A Seed of Doubt

HARD-BOILED PULP

By Clement Elmore

Chapter 1

The courtroom smelled like stale cigarettes and broken promises. I sat in the witness box with my hands folded neat as a choirboy's, staring at the twelve faces that would decide whether Joe Cook walked free or took the long ride to Sing Sing's electric chair. My name is John Farlow, and I write for the Herald—or at least I did before I became the star witness in the biggest murder trial the city had seen in five years.

The prosecutor was a thin man named Kelton with eyes like ice chips and a voice that could cut glass. He approached me the way a cat approaches a cornered mouse—all confidence and cold calculation.

"Mr. Farlow," he said, "tell the court what you saw on the night of March fifteenth."

I'd told this story a hundred times. To the cops, to my editor, to Judy over cold coffee in our kitchen. Each time it came out smoother, more polished, like a stone worn down by running water. That should have been my first warning.

"I was walking past Pete's Diner on Lexington," I said. My voice came out steady, which surprised me. Inside, my guts were doing gymnastics. "It was around eleven-thirty. I'd been working late on a story about the dock strikes."

Kelton nodded. He knew all this. We'd rehearsed it twice. "And what did you observe?"

"I saw a man running out of the diner. He was moving fast, like the devil himself was on his heels. The streetlight caught his face for just a second." I paused. This was the moment. This was where I drove the nail in. "It was Joe Cook."

A murmur rippled through the gallery. Cook sat at the defense table like a stone statue, his face gray as week-old dishwater. His lawyer, a public defender who looked about seventeen and scared, scribbled something on a yellow legal pad. Cook didn't look at me. Maybe that was mercy. Maybe that was guilt.

"You're certain it was the defendant?" Kelton pressed.

"Certain as Sunday."

"And you'd seen Mr. Cook before?"

"Twice. He used to work at the loading docks when I was covering the strike story. I interviewed him once. I'd know that face anywhere."

That was the truth. Or at least, it was what I believed to be the truth on that warm afternoon in June, sitting in that witness box with the weight of the law pressing down on my shoulders like a lead overcoat. The truth has a funny way of shifting when you're not looking at it directly. Like trying to see stars at night—they're clearer when you look at them sideways.

Kelton nodded, satisfied. "What happened next?"

"I ran to the diner. The door was still swinging. Inside—" I stopped. Even now, weeks later, the image made my stomach turn. "Inside, Pete Morelli was on the floor behind the counter. His throat had been cut. There was blood everywhere. The cash register was open, empty."

"Did you see anyone else?"

"No. Just Pete, and he wasn't talking."

The defense attorney's cross-examination was brief and ineffective. He tried to suggest that the lighting had been poor, that I might have been mistaken, that perhaps I'd seen someone who merely resembled Cook. But I held firm. I'd seen what I'd seen. The kid lawyer sat down with the defeated slump of a man who knew his client was headed for the chair.

The jury took four hours to convict. Cook got death.

I should have felt satisfaction. I'd done my civic duty. I'd put a killer behind bars. Instead, I felt hollowed out, like someone had taken a melon baller to my insides and scooped away everything that mattered.

Judy was waiting outside the courthouse. She stood under the bronze statue of Justice, which struck me as either ironic or poetic, depending on how you looked at it. Her dark hair was pinned up the way I liked it, and she wore the blue dress that brought out her eyes. But those eyes weren't happy to see me.

"It's over," I said, taking her arm. The evening sun was the color of blood oranges, painting the courthouse steps in shades of amber and rust.

"Is it?" Her voice was quiet, careful, like she was testing the strength of thin ice.

"The jury convicted. Cook'll appeal, but it won't matter. Case is solid as concrete."

"John." She stopped walking, pulled her arm free. "Are you absolutely certain it was him?"

The question hit me like a slap. "What?"

"That night. The lighting, the angle, the speed he was moving—are you completely, absolutely certain beyond any shadow of doubt that it was Joe Cook you saw?"

"I testified under oath, Judy. I said—"

"I know what you said. I'm asking what you saw."

We stood there on the courthouse steps while the city flowed around us like a river around stones. Office workers heading home. Street vendors packing up their carts. A cop on the corner blowing his whistle at traffic that didn't care. The ordinary machinery of urban life, grinding forward while a man waited to die because of words I'd spoken.

"I saw him," I said. But for the first time, my voice carried the weight of uncertainty. Just a hint, barely there, like the first hairline crack in a dam.

Judy heard it. She had an ear for the notes I didn't play, the words I didn't say. That's what made her good at her job—she was a social worker, spent her days reading between the lines of broken families and desperate cases.

"Let's go home," she said softly. "We can talk about this later."

But we didn't talk about it later. Not that night, anyway. I went through the motions—we picked up Chinese food, ate it in silence at our small kitchen table, listened to the radio while the city darkened outside our windows. Our apartment was on the fourth floor of a pre-war building on the East Side, the kind of place that had seen better days but still clung to a threadbare dignity. The radiators clanked, the floorboards creaked, and the walls were thin enough that we knew all our neighbors' business whether we wanted to or not.

