The October List

had sent them to find was only four or so blocks away. They plunged into Times Square, a disorienting world of brilliant lights, massive high-def monitors, overlapping tracks of pulsing music, hawkers, street musicians, impatient traffic, mad bicyclists, tourists, tourists, tourists … The crowds were denser now, more boisterous, anticipating plays and concerts and meals and movies.
    In ten minutes they’d come to the intersection that Joseph had described. She said, ‘There! That’s the Dumpster.’ And started forward.
    ‘Wait,’ Daniel said.
    ‘No,’ she said firmly.
    He tried to stop her. But she pulled away and dropped to her knees, looking behind the battered, dark green disposal unit.
    Gabriela fished out the CVS pharmacy bag and looked inside. She choked. ‘It’s Sarah’s sweatshirt!’ The pink garment was wadded up tightly. She started to lift it out and froze. ‘Blood, Daniel!’ The streaks, largely dried to brown, were obvious. There was something primitive about them, like paint on the face of ancient warriors.
    Gabriela gingerly lifted out the shirt, which was tied with a gingham hair ribbon. As she did, the garment unfurled and something fell from the inner folds to the grim floor of the alley. The colors were the pink of flesh and red of blood, and the shape was that of a small finger.
    Daniel got to her just before her head hit the cobblestones.

CHAPTER
17
     

5:30 p.m., Saturday
25 minutes earlier
     

 

 
     
    The only good is what furthers his interest …
    Joseph Astor recited this to himself as he carried his shopping bag toward a warehouse on the far west side of Manhattan, in the Forties. Traffic on the streets was noisy; on the Hudson River, silent.
    His large form blustered over the sidewalk, and people glanced at his bulk and his dead eyes and his curly blond hair and they got out of his way. Joseph paid them no mind, after noting that none of them was a cop or other threat.
    An impressive view of the Intrepid aircraft carrier before him, Joseph turned down a side street and approached the one-story warehouse. He undid the heavy Master padlock and muscled the door open, stepped in and slammed it shut. He flicked on the lights. The warehouse was mostly empty, though there were two vans parked inside, one completely useless, and sagging boxes stacked in one corner, molding into an unpleasant mass on the floor. The place was little used and typical of a thousand such buildings, two thousand, three, throughout the New York area. Small, solid structures, always in need of paint and fumigation, either windowless or with glass panes so grimy they were virtually blacked out. Most of these buildings were legitimate. But some were used by men, mostly men, who needed safe houses for certain activities – away from the public, away from the police. Long-term leases, paid in advance. Utilities paid by fake companies.
    Tonight would be the last time he’d use this warehouse; he’d abandon it forever and move to the other one, similar, in SoHo, for the rest of the job, which he might have called the Gabriela Job or the Prescott Job but instead had – with some perverse humor – taken to calling Sarah’s Sleep-Away.
    He took his jacket off but left on the beige cloth gloves – always the gloves. He strode to the corner of the place, a workbench. In the center of it was the windbreaker he’d showed Gabriela earlier in the day, along with a pink sweatshirt, on which Sarah was stitched across the chest. To the right were a dozen old tools and from the pile he found a large pair of clippers, like the sort used for cutting branches or flower stems. The edge was rusty, but sharp enough.
    The only good …
    From the shopping bag he extracted the fiberglass hand of a clothing store mannequin. He’d stolen the plastic appendage from an open loading dock behind a showroom in the Fashion District earlier that afternoon, after he’d been tailing Reardon and Gabriela near the building with the Prescott Investments sign on the front.
    Gripping the clippers firmly, he cut into the dummy’s little finger at the second knuckle. This he rested in the middle of the sweatshirt and lifted out the last item in the bag, a beef tenderloin, sealed in thick cellophane. He used the clippers to snip a hole in the end of the bag and let the blood dribble onto the plastic digit and the sweatshirt. There was more liquid than expected; the result was suitably gory.
    Excellent.
    He bundled the shirt up with