CHAPTER THREE #2
“I keep thinking it’s not real,” she said, her voice small and brittle. “He was here this morning. He kissed the kids goodbye. I went to church with them. He said he’d catch up later, but… he never came home.”
Kate sat opposite her. “Mrs. Brennan, I know this is difficult, but can you tell us if your husband had any enemies? Anyone angry with him?”
Belinda gave a soft, humourless laugh. “Angry? In finance? That’s like asking if the ocean’s wet. But enemies? No. People envied him, yes. Hated him, maybe, certainly hated the world he represented.”
“What world was that?”
“Banking doesn’t produce or create anything.
You don’t finish a hard day at the bank with anything in your hand.
Even the money is notional: close a deal worth sixty billion dollars, that doesn’t mean there’s some room full of stuffed mail-sacks somewhere, does it?
People don’t trust it. They can’t. And the rewards for doing it…
they’re out of proportion to the work put in. ”
“Are they?” Marcus asked. “I hear he worked very long hours.”
“My husband worked eighty, ninety hours a week, but he wasn’t carrying bricks up a ladder, or digging coal out of the ground.
He moved figures on a computer screen. Compare that to a nurse in the emergency room, or a fire-fighter…
even the clerk at Kroger’s, and it’s just not fair.
I actually think that’s why my husband worked the hours he did.
He needed to prove to the world that he deserved the salary, because ultimately, he felt that he didn’t.
And it seems like someone else thought that, too. ”
Kate and Marcus exchanged a quick glance. Mrs. Brennan made sense, but her tone was high and close to shouting, her words stumbling into one another like drunks in a storm.
“My husband was demanding,” she continued after a pause. “With everyone. Including himself. But this world doesn’t deal with resentment through blood. If you want revenge, you short someone’s stock. You hit their wallets, not their bodies.”
Marcus raised an eyebrow. “You seem very sure.”
“I’ve lived it for fifteen years, Detective. Greed doesn’t need a knife.”
Kate studied her. “Did he seem different lately? Stressed? Paranoid?”
Belinda hesitated. “He was tired. But Nate was always tired. I did notice he’d stopped sleeping at home some nights. Said it was easier to work late than commute. I thought nothing of it.”
“Was there anyone new in his life?”
“A new assistant. Male, mid-twenties, smart, very… intense. Tyler something. I can’t remember the surname.”
Kate made a note. “We’ll find him.”
Belinda dabbed her eyes. “If you do, tell him… tell him I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
She met Kate’s gaze, steady now. “For him. He spent more time with my husband than I did.”
***
They rode the elevator down in silence, broken only by the sound of Kate crunching a tic-tac. Torres’s jaw was working too, like she was chewing on a thought.
“Something about her?” Marcus asked.
“She’s sharp,” said Kate. “Too sharp for the performance she’s putting on. Either she’s hiding something, or she’s already figured out more than she’s saying. And what was that weird shit about the assistant? That was not normal.”
Torres shrugged. “Shock, maybe? People come out with crazy stuff. I had to break the news to this rich old lady in Queens once. Husband flattened by a runaway school bus. She says, ‘Why did he waste thirty dollars getting his shoes re-soled?’”
“I take your point. But all the same, keep her close.”
“We will. You two got a place to stay?”
“Not yet,” Marcus said. “We were gonna grab a hotel near the precinct.”
Torres made a face. “They're all rammed to the roof: Democrat convention and the Manhattan Film Festival. Here's an idea. My Mom's out in Astoria. She's got a self-contained apartment at the side of the house, a good hot shower, and two beds. Decent coffee, no rats, hundred twenty a night."
Marcus looked at Kate, Kate looked at Torres; everyone liked how easy it was.
As they stepped out into the lobby, Kate’s phone buzzed — a text from Winters. Updates. Hourly.
She pocketed it without replying.
Outside, the night air was heavy and metallic. The city hummed around them — taxis, sirens, steam hissing from a vent.