Around midnight, I gave up pretending to read the newspaper and went to bed. Judy was already there, her back to me, breathing the slow rhythm of sleep or a convincing imitation of it. I stared at the ceiling and watched the headlights from passing cars paint moving shadows across the plaster.

I saw him, I told myself. I saw Joe Cook running from that diner with Pete Morelli's blood on his hands.

But Judy's question had planted something in my mind. A seed. A tiny, poisonous seed that would grow in the dark.

The next morning, I went to the Herald offices on West Forty-Fourth Street. The newsroom was its usual controlled chaos—typewriters clacking, phones ringing, editors shouting, cigarette smoke hanging in layers like morning fog. My desk was in the corner by the window, which meant I got good light but also the noise from the street below.

"Farlow!" My editor, Marcus Webb, waved me over to his glass-walled office. Webb was fifty, gray-haired, and permanently skeptical of everything including the sunrise. "Nice work on the Cook trial. Front page stuff."

"Thanks." I stood in his doorway, not sure I wanted this conversation.

"Kelton's office called. They want to know if you'd be willing to testify at the sentencing hearing. Character stuff, impact on the community, that sort of thing."

My stomach twisted. "When?"

"Three weeks. You available?"

Are you absolutely certain it was him?

"Sure," I heard myself say. "I'll be there."

Webb nodded, already turning back to the chaos on his desk. "Good man. Now get out there and find me something for tomorrow's edition. World doesn't stop just because you helped fry a killer."

I walked back to my desk on legs that felt borrowed. The morning edition was already on my chair, and there it was, front page, below the fold: COOK SENTENCED TO DEATH IN DINER MURDER. My byline was attached to the sidebar story about the trial. I read it standing up, coffee going cold in my hand.

The words looked strange to me, like they'd been written by someone else. Someone certain. Someone who didn't lie awake at night wondering if he'd sent an innocent man to die.

"Hey, Farlow." It was Mickey Brennan from sports, a good egg with a nose that had been broken at least three times. "Hell of a story. Buy you lunch?"

"Rain check, Mickey. I got a thing."

I didn't have a thing. What I had was a growing need to be alone, to think, to maybe not think. I grabbed my hat and headed out.

The city in summer was a beast—hot, humid, stinking of garbage and humanity pressed too close together. I walked without direction, letting my feet make the decisions. They took me east, then south, then back west. After an hour I found myself on Lexington Avenue, standing across the street from Pete's Diner.

Yellow police tape still crisscrossed the door. The windows were dark. Someone had spray-painted a crude memorial on the sidewalk—RIP PETE, with a heart. The paint was already fading.

I stood there for a long time, trying to remember that night exactly as it had happened. Not the story I'd told in court, polished and certain, but the raw, chaotic reality of it. I'd been tired. It had been dark. The figure had come bursting out of that door and I'd seen—

What had I seen, exactly?

A man. Running. Medium height, dark jacket, that glimpse of a face in the streetlight. The same face I'd seen twice before at the docks.

Or had it just been a similar face? A face my tired brain had matched to a memory, the way you sometimes think you see an old friend in a crowd only to realize on closer inspection that you're looking at a stranger?

"You're not really helping, are you?" I said aloud to the empty diner. A passing woman gave me a look and hurried on. Great. Now I was talking to buildings.

I went home. Judy was already there, having taken the afternoon off. She worked at a clinic in the Bowery, dealing with cases that would break most people's hearts daily. She was tougher than she looked.

"You're home early," she said from the kitchen. She was making coffee, or starting to. Her hands were shaking slightly.

"Judy." I stood in the doorway, my hat still in my hands like some nervous suitor. "Tell me the truth. Do you think I made a mistake?"

She turned to face me, and I saw something in her eyes that made my heart sink. It was pity. Or maybe it was fear.

"I think," she said carefully, "that you testified to what you believed you saw. I think you're a good man who did what he thought was right."

"That's not what I asked."

"John—"

"Do you think Joe Cook killed Pete Morelli?"

The silence stretched between us like taffy. Outside, someone was playing a radio too loud. The Andrews Sisters singing about boogie woogie bugle boys. Life going on, oblivious.

"I don't know," Judy finally said. "But John, I think the question that matters is: do you think he did it?"

And there it was. The question I'd been avoiding since the moment I'd stepped down from that witness stand. I'd told my story. I'd secured the conviction. The machinery of justice had ground forward, and Joe Cook was scheduled to die in the electric chair in sixty days.

All because I'd said I was certain.

"I thought I did," I said quietly. "God help me, Judy, I thought I was sure."

"And now?"

"Now I don't know anything anymore."

She crossed the room and took my hands. Hers were warm, real, solid in a world that suddenly felt like it was built on quicksand.

"Then we need to find out," she said. "We need to know for sure."

"The trial's over. He's been convicted. Unless the appeals—"

"Appeals can take years. You said yourself his lawyer was useless. By the time the appeals process runs out, Joe Cook will be dead." Her grip tightened on my hands. "John, if there's even a chance you were wrong, we have to act now."

"What are you suggesting? I can't just recant my testimony. The prosecution would crucify me. They'd say I was lying then or lying now. Either way, my career's finished."

"Is your career worth more than a man's life?"

