Chapter 2 - The Missing Tenant
The silence in the bedroom suddenly felt heavier than the mahogany doors locking us in.
I set the coffee cup down so hard the porcelain rattled against the silver tray. “That’s impossible. I don't know any Sarah Chen. I live alone in apartment 4B. The only person who ever calls my landline is my landlord reminding me about the past-due rent.”
“Sarah Chen lived in 4C,” Leo countered, his voice steady, immovable. “Right down the hall from you. She moved in six months ago under an alias, but our surveillance cameras caught her coming out of the elevator while you were carrying your groceries up last Tuesday. You passed each other within three feet.”
My mind raced backward, sifting through the blur of exhaustion, double shifts at the county hospital, and the crushing anxiety of my financial collapse. Last Tuesday. A woman in a charcoal trench coat, her head ducked down beneath an umbrella, walking quickly down the dimly lit hallway of the fourth floor.
“I didn't look at her face,” I whispered, the realization sending a shiver down my spine. “People in my building keep to themselves. Nobody makes eye contact in a hallway smelling of radiator steam and garbage.”
“Maybe not,” Leo said, pulling a folded slip of paper from his pocket and placing it beside the photograph. “But according to the telephone company records pulled by our tech team, her phone pinged a three-minute outgoing call to your apartment at 11:42 PM on Thursday night. Exactly twenty minutes before Dominic was shot.”
I unfolded the paper. There it was—my own phone number, printed in neat digital ink, stamped with a timestamp that coincided with the night I had fallen asleep on my living room rug with a textbook open across my chest.
“I was asleep,” I said, though even to my own ears, it sounded like a weak defense. “I didn't answer a phone call at midnight.”
“The call wasn't answered,” Leo corrected. “It went straight to voicemail. But the audio file was retrieved from her carrier before her cloud account was scrubbed clean yesterday morning.”
Before I could demand to know what was on that voicemail, a low, gravelly groan cut through the room.
We both turned.
Dominic Rossi was shifting against the pillows. His eyes, the color of a stormy Atlantic, fluttered open. The heavy fog of painkillers and fever had cleared, replaced by an acute, razor-sharp awareness. He didn't look like a dying man anymore; he looked like a predator waking up in a cage, immediately taking stock of every variable in the room.
His gaze passed over Leo and locked instantly onto me.
“She’s looking at the paper, Leo,” Dominic said, his voice raspy from disuse but carrying an unmistakable authority that commanded the entire room.
“Boss, I was just briefing her on—”
“Let her speak,” Dominic interrupted, pushing his uninjured shoulder slightly upward against the headboard. He winced, a brief flicker of pain crossing his features before his discipline locked it away behind a mask of cold granite. He stared at me directly. “You look pale, Nurse Hayes. Did Leo tell you about your neighbor?”
“He told me a dead woman called my phone,” I said, my voice rising slightly, the professional detachment slipping away to reveal the raw nerve beneath. “He told me I’m sitting in the middle of a war between a pharmaceutical CEO and an underground syndicate because of an apartment building where half the locks don't even work.”
Dominic didn't flinch at my tone. In fact, the corners of his mouth twitched upward in a humorless, sardonic ghost of a smile.
“Sarah Chen isn't dead yet,” Dominic said quietly. “If she were, her body would have turned up in the East River by now. Vance’s cleaners are thorough, but they aren't that fast.”
“Then where is she?” I demanded, taking a step toward the bed, forgetting every single one of Leo’s strict rules about speaking only when spoken to.
Dominic’s gray eyes narrowed slightly, measuring me with chilling precision. “That is the exact question we are going to answer together. Because the last place Sarah's phone signaled its GPS coordinates before it went offline wasn't the docks, and it wasn't Vance’s corporate tower.”
He paused, letting the silence stretch until the rhythmic beep of the monitor was the only sound in the room.
May you like
“It was your apartment.”
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