Torres’s unmarked sedan was parked at the curb. “Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to my pal Mankovitz,” she said, unlocking the doors. “He’s in financial crimes, knows this world better than anyone. But he’s… different. Takes a bit of getting used to.”
Kate and Marcus smiled at each other. Torres spotted it.
“Something I said?”
“It’s just we have a colleague back in Portland who sounds very similar,” Kate explained.
“It’s the territory,” Torres said. “Forensics and finance are disproportionately filled with people who don’t like other humans much.”
They drove uptown, the rain starting again — light at first, then heavier. The windshield wipers beat time against the low hum of traffic.
For a while, no one spoke. Then Marcus said, “You buy that story from the wife?”
“Parts of it,” Kate said. “She loved him, maybe. Or loved the life. But there’s guilt in her voice. And she’s too aware of what people will assume about her.”
Torres glanced at her. “Meaning?”
“Meaning she’s already rehearsing the statement for the press. The grieving spouse who insists it couldn’t be personal.”
Torres made a low noise of agreement. “You think she’s covering for someone?”
“Covering something. But everyone is.”
They crossed the bridge into Queens, the skyline shrinking behind them. The rain turned to mist.
Torres’s phone buzzed against the dash. She checked it at a red light, eyes narrowing.
“M.E. with some preliminary remarks,” she said.
“Time of death somewhere between twelve hundred and seventeen hundred hours Sunday. He thinks the murder weapon was a standard, steel filleting knife. Deployed in a distinct order – the stab to the left side, between the 6th and 7th ribs, came first, and nicked the diaphragm. That would have impaired the victim’s breathing, incapacitating him whilst the killer delivered the second blow, which was a deeper, slower cut to the jugular, more like carving the Sunday roast.”
“Ugh!” Kate couldn’t help herself.
“Sorry. Blame the M.E. You know how they do. The killer would then have been able to maneuver the victim to the position in which he was found, in front of the desk, before nailing him to it.”
“Messy,” Marcus said. “I wonder how a man soaked in someone else’s blood manages to get away to wherever, without being seen.”
“Good point,” Torres replied. “I’m also wondering how come the elevator isn’t full of bloody foot- and hand-prints.”
“Took the stairs?”
“Ok, but even so, what about the foyer, the revolving doors, the entrance? We might have missed something. We’ve shut the building down and there’s two officers on guard at present. Want me to brief them?”
“Please,” Kate replied. “Tell them to check everywhere, within reason. Any smudge or smear.”
They reached Astoria just after two a.m. Torres’s mother’s brownstone stood on a quiet street lined with plane trees. The porch light glowed faintly.
Inside, the air smelled of coffee and lavender. Family photos lined the hallway — Torres as a teenager in NYPD cadet uniform, a man in an old baseball jersey, a much younger Torres holding a trophy almost bigger than her head.
Torres pointed them towards the apartment, which had clearly been a garage at some point in the past. “Sheets are clean, shower’s through the door on the left, kitchen’s stocked. Try to get some sleep. Mankovitz will meet us at eight.”
Kate nodded. “Thanks.”
They were both bruised by exhaustion, capable of only grunting a goodnight to each other.
Chivalrous as ever, Marcus took the fold-down in the living room, while Kate had a small double in a bedroom that couldn’t actually contain much else.
She lay there in the dark, expecting sleep to come, but it refused her.
That made her angry which, in turn, made her even less likely to fall asleep.
In the end, she sat by the window, gazing out at the eerie, orange light of the darkest hours, hugging a pillow. She tried to describe her thoughts and her feelings, an old therapist’s trick.
She felt, above all else, confused. The killing confirmed that someone was continuing the work begun by Cox: punishing people perceived to have broken each of the Ten Commandments, in a ritualized, performative series of crime scenes.
But beyond that lay a series of unknowns.
Was Cox himself the killer? Was it the work of a disciple, being tutored by Cox, or perhaps even acting on instructions left by Cox on his death-bed?
She had no way of knowing. She had only her instincts and right now, her instincts weren’t telling her anything at all.
She could only hope for the sun to rise, and that with it, came some answers.