It was the kind of question that has no good answer. The kind that strips away all your careful rationalizations and leaves you naked in front of a mirror you'd rather not look into.

"No," I said. "Of course not."

"Then we start by going back to the beginning. That night. The diner. Everything you saw and didn't see."

So we did. We sat at our small kitchen table with fresh coffee and notepads, and I tried to reconstruct that night with the precision of a watchmaker. Every detail, every moment, every shadow and flicker of light.

The more I talked, the less certain I became.

I'd been tired—I'd been working fourteen-hour days on the dock strike story. The streetlight had been at an angle, throwing shadows. The figure had been moving fast, hunched over like he was protecting something or maybe nursing an injury. I'd seen his face for a second, maybe two, as he passed under the light.

"Describe him," Judy prompted.

"Medium height. Dark hair. Stubble. Thin face."

"That could describe ten thousand men in this city."

"I recognized him, Judy. I'd interviewed him."

"You'd interviewed him once, three weeks earlier, in the middle of a crowd of dock workers. You talked to him for maybe five minutes while taking notes."

When she put it like that, my certainty started to feel less like concrete and more like tissue paper.

We worked until the summer evening turned to night. By the time we stopped, I had a headache that felt like someone was driving railroad spikes through my temples, and a sick certainty that I might have made the worst mistake of my life.

"What do we do?" I asked. The coffee had gone cold hours ago.

"Tomorrow, you go back to Pete's Diner. Talk to the neighbors, the other businesses on the block. Someone must have seen something."

"The cops already did all that."

"The cops were looking for evidence to convict Cook. We're looking for evidence that might exonerate him. Different goal, different questions."

She made it sound simple. It wasn't simple. What she was suggesting was that I, a nobody reporter, go back and investigate a case that the police had already closed. That I potentially undermine my own testimony and the prosecution's case. That I admit, publicly or at least to myself, that I might have sent an innocent man to die.

But the alternative was worse. The alternative was living with the knowledge, or even the suspicion, that Joe Cook's blood would be on my hands.

"Okay," I said. "Tomorrow. I'll start tomorrow."

Judy squeezed my hand across the table. "We'll figure this out, John. Together."

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to believe that the truth was something solid and findable, that we could dig it up like buried treasure and everything would be clear. But I'd been a reporter long enough to know that truth was slippery. It changed depending on who was telling the story and why.

That night, I lay awake again, listening to the building settle around us. The couple upstairs—the Hoffmans, I think—arguing in muffled tones. The radiator pipes knocking even though it was summer and the heat was off. Somewhere down the hall, a baby crying.

And in my mind, playing on an endless loop: a figure running from a diner, a face illuminated for two seconds under a streetlight, and the absolute certainty I'd felt in that moment that I was looking at Joe Cook.

Had I been certain? Or had I just needed to be certain, because the alternative—that the real killer had escaped while I stood there like a useless idiot—was too terrible to contemplate?

I turned over, punched my pillow, tried to find a comfortable position. Judy murmured something in her sleep but didn't wake. The city rumbled outside our windows, alive and indifferent to one man's doubts.

Somewhere in Sing Sing, Joe Cook was sleeping too. Or not sleeping. Maybe he was lying awake on a narrow cot, counting down the days until they strapped him into the chair and sent two thousand volts through his body. Maybe he was praying. Maybe he was cursing my name.

Maybe he was innocent.

The seed of doubt that Judy had planted was growing, spreading roots through my conscience like poison ivy. By morning, I knew it would have taken over completely. There would be no more comfortable certainty, no more easy answers. Just questions, doubts, and the terrible possibility that I'd made a mistake that would cost a man his life.

I finally fell asleep as dawn was breaking, and my dreams were full of empty diners and faces that shifted and changed every time I tried to look at them directly. In the dreams, I was the one on trial, and the jury was a dozen copies of Joe Cook, all staring at me with dead eyes and asking the same question over and over:

Are you certain? Are you absolutely certain?

And in the dream, as in waking life, I had no answer anymore.

Chapter 2

The next morning came too soon and not soon enough. I dragged myself out of bed feeling like I'd gone fifteen rounds with Joe Louis, made coffee that tasted like motor oil, and tried to pretend my hands weren't shaking as I knotted my tie.

Judy was already dressed for work, looking crisp and competent in a way that made me feel like yesterday's garbage. She kissed my cheek on her way out, her lips cool and dry. "Be careful today," she said. "And John? Follow the facts, not your guilt."

Good advice. I wondered if I was capable of taking it.

The Herald offices were a madhouse as usual. I typed up a nothing piece about a water main break on Ninth Avenue, made three phone calls that went nowhere, and spent the rest of the morning watching the clock like it held the secrets of the universe. By noon I couldn't stand it anymore. I grabbed my hat and headed back to Lexington Avenue.

Pete's Diner still looked dead, and not in the peaceful way. The yellow police tape had torn loose on one side and flapped in the hot breeze like a warning flag. I started with the pawnshop next door.

The proprietor was a bald man with thick glasses that magnified his eyes to an unsettling size. He remembered that night, sure. Hard to forget when murder comes calling on your block.

"Heard the commotion," he told me, polishing the same pocket watch he'd been polishing when I walked in. "Looked out, saw the cops arrive. That's all."

