steps. No one yelled or followed me. Either they hadn’t noticed or were too focused on stopping the big, angry jerk wearing that Yankee sweatshirt in the middle of Mets country.
I shook my head as I moved, realizing Matteo Allegro was a whole lot smarter than I liked to give him credit for; but then the man would do just about anything for his daughter, even put a few extra brain cells to work.
Either way, I was inside. Now I had to find Joy.
There were two apartments on the ground floor. Both doors were shut tight. I hurried up the stairs to the first landing. There were two apartment doors here, and both were open.
Warm air poured into the drafty hallway from the apartments, accompanied by a hiss of steam from a nearby radiator. I glanced inside the first door and saw a uniformed officer speaking with an elderly woman wearing a woolen robe.
“I didn’t hear a thing, sorry to tell you. I’m a bit hard of hearing,” the gray-haired woman said in a faint but discernable Irish brogue.
Inside the second door, I saw a big African American plainclothes detective standing next to a much smaller uniformed officer. The detective was attempting to interview a young Asian couple who’d been roused from their sleep. The husband rubbed his eyes while he spoke in rapid-fire Chinese.
“What did he say, Officer Chin?” the detective asked.
The uniformed officer shook his head. “He’s speaking Mandarin.”
“So?”
“So your guess is as good as mine, Sergeant Grimes. My people are from Hong Kong, and they speak Cantonese!”
I crept past the door and moved onto the steps that led to the third floor. A bright photoflash suddenly lit the landing above me. Another flash came, and another. I moved halfway up the stairs and paused, listening to the voices coming out of the apartment.
“Tell me why you came here again. I didn’t quite get it the first time,” a man demanded.
“You heard the message Vinny left on my cell,” a young woman replied between sobs. “You know why I came here. Why do you keep asking me the same questions?”
“Joy!” I whispered.
I took the rest of the stairs two at a time, reaching the top landing in under a second. There were two doors on this landing. One was shut tight, newspapers and magazines piled up as if the person had been away. The other door was wide-open. I could see a number of officials inside the apartment: the first was a young man in a dark blue police uniform. He was standing in the small entryway. The second was an older, wider man in a gray suit, but I could only see his back. The third man in a dark nylon jacket was holding a small digital camera and snapping photos. A woman in the same kind of jacket was stooped over something on the floor.
I could only see bits and pieces of the room from here: there were plants and a large fish tank, some framed posters. I noticed a bank of windows along the front wall were all wide-open for some reason.
Finally, the large man in the gray suit moved aside, and I saw Joy, standing just inside the doorway to the apartment’s kitchen. She’d exchanged the chef’s jacket and black slacks she’d been wearing at Solange for a white turtleneck and blue jeans. One arm was folded over her stomach. She was wiping away tears with the other, and she was also shivering.
I took a step forward into the short entryway that led to the living room. The uniformed officer who’d been standing there suddenly blocked my path. “Whoa! Where are you going, ma’am?”
“Let me see my daughter!” I shouted.
Joy heard me and called out, “Mom!”
I charged, but the officer blocked me again. “Stop, ma’am!”
“Joy, your father and I came as quickly as we could!” I called to her, trying desperately to get around the cop, but he started moving me backward.
“Back up, ma’am!” the young officer warned, his hand moving to his nightstick. “Back up, or I’ll have to restrain you!”
“Lopez! It’s all right!” called the older man, the one in the suit who’d been questioning Joy. The detective turned and moved toward us. He had thick, coarse, slate gray hair with bushy eyebrows and a seventies-style mustache to match. His gray, rumpled suit had lapels as wide as Queens Boulevard, and his loudly patterned green and orange tie was obviously chosen by a man who wore neckwear only because he had to.
I