One Small Sacrifice

by Hilary Davidson

  “She didn’t have a choice,” Yasmeen said. “You’ve never met our administrator. The only thing she’s afraid of is running afoul of HIPAA regulations.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “Patient confidentiality,” Yasmeen explained. “Searching Emily’s office means seeing her files. But the police haven’t come back yet.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  “Number one, our administrator would kneecap you. Number two, I don’t have a key for Emily’s office,” Yasmeen told him apologetically.

  “I’ve already been shot by people who wanted to keep me out of their territory,” Alex said. “I don’t care if your administrator is a fire-breathing dragon. And I have yet to meet a lock I couldn’t crack.”

  “I thought you were a photographer. Emily never told me you were secretly a cat burglar.”

  “Believe it or not, those skills go hand in hand,” Alex said. “I got my start in photography going into places I wasn’t supposed to be. Let’s go.”

  They headed into the hallway; Emily’s office was next to Yasmeen’s. In ten seconds flat, Alex unlocked the door with a paper clip.

  For all his bravado, he wasn’t eager to step inside Emily’s office. From the doorway, looking in, it was immaculate, as anyone who knew Emily would expect it to be. Her diplomas from Stanford and Cornell hung on the wall behind her desk, along with photographs taken during trips abroad for Doctors Without Borders. There wasn’t a lot of personality on show otherwise. The furniture was metallic standard-issue stuff. Emily’s blinds were closed. There was a twin of the snake plant in Yasmeen’s office, but this one was smaller and spindlier; it looked shy and reclusive.

  Breaking into the office was only the first step, Alex knew. If there was anything important, it wouldn’t be lying out in plain view. Emily’s computer was password protected, and her desk was locked.

  “I sometimes tease Emily about keeping everything under lock and key,” Yasmeen said. “She doesn’t do that at home, does she?”

  “Not exactly. But she does like her privacy.” It occurred to Alex suddenly how odd it was that Emily had left that pile of prescriptions on her dresser. It was almost as if she had wanted him to see them. “I’m not a hacker, so the odds of my breaking into her computer are nil. But the desk drawers . . .” Alex held up the paper clip. “They won’t take long.”

  He wasn’t exaggerating. In less than a minute, all four drawers were unlocked.

  “You’re really good,” Yasmeen said. “Also, really bad.”

  Alex smiled at that. “Let’s see what we have here.”

  It wasn’t much. There was Emily’s Day-Timer, filled with appointments and running times. Unless it was written in code, it offered nothing useful. Alex didn’t hit pay dirt until he dug into the large drawer at the bottom right. It was filled with manila folders, most of which contained patient files. He couldn’t explain what he was looking for exactly, only that there had to be something that didn’t fit. It was like he told the students in his workshop: it’s not your job to see what everyone else sees; your work is showing them what they don’t want to see.

  Nothing seemed suspect until he hit an unlabeled folder containing a series of plain white envelopes. Emily’s name and home address were computer printed in black ink. Each had a typed note inside.

  “What do we have here?” Alex asked as he opened the first one. He froze as he read it.

  The words hit him hard: Alex Traynor is a murderer. You need to get yourself away from him.

  Alex stared at it for a few seconds, then passed it to Yasmeen. “Have you ever seen this before?”

  She stared at it and exhaled a shuddering breath. “No.”

  “Wait, there’s more,” Alex told her. He pulled out a second typed note: Alex Traynor murdered Cori Stanton. He will kill you next.

  He passed that one to Yasmeen as well.

  “This is crazy,” Yasmeen said.

  The third one Alex picked up said, Alex Traynor got away with murder. He is a sociopath who will kill again.

  The fourth, Alex Traynor has killed before. He is sick and he will murder again.

  And a fifth: Alex Traynor is a monster. If you value your safety and your life you will leave him now.

  There were six notes in total. The last one read: Alex Traynor destroys women. Save yourself before he makes you disappear.

