C. Lawrence: Silent Stalker

As the Seventh Avenue line rattled uptown, Lee thought about the phone conversation of the night before. He had not told Chloe that Laura was missing, but that she was dead. Of course he didn’t know that for certain, but he had long believed it. His training and experience told him the chances of her being alive were remote, but it was more than that. Hope was too alluring and easily dashed-he couldn’t afford that particular emotion. It was easier to expect the worst. Hope involved wanting, which meant opening up to the possibility of more pain.

Rehearsal was already in progress when he arrived, so he slid into a seat at the back of the auditorium. They were running the scene with Antipholus of Syracuse and his twin brother’s wife, portrayed by Sara Wittier. She was actually quite good, not playing it for laughs, taking her character’s dilemma seriously. Antipholus was played by Keith Wilson, the leaner of the two dark-haired twins, and they made a good-looking couple onstage. Lee noticed that Keith wore a long navy blue cloak-part of his costume, perhaps? He remembered the blue fiber found on Caroline’s body and made a mental note to tell Butts.

Davillia watched from her director’s chair, sipping from a metal thermos and picking at a bran muffin. She stopped the actors from time to time, suggesting stage movement or alternate line readings. She was surprisingly sensitive and thoughtful, given her larger-than-life persona. They were in the middle of a scene in which Sara’s character, Adriana, confronts Antipholus of Syracuse, who she thinks is her husband. He is actually her husband’s twin brother, and of course has never seen her before. Also onstage was Ryan Atkins, playing Antipholus’s servant, Dromio of Syracuse.

Davillia put down her thermos and approached the stage, her bracelets jingling. She wore an emerald-green kimono with a long string of multicolored beads. Lee imagined her bedroom closet full of dozens of various colored kimonos.

“Sara, darling, start that speech again, will you?” she cooed in her affected accent. “But this time really let your emotional reaction to his strange behavior fuel your entrance more-all right, lovey?”

Sara nodded and they went back to the beginning of the scene. Davillia returned to her chair and her coffee, delicately plucking off pieces of muffin, using her fingers with their long, brightly painted nails. Sara entered from the wings and stopped abruptly when she saw Antipholus and his servant. Glaring at them, she flung her arms out angrily. Her face reddened as she sputtered her lines furiously.

Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown: Some other mistress hath thy sweet aspects; I am not Adriana nor thy wife.

When Sara had finished the entire speech, Davillia leapt to her feet, clapping her hands like a child.

“Yes, yes-that’s it! Brava-see what I mean?”

“Yes,” Sara said, blushing and looking pleased with herself.

Lee studied the other actors onstage. Mindy’s understudy, the young woman playing Luciana, looked on with shy appreciation, and Keith Wilson was smiling broadly. Ryan Atkins stared at Sara with an expression of entranced adoration on his freckled face. His pale blue eyes brimmed with emotion.

Lee spotted Ryan’s brother, Danny, watching from the wings. The look on his face was very different-his features were frozen in a mask of intense disapproval. Without changing his expression, he wheeled about and disappeared backstage.

Caroline Porchowsky stepped into the hallway from the overheated apartment and locked the door behind her. She slipped on the lime-colored wool coat and wrapped her scarf around her neck. It was one of those bone-chilling February days, the kind that eats right through to your core, though the apartment was so hot she had carried the coat into the hall before putting it on. She felt a little guilty for taking her roommate’s coat without asking, but it was such a lovely color, and Sara wouldn’t be home for some time. Caroline was only going to slip across the street to the bodega and pick up a few things, and she would be back before her roommate returned from her restaurant job.

Normally Sara didn’t work on Tuesdays, but she had been called to fill in for another waitress who had taken ill. Sara had worn her other winter coat, the gray down jacket with the red lining, so Caroline decided it wouldn’t do any harm to use the green coat. Besides, it was a rare opportunity-Sara rarely wore anything else this time of year, and could usually be seen a block away in her bright green coat. So Caroline snatched the chance to wear the coveted garment, just this once.

She often wore her roommate’s clothes without asking. There was something delightfully wicked about getting away with it. Lately Sara had been asking questions that made Caroline think she had begun to suspect, but Caroline always denied her accusations. The clandestine nature of it was half the fun-if she asked permission, the whole thing would lose its appeal. She was very good at acting innocent-or thought she was-though she worried that Sara, being an actress, could see through her wide-eyed protestations.

Still, she enjoyed the game, and as she pulled the collar tightly around her thin neck, she sighed with pleasure. This particular shade of green went so well with her eyes, she thought-the coat really looked better on her than on Sara. She was pulling on her leather gloves when she thought she heard the soft click of the front door latch. She peered down the narrow flight of stairs but didn’t see anyone in the tiny foyer of the tenement building.

Caroline piled her hair up inside a gray wool beret, slid on a pair of sunglasses, and proceeded down the steep staircase, clutching the banister as she went. There was a loose step right before the landing, and she looked down to make sure of her footfall.

She never saw the attack coming. Her first awareness of it was the sensation of the cold metal as it slid into her gut, perforating her small intestine. She made no sound except for a single guttural grunt as she sank to her knees. She stared down in disbelief and astonishment as thick dark blood pulsed from her body. Only then did she look up into the face of her attacker. Curiously, her face held an expression of wonderment rather than fear, as though she was bewildered that anyone could want to do such a thing to her. By then it was too late-life was draining from her body with every beat of her heart.

She was still alive when her attacker fled the building, walking quickly in the direction of the subway. But by the time he reached the platform, she was dead.

“No mask this time,” Elena Krieger said. “But otherwise the same MO?”

“Yep,” said Butts. “She was ambushed in the foyer of her building, run through with a single stab wound, and left to die.”

“It wouldn’t have taken her long to bleed out from a wound like that,” said Lee.

They were staring at crime scene photos taped to the bulletin board in Butts’s cramped office. The call had come in about Caroline’s death a little after noon, and now it was nearly four. Her body was already at the ME’s office, and the three of them were back at the precinct awaiting the autopsy results. Not that they expected to learn much from it, though there was still a thin hope of some trace evidence turning up on the body.

“Why no mask this time?” asked Krieger, studying the photos. Poor Caroline lay on her back, her unseeing eyes staring at the ceiling of the drafty lobby where she had taken her last breaths. Her bright green coat was stained with crimson blotches of dried blood. A pair of sunglasses lay to one side of the body.

“Could have been he was in a hurry because he was about to be discovered,” Butts replied. “Or-”