"You didn't see anyone running from the diner? Around eleven-thirty?"

The magnified eyes blinked at me. "Cops asked me that already. Told them same as I'm telling you—I close at eleven. I was upstairs having my dinner when it happened."

Strike one.

The tailor across the street was more helpful, but not in the way I needed. Yes, he'd seen someone running. No, he couldn't describe them. "Too dark, too fast. Could have been anybody."

Could have been anybody. The words followed me down the block like a bad smell.

By three o'clock I'd talked to everyone within a two-block radius who'd talk to me. I'd gotten nothing that would help Joe Cook and plenty that would help him straight into the chair. The physical evidence was damning—Cook's fingerprints on the diner's back door, his work boots leaving prints in Pete Morelli's blood, fibers from his jacket caught on the cash register. The only thing the prosecution didn't have was the murder weapon, which had never been found.

I stopped at a corner newsstand and bought a pack of Lucky Strikes. I didn't usually smoke, but my nerves needed something to do besides jangle. The vendor gave me a light and I stood there on the corner, letting the city flow around me while I tried to figure out my next move.

That's when I saw him.

He was standing across the street in the shadow of a loading dock, just standing there, perfectly still in a way that made him stand out more than if he'd been dancing a jig. Medium height, dark coat despite the heat, hat pulled low. I couldn't see his face but I felt his attention on me like a physical weight.

I watched him. He watched me. The moment stretched taut as piano wire.

Then a delivery truck rumbled between us, and when it passed, the stranger was gone.

I crossed the street fast, dodging a taxi that laid on its horn like I'd personally insulted its mother. The loading dock was empty except for some crushed cigarette butts and a sleeping cat. No sign of my watcher.

Maybe I'd imagined it. Maybe the guilt and the sleepless nights were catching up to me, making me see things that weren't there. Wouldn't that be rich? The star witness who couldn't trust his own eyes.

I finished my cigarette and headed home.

Our building was a six-story pre-war affair that had been painted green sometime during the Coolidge administration and hadn't seen a brush since. The elevator worked when it felt like it, which wasn't often. I took the stairs to the fourth floor, my footsteps echoing in the stairwell like accusations.

The hallway was dimly lit and smelled of boiled cabbage and failure. I was fishing for my keys when a door opened behind me.

"Farlow."

I didn't have to turn around to know who it was. Albert Wing, my next-door neighbor and the human equivalent of a persistent rash. Wing was a thin man in his fifties with a pencil mustache and the disposition of a cornered rat. He worked as some kind of clerk downtown and spent his free time finding new ways to make everyone around him miserable.

"Wing," I said, not turning around.

"I want to talk to you about the noise."

"What noise?"

"Last night. You and your woman arguing. I could hear every word through the walls."

We hadn't been arguing. We'd been speaking in normal tones at our kitchen table. But with Wing, everything was too loud, too late, too much. He was the kind of neighbor who called the super if you sneezed after ten P.M.

"Sorry if we disturbed you," I said, managing to get my key in the lock.

"See that it doesn't happen again." He sniffed. "I have half a mind to report you to the building management."

"You do that, Wing." I pushed open my door. "You do whatever makes you happy."

"Some of us," he said, his voice dripping with implication, "have standards. Some of us don't appreciate living next to people who consort with criminals."

That stopped me. I turned around slowly. Wing was standing in his doorway in his undershirt and suspenders, a newspaper in one hand. My byline story about the Cook trial was visible on the front page.

"What did you say?"

"I read about your testimony. Very civic-minded of you, I'm sure. But it brings a certain element around, doesn't it? I've seen the reporters lurking, the gawkers. It's unseemly."

My hands had curled into fists without my permission. I forced them open. "Go back inside, Wing."

"I'm just saying that some of us prefer a quiet, respectable building. Not one that's in the papers for all the wrong reasons."

I could have told him what I thought of his respectability. I could have told him that if he didn't like living next to me, he was welcome to move to a nicer place where the walls were thicker and the neighbors didn't have to listen to him clear his throat forty times a night. Instead, I went into my apartment and closed the door before I did something I'd regret.

Judy came home an hour later to find me pacing the living room like a caged animal.

"Bad day?" she asked, setting down her purse.

"Wing's being Wing. I may have to murder him."

She smiled faintly. "Get in line. Mrs. Hoffman upstairs has been fantasizing about it for months."

We made dinner—scrambled eggs and toast, bachelor food even though we were engaged—and talked about her day at the clinic. She'd had a case involving a mother of four whose husband had skipped town with the rent money. Standard stuff for the Bowery, heartbreaking but familiar.

"What about you?" she asked. "Any luck at the diner?"

I told her about my fruitless interviews, the witnesses who'd seen nothing useful. I didn't tell her about the stranger in the shadows. It seemed crazy even to me, and I was the one who'd seen him. Or thought I'd seen him.

"Maybe tomorrow," she said, but she didn't sound convinced.

We cleaned up, listened to the radio for a while—Bob Hope making jokes that seemed to come from a different world—and went to bed early. I was exhausted but sleep wouldn't come. I lay there in the dark, listening to the building's nighttime symphony. The Hoffmans upstairs having another muffled argument. The pipes knocking. Someone's radio playing too loud.