  Alex felt nauseous and dizzy. For a moment, it felt as if he were locked in a tight space again with no air and no light; the walls were closing in on him. Why had Emily never told him about these letters? From the look of it, she’d been receiving them for months. They’d arrived at their home address, but she’d hidden them away in her office. He cleared his throat. “You’re sure Emily never mentioned getting any letters?”

  “Positive.” Yasmeen picked up the envelopes and paged through them. “These have stamps on them, but they haven’t been canceled. There are no post office markings on the outside of the envelopes.”

  Anger was starting to crystallize in Alex’s veins.

  “This is absolutely insane,” Yasmeen said. “Who would send this garbage to Emily?”

  “That’s not a mystery at all,” Alex said. “I know exactly who wrote these notes.”

  CHAPTER 22

  SHERYN

  “That’s a lot of blood,” Sheryn said.

  “Head wound?” Rafael speculated. “That would be a heavy bleed.”

  “It doesn’t look right,” Sheryn said. “You stuff a human body in a trunk, and there’s not much wriggle room. There sure as hell is no room to flip over and have your head land where your feet were.”

  “True, that. Maybe she was bleeding from several wounds.” Rafael shook his head. “If this is actually her blood, I don’t know what the odds are that we find her alive.”

  Sheryn shoved that thought aside while she called in the CSU. “They’re on their way,” she told Rafael.

  “A couple more uniforms are heading over too,” he answered, hanging up his own phone. “We’re gonna need a lot of warm bodies for the canvass.”

  “You want me to block off the area?” the uniformed cop who’d let them into the car asked. He looked fresh out of the academy, with brush-cut hair, bright-green eyes, and reddish-brown skin that was covered in freckles.

  “Roll out the crime scene tape,” Sheryn said. “We’re going to need it.”

  As she was speaking, the front door of one Victorian house opened, and an elderly woman called out, “Excuse me!” She had short, frizzy gray hair, and her petite body was swallowed up by a magenta kimono. She peered at them through thick bifocals, which made her brown eyes seem enormous. “Did 311 send you?” the woman asked. “This is the first time they ever listened to me.”

  “No, ma’am. We haven’t been in touch with the 311 folks,” Sheryn answered. The 311 line had been installed in New York years earlier to allow residents to complain about everything in the city that wasn’t actually a crime. Like most cops, Sheryn joked about it as a mental health hotline.

  “But you’re here about that car, aren’t you?” The woman crept forward. She was hunched over, and her arms were crossed in front of her chest as if she thought someone was leering at her.

  “Did you call about the car?” Sheryn asked.

  “I did. It’s extremely aggravating. My son couldn’t park in front of my house when he visited Sunday. That stupid car was there.”

  “How long has it been here?” Rafael asked. “Did you see who parked it?”

  “I watch everything on this street,” the woman said. “And I wake up early. Five thirty, it was parked there. Some entitled bitch thinks she can park in my spot . . .”

  “You saw the driver?” Sheryn nudged her.

  “Yeah, sure,” the woman answered.

  “Can you describe her?”

  “She was tall.”

  “Okay, what else?” Rafael prompted.

  The woman thought about that. “She was wearing a coat. It’s hard to
say how big she was.”

  “What color was her hair?”

  That brought on a deep squint. “I’m pretty sure she was wearing a hat.”

  “What about her clothing?”

  “Black. She was all in black.” The woman sounded jubilant, as if she’d presented a key piece of evidence.

  “Could this be her?” Sheryn held up her phone. There was a picture of Emily Teare on the screen.

  “Maybe,” the woman answered. “I never saw her face. I only got a look at her from the back.”

  “Are you sure it was a woman?” Rafael asked.

  “Of course I’m sure!” The elderly woman looked outraged.

  “Because the way you described her, it’s hard to know,” Rafael said. “This person was tall and wearing black. Those seem to be the only details.”

  “Young man, it was definitely a woman.” She drew herself up to her full, though still diminutive, height, like an aggressive meerkat. “She was wearing earrings. They were so big I saw them in the lamplight. And she had a purse.”

