Victims
Victims
Dorothy Uhnak
USA (1986)
There were plenty of witnesses, but none of them called for helpIn Queens, in the middle of a brightly lit street, a woman is savagely stabbed to death as people watch from their windows. The victim, Anna Grace, was a nurse devoted to helping others. But no one tried to help her on the last night of her life, even as she screams. No one called 911, until a passing bus driver saw her crumpled at the foot of a lamppost. Homicide cop Miranda Torres is shocked by these callous witnesses, and vows to bring the killer to justice. Post columnist and onetime Pulitzer winner Mike Stein views the senseless murder as a way to bring his career back from the brink.
Then a series of mob hits in the city takes the case in an astonishing new direction. When Miranda discovers why Anna was murdered, she must catch a killer who will soon hold her own life in his hands.
A Novel
Dorothy Uhnak
This book is dedicated with love and deep affection to three of the most constant, supportive and dependable people in my life:
To Dennis Power
To Sam Schmerler
And especially to my dear old, forever young Swanie
Prologue
S
HE HAD FORGOTTEN TO
lock the door on the passenger’s side. Even through the pounding headache, Anna Grace followed routine procedures. She slipped the key into the lock, gave it a quick half turn, checked the door handle, then let the car keys fall into her shoulder bag. In her right hand she held the house keys. The key to the apartment was positioned between her thumb and forefinger.
She sensed him before she heard or saw him: a heavy-smelling damp physical mass, large and ill-defined. He crowded her, forced her without actually touching her with his hands, just by his presence, moving into her, against the warm metal of her car. She twisted around to face him, to face the barrage of unintelligible words, directed at her. He was talking, whispering, leaning into her, ferociously insistent.
“What? What is it? What do you—”
His voice dropped to a growl as he grabbed her shoulder. Her hand went up automatically, to protect her face.
“Money? Do you want money? Here, take this—”
He slammed her across the face, but it didn’t feel like a blow. It was a sharp clean tearing sensation. Her hand caught the next peculiar pain: so sharp and intense across the palm and down her arm.
She pushed at him, pulled herself away from the car, from his grasping hand, his slashing hand. She swung out with her shoulder bag, swung wildly, felt the impact, heard him roar, screaming at her, furious that she had struck back.
“Oh my God help me help me help me please someone he’s hurting me...”
His hand, strong, incredibly strong, clamped on her neck as he leaned into her. He was talking to her: she caught a word, a phrase.
“No, no. A mistake. I don’t know you, please you’re making a—”
There were a series of blows, each thud felt dull and strangely without pain. And yet she knew he was stabbing her with a sharp long-bladed knife, his arm rising, punching down at her, delivering new and unimaginable wounds.
She screamed as loudly as she could. That would stop him. The noise would frighten him. They were standing in the middle of the brightly lit street. She cried out to all the people at all the windows in the apartment buildings on both sides of the street. From the bottom of the canyon created by the buildings, she called out to them.
They heard her. She saw them, watching. She pushed at the heavy wetness covering her face, knew that it was blood, that he was ripping at her with each new blow. She was beginning to feel oddly hollow. Shell-like. Empty and emptier, lighter and lighter, flowing and fading away.
He was making as much noise as she was. His own screams of rage, anger, fought hers of anguish and terror. And then, in one surprisingly quiet moment, he backed off and let his hands dangle at his sides. He lowered his head, glared at her, studied her as though deciding what to do next.
In that silent split second, Anna Grace felt a scream of agony rise from some reservoir of life-force energy. It was her final cry for help, and it was electrifying.
He froze, listened, looked around as though for the first time aware of where they were—in the middle of a well-lit street, surrounded by apartment buildings, people at the windows, watching. Seeing everything.
He turned and ran and was gone.
Her cries were low-pitched now, very soft, but audible in the stillness of the night. She raised her face, looked around, saw the buildings shimmer and blur. She moved carefully toward the lamppost. It was her immediate goal, and she reached it, leaned against it, cried softly, then felt her body slide down slowly, carefully, landing in a sitting position. She brought her knees up, felt her head fall back, heard one last softly mourning cry: a final animal sigh of despair and sorrow.
Then Anna Grace felt her head fall forward, and her last thought was about all the blood she was losing. Someone better start applying some pressure pretty soon...
Anna Grace was a nurse, so it was logical that her last thought should be of the medical action necessary to save her life.
I
F MIKE STEIN HAD
waited until morning to drive home from the beach house in Bridgehampton, he would never have become involved in the case. He would simply have added the name Anna Grace to the body count of violent deaths in New York City in the lower right-hand corner of his twice weekly column in the New York
Post.
The details would have been left to whoever was covering Queens that night.
