One Small Sacrifice

by Hilary Davidson

  “The fight they had at her office?”

  “The one that was loud enough for Dr. Khan to hear? Yeah.” Sheryn set the page on the coffee table. “Maybe Emily Teare had doubts about Alex Traynor. Maybe she swallowed them because she thought she could help him. Maybe the guilt was too much for her.”

  “What makes you so sure she feels guilty?” Rafael asked.

  “She’s spent a lot of time providing free medical care in war zones,” Sheryn said. “That’s an amazing level of sacrifice, something the vast majority of people who think they’re moral human beings would never even consider doing. She knows right from wrong. She wants to do good in the world.”

  She was quiet for a moment, lost in her own thoughts. Sheryn had the tendency to shrink people, and she blamed that on her mother, who was a therapist. Back when she’d interviewed Teare about Cori Stanton’s death, the good doctor had let slip that she knew Alex Traynor was using a lot of drugs. He has PTSD, and he’s trying to self-medicate, was how she’d put it. If Sheryn had to lay down odds, she’d swear that Teare was determined to rescue Alex Traynor. He was a lost cause she was going to sacrifice herself for.

  “I’ve never met her, so I don’t have much of an opinion, but I get what you’re saying,” Rafael said. “You think something scared her off?”

  “Maybe it just took her a long time to see Alex Traynor for who he really is. For all we know, he’s still abusing drugs, so maybe there’s been some signs of danger. Anyway, maybe Emily Teare has taken some time off from her life, because she’s trying to figure out what to do. Maybe she’s decided she can’t live like this anymore.”

  “That’s a lot of maybes,” Rafael said. “What do you really think?”

  Sheryn turned in a slow circle, taking in the apartment. There were books on the shelf about war photography, some of them by Traynor himself, and others by the likes of Don McCullin and Lynsey Addario. There were the remains of a bullet inside solid plastic, a grim souvenir of the time Traynor had been shot in the leg; she remembered seeing it last fall and thinking that it might have seemed strange to some people, but she got it. There were pictures of Traynor and Teare in war zones, then pictures of parents and friends. There was even a framed shot of Sid with his original rescuer; Sheryn wished she could remember the soldier’s name. Her eye snagged on the shot of Cori Stanton on horseback next to a terrified-looking Alex Traynor. It was funny how confident Stanton looked and how scared to death Traynor seemed; what a funny choice of a photo to keep up.

  “How do you want to handle it?” Rafael asked. “You get a call back yet from Emily’s brother in California?”

  “No, but I already know what we need to do.” Sheryn leaned down to pet Sid again. “I want to go over every inch of this apartment . . .” Her words trailed off suddenly as her eyes fixed on the carpet. Sid had been worrying at it, and she suddenly realized why.

  Rafael didn’t notice. “I don’t think we have grounds to do that.”

  “Take a look at the carpet.” The wool rug under the sofa, chairs, and coffee table was a mix of rich blues and pale ivory woven in a geometric pattern with dark bands of red and maroon.

  Rafael gave it a once-over. “Okay.”

  Sheryn pointed at a rust-colored triangle. “That’s blood.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s a pattern.”

  “No.” She got to her feet. “Look at it. One ivory triangle, then another, then one that’s soaked in blood. I’m calling in a crime-scene team.”

  CHAPTER 10

  ALEX

  While he hadn’t wanted to teach his class, facing a room of eager students had helped Alex file his problems away at the back of his brain. But that didn’t last long. When the class ended, he escaped quickly.

  His conversation with CJ had left him unsettled. Emily was in some kind of trouble, and it seemed impossible that Diana wasn’t connected to it. Who the hell was she? And how did she know Cori? That connection bothered him, but it also gave him a shadow of a lead: Cori had studied acting, and all of her friends were actors. It wasn’t a stretch to think that Diana was part of that crew. However tenuous, it was a place to start.

