Chapter 6
I don't run out of my new home so much as escape.
I'm dressed and out the door before the apartment is fully light, wired from a night of bad sleep and way too much caffeine. The pendant is back in the jewelry box, the crucifix back around my neck. Who knows what I was trying to accomplish last night when I wore the pendant and Eleanor’s leather jacket.
Maybe I thought some of her confidence would rub off on me.
The elevator doors are open when I reach the hallway. Almost as if it’s waiting for me. I look down the hallway in the other direction, toward the far end where a heavy door sits in the shadows that I've walked past twice without really registering.
I walk toward it.
My footsteps echo louder than they should, the way they always do in this building. Something about the acoustics, the stone and marble and sealed spaces, that amplifies sound.
I reach the door. Heavy, no window, a push bar worn smooth by years of hands. A small sign I have to lean in to read:
ROOF ACCESS.
I push through it.
The stairwell is dim and narrow, concrete walls, a single bare bulb overhead throwing more shadow than light. One flight up, gray light seeps around the edges of another door, heavier than the last. I climb slowly, listening. Nothing above me but the sound of wind against the building's exterior.
The roof door opens onto the sky.
Wind hits me immediately, harder up here than it ever is at street level, the city's breath unobstructed for the first time.
I step out and take in my surroundings.
Tall buildings surround me. At the center of the roof, HVAC units hum their continuous note. Along the far parapet, ceramic planters hold soil and something still stubbornly green despite the October wind and the altitude. I figure this was Eleanor’s herb garden.
I approach the ledge and look over at thirty stories of open air.
The street so far below that the yellow cabs are toys and the people on the sidewalk are ants.
The drop is so absolute, so perfectly vertical, that I feel it physically — a tightening in my legs, a reflex pulling me back from the edge even though I'm nowhere near falling. I stand there and take a deep breath.
Suddenly, something stirs beneath the parapet to my right.
I spin —
An explosion of wings, close and violent and immediate as a flock of pigeons erupts upward from beneath the ledge in a chaos of gray feathers and panicked noise. They burst past me close enough that I feel the air displaced by their wings, and I stumble backward, heart racing.
The birds scatter into the skyline, disperse and vanish.
Silence floods back.
I stand with my back against the HVAC unit, wait for my heart to find its normal rhythm and look across the empty rooftop. The wind moves and the planters' herbs bend. The roof is empty and entirely ordinary, and yet something doesn't feel right about it.
I look up at the sky. Gray, overcast, nothing weird here.
I move toward the opposite side of the roof, toward the west-facing parapet, and freeze.
Six blocks away, maybe seven, I spot activity on another rooftop. Too far to make out all the details from here, but the blue uniforms are unmistakable.
Could this be another rooftop crime scene?
I leave the roof and take the stairs at a run.
The binoculars are on Eleanor's desk where I left them. I raise them as I cross the living room to the west-facing window. The city snaps closer, my hands finding the focus adjustment automatically now.
The second crime scene comes into view.
Same choreography as the first, the same grim efficiency, detectives moving with contained urgency, uniformed officers managing a perimeter, crime scene tape marking the boundaries. Two EMTs wheel a covered stretcher toward a roof access door.
Following a hunch, I move the binoculars upward.
I take in a blur of stone ledges and narrow parapets. My binocular-enhanced gaze lands on an ornate roofline of an older building overlooking the crime scene.
And there. Perched on the corner of the parapet, its dark form resolving out of the stone, the by now familiar gargoyle statue.
"No way," I say to the empty apartment.
I lower the binoculars.
I stand very still for a moment, mentally working through what I’m seeing here. Two murders, two rooftop crime scenes. And at each scene, on an overlooking building…
I don’t finish the thought. Instead, I cross the apartment to the east-facing windows.
Raise the binoculars.
Find the first crime scene rooftop. The body is long gone, but the grisly memory of the mangled corpse remains vivid in my mind.
I tilt the binoculars upward, toward the adjacent building where I first spotted the gargoyle statue.
I gasp.
The parapet… is empty.
I stare at it. Sweep slowly along its length, checking every corner, every ledge.
Nothing. The stone is bare.
I lower the binoculars and walk back across the apartment, fast now, not quite running, to the west-facing windows.
I raise the binoculars again.
The new crime scene is emptying out. The body is gone, and the remaining officers begin the slow process of clearing the scene. One by one, they drift toward the access door.
I point the binoculars at the neighboring structure. The gargoyle statue is still there. Exactly as I left it. Unmoving, wings folded, head lowered, watching the activity beneath it with that patient and terrible attention.
I lower the binoculars to the streets below. Watch as the EMTs emerge from the building and place a stretcher with the latest victim into a waiting ambulance.
The ambulance pulls away from the curb.
After a moment, I shift my attention back to the roof, just in time to see the last officer disappear through the access door. The roof is empty now. No sign of the crime that was committed here.
I swing back up to the parapet and…
Holy shit.
The gargoyle is gone.
I don't move. I keep the binoculars trained on the empty ledge as if sustained attention might reverse what I'm seeing, and somehow restore the stone figure to its position.
I was hoping for a logical explanation, hoping the gargoyle sightings were coincidence, two different carvings on two different buildings that I mistook for one.
After all, there are gargoyles all over this city. I know this. Old buildings put them everywhere, on cornices and parapets and over doorways, weathered into the stone until they're practically invisible.
I sweep the surrounding rooftops. Methodically, east to west and back again, every parapet and ledge and water tower and HVAC housing. The binoculars move through the skyline and find nothing but stone and metal and the ordinary detritus of urban rooftops.
There’s no trace of any gargoyle.
I lower the binoculars slowly.
The city suddenly feels different. Predatory.
Like I’m not the only one doing the watching.
Like something out there among the rooftops is watching me now.