‘This is more important,’ Bell objects.
‘Travis, you look like you’re ready to fall down.’
Kristin glances over, shrugs. ‘She’s not wrong. You do look rather awful.’
‘Kristin can come with me,’ Emma points out. ‘Go back to the hotel. I’m telling Carter you’re out until you get some rest. Don’t even think about arguing.’ She ignores his shitty expression, holds her hand palm up. ‘Just give me some of those Excedrin before you go.’
That’s how it plays out: Emma finds her feet, Bell gives her the Excedrin. Kristin passes over a shopping bag full of clothes, Emma’s usual ones this time, before walking with Bell to the elevator, to make sure he gets into it.
Emma is left to shower and dress. She waits until no one else is around before she picks up her water glass, clenches her fingers around it, weighs it in her hand. The urge to throw it at the wall is almost overpowering, but in the end, she sets the glass down again.
The sketch artist is a younger Black guy called Wilson, and he’s very patient with her.
‘Okay, his eyebrows are as dark as his hair. Full lips like this?’ He sifts through the composites, offering her options.
She squints at the images, points. ‘More like this guy. But you got the chin. The chin is good.’
She’s never worked with a police artist before, and the amount of time and detail involved is staggering. Face shapes, eye shapes, noses, cheeks, brows. They’ve been at this over three hours, and allshe can think about is Linda Kittiko, strung out and terrified in the College Killer’s basement. She takes another slug of her to-go coffee.
‘So kind of a smaller mouth, with fuller lips. Okay, try this.’ Wilson draws fast, his brown hand moving quickly across the page with astonishing accuracy.
He keeps encouraging her to correct and adjust as the sketch emerges. When it’s done, Emma sits back. The bustle and noise in the bullpen fade out around her as she stares into the eyes of the man she saw last night. The man who told her to remove her gloves, and then used one of them to decorate the scene of his latest kidnapping. The finished likeness is only pencil and shadow, but it still makes her shudder.
She nods at the completed image. ‘That’s him. That’s Peter.’
Wilson waves across the room to flag Horner down. Horner takes the sketch and hands it off to another officer to photocopy, then calls for a detective.
‘We’ve got an identification picture to go out with an APB – tell highway and foot patrols to check the fax. Put some language together for a broadcast, but don’t let it go without my sign-off.’ He gesticulates at Kowalski two desks over. ‘Get me Alan Kraus on the phone, I want to see this sketch in the papers.’
Kowalski nods. ‘You got it, Chief.’
Emma retreats as the wheels of law enforcement process begin turning. She dumps her coffee cup and goes back to the spare interview room where Kristin is sitting at a table, reading the report from last night’s Paradise operation while eating kung pao chicken from a takeout container. The windowless room reeks of soy sauce and chili peppers.
‘Oh, Emma, here, you must have some of this, it’s delicious.’ Kristin passes her another container, with a paper napkin and a set of chopsticks. ‘I can’t say I’m terribly impressed with the way the search was carried out last night – there was nobody covering the elevators at all.’
‘Is that how they think he cut loose?’ Emma takes the lid off her lunch, ditches the chopsticks for a plastic fork. She’s not sure her stomach is enthusiastic about anything right now, but she starts picking at the chicken.
‘Yes.’ Kristin slides the club schematic across the table with her elbow, points with her chopsticks. ‘Although there were a couple of other gaps. The mezzanine had a fire exit stairway used only by staff, but it turned out some of the nightclub patrons had propped it open so they could bring in friends rejected by the bouncer.’
‘Paradise was full of problems. It would have always been a tough venue to lock down.’ Emma’s tired and headachey. She’s sick of being around herself, and she just wants this day to be over.
‘Apparently it was well above patron capacity,’ Kristin says. ‘It was only licensed for three hundred people, but there were at least a hundred more on-site. Mr Horner said that it would be hard to argue that point with management, however, as they were so cooperative about allowing the police operation to proceed …’
Kristin keeps talking, but Emma tunes her out. The dark-glazed chunks of white meat in the takeout container have become suddenly unappetizing. She needs to breathe awhile, and she’s not sure how to do that in Pittsburgh.
She borrows a copy of the report from Kristin, plus the folder on Linda Kittiko, and goes out to find Francks. He’s been replaced by a young, stocky guy called Napier, who agrees – after phoning in tothe local field office – to allow Emma to go for a walk to the park. There is no nearby public park, so Napier drives her in a field office Dodge Diplomat to Duquesne’s Gumberg Library, where she can sit in the sun on a park bench in Brottier Commons and see green grass and feel warmth on her shoulders.
The breeze on the Commons is stiff, but Emma doesn’t care. It’s clean air. No stale cigarette smoke in the bullpen, no stuffy interview rooms, no other people nearby – if she ignores Napier sitting in the Diplomat with the door open, drinking a Tab.
There’s a scattering of college students walking around on the grass, who at least don’t make her feel like the youngest person in the vicinity. She herself is a college student; she should be at Ohio State right now. She turns her face up to the sky and inhales, keeps breathing deeply until she realizes that this attempt to release tension is only going to make her cry. Then she blots her eyes on the sleeve of her Henley, pulls her jacket more firmly around herself, sets the report and the Kittiko file on her knee.
She reads for about an hour. Linda Kittiko is a second-year student at Carnegie Mellon, with excellent grades in music theory. She plays the oboe with a band on campus. She is one of three children; her parents are flying into Pittsburgh from Youngstown, and the Ohio connection is probably significant. She is white, and slim, and dark-haired, and pretty, and it’s driving Emma crazy that this girl, this poor fucking girl, is screaming somewhere in the city because of a superficial resemblance and police incompetence and some really shitty luck.
Feeling sick, she puts the file aside, picks up the Paradise report.
After a while, the warmth of the sun overpowers the breeze; Emma lets the light fall on the nape of her neck. When she’s done, she sits for a minute to let it all sink in. Her mind spins through the information, and through her garbled memories of what happened at Paradise.
Gosh, it’s hot in here…
