Clayton Guthrie is a private fixer for the aristocracy of New York City. His latest job is to protect a Manhattan heiress from a dangerous stalker. He hires retired bodyguard Abraham Swabe to protect her while he runs a trap operation assisted by his young operative, Rachel Vasquez, who juggles her new responsibilities while suffering from the shaky aftereffects of a shootout.
Guthrie and Vasquez pursue the stalker across the city, from watching a quiet townhouse on the Upper East Side, to staking out New York University around Tompkins Square, and even crawling through the grimy industrial guts of Brooklyn. Searching for the stalker's hideout, they learn the identity of one of his previous victims. She was murdered, but the killer is still at large.
Dark, riveting and hardboiled, Hunt's sequel to Cuts Through Bone is a thrilling mystery, sure to cement his reputation as one of crime fiction's most promising new authors.
Release date:
August 25, 2015
Publisher:
St. Martin's Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
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If anyone had asked, Rachel Vasquez would have been forced to admit the stupidity of getting drunk and picking up college boys; good Puerto Rican girls in the city didn't cruise. So she dodged the question before it was asked.
Since she worked for a private detective in midtown Manhattan, traffic, long drives, and stakeouts cluttered her days and nights. Encouraged by some mumbled excuses, her parents chalked overnight absences from their Lower East Side tenement apartment to her busy schedule. Her loco overprotective brothers Miguel and Indio had already stolen all her school years of adolescent exploration, but her job placed her suddenly outside their grasp. They would never catch her at Skinny's, the white dive she prowled on the edge of the Lower East Side.
After September had become October, and then a wild Halloween screamed past, Vasquez realized she cruised out of defiance. Each day, she made the motions of living, but at night her fists clenched and she wanted payback.
So sometimes after work she slid into soft, faded blue jeans, a too tight T-shirt, and running boots from the bundle she kept at the office. In the bathroom before she left, she checked the beads threaded onto the damaged lock of her long black hair, cut short by a knife-slash the previous August; the dark wooden beads melded the loose lock, tucking it above her ear. She always added a small feather to the beads before she went drinking. She crowned herself with a Yankees cap tilted with an East Side twist, then prowled.
The bouncers at Skinny's always passed her with a shrug after eyeing her fake ID, and the dark interior was perfect for her. The speakers blared Pantera instead of Pitbull; dancers swayed and ground. The white boys liked skinny girls-easy for her, a young woman with no curves, to catch eyes. In the drunken darkness, Vasquez took the chances she had left. She always found someone willing to take her home, no matter what her face looked like. All too often the boy she chose clung to her like a prize, bruising her mouth with eager kisses; faint marks from possessive hands lingered afterward like fingerprints on her shoulders and calves. Alongside a few stiff drinks, boys were enough to lift her outside the box of herself. The fierce sex scalded away her memory. While she could taste their sweat on her lips, Vasquez was happy. Late at night she knew the truth: Any hope of more had ended when her face was destroyed.
That Thursday night started like any other. A teeming mass of young people filled the narrow space edged by the wooden bar at Skinny's. Slashing guitar riffs alternated with shouted vocals. Rows of bottles glowed behind the bartender. Vasquez killed a rum and Coke while she threaded the crowd. She brushed away unwanted hands, then paused at the far end of the bar to wave her empty glass at the bartender. While she waited, she began to vibrate with the music, swimming on the dark undercurrent of the rum.
Vasquez found a boy named Steve Hartford, with broad shoulders and a mop of curls that looked in the darkness like honey swirled in chocolate. She caught her second rum and Coke without taking her eyes off him. She paused along the way for sips of her drink and angled glances, then slid as close as his shadow. His hair was as soft as fur and clung to her fingers like rings.
At Skinny's a smile substituted for hello when the music blared. Hartford had bright eyes and a startled grin with a few slanted teeth. He was unclaimed. He rested his hands on her shoulders while they danced, and traced the lines on her palm with a fingertip as they shouted in breaks between songs. Steve was young, cute, and earnestly drunk-exactly how Vasquez liked her boys. She tugged him through the crowd. By the time he entered the pool of light around the door, he realized she wanted to leave.
