Urge to Kill

So little used was this corridor that she expected to see no one. Instead she saw two men. One was on the floor, the other bending over him. As Rosa watched, the man who was standing lowered himself on one knee and removed something from one of the pockets of the man on the floor. She was sure it was a gun, and realized the sound that she’d heard had been a shot. The kneeling man placed the fallen man’s gun in his own pocket. Then he straightened up and looked up and down the corridor.

And saw Rosa.

He didn’t hesitate. He strode toward the storage room.

Rosa thought about screaming, but realized no one would hear her. Instead she decided to shut and lock the door.

But of course there was no lock on the inside of the storage room door.

It opened quickly, the knob yanked from her hand so suddenly and violently that it hurt.

He was tall and fierce looking. She saw that his big hands were empty. He’d left the gun he’d taken from the other man in his pocket. He simply stared at her with cold blue eyes.

Then he smiled. He raised his forefinger to his lips in a signal for her to be quiet, and to remain silent about what she’d seen. Then he turned and walked back toward the man on the hall floor.

As she watched, he again bent over the prone man, gripped him beneath each arm, and pulled him backward, toward the door leading outside. He glanced at Rosa and again raised his forefinger to his lips. Then he dragged the other man out through the doorway and into the night.

The door swung shut. She knew that it automatically locked and couldn’t be opened from outside without a key.

She told herself she was safe, but she didn’t feel safe.

Rosa stood trembling, staring at the empty corridor. It had all been like a dream. Had she seen it? Had it actually happened?

She moved backward all the way into the storage room and, without thinking about it, resumed her work. She pushed the empty laundry cart out into the hall, bumping the door open, thinking of her mother and Sara in Mexico, of her forged papers and her job at the Antonian. Rosa was in charge of rooms 570 through 580 on the fifth floor. They were suites, and the tips were more than adequate. They were in dollars that soon became pesos.

She pushed the cart back along the corridor the way she’d come, listening to its squeaking rear wheel, telling herself that what she’d seen hadn’t happened. She couldn’t afford for it to have happened, so it hadn’t.

It hadn’t. She’d seen nothing, and she’d say nothing.

It hadn’t happened.

She silently repeated her daughter’s name to herself to the rhythm of the squeaking wheel, Sara, Sara, Sara…

It hadn’t.

33

Sal Vitali knew this was going to be one of his worst days.

“I wanted to look the place over before my company seriously considered leasing it,” Arnold Penington said. He gulped. “That’s when I found it. Her, I mean.”

It, Vitali thought, as he looked at what was left of the woman. She was hanging upside down from her bound ankles attached by rope to a beam, a long incision made from her pubis to her throat. She was opened up and hollowed out like Hettie Davis, only the long period of time had…Vitali, stared slack-mouthed at the dried, leathery state of her body. He could only think of it as cured meat.

The hardened mass on the concrete floor, beneath and alongside the woman’s upside-down head and gracefully draped arms, was what was left of her internal organs. Her eyes were missing—thanks to the rats that lived in the long-abandoned warehouse—and three of her fingers on the dried hand that lay partly on the concrete floor had been nibbled to bare bone.

Vitali heard the warehouse’s steel overhead door clatter and clank up, then lower. His partner, Harold Mishkin, he of the turbulent stomach, had just entered the warehouse after talking to the uniforms outside who’d secured the scene.

Vitali considered telling Mishkin not to look at the dead woman, then thought better of it. Mishkin took pride in the fact that he could screw his courage tight and look at what homicide detectives too often saw without losing his lunch. Occasionally his stomach had its way.

Arnold Penington had moved well back and stood silently, not looking in the direction of the dangling body. Mishkin continued to advance. He was about twenty feet away, waving at the dirty, narrow windows lining the east wall of the building. “We oughta get more light in here, Sal.”

“Maybe not, Harold,” Vitali said in his gravel-box voice.

Mishkin stopped cold and stared at what was left of the woman dangling upside down from the warehouse beam. His hand floated up to his mustached mouth.

Almost immediately he gained control of himself and pretended he’d raised his hand to stroke his mustache.

He said “Jesus, Sal.”

“Him and his dad,” Vitali, the lapsed Catholic, said. “I don’t see how they could let something like this happen.”

“Just like the other one,” Mishkin said. “Hettie Davis.”