  “This is all helpful, ma’am,” Sheryn said, glaring at Rafael. “Because you never know what detail might help. What’s your name?”

  “Orla West.”

  “Okay, Ms. West, what I want you to think about is what made you get up and look out your window,” Sheryn said.

  “I heard a car door close,” the woman answered. “It wasn’t loud, but I don’t sleep well. I was lying awake, and I heard it. It was five thirty because I looked at my clock.”

  “And that made you get up?”

  “No. A minute later, there was a big slam, like a jerk flung a car door closed. That was when I got up and looked outside.”

  “So, was there more than one person on the street?”

  “No, just that woman. She was alone.”

  “But you heard two doors close, one quiet and one loud, correct?”

  Orla West nodded. “I did. But the street was empty except for her.”

  “Was it you who keyed the side of the car?” Rafael asked.

  The woman’s mouth opened and shut quickly. “I need to get back inside. Excuse me.” She hurried through her door and slammed it behind her.

  Rafael whistled. “I guess we solved one mystery.”

  “What the hell did you do that for?” Sheryn demanded. “We need her to make a statement. You better not scare her off.”

  “Her statement isn’t going to be worth much. She saw a tall person in black on the street.”

  “Emily Teare is what, five nine or five ten? We can’t rule out the possibility she drove the car over here.”

  “Orla West is all of four foot ten,” Rafael answered. “She probably thinks a tall person is five four.”

  Sheryn sighed. “Let’s look at this rationally. A woman who may or may not have been Emily Teare dumped the car here in the middle of the night.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “But how does that make sense?” she asked. “If she dropped it off and walked away, where did all the blood come from?”

  “Maybe she came back, and someone attacked her . . .” Rafael’s voice trailed off. “Nah, that doesn’t work. How could her blood be all over the rug in her apartment and all over the trunk?”

  “Especially if there’s a chance she walked away from the car. That doesn’t add up.” Sheryn considered the problem. “Maybe she was attacked in her apartment, rolled up in the rug, then put in the trunk. Only, how did she escape like Houdini?”

  “Maybe we’re looking at this the wrong way,” Rafael said. “Maybe she left Traynor, and then she was attacked. He could’ve followed her.”

  “You think he brought her back to the apartment and got blood on the carpet?” Sheryn asked. “Say what you will about a fifth-story walk-up, but it definitely inhibits people from carrying a bleeding body home. All those stairs . . .”

  “How do you make sense of it, then?”

  “We don’t know this is Dr. Teare’s blood. We don’t even know if it’s human blood.”

  They both stared into the angry red void of the trunk.

  “It’s a lot of blood,” Rafael said. “If that came out of one person, she didn’t break out and walk away from the car. She would’ve been carried off in a stretcher, weak as a kitten.”

  “There was a woman in Alex Traynor’s apartment on Sunday night. She was dressed in black, according to his neighbor.”

  “You think she’s Alex Traynor’s accomplice?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud,” Sheryn said. “Let’s say Emily Teare was attacked at home. That’s how her blood ended up on the carpet there. And then Alex Traynor put her in the trunk of this car . . .” She was quiet for a moment. “Only, if that’s true, this vehicle would be on traffic cams on a bridge or tunnel. We’ll have to check that.”

  “You think Orla West spotted Traynor on her street?”

  Sheryn shook her head. “The way he’s built? I bet no one ever mistook him for a woman.”

  “Then he’s got an accomplice. Cherchez la femme.”

  They were at an impasse. All that was clear was that the trunk had just complicated the case.

  “We need a fresh angle,” Sheryn said.

  “Okay, let’s go back to basics,” Rafael said. “Why is the car parked here?”

  “The only prominent landmark nearby is the cemetery.”

  “You told me Emily’s parents died in a car crash. Are they buried in Woodlawn?”

  “No. That accident happened in San Francisco. They were cremated on the other side of the country.” Sheryn turned around slowly. “You know who is buried in Woodlawn? Cori Stanton.”