They stopped at Hy Ly's on Pearl for dim sum and jokes. The night was cold and clear. A student at Fordham, Steve had a tiny fifth-floor walkup in the Heights. After the cab rides and the rushing cold air on the sidewalks, the apartment seemed warm and cozy. He played jazz on his radio, they had a nightcap, and then they explored his bed. Afterward, Vasquez settled into a blissful, rum-soaked sleep.
In the small hours Vasquez wanted slow, sleepy kisses, followed by a face-to-face wound in sheets. Steve Hartford had other ideas; his golden curls were the angelic disguise of a demon. He tried to turn their drunken hookup into a kinky interlude. Vasquez snapped wide awake when she heard the rattle of handcuffs. The sound opened a wormhole to the fight in August that had almost left her dead; she threw a punch without asking questions. A few more punches and a bite broke up the date.
Vasquez wasn't an innocent to bad endings for overnight adventures. On previous occasions, she called a girlfriend to bail her from messes. Isadora's anxious looks reminded her that her friend knew her brothers, a loco mess she should tiptoe to avoid, and held a mixture of guilt; Isadora invited her out onto the limb of cruising. Downstairs in the cold vestibule of the Washington Heights walkup, Vasquez sobered enough to realize she didn't want to be second-guessed.
A fistfight with a hookup was a bigger mess than usual, carrying a couple of complications. Vasquez hadn't brought a jacket. With drunken hindsight, she realized a mid-November night needed a jacket, even though baggage made catching a boy harder. On top of that, she was broke, after splurging her pocket money on a two cab fares, Chinese food, and a bottle of Bacardi Golden Reserve for the nightcap. She needed a ride. The subway stopped well short of her parents' Henry Street tenement, not to mention the dashes for midtown transfers.
Reluctantly, Vasquez called Tommy Johnson, a boy who worked for NYPD Investigative Services. He was a small-town kid from Ohio, transplanted to the city with some guidance from her boss, Clayton Guthrie. The boy was oafishly cute, with a lingering case of small-town helpfulness that brought him to the hospital repeatedly to see her while she recovered, in August, from having her face rearranged with the butt of an empty pistol, a condition never completely corrected despite surgery. Working for Clayton Guthrie included moments of insanity mixed into the pedestrian yawns. The killer was insane; Tommy Johnson was a yawn.
"I'm cold," Vasquez suggested on the phone, once Johnson seemed awake enough to understand. She repeated the address, and then while she waited she took off her running boots for long enough to put on her socks. She considered marching back up the stairs to demand her underwear, but decided Steve Hartford deserved a trophy to go with the punches. She did have the bottle of Bacardi. She settled on the bottom step, hugging her knees for warmth, and drifted on the downward slope of the rum.
Johnson materialized at the door, peering through the glass. He rattled the knob. Vasquez rose unsteadily to let him inside; her legs cried asleep with an insistent prickling. He wore a dark, heavy peacoat, and held a lighter jacket by its collar.
Johnson brushed by Vasquez. Worry lines on his face morphed into an angry scowl as he studied her. He caught her arm and shook her.
"What're you doing, Rachel?" he demanded.
"What?" she asked, tugging to free her arm. He didn't let go. His grip was as sure as a slugger's grasp on a baseball bat. Sitting at her bedside in the hospital, he'd never seemed large. In the small vestibule he was huge. Vasquez barely came up to his shoulder; he was even bigger than Indio, her middle brother. His anger startled her.
"Look at you!" Johnson whispered fiercely. He dropped the jacket, and plucked at the tag jutting from the neck of her T-shirt. In a hurry, she had pulled it on inside-out and backward.
Vasquez shrugged. "So?" She tugged to free her arm again. Even drunk, she wasn't going to blurt out the apology bouncing between her ears, not for Tommy Johnson. "Let me go."