And from next door, through walls that might as well have been tissue paper, the sound of Albert Wing clearing his throat. Again. And again. And again.

Around two A.M., I finally drifted off.

The dream started normally enough. I was at the Herald, typing up a story. But the typewriter keys felt strange under my fingers, too soft, like pressing into flesh. I looked down and saw that the keys were teeth, human teeth, and they were chattering at me.

I stood up, but I wasn't in the newsroom anymore. I was in a courtroom. The judge's bench loomed above me like a gallows platform. The jury box was filled with identical men who all had Joe Cook's face.

"John Farlow," the judge intoned, except it wasn't a judge, it was Albert Wing in a black robe, his mustache twitching with satisfaction. "You stand accused of murder in the first degree."

"What? No, I'm not—"

"The victim," Wing continued, "was Albert Wing, age fifty-three, found with his throat cut in the manner of Pete Morelli. How do you plead?"

"This is insane. I didn't kill anyone."

"The jury has heard the evidence. We have an eyewitness."

A figure stepped forward from the shadows. It was me. Another me, younger, more certain, wearing the suit I'd worn to Cook's trial.

"I saw him," the other me said, pointing. "I saw John Farlow running from Wing's apartment with blood on his hands. I'd know that face anywhere."

"But I didn't—"

"Are you absolutely certain?" Wing-as-judge asked my doppelganger.

"Certain as Sunday."

The jury of Joe Cooks all nodded in unison. Their verdict came without deliberation: guilty.

I tried to protest, to explain, but the courtroom was melting around me, walls flowing like wax. I was being moved, dragged, carried. The scene shifted with dream logic and suddenly I was in a small room that smelled of ozone and death. The electric chair sat in the center like a throne.

They strapped me in. The leather was warm, as if someone had just been there. Someone who might still be there, their ghost burned into the wood.

"Any last words?" Wing asked. He was pulling on thick rubber gloves, preparing to throw the switch.

"I'm innocent," I said, but my voice came out as Joe Cook's voice. "Please, you have to believe me."

"The jury has spoken," Wing said. His hand moved toward the switch. "Justice must be served."

I screamed.

The electricity hit like the fist of God, every nerve in my body lighting up at once. The world went white, then black, then—

I jerked awake, gasping, drenched in sweat. The sheets were tangled around me like a burial shroud. Judy was sitting up beside me, her hand on my shoulder.

"John? John, you were having a nightmare."

"I—" My voice came out as a croak. My heart was hammering so hard I thought it might break a rib. "Yeah. A bad one."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

I shook my head. What was there to say? That I'd dreamed of being in Joe Cook's place, that for a few terrible dream-seconds I'd felt what he must be feeling every day, waiting for death with the weight of injustice pressing down like a tombstone?

"I'm okay," I lied. "Go back to sleep."

She lay down, but I could tell from her breathing she wasn't sleeping. Neither was I. We lay there in the dark, both of us pretending, while the building creaked and settled around us.

That's when I heard it.

A sound from the hallway. Not the usual nighttime sounds—no footsteps, no doors, no late-arriving neighbors fumbling with their keys. This was different. A scraping sound, like something being dragged. And underneath it, a wet, gurgling noise that made the hair on my neck stand up.

I sat up. "Did you hear that?"

"Hear what?"

"In the hallway."

We both listened. For a moment there was nothing, just the standard building noises. Then it came again. Scrape. Gurgle. A soft thump against a wall.

"That," I whispered.

Judy's hand found mine in the dark, squeezed tight. "What is it?"

"I don't know."

I got out of bed, pulled on my pants. Judy grabbed my arm. "John, don't."

"Someone might need help."

"Or it could be dangerous. Call the police."

But I was already moving, driven by something between curiosity and dread. I crossed to the door, pressed my ear against it. The sound was closer now. Just outside. Scrape. Gurgle. And now I could hear breathing, labored and wet, like someone trying to breathe through a mouthful of water.

I put my hand on the doorknob. Judy hissed a warning but I wasn't listening anymore. The dream was still clinging to me like cobwebs, and I had the irrational thought that if I didn't open this door, if I didn't face whatever was out there, I'd be trapped in the nightmare forever.

I turned the knob. Pulled the door open.

The hallway was empty.

No, not empty. At the far end, near the stairs, something moved. A shape, man-sized, dark against the dim light from the emergency exit sign. As I watched, it lurched toward the stairwell and disappeared.

"Hello?" My voice echoed in the hallway. No answer.

I stepped out in my bare feet, Judy close behind me now despite her protests. The hallway felt wrong, the air thick and copper-scented. We moved toward where I'd seen the figure, our shadows stretching out before us like dark prophecies.

That's when I saw the door.

Albert Wing's door. It was ajar, just an inch, and in the gap I could see darkness and something else. Something glistening.

"John." Judy's voice was barely a whisper. "I don't think you should—"

But I was already pushing the door open.

The apartment was dark except for the ambient light from the street filtering through cheap curtains. It was enough to see by. More than enough.