Queens, to Stein, was a place to drive through on the way to the Island, or to hurry past in the back of a cab on the way to the airports. It was almost as unknown as Brooklyn, though a little less remote than Staten Island. The Bronx of his boyhood was memoryland: it had been burned and pillaged and systematically destroyed beyond recognition through the years. Occasionally, his column was a sad, nostalgic journey into what it had been like to grow up in the Bronx in the thirties. It read like ancient history.
New York was Manhattan, and Manhattan was home, and he was gratified by the light traffic on Grand Central Parkway. It would take him no more than twenty to twenty-five minutes to reach his apartment. His ex-wife, Julie, had given him a week to come up with a solution. It was his fault. His attorney had told him ten years ago, when he bought the beach house in both names, “You want to give your child bride a gift, make it jewelry or a car or a new wardrobe. But not half interest in a house. That is serious stuff: a well-meant gesture that will one day blow up in your face.”
This was the day. Julie, just turned thirty, twenty years his junior, had come in from California. She had the West Coast look, thin but firm, long loose blond hair, tanned skin, free of even the most ordinary lines—not even a laugh wrinkle.
Her new lover made
her
feel old, she confided. He was four years younger than she was. Mike could sympathize with that. In theory.
He had two choices, she told him. First choice, put the house on the market. She’d checked around. They could ask for three hundred thou. Probably get two hundred and fifty thou. Or, second choice, he could buy her out. She would be more than fair. For a hundred thousand dollars, he could make the house all his. Which was what it should have been all along.
He did not want to put the house on the market. It was the only place he had ever truly loved. It was where he went when the alternative was to go crazy.
What Julie could not understand was why he couldn’t come up with a hundred thousand dollars. He’d made a killing on his novel about the Korean War. The movie sale alone had been in the six figures, plus the book club rights and the paperback. And what about all the money he’d made a few years ago, when he won the Pulitzer Prize for that book about that murder—or whatever—in Vietnam? Didn’t that book make a lot of money?
Yes and no, he said. The novel about Korea was a long time ago. Okay, he’d made a lot of money. And spent a lot. He had four kids to support before he met Julie. And the Pulitzer—that bestowed more prestige than cash. The timing was wrong; no one wanted to read a horror story about a young American soldier murdered by other Americans who passed it off as a war death.
Listen, did she think he wrote two columns a week because he loved to wallow in the slow and certain destruction of life of the New Yorker? Yes, he was syndicated in over a hundred newspapers. Yes, she did read him in L.A. But it did not pay enough for him to do anything but meet expenses. That was why he did the lecture circuit from time to time: for money. She didn’t forget, did she, that they, between them, had a nine-year-old son? That Mike had to pay his tuition, among other set responsibilities?
Now Julie, who had been his response to turning forty, had a new man in her life. He was just getting his production company together, and she wanted to buy in. The hundred thousand from the beach house would do for openers.
As though she could not bear to let it pass, she mentioned his upcoming birthday casually. Fifty, Mike. Wow!
But what Julie really wanted to talk about, what she talked about incessantly, was money. Why hadn’t he stayed in L.A. when he was hot? Did he realize how much money was floating around?
The two-day stay at Bridgehampton ended the way it began, and what he had to do was find a way to come up with a hundred thousand dollars to buy back from her what was already his.
He hadn’t been listening to the blips and static and metallic drone of information being broadcast over the police radio. It was his background music, the way kids who walked around with earphones clamped to their heads became oblivious to the sounds being forced into their brains. It was purely coincidental that within two miles of the Grand Central Parkway exit to Forest Hills Mike yawned and decided to not think about Julie or money or the Hamptons or Hollywood or young producers who made his former child bride feel old, because what the hell did that make him?
“On Barclay Street, Forest Hills, between Sixty-ninth Avenue and Sixty-eighth Avenue, female on sidewalk obviously injured described as covered with blood...”
Once he caught the first few words, the message seemed clear of distracting noise. A long time ago, he had wondered how cops could ever understand any of the messages directed toward them, but it was something subliminal. When it was meant for you, you got it, and this message was directed to him. Acting on it, Mike swung to the right and followed the ramp which led to the Sixty-ninth Avenue exit.
He knew where he was going, but he didn’t know where he was. Years ago he had attended the tennis matches at Forest Hills Tennis Stadium, which was more or less the location given on the police call. The area had been all low buildings and empty lots, but that was more than twenty years ago. Driving across Queens was like drifting through an unknown, unimagined city. Queens Boulevard looked like a reasonable facsimile of Third Avenue. It had that new-town quality, as though all the buildings had been put up within a month of each other.
He remembered, vaguely, that the eight- or ten-lane Queens Boulevard had been lined with six-story apartment buildings set between large used-car lots. It had crossed his mind, years ago, that a great deal of valuable land was waiting to be developed. Now it was all twenty- or thirty-story buildings. The six-story buildings had been plowed under and the vacant lots had been built on, and for a moment it was difficult to tell exactly where he was. No landmarks until he spotted Continental Avenue: gateway to the real, old Forest Hills Gardens.