  He felt faintly ridiculous entering the red door of the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute on East Fifteenth Street, just off Union Square. Everyone else in the vicinity was maybe eighteen years old, artfully dressed for a social-media age where your latest selfie might make you a star. It was clear he didn’t belong. The woman who stopped him at the door, with her rainbow hair extensions blown out in all directions like a lion’s mane, clearly sensed it too.

  “Can I help you?” Her sharp tone didn’t sound helpful.

  Alex pulled out his NYU identification—the Strasberg school had a loose but important relationship with the university’s own Tisch School of the Arts—and introduced himself. “I was friends with one of your students, Cori Stanton. I’m looking for another friend of hers, Diana.”

  “I don’t think we can help with that.” The woman had the brusque manner of a functionary used to fending off requests, but the sight of his ID made her less standoffish.

  “Cori died last Thanksgiving,” Alex said. “Some of her friends are organizing a special service to remember her. I know Diana would want to be there.”

  The woman eyed him suspiciously but relented, allowing Alex to hunt through the database of head shots. He scanned them quickly, expecting Diana’s face to pop up at any moment, but it never did.

  He was still disappointed on his walk home. What next? he wondered, trying to come up with another angle. Cori had never really worked as an actor—auditions had made her panic, and she’d self-medicated to deal with the anxiety, and that had rarely ended well. He was going to have to figure out another connection.

  He was still working on that as he approached his apartment, when the sight of four NYPD vehicles parked in front grabbed his attention. What the hell happened? His mind immediately went to Emily, but he pushed that image away. If there were questions about Emily, one police car would be there; four suggested an emergency. Instead, he wondered about Mrs. DiGregorio, his widowed neighbor down the hall who doted on Sid, frying up bacon for the dog as a regular treat. What if something had happened to her?

  There was a uniformed cop outside the door, scrolling through her phone. “Was someone hurt?” Alex asked.

  “A woman who lives upstairs.”

  There was a surge of pain inside Alex’s chest. Emily’s face floated in front of his vision again. He ran up the stairs, feeling a stab in his leg with each step. The bullet that had ripped through it three years before had left an injury that—he was told at the time—would leave him with a permanent limp. Instead, he’d worked through it to the point where his gait was normal, unless he ran. By the time he made it to the fourth floor, he was gasping in pain. One more flight to go. When he finally looked down the hall, he realized it was his apartment door that was open. There was another uniformed cop standing guard, giving him the evil eye.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, walking up to the man. The cop glanced inside the apartment and jerked his head.

  A moment later, a voice he recognized floated to the hallway. “Speak of the devil, and he will appear.” It was a woman speaking, her voice low and resonant. Her leather boots clicked across the wooden floor, and suddenly she was in the doorway. “Good afternoon, Mr. Traynor. Do you remember me?”

  Of course Alex recognized her. Not all of his nightmares were about war zones. In some of them, this woman was standing over him, staring at him as if he’d just crawled out of a sewer. You know you killed her, she would say in that same husky voice. Admit it.

  “Detective Sterling.” Alex swallowed hard. “What’s going on?”

  “I’m here about your girlfriend.”

  “Something’s happened to Emily?” Alex’s voice rose in a panic.

  There was a pause as they faced off. Then the detective said, “Why don’t you tell me how she is.”

  Alex stood his ground
. “Do you have a warrant?”

  “Of course.” She held it out to him; he took it without reading it.

  “Why are you in my apartment?”

  “I’m the one asking questions,” the detective said. “Starting with, where is Emily Teare?”

  “I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”

  “She’s been reported missing, so that makes this very much my business.” Her eyes narrowed as she spoke. Even though her voice was calm, Alex could feel her smoldering anger. It was like standing before a volcano that was about to erupt.

  “Reported missing?”

  “Her colleague Dr. Yasmeen Khan phoned it in this morning. But Dr. Teare has been missing since Friday night, as far as we can tell. So, you tell me, Mr. Traynor. Where, exactly, is she?”

  “She left.”