Albert Wing was on the floor next to his reading chair, sprawled on his back with his arms flung wide like he was making a snow angel. His throat had been opened from ear to ear in a smile that would never close. Blood had pooled around him, soaked into the cheap carpet, painted the walls in arterial spray patterns that looked like some kind of horrible abstract art.

The smell hit me a second later—copper and meat and the particular stench of bowels letting go. I staggered back, my hand over my mouth.

Judy gasped. Then she was moving past me, her social worker training kicking in even as her face went gray. She knelt beside Wing, checked for a pulse even though we both knew there wouldn't be one. You don't lose that much blood and keep breathing.

"He's dead," she confirmed, her voice steady but her hands shaking. "John, we need to call the police. Now."

I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. Because I was staring at Wing's throat, at the clean, brutal efficiency of the cut, at the way the wound gaped open like a second mouth.

It was identical to Pete Morelli's wound. Exactly identical.

The same killer.

Which meant either Joe Cook had somehow killed Wing from his cell at Sing Sing, or—

Or I'd been right to doubt. Right to question. And the real killer was still out there.

Still killing.

And he'd just murdered the man who lived next door to me.

"John!" Judy's sharp voice snapped me back to the present. "The police. Now."

I nodded, backed out of the apartment on legs that felt like water. Back in our own place, I picked up the telephone with hands that wouldn't quite work right. Dialed the operator. Asked for the police.

While I talked, giving our address in a voice that didn't sound like mine, I looked out our window at the street below. The city was still out there, oblivious, alive with its own concerns. A drunk stumbled past. A cab prowled for fares. Somewhere a radio was playing dance music, the notes floating up through the warm night air.

And in the shadows across the street, barely visible under a broken streetlight, a figure stood watching our building.

The stranger from before. I was certain of it, even though I couldn't see his face, couldn't make out any details. I knew it was him the way you know when someone's staring at you from behind.

I raised my hand to point, to show Judy, but when I looked back the figure was gone.

Just like before.

Just like the figure I'd seen running from Pete's Diner.

The police arrived twelve minutes later, their sirens splitting the night and waking the entire building. By then I was sitting at our kitchen table with my head in my hands, trying to convince myself this was real, that I wasn't still dreaming.

But I wasn't dreaming. The nightmare was just beginning.

And somewhere out there, a man with a blade and a purpose was still walking free.

Chapter 3

The cops who showed up weren't the sympathetic types you see in the movies. They were hard men with harder eyes, the kind who'd seen enough of humanity's worst to stop being surprised by anything. The lead detective was named Brennan—no relation to Mickey from sports—and he had a face like a clenched fist.

"You found the body," he said. It wasn't a question.

"That's right." I was still in my undershirt and pants, no shoes, looking like exactly what I was—a man dragged from sleep into a waking nightmare. "We heard sounds in the hallway. I went to investigate."

"Sounds." Brennan wrote something in a notebook so small it looked like a toy in his meat-hook hands. "What kind of sounds?"

"Scraping. Gurgling. Like someone was hurt."

"But you didn't see anyone."

"I saw a figure. At the end of the hall, going toward the stairs. It was too dark to make out details."

Brennan's eyes locked onto mine like gun sights. "But you're good at making out details in the dark, aren't you, Mr. Farlow? That's what you testified at the Cook trial. That you saw the defendant's face clear as day, even though it was night, even though he was running."

My stomach dropped into my shoes. "That's different. That was—"

"Was what? Better lighting? Better angle?" Brennan smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "Or maybe you were more certain then than you are now."

Judy stepped in, her voice crisp with professional authority. "Detective, my fiancé has cooperated fully. He called you immediately. If you're suggesting—"

"I'm not suggesting anything, Miss...?"

"Crawford. Judy Crawford. And yes, that's exactly what you're suggesting."

Brennan turned his attention to her, and I saw him reassessing. Judy in her nightgown and robe should have looked vulnerable, but she carried herself like a woman used to staring down worse things than hostile cops. Her work in the Bowery did that to you—gave you a spine of steel wrapped in silk.

"You heard these sounds too?" Brennan asked her.

"I heard something. John went to investigate. I followed."

"And you saw the body."

"Yes."

"Touch anything?"

"I checked for a pulse. There wasn't one."

Brennan nodded, made another note. "We'll need formal statements from both of you. Down at the precinct, tomorrow morning. Nine sharp."

"We'll be there," I said.

But Brennan wasn't done. "One more thing, Farlow. You and the deceased—what was your relationship?"

"Neighbors. That's all."

"Just neighbors. Nothing more."

"We weren't friends, if that's what you're asking."

"I'm asking about any conflicts. Arguments. Bad blood."

The question sat in the air like smoke. I could feel Judy's eyes on me, willing me to be careful, to think before I spoke. But the truth had a way of coming out whether you wanted it to or not.

"We didn't get along," I admitted. "Wing complained about everything. The noise, the hours I kept. He was that kind of neighbor."

"The kind you might want dead?"

"Detective—" Judy started, but I held up my hand.

"The kind who was annoying," I said. "Nothing more. I didn't kill him."

"Nobody said you did." Brennan closed his notebook with a snap that sounded final as a coffin lid. "Nine A.M., Farlow. Don't be late."

