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26
Then
AROUND FOUR MONTHS AFTER THE MURDER, EMMA FINALLYvisited the site where it happened. She’d originally intended to go in the days immediately following, as she thought seeing the location firsthand would help quiet her fraught imagination and make it stop creating endless, horrible snapshots of the scene in her mind.
And she’d hoped, too, that being there in person might jog something in her memory. Perhaps a street number would ring a bell, or she’d notice an establishment Derrick had referenced in the past, and finally his presence in SoHo that night would be explained. And finally, too, there’d be a lead for Detective Lennox to run with.
Though she might not be prostrate with grief, she certainly wanted the killer caught.
But she changed her mind about going as soon as sherealized the police were suspicious of her. Maybe it was a cliché that criminals frequently return to the scene of the crime, but if the NYPD were indeed keeping tabs on her, she didn’t need to be observed anywhere near the garage or alleyway.
In July, though, things seemed to shift. The police had seemingly lost interest in her, and the sense she’d had of being followed passed. So Emma headed there one hot afternoon from her uptown apartment, taking a couple of different trains just in case.
She walked slowly along Houston then turned onto Greene Street, her dress sticky with perspiration and her heart thrumming between her ears. Nothing she saw triggered even a sliver of a memory, though. She still had no idea what would have brought Derrick there, particularly that late in the evening.
This meant she still couldn’t hazard a guess about who could have killed him or why. If it was someone he knew, then based on everything she’d read about homicides, the motive must have been vengeance or lust or greed, but she couldn’t imagine how one of those compulsions had played out in a disastrous way for him. There were people who’d disliked Derrick, but not enough, it seemed, to kill him; he might have been fantasizing about an affair, but it apparently hadn’t blossomed into anything; and his wealth at the time had been tied up in two paintings he had no intention of selling.
At last Emma reached the parking garage and then a little farther ahead, the small alleyway where he’d been found.She stared down the short length of it, the brick walls caked with grime and soot.
To her surprise, she’d broken down and cried, thinking of him lying on the ground as his life slipped away. Because despite all the ugliness in their relationship, she’d once loved him, married him, and hoped for the best with him.
