The Collector
Page 9

“Sure. There’s a place just across the street.”
“Thanks. Ash,” he said, holding out his hand. “Ashton Archer.”
Something tickled the back of her brain at the name, but she offered her hand in turn. “Lila.”
He led her out, nodded when she gestured to the coffee shop across the street.
“I really am sorry,” she said as they waited for the light beside a woman who was arguing bitterly on her cell phone. “I can’t imagine losing a brother. I don’t have one, but I can’t imagine losing him if I did. Do you have other family?”
“Other siblings?”
“Yes.”
He glanced down at her as they started across the street, washing along in the surge of pedestrian traffic. “There are fourteen of us. Thirteen,” he corrected. “Thirteen now. Unlucky number,” he said half to himself.
The woman on the phone marched beside Lila, her voice pitched high and shrill. A couple of teenage girls pranced just ahead, chirping and giggling over someone named Brad. A couple of horns blasted as the light changed.
Surely she’d misheard him. “I’m sorry, what?”
“Thirteen’s unlucky.”
“No, I meant . . . Did you say you have thirteen brothers and sisters?”
“Twelve. I make thirteen.” When he pulled open the door to the coffee shop, the smell of coffee, sugary baked goods and a wall of noise greeted them.
“Your mother must be . . .” “Insane” crossed her mind. “Amazing.”
“I like to think so. That’s step-sibs, half sibs,” he added, grabbing an empty two-top booth. “My father’s been married five times. My mother’s on her third.”
“That’s—wow.”
“Yeah, modern American family.”
“Christmas must be a madhouse. Do they all live in New York?”
“Not exactly. Coffee?” he asked her as a waitress stepped up.
“Actually, can I get a lemonade? I’m coffee’d out.”
“Coffee for me. Just black.”
He sat back a moment, studied her. A good face, he decided, something fresh and open about it, though he could see signs of stress and fatigue, especially in her eyes—deep, dark brown as rich as her hair with a thin line of gold around the iris. Gypsy eyes, he thought, and though there was nothing exotic about her, he immediately saw her in red—red bodice with a full skirt, and many colorful flounces. In a dance, mid spin, hair flying. Laughing while the campfire blazed behind her.
“Are you all right? Stupid question,” she said immediately. “Of course you’re not.”
“No. Sorry.” Not the time, not the place, not the woman, he told himself, and leaned forward again. “You didn’t know Oliver?”
“No.”
“The woman, then. What was it? Rosemary?”
“Sage. Wrong herb. No, I didn’t know either of them. I’m staying in the same complex, and I was looking out the window. I saw . . .”
“What did you see?” He closed his hand over hers, removed it quickly when he felt her stiffen. “Will you tell me what you saw?”
“I saw her. Upset, crying, and someone hit her.”
“Someone?”
“I couldn’t see him. But I’d seen your brother before. I’d seen them in the apartment together, several times. Arguing, talking, making up. You know.”
“I’m not sure I do. Your apartment looks right out into hers? Theirs,” he corrected. “The police said he was living there.”
“Not exactly. It’s not my apartment. I’m staying there.” She took a moment when the waitress brought the lemonade and coffee. “Thanks,” she said, offering the waitress a quick smile. “I’m staying there for a few weeks while the tenants are on vacation, and I . . . I know it sounds nosy and invasive, but I like to watch people. I stay in a lot of interesting places, and I take binoculars, so I was . . .”
“Doing a Jimmy Stewart.”
“Yes!” Relief and laughter mixed in the word. “Yes, like Rear Window. Only you don’t expect to see Raymond Burr loading up the pieces of his dead wife into a big chest and hauling it out. Or was it suitcases? Anyway. I don’t think of it as spying, or didn’t until this happened. It’s like theater. All the world really is a stage, and I like being in the audience.”
He waded his way through that to the key. “But you didn’t see Oliver. You didn’t see him hit her? Push her?”
“No. I told the police. I saw someone hit her, but it was the wrong angle to see him. She was crying and scared and pleading—I could see all that on her face. I got my phone to call nine-one-one, and then . . . She came flying out the window. The glass shattered, and she just flew through it and fell.”
This time he put his hand over hers, left it there because it trembled. “Take it easy.”
“I keep seeing it. Keep seeing the glass breaking, and her flying out, the way her arms went wide, and her feet kicked at the air. I hear her scream, but that’s in my head. I didn’t hear her. I’m sorry about your brother, but—”
“He didn’t do this.”
For a moment she said nothing, just lifted her glass, sipped quietly at the lemonade.
“He wasn’t capable of doing this,” Ash said.
When she lifted her gaze to his, sympathy and compassion radiated.
She was no Valkyrie, he thought. She felt too much.
“It’s terrible what happened.”
“You think I can’t accept my brother could kill, then kill himself. It’s not that. It’s that I know he couldn’t. We weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him in months, and then only briefly. He was tighter with Giselle, they’re closer in age. But she’s in . . .”
Sorrow fell into him again like stones. “I’m not entirely sure. Maybe Paris. I need to find out. He was a pain in the ass,” Ash continued. “An operator without the killer instinct it takes to be an operator. A lot of charm, a lot of bullshit, and a lot of big ideas without any practical sense of how to bring them around. But he wouldn’t hit a woman.”
She’d watched them, he remembered. “You said they argued a lot. Did you ever see him hit her, push her?”
“No, but . . .”