tom Mackereth, carefully scoping me out on the job. Or my aunt, suddenly showing up on my front door, after nearly a year apart. Or a long-lost friend, that kid from high school I couldn’t remember but would vaguely recognize, having spent yesterday flipping through the yearbook. Someone I wouldn’t immediately assume was a threat. Someone smart enough, practiced enough, to walk right up to me without tripping any of my internal alarms.
Twelve months later, I still had more questions than answers. Mostly, I felt the stress of too many sleepless nights, the ticktock of a clock, so close now, so unbelievably close to a very personal, very gruesome deadline.
I walked down the sidewalk toward the T stop in Harvard Square, jumping at every unexpected noise, while thinking that it was a good thing I’d left my Taurus at home, because at this stage of the game, I was a danger to myself and others.
I wished it was already January 21. Frankly, I needed the fight.
A crunching sound behind me. Footsteps, fast and heavy breaking through the crusty snow. I jumped to the side, turning quickly. Two college students strode past me, the bottom half of their faces hidden behind thick plaid scarves. The boy glanced up at my acrobatics, gave me a funny look, then put his arm around the waist of the girl, pulling her closer to him as they walked past.
My heart rate had just resumed its normal pace, my feet turning back toward the Cambridge T stop, when the cell phone in my pocket chimed to life.
I pulled it out, half-curious, half-fatalistic. I flipped it open. “Hello.”
And heard nine-year-old Michael’s voice. “She called him. Last night. She’d been drinking and then she started crying and then she called him.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t find the words through the rush of guilt and shame that flooded through my veins. Michael, and his sister Mica and his mother Tomika, the family I’d tried to save. Little Michael, whose father I’d taken from him, iron spikes protruding from his bloody chest.
“But he didn’t answer the phone,” Michael continued now, voice flat and quick, getting his story out. “Tillie, our next-door neighbor, answered, and he-she said Stan fell off the fire escape. He-she said Stan’s dead.”
“He-she?” I asked, the only words I could muster.
“Our neighbor Gary Tilton. ’Cept now he’s a she, so we call Tillie him-her or he-she, but never it ’cause that gets him-her mad.”
“Okay.”
“Charlie…is Stan really dead?”
“Yes.”
“Good!”
The vehemence in his young voice startled me, made me wince.