They spent the next three hours processing Wing's apartment. I watched from our doorway as uniforms came and went, as the photographer's flash painted the hallway in stuttering white light, as they finally carried Wing out in a black bag that seemed too small to contain a whole human life, even one as pinched and mean as his had been.

The other neighbors gathered in doorways and on the stairs, whispering among themselves. Mrs. Hoffman from upstairs, her hair in curlers and her face slack with shock. The young couple from down the hall, holding each other like the world might end if they let go. The super, a Greek named Stavros, wringing his hands and muttering about property values and what the landlord would say.

By five A.M. the police were gone and the building had returned to an uneasy silence. Judy and I sat at our kitchen table with coffee neither of us could drink, watching the sun come up over a city that didn't care about dead men or the living who mourned them.

"They think you did it," Judy said quietly.

"I know."

"They think you killed Wing and maybe Morelli too. That Joe Cook is innocent and you framed him to cover your own crime."

"That's insane."

"Is it?" She wasn't being cruel, just practical. "Think about it from their perspective. You're the star witness in a murder trial. The man you testified against is convicted. Then another man dies the same way, and you're the one who finds the body. You live next door. You've had conflicts with the victim. What would you think?"

I didn't want to answer that question. "There was someone else in the hallway. The figure I saw."

"Who you can't describe. Who vanished into thin air."

"Just like the figure I saw at Pete's Diner."

The words hung between us, heavy with implication. Judy reached across the table and took my hand. Her fingers were ice cold despite the summer heat already building outside.

"John, I believe you. But believing you isn't enough. We need proof. We need to find whoever's doing this before they charge you with murder."

"The police—"

"The police have their suspect. You. They're not looking for anyone else." Her grip tightened. "We're on our own."

Nine A.M. found us at the precinct house on East Fifty-First, a gray fortress of bureaucracy and broken dreams. We gave our statements separately, each of us recounting the same story from different angles. I told them about the sounds, about the figure in the hallway, about finding Wing's body. I didn't tell them about the stranger I'd seen watching the building. Some instinct told me that would sound too convenient, too much like a desperate man making up stories.

Brennan listened with the expression of a man who'd heard every lie in the book and was waiting to catalog this one. When I finished, he leaned back in his chair and studied me like I was a bug on a pin.

"Let me tell you a story, Farlow," he said. "A man testifies in a murder trial. Big case, lots of publicity. His testimony puts the defendant on death row. Should feel good, right? Civic duty and all that. But then the man starts having doubts. Starts wondering if maybe he made a mistake. That doubt eats at him, keeps him up at night, poisons his relationship with his girl. So he decides to do something about it."

"What are you suggesting?"

"I'm suggesting that maybe this man figures if there's another murder in the same style, it'll cast doubt on the first conviction. Create reasonable doubt for the appeals. Make him look like less of a liar if it turns out he was wrong the first time."

The room felt too small, the walls pressing in. "You think I killed Wing to exonerate Cook?"

"I think it's an interesting theory."

"It's insane."

"Is it? You're a reporter. You're smart. You know how the system works. You know that one murder is a conviction, but two murders creates a pattern. Creates the possibility of a serial killer, which means Cook couldn't have done the first one."

"Why would I find the body if I killed him? Why would I call the police?"

"Because you're smart enough to know that hiding from it would look worse. Better to be the heroic neighbor who discovered the crime than the suspicious guy next door who didn't hear anything."

I stood up so fast my chair tipped over. "This is crazy. I'm telling you the truth."

"Sit down, Farlow."

"I want a lawyer."

"You're not under arrest. You're free to leave anytime." Brennan smiled that humorless smile again. "But walking out now, that doesn't look good either, does it?"

I sat back down because he was right. Everything looked bad. Everything pointed to me. I was caught in a web of circumstantial evidence as sticky and inescapable as silk.

"I didn't kill anyone," I said again, but the words felt hollow even to me.

Brennan closed his folder. "We'll be in touch, Mr. Farlow. Don't leave town."

Outside the precinct, the summer sun felt like a judgment. Judy was waiting on the steps, her face pale but composed. We started walking, not toward home but just away, needing to move, to feel like we were doing something even if it was only putting distance between ourselves and that gray building full of suspicious eyes.

"They're going to arrest you," Judy said after we'd gone three blocks in silence.

"Maybe."

"Not maybe. Definitely. They're building a case right now. Checking your alibi for the Morelli murder, talking to your neighbors about your relationship with Wing, looking for the weapon."

"They won't find the weapon because I don't have it."

"That won't stop them from looking. And when they can't find it, that'll be more evidence of your guilt. You were smart enough to dispose of it."

We turned onto Third Avenue, letting the flow of foot traffic carry us along. The city was alive with its usual Monday morning bustle—office workers hurrying to their jobs, vendors setting up their carts, mothers pushing prams. Normal life, carrying on oblivious to the fact that my world was crumbling.

"What do we do?" I asked.

Judy stopped walking, pulled me into the doorway of a closed shop. Her eyes had that look I'd seen before, the one that meant she'd made a decision and nothing was going to change her mind.

"We find the real killer," she said. "Before they arrest you, before they can build their case, before Joe Cook runs out of time. We find him and we prove you're innocent."