"That's it?" he demanded. "The time I spent worrying about you, trying not to rush you when you were hurt-holding your hand when you wanted someone to talk-" He shook her, like jabs of punctuation forceful enough to rattle her teeth. "You needed me to get you drunk? I can't drink!"
"Let go!" Vasquez fired a sloppy jab, but Johnson pushed her to arm's length and she couldn't reach him. She aimed a kick, but he hoisted her into the air with an effortless jerk. Her foot grazed him harmlessly. The big man was pissed, and she was helpless.
"Tommy!" she yelped.
He lowered her to her feet, and his scowl softened into sadness. "I'm sorry," he said. "Really, I'm sorry." He shrugged his peacoat from his shoulders and wrapped it quickly around her. The warm coat swallowed her almost to her ankles. He slipped into the jacket he had dropped.
Johnson had a recently acquired rust-eaten classic Challenger and some unfulfilled plans for restoration. Some of the original red paint was visible. The old car's throaty engine provided the only conversation during the drive downtown, then rattled like firecrackers when Johnson peeled out after dropping her off on Henry Street.
Vasquez kept his peacoat without a twinge of guilt. In her closet, she had a growing collection of clothes adopted from her boys-jackets, ties, and oversized shirts. She never gave them a second thought. She stripped to sleep, then dragged Johnson's peacoat to her bed. It was as wide as a blanket, and it smelled like pernil y pastele,exactly what Mamì cooked on holidays. Vasquez smiled as she drifted to sleep beneath it.
* * *
Since then, the Thursday night misadventure demanded Vasquez's attention at offhand moments, another item on a list of things that she thought about when she should be doing something else. That wasn't what she wanted. She liked her job as a private detective, at least when she was holding her paycheck or firing her pistols at the range. Her thoughts wandered when they wanted, then returned unexpectedly to leave her holding the bag.
On Monday morning, her boss received a phone call from George Livingston asking him to protect a woman from a stalker. The detectives drove down to Ruger's, a Twenty-fifth Street art gallery, for an interview, but Vasquez couldn't focus. She could see that Stephanie Morgan was scared; the heiress's fear interrupted the symphony of aesthetic in the art gallery like a repetitive discord of screaming. Vasquez drifted, sparing puzzled glances for the bright paintings surrounding them. A clerestory topped the gallery's soaring quadrangle of light cream walls, and a handful of freestanding dividers broke the space into bays and a court. A few silent customers paid the mismatched detectives the sort of inattention due ballboys at the U.S. Open.
"I really do hate bothering anyone with this," Stephanie Morgan said in a hushed voice. She darted glances at the customers, and sighed unhappily when she noticed a clerk watching them with a pinched face of disdain. "I expect I'm probably making too much of nothing."
"Stephanie, a stalker is a serious matter." Morgan's husband, Peter Ludlow, briefly wrapped her slender shoulders with a protective arm. She answered him with an anxious smile.
Clayton Guthrie nodded in agreement. "That sort of thing can build up from a slow beginning," the little detective said, shaping the brim of his brown fedora with his hands as he spoke.
The customers in the gallery carried their coats and wraps over their arms, revealing patterned dresses and sharp-edged Italian suits-except for one hipster in a Nehru jacket pointedly examining a framed street scene assembled from bold colors like a pane of stained glass. By stepping away from the detectives, the Morgans could've blended with the sparse crowd. Ludlow, a tall lean man with a too-even tan, wore a navy suit and a crisp red tie. He gestured with the practiced care of a courtroom lawyer. Stephanie Morgan's creamy skin and honey-blond hair glowed against an umber silk sheath dress. A gold link belt tightened the dark silk around her slender waist.
The detectives looked like AA members searching for a meeting at the wrong address. Guthrie's rumpled navy suit needed some dry-cleaning and replacement buttons, and maybe a dye job to match colors with his sun-bleached brown fedora. The little old man's grizzled fade had more shine than his shoes. Despite that, the clerk's disdain was squarely aimed at Rachel Vasquez; a trail of scuffs led across the shiny white tile floor, directly from the entrance toward her dusty jungle boots, like fingers of accusation. The young Puerto Rican detective wore a yellow windbreaker, a tilted Yankees cap, paint-stained blue jeans, and an angry scowl that didn't disguise sharp-featured good looks.