  “You think that’s the connection?” Rafael asked. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

  “It doesn’t. But you know how I feel about coincidences.” She beckoned at Rafael. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “You’re not dragging me into the cemetery, are you?”

  “Aw, don’t be scared now. Let’s play this out.” She headed toward Woodlawn, and Rafael followed reluctantly. “Okay, just for the sake of argument, let’s say that Emily Teare came up to the Bronx to get her car. Why would she park it here?”

  “Maybe she was seeing someone she knew in the neighborhood,” Rafael suggested.

  “But why would she go to the trouble of getting the car if that’s all she was doing? It doesn’t track.” Sheryn shook her head. “It doesn’t smell right.”

  “Well, another possibility is that Alex Traynor beat her to a pulp and stuffed her in the trunk. Maybe he was driving around looking for a place to dump her body.”

  “Yeah, right. What did he do, bring her bloody body on the train to the Bronx with him?” Sheryn asked. “No.”

  “Then enlighten me. What’s your theory?”

  There was a dim memory floating in the back of Sheryn’s head. Alex Traynor had grown up in the north Bronx. There was another connection she couldn’t quite make. She needed to look over her notes from the Stanton case again.

  “It’s possible that they came up here together,” Sheryn said slowly. “Maybe they wanted to see a grave. Maybe it was to see a friend. What if something went wrong?”

  “A lot of maybes in there,” Rafael grumbled.

  “Well, how about this: maybe Dr. Teare came up to get the car, and someone attacked her? Wouldn’t be the first time someone was harmed over a nice car.”

  “That theory lets Traynor off the hook,” Rafael said. “Don’t you think he’s good for this?”

  “You know I want to lock him up. But I’m not going to lie. This feels off.”

  “Off, how?”

  “Why is there so much blood in the trunk?”

  Rafael shrugged. “I’m leaving that to the experts. I just want to get the guy.” They were at the cemetery’s entrance now, and he gave an exaggerated shudder. “We really have to go in here?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re afraid of a graveyard.”

  “Afraid, no. Creeped out by, yes. It’s not the same
thing.”

  Sheryn’s phone rang. “Hey,” she said to the sergeant on the desk. “What’s up?”

  “Sterling, you got some kind of standing order for news on Alex Traynor, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Then you’ll want to know about this,” the sergeant said. “He was just arrested downtown.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “I don’t have details, just the name,” he said. “But I heard the scene is a real mess.”

  CHAPTER 23

  ALEX

  There was a tightness in Alex’s chest when he got out of the cab at Sara Roosevelt Park on the Lower East Side. There were too many people around, day or night, in this part of New York. One of the symptoms he’d struggled with after his kidnapping in Syria was an aversion to crowds. It made no sense, logically; most of his time in captivity had been in solitary, in a tiny cell with a ceiling so low he couldn’t even stand up. But the feeling that his heart was being squeezed in a vise had nothing to do with his PTSD. It was all about the letters.

  Alex Traynor murdered Cori Stanton. He will kill you next.

  He tried to take some shallow breaths while his eyes swam, but it was hard for him to breathe. It’s a panic attack, he told himself. That’s all it is. But knowing that fact and somehow separating himself from the tentacles of fear and dread were different things. It took some time to pull himself together.

  He headed for Stanton Street and followed it east, flinching each time he spotted a street sign. Stanton, like the street downtown, Cori had liked to say. That’s my street. He knew that he was on a bad path, and he still had time to turn away from it. But he couldn’t. He moved forward, mentally steeling himself.

  He wished he could forget these little moments that popped into his head at the worst possible times. He couldn’t think about Cori just then; he’d had ugly confrontations with her father after she’d died, and he knew he would never change that man’s bile and hatred. That was how the drugs used to help him, albeit temporarily; they could lift Alex out of the skin he was trapped in and transport him into a fresh body, one with eyes that hadn’t looked upon so many of the dead. They erased all of the things he didn’t want to remember.