the burglary, too,” Dara said. “That was the only other thing we really discussed.”
“Yes, I included that, too.” She thought suddenly of the call last week from Detective Molinari and wondered if Dara had mentioned that to Burke. Kit guessed that for now at least she hadn’t. Dara would err on the side of discretion.
“It seems you’re all packed up,” Kit added. “Just give me a few minutes to grab my stuff and then we’ll split.”
As Kit threw the last items into her duffel bag, she tried to piece together what little info she had. For some reason Avery had taken the stairs and then, from the sound of it, been attacked there.
A name came to her with sickening clarity: Ithaka. She recalled the two men whom Kelman had mentioned, the ones behind the illegal trade. If they were behind the break-in, they—or whoever they’d hired—might have returned, intent on silencing her this time. And then killed Avery by mistake.
She thought of the error she’d made over the phone with Molinari, hearing words like red hair and blue eyes and just surmising it had to have been X lying in the morgue. It would have been easy for someone in the dim light of her stairwell to see Avery from behind and assume, because of the hair, and the body shape, and the trench coat, that it was her instead.
Avery’s killer had probably been hiding on the steps up to the roof and descended as soon as he saw her emerge. It would have taken a few seconds to reach her and that would explain why she was pushed from the landing between the fifth and fourth floors.
But that didn’t make sense, she suddenly realized. How would someone know Avery would take the stairs? So maybe the person had actually accosted Avery by the elevator and forced her into the stairwell. Kit tried to summon the moments just after Avery had swept out of her office. She’d been preoccupied then, her attention immediately turned to the meeting ahead with Kelman. And yet if there’d been any kind of altercation in the hallway, she certainly would have heard it. Maybe the assailant had used a gun. A paid killer would have been armed, which would also explain why the wrong person had been targeted—he’d have been working with a photograph or a description. But then why throw his victim down the stairs rather than fire a bullet into her head.
She shuddered, overwhelmed by both remorse and dread. She’d spent the past few days determined to obtain answers, confident she could dig herself out of the hole, but the old questions had been replaced by even scarier ones. Would the killer return once he realized his mistake? Was there any way at all to save herself? It felt as if she’d been sucked into quicksand and was struggling futilely to heave herself above the muck.
She wondered why the hell Kelman hadn’t called her back. Though it seemed unlikely that he was the killer—she could still picture the expectant look on his face when she’d arrived at Jacques—there might be other wrongs on his conscience causing him to retreat back into the shadows now. She felt a wave of fury toward him. He’d set it all in motion two weeks ago and now Avery was dead.
But that wasn’t the full picture, was it? She’d set it in motion, too, by saying yes to his invitation, by going to bed with him, by picking up a pen that didn’t belong to her.
Finally she tugged the zipper on her duffel bag closed and stuffed her new laptop into its carrying case. She threw the bolt on the main door to the apartment and then checked the living space. This was her sanctuary, she thought mournfully, and she was being expelled from it.
When she and Dara emerged from the building, they found that a small crowd of people had already congregated outside, drawn out of morbid curiosity to the official vehicles lined up along the curb and the two patrol cops guarding the front. Miraculously, a free cab sailed by the moment they stepped on the sidewalk and Kit shot her hand up for it. At the other end of the crowd, a guy with a lanyard and name badge around his neck—probably a reporter—spotted them and darted in their direction, running along the perimeter of rubberneckers. But they were in the cab and moving before he could reach them.