"George Livingston mentioned that a guy was following you," Guthrie said, "but he didn't spend time on details. What I need is for you to explain what's happening. Start at the beginning, and I'll put it together from that."
The heiress sighed. "I'm sorry. I suppose this might take some time, but I can't leave right now. I need to meet some of these people."
The little detective glanced around the gallery. "Someone's coming?"
"I'm afraid so. Several, in fact. We're having an opening for Werner's new paintings, but I suppose that's less important at the moment."
"Tell him about the festival, Stephanie," Ludlow said.
She nodded unhappily. "That's where this started. I thought I'd only had a New York moment." She sighed, and crossed her arms with a shiver. "I follow the trends in art. Being current, is, well, current. I've been told that I shouldn't apologize for packaging charity with art. I'm an artist-not a talent, I'm too representational..."
Ludlow took her hand for a brief squeeze, and smiled gently.
"I'm sorry," Morgan repeated. "I really do know I'm babbling. I must be reminding myself why it's so necessary that I do what I do."
Guthrie nodded. Vasquez watched him wait through the moments of silence, reminded of something the little detective told her before. "Sometimes you gotta let them talk. If you ask questions, a witness works on answering. If they're talking, maybe they say something you didn't know to ask about." She watched Ludlow attend carefully to his wife's mood, and flashed alongside it an image of the casual insult of indifference from a boy at Skinny's, too far drunk to care.
"A great deal of the DUMBO festival features sculpture," Morgan said, and smiled. "Some buyers prefer a good price by the pound. My primary interest is painting, but when so many serious artists open their studios, I can't be finicky. I visit, listen, take notes ...
"The new park is changing the feel of the festival, I think. More of the traffic is ordinary. I mean, they don't come specifically for the festival. They happen to be caught in the whirlpool, and maybe decide to take a look out of curiosity. A few years ago, I never saw anyone at DUMBO who wasn't connected with art: artists or dealers, critics, buyers, suppliers, advertisers, scholars and students. Now, the festival has a holiday feel." Morgan blushed. "This year I had a few glasses of wine while I visited. There are vendors right on the street, if you can imagine.
"At the beginning of October I visited Prudel's studio. He's sculpting lions in marble, and he has some young men there with him making wrought-iron vines and foliage. The old man is full of ideas. He's very rude to these young men, but it's funny. Afterward, I sat outside for a while. The morning wasn't chilly. I scanned my notes, looked out across the river, and thought about lions. All completely ordinary."
She paused, uncrossing her arms to reach up with one hand as if to check her upswept golden hair, then stopped. "I had my hair down, in a loose tail." She shuddered. "That's how he caught my attention. He ran his fingers through my hair. For a moment, I thought Peter was surprising me.
"He seemed startled when I turned and saw him," she said. "I don't know ... maybe he thought no one could see him, a sort of invisible crazy man. I ran away. I was definitely more startled than he was. I ran away, and he stayed. From that morning, I mostly remember that he seemed ugly and large, massively oversized like a statue. I kept my notebook, because I was holding it in my hand, but I left everything else. I ran all the way down to the park, then spent a few minutes recovering my courage, and I realized I couldn't even call the police. My phone was in my bag. I walked back carefully, looking for him, and outside Prudel's studio it was as if nothing had happened."
Morgan shrugged. "My bag was gone. As the day went on, I convinced myself that that was all that had happened. I'd had a New York moment: an encounter with a strange person.
"Several days passed before I saw him again," she continued, frowning anxiously. "Outside City Hall, the restaurant in TriBeCa. That was only a moment, and he disappeared before I could point him out to Peter. Seeing him from across the street, I realized how large he truly was. Even stooped over he seemed as large as two or three ordinary men."
