Seven Minutes to Noon

rose-colored sunglasses perched atop her black hair.
    “But I have to open the store.”
    Frannie leaned forward on her elbows. “Have your guy out there take you home. He can open the store himself.”
    “Why?” Alice asked.
    But Frannie didn’t answer. The tense set of her expression made it clear there was more, but it would have to wait.

PART THREE

Chapter 23
    KILLER ON LOOSE IN CARROLL GARDENS, by Erin Brinkley.
    Alice’s pulse jumped when she read the headline, the first thing she saw when she pulled the morning paper out of its blue plastic sleeve. It had been such a busy morning, hustling the kids off to school, cooking and getting the stew over to the Shorts’, and she hadn’t had time to look at the paper until now.
    The lead article was not long, but there were associated articles and she wanted to read them all so she wouldn’t miss anything. She sat down at the kitchen table and forced herself to read carefully, not to skip ahead.
A Brooklyn real estate broker who was found Thursday by a neighbor asphyxiated in her car was a victim of foul play. Pam Short had in fact been shot in the neck and left in the car by her attacker, who turned on the engine and abandoned the fifty-year-old woman to die in her private garage. But in the botched murder attempt, the .22 round-nose bullet that had meant to kill Ms. Short bounced off her jawbone instead and lodged in a pocket of fat on the side of her neck.
    Alice read the details in horror, forcing her mind to slow down as she scrambled for new information between the cramped lines of the newsprint, which resonatedwith truths — some unproven, some plainly chilling — from her own small life.
Pam Short appears to have no enemies in the tightly knit community in which she has lived and worked for over twenty years. She has been married to her husband, Ray Short, an antiques dealer, for seventeen years. Nor is there any record of mental illness or suicide attempts in Ms. Short’s history.
    Although the location of the gunshot wound might have indicated self-infliction, attempted suicide has been ruled out by a forensic pathologist. Ms. Short’s hands were free of barium antimony, lead deposits that collect on the fingers and palm of someone who has recently shot a gun. There was also no sign of the blood spatter or tissue particles, known as blockback, that are found on ten percent of suicides.
    In a related development, the New York City Criminalistics Laboratory has determined that the bullet used in the attack on Ms. Short was shot by the same gun used nearly two weeks ago to kill Lauren Barnet, also of Carroll Gardens. Ms. Barnet was nine months pregnant at the time of her murder. Her unborn baby has not been found, and is currently being treated as a missing person by Brooklyn’s Seventy-sixth Precinct.
    The article continued toward the end of the Metro section, and this was where Alice found the related pieces on Christine Craddock and Lauren. The sight of Lauren’s photograph, a straight-on glance at the photographer, had the effect of a final valediction. Over, it said. Gone. Lauren had become a stepping-stone in the path of a madman. Alice couldn’t bring herself to read the article, not yet. She went first to Christine Craddock’s.
    Christine’s story had advanced since new interest had been turned on it by Erin Brinkley. Alice imagined thereporter as young, hungry as they said in the trade, willing to go farther and faster than the police, unencumbered by doubt or due process. Ms. Brinkley had found someone who had spoken with Christine the morning of her disappearance. Alice was sure this was new information; she would have remembered reading it on Christine’s Web site or the older articles. The last person to see Christine was not the man at the local deli, where she had bought a small bottle of water just before she vanished, but Andre Capa, the artist who lived in the round house on the Gowanus Canal.
    Andre Capa — so now he had a name. The artist whose sculptures awed and entertained passersby, spraying them with toxic water. Who sat on the bridge with his easel, from time to time, painting the rough horizon. Andre Capa. The last person to see Lauren alive, eight minutes before her death. And now, the last person to see Christine Craddock.
    Andre Capa had been standing on the Carroll Street Bridge, photographing his latest fountaining sculpture — a twisted-wire angel spewing canal water from her mouth — when he saw a hugely