Midnight Voices Read Online Free Page B

get to it, I’m not going to get done until dinner. See you Tuesday.”
    As she hung up the phone and turned back to Laurie and Ryan, Caroline felt a little better, cheered by the prospect of seeing her old friends again on Tuesday. Unless, of course, the lunch turned into nothing more than a bitter taste of what life would be like if Brad hadn’t gone running in the park that night.

CHAPTER 2
    “Let’s walk down a few blocks,” Caroline said. They were at the corner of 77th and Central Park West, and even though the light had changed and the north-south traffic had come to a halt, Caroline stayed on the curb, clutching her children as if they were toddlers instead of near-adolescents. As she stared across the street to the spot where Brad had entered the park on the night he’d been killed, she told herself she was being stupid, that there was nothing threatening about the spot at all. Everyone who’d ever been mugged in the park had entered it somewhere; what was she going to do, avoid the park completely for the rest of her life? Keep herself and Laurie and Ryan penned inside the apartment because she was afraid to go outside?
    “You don’t have to go with me, Mom,” Ryan said, trying to tug loose from her grip. “I know where I’m going. Why don’t you and Laurie just go to the zoo?”
    Because I don’t want the same thing to happen to you that happened to your father,
Caroline thought, but managed to let her voice betray not even a hint of the thought. Instead she smiled brightly. Too brightly? “Embarrassed to be seen with your old mother?” she asked, and saw by the flush of Ryan’s face that she’d hit the nail squarely on the head.
    “All the other guys’ll be with their dads,” Ryan blurted out, and his flush immediately deepened. Then he swiped at his eyes with his sleeve, in a not-quite-successful attempt to conceal their dampness.
    “Hey, it’s okay.” Caroline squatted down so her eyes were level with her son’s. Suddenly he looked far younger than his ten years, and the pain in his eyes tore at her heart. “I know it’s not easy,” she said, resisting an urge to wrap her arms around him. “But we’ll get through this. I promise we will.”
    Ryan’s jaw trembled, but then he bit his lip and drew slightly away from her. “I’m okay,” he muttered.
    But it was so obvious that he wasn’t okay that for a moment—just a moment—Caroline considered letting him go on to the playground by himself. After all, it was one of the ball fields down at the south end of the park that they were going to, not the ones farther up.
    The exact opposite direction from the way Brad had gone that night.
    But then she scanned the park, already filling up with people brought out by the perfect spring morning. Was it possible the man who’d killed Brad was here? They’d never caught him, never even had a clue. And the detective in charge of the case—a big, bluff, sad-eyed Sergeant named Frank Oberholzer up at the 20th Precinct on West 82nd—had explained that they probably wouldn’t catch the killer. “The thing is, it doesn’t look like your husband was a specific target. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. So we don’t have much to go on unless we get a bunch more just like it. Same M.O., same area, same time of day. Then we got a pattern, and we got something to look for. But if it was just some junkie looking for quick cash, there won’t be a pattern—he’ll hit someone else, but it won’t necessarily be a jogger, or even in the park. Hell, he might already be sitting out on Rikers for something else, but unless he talks, there’s no way we’re going to find out what he did.”
    “And he could just as easily still be in the park, looking for someone else,” Caroline had countered. Oberholzer at least had had the decency to tell her the truth.
    “He could be. But if he is, and if he does the same thing again, then we’ve got a shot at him. With your husband, there