Guthrie grunted. The little detective eyed Peter Ludlow, an ordinary man larger than both detectives. Vasquez and Guthrie each stood five and half feet, and weighed less than a hundred and fifty pounds. Stephanie Morgan shook her head.
"No, much larger-twice Peter's size." She sighed. "He wasn't outside after we ate, but for a few days after that, I saw him irregularly, always employing a vanishing act before I could show him to anyone."
"Then I did see him," Ludlow said.
"Peter finally saw him across from our town house. He noticed immediately that the man was carrying a camera. I must've always been so frightened that I couldn't notice."
"That did give you an idea, though," her husband offered.
"I carried the camera on my phone ready in my hand until I caught him," she said. She pulled her phone from her clutch, and browsed the archive for a photo. Her face twisted with distaste and fear, studying the photo for a moment before she handed it to the detectives.
The stalker looked startled, caught with his own unaimed camera in his hand. His broad, pasty face was striped with dark slashes from bushy eyebrows above dark, hollow eyes and an overgrown mustache above brown teeth; a misshapen lump bulged from one side of his towering forehead. A brickred muffler collared his thick throat. He wore a black greatcoat and heavy boots. Half-hidden by his body, a blue United States mailbox on a pedestal didn't reach his waist.
Guthrie let out a hiss of surprise, and Vasquez said, "That's walking around in the city?"
Stephanie Morgan nodded unhappily. "I took the picture before he began leaving the roses in my Saab. I keep the car in a garage. Somehow he found the car. He unlocks it, leaves a yellow rose on the driver's seat, and relocks it."
"He's done that four times," Ludlow interjected.
"You showed the picture to the police?" Guthrie asked.
"I did. I can't prove he left the roses. They said that might be trespass, but he isn't communicating with me. He can't be charged with stalking unless he does something overt."
"After the felony, they mean," Ludlow said. "They're worthless."
"Peter, please don't be angry-" She stopped when her husband deflated with an angry sigh. "When I went to the police station, I discovered that the man really hasn't committed a provable crime. They were very nice about being unable to help me ... Then, as I was leaving, a detective spoke with me. Mr. Walls recommended that a private investigator might be able to gather evidence that could prove stalking."
"That was the precinct on East Fifty-first?"
Morgan nodded.
"The One-Seven. Walls is an old guy that never took the exam for sergeant. I'm afraid he's right. Stalking is a crime, but it ain't something the police can solve. It's a crime for a prosecutor to use after something else happens."
"I said that from the beginning," Ludlow said. "Stephanie, I can call someone to warn him away-"
"Peter, you mustn't." Morgan's glance was sharper than her tone.
The tall man deflated again, but quickly smiled at Guthrie. "Perhaps that's something Mr. Guthrie would be prepared to do," he said.
Guthrie studied Ludlow, noting his unscarred face and manicured hands, then shrugged. "This world ain't as simple as it used to be, Mr. Ludlow. Having a look at that man's picture don't convince me he's dull. I won't be warning him. I'm gonna trap him like a rat. You ought not to do anything yourself you wouldn't want to see on YouTube, right?"
Stephanie Morgan sighed. "Thank you, Mr. Guthrie," she said. "I see that we've been sent to a capable man."
The little detective nodded. "George Livingston said to take care of you," he said. The Whitneys and Morgans shared social and business connections that disappeared into the past of the city. H. P. Whitridge was the family fixer for the Whitneys; he paid Guthrie a hefty retainer and kept his pocket full of expense money. Livingston was his hatchetman.
"I'm gonna start this by putting a man in your pocket around the clock. That rat won't get near enough to touch you again. I'll look around to see what else I can do. I'll need a copy of that picture, and some addresses, door keys, that sort of thing. Are you gonna be here for a while?"
"Werner's opening won't end until four o'clock," she said.
"I'll have a man here before then," Guthrie said. He stepped away, and took a picture of Stephanie Morgan with his phone. "He'll recognize you."
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