“Can I play out this scenario?” asked Feller. “Our killer’s inside when
you approach, Detective Heat. You interrupt his job on the locksmith—‘Uh-oh!’—
and flush him out the back door. He hides behind this Dumpster…” The detective
acted it out, tracing steps from the back door and hiding behind the bin. “He’s
here when Strazzullo arrives—this close to a collar—but then the cavalry gets
called back out front and he gets away.”
“Looks like an escape setup to me,” said Ochoa, eyeballing the short distance from
the Dumpster lid to the fire escape ladder. “Right after Strazzy got called away to
work the evacuation, our boy climbed up on the bin, and poof.”
“Could be how he came and went, both,” agreed Raley.
Detective Heat boosted herself on top of the bin and ascended the fire escape ladder
with teeth clenched. On each rung, she silently voiced anger and frustration at the
killer being this close to capture—if he truly had been there.
If.
The others followed her up, and they all walked the roof in a line, searching the
flat, grimy surface for anything that told them if.
They found it at the far end of the rooftop. Everyone saw it at the same time. And
knew.
One end of a length of red string had been tied to the knob of the door to the
access stairs and fluttered in the warm breeze. The string had many colors,
following the pattern of the other homicides. Red was tied to yellow. Yellow was
fastened to purple. And purple was knotted to a new piece of string, this one green.
Heat had already stationed officers to cover all exits of this building, including
the stairwell. Silently, she drew her service piece and held it up at-ready beside
the door. All but Rook, who was unarmed, did the same and took tactical positions.
She nodded, and Detective Feller yanked the door open. Inside, at the top of the
steps, stood Officer Strazzullo and his partner. Everyone holstered.
They looked down at the threshold at a broken piece of cinder block. Feller bent,
and when he lifted it, a small piece of paper, slightly larger than a postage stamp,
that had been underneath it fluttered off in the wind. Raley chased the scrap across
the roof so it wouldn’t blow away, and picked it up with his gloves.
Everyone stood around him in a huddle to see it. The paper, about an inch square,
was blank on one side and had a color image on the other. It looked as if a small
section from a photocopy of an oil painting had been cut with scissors. All it
showed was someone’s fingers and knuckles.
Detective Raley used his cell phone and captured a decent close-up image of the hand
on the little square of paper before they turned it over to Forensics to fingerprint
and lab it. Heat tasked Roach with seeing what they could find out about the
painting it had been clipped from. “What you found out about the key saved this guy
’s life. Find out about the painting, maybe we’ll capture our killer.”
At Roosevelt Hospital, Heat had to hunt for parking because of all the news vans
that had gathered outside the entrance to the Emergency Room. Reporters who were
staking out positions for their stand-up pieces for that evening’s newscasts saw
Nikki and called out to her by name, hollering for comment. She kept her eyes front
and badged herself and Rook past the officer at the door.
They found Glen Windsor sitting up with his legs dangling over the side of a bed in
one of the trauma bays. He sipped apple juice through a straw, and the color had
come back to his face. “How are you feeling, Mr. Windsor?” asked Heat.
He smiled and said, “Lucky to be alive.” She returned his smile and thought,
Buddy, you have no idea. “Thank you again. I’ve been thinking. How the hell did
you know to come help me?”
Heat wasn’t sure how much to tell him. On the one hand, he had been the target of a
serial killer. But on the other, the press waited, and she wanted to control what
got out there. “We smelled gas,” she said, truthfully enough.