I reached the sixth floor. A sign on the wall indicated even numbers were to the left, so I went that way. The hallway was quiet and well lit, with pale blue walls and a turquoise patterned carpet. Morning newspapers sat in plastic sleeves outside many of the doors. At the end of the hallway, I could see a few items in front of one of the doors. When I got closer, I realized they were flower arrangements.
I reached the door with the flowers, 626. It was Contessa’s apartment, and the flowers had to be for Hart’s death. I knocked. There was no answer. I waited, then knocked again, harder.
“Contessa?” I called out, and in the next moment, I heard a door opening behind me. I turned around to find an older woman in a thick bathrobe standing in the threshold of the apartment across the hall.
“She’s probably not home, don’t you get it?” The woman’s hooded eyes flashed with anger. She had a white towel wrapped around her head. “All morning, everybody’s knocking! They woke me up!”
“I’m sorry—” I started to say, but the woman scowled at the flower arrangements in the hall, throwing up her hands.
“Everybody lets them in! Nobody follows the rules, her most of all! She leaves everything in the hall! Amazon boxes! Her bicycle! Muddy boots! Umbrellas! Recycling, trash! She’s too lazy to take it to the incinerator! I tell her, it’s a fire hazard!”
I didn’t know what to say and wouldn’t have gotten a word in edgewise anyway.
“I’ve had enough! You wait here!”
“What, why?” I asked, but the woman popped back inside her apartment, slamming the door behind her. She came out a minute later, holding up a key. “Pick those flowers up! We’re moving her crap into her apartment.” The woman charged past me, shoved the key in Contessa’s door, and twisted the doorknob. “Put them inside! She’ll see them when she gets home! I’m sick of this!”
I picked up the flower arrangements.
“Contessa, you home?” The woman flung open the door and stalked inside the apartment, with me on her heels. “Listen, you gotta get your—”
The woman gasped in horror.
I almost dropped the flowers.
Contessa was hanging from a ceiling fan in the living room, dead. Her face was a horrid blue color. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, her neck bent at an unnatural angle.
Horrified, I took in the rest of the scene. A wooden chair under the ceiling fan had been knocked over. An open Mac laptop and an empty bottle of wine sat on the coffee table. A wineglass lay on the rug in a circle of red.
The woman screamed. “Help! Help!”
I edged out of the room. I couldn’t be here when the cops came. I left the flower arrangements.
I ran down the hall and into the stairwell. I could hear the woman screaming and the sounds of doors opening, then a commotion. I raced down to the third floor, then the second, then the first.
I stuck on my hat and sunglasses, then left the stairwell. I hurried through the lobby, keeping my head down. I hustled across the street, jumped inside the car, and drove off, taking my first breath.
Chapter Forty-Two
I drove under the concrete pillars of I-95 on Delaware Avenue, the wide boulevard that bordered the gritty underside of Philadelphia. My heart was pounding, my mouth had gone dry blocks ago. I couldn’t get the horrific image of Contessa from my mind.
Clouds blanketed the sky. I passed Fishtown and Port Richmond to my left, and to my right the industrial riverfront was marked by warehouses, loading docks, and stacks of shipping containers. They lined the Delaware River, a murky body of water that curved east and divided Pennsylvania from New Jersey. Petty Island squatted in the middle, a gloomy, gray spit of land, dotted with oil drums.
I raced ahead in grimy truck traffic, sensing I had to get off the street. I passed a few storefront lunch places serving truckers and longshoremen, then the massive truck parking lot at Tioga Marine Terminal. I bypassed chain hotels and finally spotted a run-down two-story motel with a flat roof and water stains marring its concrete fa?ade. An old-school neon sign read the waterbird.
I pulled into its lot and parked next to a row of trucks. I took my cardboard box from the funeral home, left the car, and headed for a glass door labeled office, which was covered with faded credit-card decals. It looked like the kind of place that wouldn’t insist on ID if I paid in cash.
I turned out to be right.
* * *
—
My room was on the second floor, overlooking the parking lot and Delaware Avenue. The noise of the traffic rumbled through its thin walls, and I could hear raucous laughter coming from another room.
I took off my hat and sunglasses and set the box on a double bed with a ratty blue quilted cover. The room was bare except for a night table across from a matching bureau and boxy old TV on a metal cart. I turned it on and headed into the bathroom.
I went to the sink and splashed cold water on my face. What had happened to Contessa had shaken me to the core. Maybe because she was young, maybe because it came so quickly after Hart. And Allison.
I twisted off the faucet, dried with a thin towel, and left the bathroom, sliding out my Tracfone. I had to understand what I had just seen. It made sense that Contessa would be in despair after the murder of her married boyfriend, but my suspicions were on alert. It might have looked as if she died by suicide, but I wondered if it had been staged.
I sank onto the edge of the bed, running over the possibilities. There was no doorman at Contessa’s building. No check-in. Someone could have gotten into the building the way I did, then knocked on her door. She could have opened it, whether she knew him or not—assuming it was a man, which was likely given the strength that staging a suicide would have taken. It could have been two men, even three.
I followed the same analysis as I had with Hart, trying to figure who benefited from her death. I got the same answer: Milo. Milo could have been as worried about Contessa as he was about Hart. It was the same reason I wanted to talk to Contessa. I was assuming she knew Milo was a confidential informant and also where to find the cooperation agreement. So Milo had a motive to kill her, eliminating his last loose end.
I mulled it over. I didn’t know if the killer had been Milo, the BMW driver, someone else, or all of the above. The BMW driver couldn’t have been in two places at once—here and waiting for Hart until the fundraiser was over—but I didn’t know what time Contessa had been killed. If she hadn’t gone to the fundraiser, she could have been killed first, then the killer could have gone after Hart. She would have trusted him enough to let him in, or he could have overpowered her.
I could imagine Contessa’s terror when she realized what was about to happen. I had seen it in Allison’s eyes. The terror of knowing what no one wants to know. I felt a deep stab of grief, and the words came to me as if I were reading my daughter’s mind.
This is how I die.
I couldn’t stop thinking of Allison, then realized I was never not thinking of Allison. Maybe that was the way it was going to be from now on. Maybe that was the way I could keep her with me. Maybe there would come a time when it didn’t make me feel broken, but I doubted it. Allison was younger than Contessa, but they were both too young to be gone.
I flashed on the scene in Contessa’s apartment and the open laptop on the coffee table. I was sure that Lattimore & Finch, if not Hart or Contessa, stored files and documents on the cloud under a passcode. Maybe Milo, or whoever was working for him, had gotten her to delete the file before killing her. The Philly police or the FBI would figure out if it was suicide or murder, but that would come later. Now there was just the loss of a young girl, and that alone was awful.