The Caller. Alex Barclay
fighting for his every breath, putting all his strength into that, then he’s slammed in the face with the hammer. He’s focused on that agonizing pain, then back to fighting for breath, then pain again, everything mounting right ’til the end. Then a gunshot wound. And that’s it. He’s gone.’
‘These wackos always got their own screwed-up reasons,’ said Danny. ‘Some of it is looking familiar to me, I gotta say. You remember William Aneto?’
Joe shook his head.
‘Oh yeah. You weren’t here. It was me and Martinez. This gay guy on the Upper West Side. It just … there’s something about it rings a bell.’
‘If we’re done here …’ said Hyland. He pointed to Joe’s notebook. ‘I’m sure you got it all there.’
‘Yeah, until I get back and I find one word I can’t make out and nothing else makes sense without it.’
‘Well, if you need anything else, call me.’
Joe nodded. ‘Thanks.’
‘Good luck,’ said Hyland. ‘You know, I wish when I dissected a brain I could find a little reel, like a victim’s-eye movie, so we could just sit back and watch a replay of what happened. It’d be foolproof in court for you guys, wouldn’t it? Slam dunk. Wouldn’t that be great? Or if I could find, like, a mental black box that would log the minute-to-minute psychological impact of what the victim’s been through. Although I’d say with this guy, it was all so horrific, a circuit somewhere would have blown.’
Anna Lucchesi lay on the sofa in her pyjamas with a light fleece blanket over her. She was watching the fourth episode in a row of Grand Designs. A couple had renovated a country estate somewhere in England and she was now watching the car wreck that was their 80s taste in interiors. When she first started watching the show in Ireland, it was from a different vantage point in a house that fit. She was a rising star at Vogue Living and had overseen the renovation of a lighthouse and the keeper’s home beside it outside a small village in Waterford. She was doing the job she loved in a beautiful location with her husband and son cheering her on. Watching Grand Designs now, she felt like a disconnected outsider, sitting in a grim two-storey brick frame house in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn – not Brooklyn Heights, not Williamsburg, not even DUMBO. It was older, it felt safe, the neighbors were nice, but it held no spark for Anna.
She stared towards the window, missing the sea view and waves that could get so loud, you had to close the window to hear people talk. The house had been peaceful and comfortable, with simple furniture and neutral tones. Then everything it represented was gone, shattered by Duke Rawlins. He wanted to destroy Joe. But he had underestimated his resilience. And when Anna thought of it now, she didn’t admire Joe for it, she resented him. Joe killed Donald Riggs and she paid the price. He was uninjured, back on the job. She was in her pyjamas in the afternoon.
For two months after Ireland, she stayed with her parents in Paris. Joe and Shaun came for the first three weeks, but the tiny house started to close in on them. She felt like Joe was trying to rush her recovery and make things go back to a kind of normal she knew they never would. She eventually persuaded him to take Shaun back to New York.
When she followed them over, she spent time adjusting to the new house in the new area she had been too depressed to take an interest in choosing. She would wake in the morning, wondering why she was there, but never able to figure out where she would really like to be. But she knew she wanted to avoid the outside world. And that meant embracing the four walls.
Her boss, Chloe da Silva, had allowed her to work from home, but had made it clear that it was only a temporary arrangement – Anna was too good an interior designer to lose on the big jobs. That was fine at the start, but as the months went by, Anna felt a rising insecurity that any day she would be fired and the only thing keeping her sane would be taken away. She liked styling shoots from home, choosing products from catalogs or jpegs or from the packages that were sent nearly every day to the house. It was unorthodox, but it worked. She hoped.
She dragged herself up off the sofa and was about to go into her makeshift office when the phone rang. She heard the harsh clatter of being punched off speaker phone in Chloe’s office.
‘It’s me again.’
Anna held her breath.
‘I’m sorry to land this on you, but, Anna, I really am under serious pressure here. There’s a major shoot at W Union Square tomorrow morning and Leah has let me down big time. Anyway, the shoot is bedrooms – models in hotels slash extravagant homes, sleeping off all that hard work they do – walking and um, staring. A lot of our major advertisers are involved and, here’s what I’m hoping you’ll go for: the photographer is Marc Lunel. You can work with someone who doesn’t pronounce Moët wrong. Come on. Please. Please. Please.’
Anna paused, watching the couple on television directing two men into the house with a red leather sofa. ‘Only if I get the main credit,’ she said finally.
‘You’ll do it?’ said Chloe.
Anna’s heart was beating rapidly, but not out of excitement. ‘Yes.’
‘God, if I’d known it was going to be that easy, I would have called Marc months ago.’ Her laugh was shrill. Anna was silent.
Chloe jumped in. ‘Oh, listen to me being so insensitive. Of course you needed all that time—’
‘Please,’ said Anna. ‘Email me the details.’
‘Of course. Done. Darling, thank you. Thank you so much.’
Joe leaned into the mirror in the men’s room, snipping away the nasal hair that had spent three hours soaking up the smell of death. He never figured out if it was a practical or a psychological routine or both. He didn’t like seeing his face up close, seeing the new lines around his eyes, the extra gray hairs at the side of his head; more things that were out of his control. He went to his locker and grabbed a bottle of tea-tree shower gel that Anna had given him. He got undressed and threw his suit into a plastic bag.
‘The smell of that crap,’ said Danny walking in. ‘I think I’ll go back to the autopsy.’
‘Screw you,’ said Joe. ‘I’d rather smell—’
‘Like weird-ass tea—’
‘Like – clean, than how you go out with your cheap foaming shit that doesn’t cover up nothing.’
‘If a woman can’t handle the smell of death from a man—’
‘She can’t go out with a deadbeat.’
‘Shit,’ said Danny, closing his locker door. ‘I’m all out of shower gel. Give me some of that crap.’
Joe went back to his desk and checked his email. Danny walked over a few minutes later, smelling the back of his hand and frowning.
‘Get over the fucking shower gel,’ said Joe.
‘Let me pull that file,’ said Danny. ‘The one I told you about – Aneto.’
Joe made space on his desk, laying a stack of files on the floor beside him. Danny came back and opened William Aneto’s file in front of him. Aneto was thirty-one, slightly built, handsome, with collar-length black hair. Joe looked at his head shot and saw a TV actor’s face; the four-line max guy, two or three steps back from the main action. His role in a Spanish language soap opera was the friend of the brother of the leading man. He was killed almost a year earlier, his body discovered in his Upper West Side apartment by a female friend. The case had quickly gone cold. As a victim, William fell into the high-risk category, promiscuous on the gay scene, known for disappearing at the end of a night with a stranger. Danny and Martinez had interviewed hundreds of Aneto’s friends, acquaintances and lovers and had gotten nowhere. His murder was down as a hook-up gone bad.
Joe pulled out the next photos and laid them in rows on the table in front of him. Danny stood beside him. Like Ethan Lowry, the body was found in the hallway. But behind William Aneto,