  “Left?” the detective repeated, drawing the word out as if it had multiple syllables. “Left for what?”

  “She told me she was going away on Friday night,” Alex said. “She said she would be back in a few days to pick up her things.”

  “Yes, we found her note,” the detective said, and Alex flinched. “So, she left you after you two met up on Friday afternoon?”

  Alex didn’t answer that. If there was one thing CJ had drilled into him, it was to keep his guard up around cops. If they knew about his visit to Emily’s office, what else did they have? Or was this a fishing expedition, designed to trip him up? “If you want to know why she left, you’ll have to ask her.”

  “But I can’t ask her, Mr. Traynor. She’s missing.”

  The two of them were in a stare down, and neither gave an inch. Emily’s not missing, Alex thought. She’s . . . that was where he faltered. Where had she gone, and how much trouble was she in? What if she actually needed the help of the police? Only that didn’t sit right with him. When he’d gone to her office, he’d known she was involved in something illegal. Knowing Emily, she was only trying to help someone in need, but the end result could be disastrous for her and for the career she loved so much. Talking to the police was more likely to hurt her than to help her.

  “Emily isn’t missing,” Alex said. “She’s taking a few days away. I’ll let you know when she comes back.”

  “What about that woman who was in your apartment last night?” the detective asked.

  For the first time, she’d truly thrown Alex. “What?”

  “We spoke to your neighbors, you know. Miriam DiGregorio distinctly remembered seeing a young woman in your home last night. Someone between twenty-five and thirty—‘exotic looking,’ to quote her—wearing a platinum wig. Ring a bell?”

  “I don’t know her,” Alex said. “She was only here to see Emily. Claimed her name was Diana. That’s all I know about her.”

  Detective Sterling stared at him silently for a moment, taking that in. “You know, Mr. Traynor, I’m surprised you still live here, in this building. After what happened with your former girlfriend, I mean.”

  “Cori was my friend, not my girlfriend.”

  “I remember you telling us that.” Her voice was cool, oddly detached, like a scientist studying a creature she was about to cut open. “But if it were me, I don’t think I could stay in a building where someone I cared about had died.”

  Alex considered that. Cori’s death was a tragedy. There wasn’t a day that went by that he didn’t think of her and experience shame and guilt, as if it had just happened. “It’s not as if moving away to another part of town would make Cori’s death any less sad,” he said. “I’ll miss her, wherever I am. I can’t run away from that.”

  He had the sense, for the first time, of truly surprising the detective. Whatever reaction she’d expected from him, it wasn’t that.

  “You never explained what you’re doing in my apartment,” he added. “I get that you came here looking for Emily, but what the hell are those guys doing?” Alex stared through the doorway. The carpet had been rolled back. Two techs with their backs to him seemed to be studying it.

  “That’s an interesting story, Mr. Traynor. Your super let us into the apartment, just in case Dr. Teare was sick or incapacitated. And we found blood on the carpet.”

  “If you did, it’s mine. I cut myself yesterday.”

  “It was a lot of blood,” the detective added quietly. “Just how badly did you cut yourself?”

  He held up his bandaged arm. “There were three cuts from broken glass.”

  She looked at it and shook her head. “There’s no way you bled this much.” The detective’s tone was certain.

  “Show me.”

  “Come on inside.”

  The detective had to be lying, Alex thought as he followed her in. The police played tricks like this, mind games to crack you open like a clam. The bedroom door was closed, and he could hear Sid whining behind it, unhappy to be left alone when there was a ruckus in the main room. The sofa had been pulled off to one side, blocking the door to the bathroom, while the chairs were stuck in opposite corners of the room, separated like kids who’d been fighting. A couple of cops with plastic bags pulled over their shoes were extracting fibers from the rug.

  “This is Traynor?” asked a slick-looking man in a gray suit. He had black hair and inky black eyes and reminded Alex of a couple of drug dealers he’d known.

  “Yes. Mr. Traynor, this is my new partner, Detective Mendoza.”

