Nikki was careful as she climbed the stairs to the second floor. She could imagine that Steve Knight would not particularly appreciate an evening visit from a BPD detective. She flicked the light switch, and the long corridor lit up slowly and twitchingly. Then, she looked around cautiously and finally looked for Knight's apartment. But even before she had checked the first three apartments, Nikki heard the sound of an apartment door opening. Her eyes involuntarily scanned the corridor, only to find that the noise from one of the apartments at the back of the hallway had become louder. But although the door to this apartment had obviously been opened, no one had stepped out into the hallway. There was also no murmur of voices or shadows to indicate that someone was still saying goodbye to their host.
Nikki was determined to solve the situation and carefully approached the door, which had been opened just a crack from the inside. She could now hear a mixture of television noises, footsteps, and what sounded like muffled moans coming from the apartment.
"Hello, is someone there?" she called through the open door into the apartment.
She has yet to receive an answer.
"Mr. Knight, is that you?"
Nikki's mood had suddenly changed. Minutes before, she had self-critically regarded her late night out as an overly cautious distraction from her nightly thoughts of her family. Now, as the noises from the apartment seemed increasingly threatening, she believed for the first time since her hasty departure that the young offender might really be in danger.
"Boston Police!" she shouted, pulling out her service weapon and carefully pushing the door open further with her foot. "I'm coming in now!"
As Nikki stepped into the apartment hallway, everything she had learned during her training and had already applied in numerous missions automatically ran through her mind. It was, therefore, downright responsible for going into a potentially dangerous situation alone and without having called for backup beforehand. The following day, she would have to listen to her mother give her a telling-off, which was quite something.
Step by step, she nevertheless felt her way further into the small apartment, while the noises from the TV got louder and louder the closer she got to the living room.
"So what? I just got stoned. Good for you. That's your problem. Look at you, dude!" barked the toneless voice of an amateur actress from the TV loudspeaker.
"I'm entering the living room now!" Nikki announced loudly and turned around again for good measure, although she had already checked the bathroom and the small kitchen behind her.
Finally, she entered the living room. Nikki immediately wrenched her eyes open in shock and stared in bewilderment at the horrible spectacle before her: pale and frozen with bewilderment, Steve Knight lay on his back with his gag like a cockchafer, staring at his deep blue discolored forearms as if they were no longer part of his own body, but just the grotesque horror version from a horrible dream.
"I'll get help," the detective promised after she had assessed the situation.
She reached for her cell phone and was just about to dial a number when her gaze, which had been jumping from one point to another in the devastated room, fell on the playing card with the three on it. Suddenly, the question of whether the disturbing sight of Steve Knight had made her forget for a moment came to her mind.
Who had opened the door? Hardly Knight.
Nikki had carefully checked all areas of the apartment. Apart from her and the injured man, no one else was in the apartment. So she quickly made the emergency call for the wounded man and then put her cell phone back in her pocket. Knight gasped and snorted harder into his gag as he watched, paralyzed, as Nikki approached the only part of the apartment she hadn't yet checked - the balcony. It was bright in the living room, so she couldn't see through the reflection on the window to see if someone was hiding outside on the balcony. She held her gun out before her and carefully stepped onto the balcony.
There was no one to be seen, but the door to the outside wasn't locked; it was just closed.
"Is he out of there?" she asked Knight, who could not answer.
He must have escaped via the balcony; what else? How much of a head start could he have?
The athletic detective pulled open the outside door, saw the bucket of water with the handcuffs in it, and then looked over the balcony scaffolding. She noticed that someone seemed to be moving away from the house at a rapid pace further back.
The tracks in the snow occurred to her, and before she had really thought about it, she had already jumped off the balcony in one leap, landed awkwardly in front of it, and quickly identified the direction in which the stranger had fled. The fugitive's tracks were the only ones Nikki could make out in the snow at this time of night. At least she could follow him to the road without any problems.
Nikki rushed after the tracks as fast as she could until she finally reached the fence behind the road. Jack's footprints ended there, but there was another advantage: it was light. The streetlights illuminated the road, and even if Nikki had lost a few precious seconds on the perpetrator, she hadn't yet noticed the sound of a car driving away. Nikki's hands froze miserably, but she clutched her service weapon tightly.
He must be here with the car. Whatever he did with that bucket, he couldn't have brought it here by bus or cab. And he parked not far from the apartment. How else could he have brought it up without anyone noticing? He ran away, but he didn't drive off. Even if he came on foot, his car is still here somewhere—right in front of me.
