John Manning - The Killing Room

It made sense, then, that Carolyn would leave the Bureau and move to New York. She told colleagues it was time that she opened her own agency, but in truth it was mostly so she could be closer to her mother and sister. Rye was just a short train ride away from Grand Central Station, and Carolyn went home as often as she could, sitting at the side of Mom’s bed, regaling her with stories of strange cases, like the so-called haunted houses and the guy who thought he was a zombie-and maybe was. Finally, after three difficult years, Mom passed away. Carolyn had spent a small fortune taking care of her mother. But she never regretted one penny.

What she did regret was David Cooke. When she’d arrived in New York, she was single and alone. For the last several years she’d been immersed in her work and taking care of her family. She’d never had time for a real boyfriend. Now she found herself alone in the Big City, knowing very few people and susceptible to the charms of a smooth-talking man. That man was David Cooke. For all of Carolyn’s shrewd powers of observation on the job, she failed to see through David’s shiny, happy façade. They’d met when she was hired by the family of nineteen-year-old Lisa Freeman, a student from NYU who had gone missing. David Cooke had dated Lisa briefly, and the girl’s parents thought he knew more than he was saying. But after a half hour of questioning, Carolyn concluded that David had nothing to do with Lisa’s disappearance. He was sweet and harmless. David was able to make her laugh like no man had ever done before, teasing her about her pug nose and freckles. She found herself surprisingly attracted to him. She’d even found the scar on his face strangely erotic. It was a pink, jagged line that extended from his left temple down to his cheek. A boating accident when he was a boy, David explained.

When she got up to leave after the interview, Carolyn was stunned when David asked her to dinner. She hesitated a moment, then accepted. Eating sushi and strolling through Central Park, they had a delightful time, and as he walked her home, he asked if he could see her again. On the second date, Carolyn slept with him; he was her first lover since college. On the third date, David told her that he loved her. Carolyn was over the moon.

After that, their relationship proceeded quickly. David was being evicted from his apartment; he told Carolyn that the owner was selling the place, so she let him move in with her. Along with David came his instruments: he was a musician who played the guitar and the sax and the drums. Many a night Carolyn was unable to sleep because David was out in the kitchen practicing his music. But she’d stumble groggily to work with a grin on her face the next morning, pausing to kiss the forehead of her sleeping lover before she left. David didn’t have a regular job. He’d take the ferry out to Staten Island and play gigs there on the weekend. He never had much money. If only he could finish enough songs to cut his own album, he was certain he could hit it big-and Carolyn was certain, too. She thought she had never heard a more beautiful singer. No one could play the sax like David. But he needed money to buy new mixing equipment, so she put him on her credit cards and authorized him to withdraw money from her account. It only made sense: they were going to get married, after all. This was what committed couples did for each other. This was how they lived.

One night, Carolyn sat transfixed at a music club, her chin in her hands, her eyes trained on the man she loved. David singing for the beer-drinking crowd, pouring his heart into his words. A couple of guys she didn’t know sat down next to her. They watched David as intently as she did. Finally Carolyn heard one of them say, “Such stirring words about love and devotion from a guy who killed his girlfriend.”

She spun on them. “What the hell are you talking about?”

The man beside her crooked a grin at her. “Come on, everyone knows he killed Lisa Freeman.”

“Watch it,” Carolyn snarled, “or we’ll hit you with a defamation suit.”

“Oh,” the other man said, smiling himself now. “I take it you’re the latest squeeze. Well, honey, I’d keep looking over my shoulder if I were you.”

The nightmares began after that. Lisa Freeman would be standing in her closet, staring at Carolyn when she opened the door. Or she’d be drowned in the bathtub. After each horrifying dream, Carolyn would awake with a start-and discover David was awake, looking over at her, his eyes seeming to glow in the dark. “You’ve been talking in your sleep,” he told her one morning. He wouldn’t reveal what she had been saying.

She tried to push the idea out of her head. David couldn’t be a murderer; it was just idle, cruel gossip. But more and more she began to notice a darker side to the man she lived with. He could be so heartfelt and emotional when he sang his songs, but he was easily roused to anger, once upsetting the entire table when a waitress brought him the wrong order. Another time he’d snapped at a cabdriver who’d taken the wrong route, threatening to break the guy’s neck. Carolyn had been horrified, and fearful the cabbie would call the police. That night she couldn’t sleep. She just lay there beside David, listening to him breathe, unsure if he was asleep or awake. The scar on his face was no longer erotic. It now seemed like evidence of some terrible encounter. The last scratch of a dying woman. Carolyn no longer believed his stories of a boating accident.

Then one night David didn’t come home from a gig. Carolyn called his cell phone; it just went to voice mail. She phoned the club where he was supposed to play, and they said he had left hours ago. Checking his closet, Carolyn noticed several shirts and pairs of pants were gone. His drums were still in the apartment, but he had his guitar and his sax with him. Carolyn pulled open the top drawer in his bureau and realized he had taken his passport. She knew then that he wasn’t coming back. She was heartbroken, but after the way she’d been feeling the last few weeks, a part of her was also relieved.

Relief turned to horror the next morning, when she received a notice from her bank that her entire account had been withdrawn and closed out. Her entire savings plus her portfolio of investments. Hundreds of thousands of dollars-gone! Immediately she phoned her credit card companies. Every one of her cards had been maxed out. Her debt nearly equaled the money she had lost. Carolyn stumbled into the bathroom and got sick.

Suddenly she knew without a doubt that David had killed Lisa Freeman. Her suspicions were confirmed when she got a call two weeks later. David’s old landlord, renovating the apartment he’d lived in, made a gruesome discovery. A hole had been cut into one of the walls, then expertly plastered over and repainted, but not before something had been placed inside. The landlord had found an industrial-strength plastic bag in the wall. Unzipping it, he was assaulted by a terrible, toxic odor. He called police, who discovered inside the decomposed body of Lisa Freeman. A warrant for David’s arrest for murder was immediately issued.

Of course, David was long gone. He had disappeared without a trace. Carolyn-who knew how to track people down-had been absolutely stymied. He must have changed his name, probably even left the country. With his passport he’d gone over the border to Canada or Mexico, and who knew where he headed from there? Carolyn told police he might be traveling with a guitar or a saxophone, but he could have stashed them somewhere. Returning to her apartment, Carolyn had all her locks changed and double bolts installed. She cried then for the first time, really let loose with heaving sobs. How had she not seen? How had she fallen for his sweet talk? She was too good, too shrewd for that. But for a year she had slept beside a murderer. Drying her tears, she began the slow process of digging herself out of debt and getting her life back.