  The man didn’t offer a hand to shake; he looked Alex over like he was about to fit him for an orange jumpsuit.

  “You want to explain how that much blood got on the carpet?” Sterling asked him. “It was hard to detect it all at first, on account of the pattern. But as you can see, there’s a lot.”

  Alex’s eyes roamed over the rug. It wasn’t hard for him to make out; there was blood—or something equally, opaquely red—in large splotches on the rug. “That wasn’t there this morning.”

  “Didn’t you tell me your arm was bleeding?”

  “It was, but I meant drops of blood,” Alex answered. “It wasn’t . . .” His voice trailed off as he surveyed the scene. It was as if someone with a massive head wound had been lying there, bleeding out. He’d watched that happen enough times overseas, in the aftermath of a car bomb or IED, when civilians with shrapnel carved into their skin lay helpless on the ground. He’d photographed them and the people who had tried to help them; there were too many of the former and never enough of the latter. For a moment, he felt as if he were falling backward, into a pit he’d never crawl out of.

  “Mr. Traynor?”

  Detective Sterling’s voice pulled him back from the edge. “I don’t understand what happened,” Alex said. “That blood wasn’t there when I left this morning.”

  “Where were you today?”

  “Teaching,” he murmured.

  “Where?”

  “NYU’s Tisch School. A first-year class on analog photography. It ran from nine thirty until one.”

  “Those are some long hours for a class,” the detective said. “Anything else?”

  “I saw a friend before that. CJ Leeward.”

  She raised her eyebrows at that. “Your lawyer? I suggest you give him a call right now.”

  Alex could barely breathe.

  “We need to ask you a long list of questions,” she added. “You have the right to have counsel present.”

  “I’m not going.”

  “You can come along of your own free will, or I’ll arrest you right now,” Sterling answered. “The choice is yours.”

  CHAPTER 11

  SHERYN

  “What I don’t get,” Rafael said, when they were back at the precinct, “is why you didn’t just arrest Traynor at his apartment. I know you were itching to.”

  “We have blood on a carpet,” Sheryn responded. “No victim, no body, no real evidence of a crime. You have any idea how much the ADA hates it when we arrest someone and have to cut them loose? It’s better this way.”

  “There was no reason to suggest that he bring in his lawyer,” Ra
fael muttered. “That was a bad call.”

  Sheryn turned on her heel to face him. “I had evidence thrown out last time around because of a technical glitch in how it was collected. I’m not going to let that happen this time.” There was heat in her voice. She headed for the interview room, pausing long enough to glance back. “If that’s a problem for you, stay out of the room.”

  She didn’t wait for his reaction. Instead, she headed down the hall, knocked on the door, and stepped inside.

  Alex Traynor was slouched behind a metal table, his hands clasped in front of him like he was trying to arm wrestle himself. His dark hair was shaggy, and his face was pale and drawn. Beside him, his lawyer, CJ Leeward, looked relaxed in his dapper suit, but Sterling recognized the pose. His composure was artful, not natural.

  “Gentlemen,” Sheryn said. “I’ve given you time to confer. Now I have some questions.”

  “Just to be clear, my client is here of his own free will,” the lawyer said. “He’s deeply concerned about the blood you found in his apartment and about his fiancée’s whereabouts and wishes only to assist your investigation. However, he is free to leave the precinct at any time.”

  “Of course.” Sheryn took a seat and spread her upturned hands. Nothing to see here, nothing up my sleeve. “Obviously, we’re doing a DNA analysis on the blood. Right now, all I can tell you is type. There were traces of type O blood, but most of it is type A.”

  “I’m type O,” Traynor said quickly. “Emily’s type A.”

  His lawyer gave him a warning look.

  Alex caught his gaze and shrugged slightly. “When you work in a war zone, you know what blood type you are. It goes with the territory.”

  “That’s right,” Sheryn said, watching Traynor carefully. “You both spent time in Syria. You talked about that the last time you were here. You told me about another girl who died.”