Instead of blindly continuing the pursuit, which would have been practically hopeless on her own and given the branching streets, Nikki now considered how Jack might behave given the unexpected situation. Her eyes roamed unwaveringly over the area surrounding them. When she thought she heard a suspicious noise, she shouted shaky into the stillness of the icy night, "If you're still here, you'd better turn yourself in! We have your car and DNA; the game's up anyway. You want to tell us something, don't you? Then come out and tell me."
The silence that now descended on the snow-covered street seemed so ominous that it seemed like an eternity to Nikki until something finally stirred.
With an unexpected clunk, the station wagon doors parked almost directly next to her at the side of the road unlocked. When the lights inside the vehicle came on, the detective suddenly turned in its direction. Just as she realized that she had obviously fallen for a diversionary tactic, she felt the barrel of a gun in her back.
"You have my DNA?" breathed the man, who was unknown to Nikki. "And now you think my game is up?"
Nikki continued to tighten her grip on her gun. She knew it was unwise of Jack to stand directly behind her and press his gun right against her back. With a quick twisting motion, she was able to grasp her opponent's hand and weapon and knock him to the ground with a well-aimed blow.
"You want me to communicate? Good. I'll tell you two things," continued the man called Andrew Moss. "Firstly, my game, as you call it, hasn't even started yet. And secondly --"
Nikki suspected that Jack wanted to strike her down immediately after he'd gotten rid of his second comment. But still, what resonated in his voice made her curious to hear at least part of what he had to say. But what Andrew was now speaking to her in a clear, unmistakable tone made Nikki's blood run cold. And although she should have overpowered the stranger behind her long ago, she remained in her position for precious seconds.
Only seconds later did a shot echo through the night, followed shortly afterward by a second.
xxx
"Well, if you had disappeared, I would have behaved differently," Nick claimed, indicating to the brunette woman that she should give him the cover for his pillow.
"I see; how?" the woman called Alexandra asked, handing him what he wanted and then flipping open the other pillow.
Nick took a deep breath and pulled the corners of his mouth down. "I'd auction off all your clothes on the internet, invite my buddies over, and party and drink around the clock."
Nick and Alexandra had been a couple for more than a year. They met during an investigation in which Alexandra, an analyst at BRIC, was able to provide a crucial clue. Since then, they had been inseparable, as they liked pulling each other's legs.
Alexandra laughed happily before becoming a little more serious again. "But Price isn't with Henderson either," she objected. "It's just a business relationship."
"Maybe it is, but they've known each other for ages. Besides, she's Price's cash cow."
"What did he do that made you think he was so weird anyway?"
"Just his whole behavior in a situation like this. It starts with me calling the cops all the time to see if there's anything new. And I wouldn't wait for the others; I'd try everything I could to find you myself. Even completely pointless actions like stapling wanted notices to trees or something like that. But this Joshua Price sits at home, cool as a cucumber, watching this TV producer doing sleazy search calls into the TV cameras and telling me the whole way to the former family home that we won't find his artist there anyway."
Alexandra briefly stopped making up her comforter, scratched her head in embarrassment, and replied: "That is a bit strange."
"But here's the best part," Nick announced, taking the white bedspread out of the closet. "When we were standing outside the house and heard noises, he suddenly broke in through the window like a madman and couldn't search the rooms fast enough."
"At least that's understandable," Alexandra pointed out.
"Maybe so. But it's not as if he then chatted with a homeless man and gave him his business card instead of being disappointed that we found a stranger and not Tanja Henderson in the house. On the way back, I almost felt he was relieved she wasn't in the house. I'm telling you, something's not right, Alex."
Alexandra left the bedroom momentarily but continued talking to Nick from the bathroom. "Was she maybe going to fire him?" she asked.
Nick rolled his eyes. "Could be. Or just --"
Alexandra came back into the bedroom. "You don't think he did something to her himself, do you?"
Nick took a deep breath and shrugged his shoulders before making the bed. "By now, I think anything is possible. Although he'd have to be a damn good actor."
She looked at him with her brown eyes and drew her eyebrows together. "Didn't you say he's from show business?"
Nick had to grin. "Well, I'll watch him tomorrow," he decided. "If there's something wrong with him, then the action at the family estate has shaken him up. He may be doing something now."
"Just come home safe and sound," the analyst replied.
Nick took a deep breath and nodded slowly. "I will."