Bridget goes to the living room window, gazes down the street, looks at the traffic. There’s a car down there with something funny on top of it. A small car, a Civic maybe, with a short pole fixed to the roof with brackets, and something mechanical-looking on the end of it.
Bridget steps away from the window, still restless. She wanders into the bedroom, casts her eye upon this second unmade bed. She walks around it to the bedroom window and stands there, listens to the muffled sounds of the city through the pane of glass, feeling anxious. She berates herself, for at least the hundredth time, for allowing herself to get into a compromising relationship. For putting everything at risk. Herself. Her husband. His future.
I’m such a fool, she thinks. Such an idiot. I have everything and I’m throwing it away. Need to control my impulses. There’s that weird car again. What is that on—
Hears something behind her. Starts to turn.
Everything goes white.
She cannot breathe.
NICOLE is finished. She has retrieved the cell phone from the target’s purse. She is preparing to leave when she hears the door open. It’s too soon for the cleanup crew. She has only just made the call.
The roommate. It must be the roommate. She’s supposed to be at work. She’s come back to the apartment during the day.
Shit shit shit.
From the kitchen, a woman calls out, “Bridget?”
Bridget?
Nicole’s briefing for this job included two names: the target, Allison Fitch, and Courtney Walmers, the woman with whom she shares this Orchard Street apartment.
If the woman Nicole has just killed is Bridget, then the person entering the apartment could be the target. Or it could still be Walmers.
Doesn’t much matter. It could be goddamn Britney Spears, for all Nicole cares. It’s a complication she must deal with.
Nicole intends to move around the bed, flatten herself up against the wall before the woman comes into the bedroom. But before she can make the move, the woman appears in the doorway.
Her eyes move from Nicole to the dead woman and back again. In an instant.
That’s all it takes for Nicole to see who she is. She recognizes her from the photos she was provided beforehand. This is Allison Fitch. She’s about the same size and height as the dead woman. Roughly same color hair.
Fitch screams, turns, runs.
Nicole knows she has to move quickly to shut the woman up. Forever.
Twice the work for the cleanup crew. They’ll have to deal with it.
Nicole intends to take the same shortcut out of the room that she used to enter it. Straight across the bed. Sees the moves in her head without even having to think about them. Push off the floor with left foot, right foot hits the bed, left foot lands on other side.
Should save her a full second.
Fitch has just slipped from her sight, tearing through the kitchen for the door. Nicole leaps onto the bed, but her foot gets tangled in the rumpled bedspread. Nicole tumbles forward off the far side of the mattress, dragging the bedspread with her as she slams into the wall.
She untangles her foot from the spread, comes through the bedroom door like a sprinter charging out of the blocks. The door to the hall is open. She can hear frantic footsteps, at least a floor below.
Not good.
Nicole descends the two flights of stairs three steps at a time. Bursts onto the street. Stops, looks both ways.
No sign of Allison Fitch to the north.
No sign of Allison Fitch to the south.
Nicole takes out her cell and calls Lewis. “You’re not going to like this,” she says.
LEWIS calls Howard. Tells him the wrong woman was killed. That Fitch got away. And that it’s even worse than that.
The dead woman is Bridget.
“Mother of God,” Howard says. “What are you telling me? Bridget? She killed Bridget?” He is saying all this in heated whispers so Agatha will not hear him on the other side of the office door.
“Goddamn it, Lewis, you said this was the way to handle it! I listened to you! You said you knew someone who could handle this! Sweet Jesus, Bridget?”
“Howard, you can vent later. Right now, we have to think. Fast.”
Howard wants to rant some more, but appreciates that time is not on their side here. Lewis is right. They have to move quickly. “She can’t be found there,” Howard says. “Bridget can’t be found in that apartment.”
“I agree.”
“But she has to be found. She can’t just…disappear. That’ll drag on for months.”
“I agree.”
Howard is thinking. He doesn’t know the condition of Bridget’s body, and does not want to know any details, except for one. “Is it possible to make this look like an accident, or better, self-inflicted?”
Lewis is quiet for three seconds. “Yes. Maybe.” Then, “Morris and Bridget have several residences in the city.”
“Yes.”