Strangled - Brian McGrory [61]
As I said this, the camera proceeded from the living room to the small kitchen, the angle drifting over the appliances to a stainless-steel kitchen door that had a photograph of a tanned thirtysomething man in a blue blazer and open collared white shirt with his arm around a smiling woman in a yellow sundress.
Mongillo said, “Your wish is my command. Can you invite a murderer to lunch, or is that unseemly?”
Whoever was carrying the camera was now walking it down a narrow hallway that seemed to connect the front of the apartment to the back, the picture growing darker without any ambient light. I could make out a collection of old maps on the hallway walls, and at the end of the hall was a giant vintage poster, an advertisement for a trans-Atlantic voyage on board the Queen Elizabeth II. Very stylish. Maybe I’d buy the place. I wonder if I could get it furnished.
I said to Martin, “Why don’t you just find out where he is, for starters. We’ll figure out tomorrow’s lunch plan later.”
He hung up. The camera took a left into a rear bedroom of what Realtors call a floor-thru apartment. For whatever reason, I became instantly drawn in by the image, my spine feeling a slight chill. I wasn’t entirely sure why until I took a harder, more focused look. Unlike the front room and kitchen, the bedroom was in a state of disarray, as if it had been ransacked. Items had been knocked off a bureau and could be seen scattered on the carpeted floor — loose change, a makeup kit, a jewelry chest. A closet door was ajar. Clothes were flung here and there. A desk chair had been flipped on its side. If this was a real estate promotion, I’d want a new Realtor.
That’s when the camera casually but abruptly focused on the rumpled bed, and clear as day, which is when this shot was taken, I could see the woman who had been shown in the photograph on the refrigerator door.
She was sprawled on top of a white comforter, dead, her eyes wide open, her tight purple tank top lifted above her bare breasts. She was completely disrobed from the waist down. She had her head propped up on a pair of pillows. Her bare legs were parted wide, one of them bent awkwardly under her at the knee. She had what looked to be a pair of nylons wrapped around her neck in a ligature, tightened into a knot, and then tied into a looping bow just beneath her chin. I could see blood in her right ear, and drops and smears of blood on the sheets. Her face looked unsettlingly serene, as if death came as a relief from what she had gone through in the moments before it.
The camera casually lingered on her body the same way it did on the coffee table and the refrigerator door, as if this body was nothing more than another inanimate object in what was now a completely lifeless apartment. And then the image simply went blank, a circle appearing in the screen where the video had just played. My eyes remained frozen on it, as if at any moment anything else could appear. After a few long seconds, I clicked the video player off, placed the laptop on the passenger seat beside me, and took a couple of long, deep breaths. When I shut my eyes, I could see the woman’s face, her brown hair matted against her right temple, her sharp blue eyes, her slightly chubby cheeks. Someone’s girlfriend, someone’s daughter, someone’s friend, maybe someone’s aunt. And my bet is, I was the only living person besides her killer who knew she was dead.
I pounded out Martin’s number. He, in turn, put Edgar on another conference line, as well as Vinny Mongillo and Monica Gonsalves. She e-mailed the three of them the link, and all three watched it in silence as we stayed on the line. Well, almost silence. At the key moment, I heard Martin mutter, “What the frick.” Mongillo gasped. Poor Edgar simply said, “Dear Jesus.”
Martin cleared his throat and asked, “Okay, now what?”
I replied, “The Phantom has struck again. Problem is, we don’t know