"How? I'm a reporter, not a detective. You're a social worker, not a cop. We don't have resources, we don't have authority, we don't even know where to start."

"We start with the stranger."

"What stranger?"

"The one you've been seeing. The figure in the hallway, the watcher across the street. You've seen him twice now, haven't you?"

I hadn't told her about seeing him outside our building. She read it in my face.

"John, when were you going to mention that?"

"I thought I was imagining it. Seeing things because I'm tired and guilty and—"

"You're not imagining it. Someone is following you, watching you. Someone who was at Pete's Diner the night Morelli died and who was in our building the night Wing was killed." She grabbed my arms, her fingers digging in with desperate intensity. "Don't you see? This is our proof. This is the real killer."

"Or it's just some random guy who—"

"Who what? Coincidentally shows up at two different murder scenes? Coincidentally runs from both? Coincidentally matches the description of the person you saw that first night?" She shook her head. "There are no coincidences, John. Not like this. Someone is killing people and you're connected somehow. Maybe you were always meant to be the fall guy. Maybe he's framing you deliberately."

The possibility chilled me more than I wanted to admit. "Why would anyone do that?"

"I don't know. But we're going to find out."

She pulled me back onto the sidewalk, her stride purposeful now, heading east. I followed, half running to keep up.

"Where are we going?"

"To find the stranger. He's been following you, which means he knows where you live, where you work. He's watching you for a reason. So we're going to stake out your regular haunts and watch for him."

"That could take days. Weeks."

"Then we'd better get started."

We spent the rest of Monday camped out in a coffee shop across from the Herald building, drinking cup after cup of bitter joe and watching the street. Every man in a dark coat made my heart jump. Every figure in the shadows looked suspicious. By evening my nerves were stretched tighter than piano wire and we hadn't seen anything useful.

Tuesday was the same. And Wednesday. On Thursday, Brennan called and asked me to come back to the precinct for "a few follow-up questions." I went with a lawyer this time—a guy named Feldman that Judy's boss at the clinic recommended—and we spent three hours going over my statement again. They'd checked my alibi for the Morelli murder. I'd been at the Herald offices until ten-thirty that night, which dozens of people could confirm. But that left an hour unaccounted for, enough time to get to Pete's Diner and back.

"Not enough to arrest him," Feldman told me afterward. "But enough to keep you on their suspect list."

Friday morning, I was sitting at my desk at the Herald, pretending to work on a story about sanitation strikes, when Mickey Brennan from sports stopped by.

"Hey, Farlow. You look like hell."

"Feel worse."

"Listen, I don't want to pry, but word around the newsroom is you're in some kind of trouble."

I looked up at him. Mickey was a good guy, had been around the block enough times to know when to ask questions and when to keep his mouth shut. Right now his face said he was genuinely concerned.

"Nothing I can't handle," I lied.

"Sure, sure. Just—" He looked around, lowered his voice. "If you need anything, you let me know, okay? We take care of our own around here."

After he left, I stared at my typewriter and tried to remember what it felt like to be a reporter instead of a murder suspect. The words wouldn't come. Nothing would come except the sick certainty that time was running out.

That afternoon, Judy called me at the office.

"I found something," she said, her voice tight with excitement. "Can you come home?"

I was there in fifteen minutes, taking the stairs two at a time. Judy was in our living room, surrounded by newspapers and file folders, her hair escaping from its pins, her eyes bright with discovery.

"What is it?"

"I've been going through records at the clinic, calling around to mental institutions in the area. I had a hunch." She shuffled through papers, found what she was looking for. "Three months ago, a patient escaped from Bellevue psychiatric ward. Male, medium build, history of violence. His name is Thomas Merrick."

"So?"

"So, I got his file. John, look at this." She handed me a medical photograph clipped to a case file.

The face staring back at me from the photograph was gaunt, hollow-eyed, framed by dark hair and stubble. Medium height according to the notes. The kind of face that could be anyone or no one, depending on the light.

The kind of face I might have seen running from a diner.

The kind of face I might have mistaken for Joe Cook.

"This is him," I breathed. "This is the stranger."

"I think so. And John, there's more. Merrick's file says he has a fixation with knives. He attacked an orderly with a scalpel before he escaped. They never found him."

My hands were shaking so hard the photograph blurred. "We have to take this to the police."

"We will. But first, we need to find him. Because a photograph and a theory isn't enough. They'll say we're grasping at straws, manufacturing evidence. We need to bring them Merrick himself."

"How do we find him?"

"We already know how. He's been following you, watching you. So tonight, you're going to lead him somewhere private, somewhere we can corner him. And I'm going to be watching, ready to call for backup the second he makes his move."

It was insane. It was dangerous. It was probably going to get us both killed.

But it was also the only chance we had.

"Okay," I said. "Let's do it."

Judy pulled me close, pressed her forehead against mine. "We're going to fix this, John. We're going to save Joe Cook and prove you're innocent and stop this maniac. We're going to make it right."

I wanted to believe her. God, how I wanted to believe her.

But all I could think about was the dream I'd had, strapped into the electric chair, feeling the voltage sing through my veins while Albert Wing smiled and threw the switch.

Some nightmares, you don't wake up from.

You just learn to live in them.