Page 91 of The Writer

At her feet, the cat sends up a soft purr. Denise bends and scratches him behind the ear. “What do you think, Quimby? Should Mama work with this man?”

The cat eyes Cordova, then weaves around Denise’s anklesseveral times in a slow figure eight, hops onto a chair, and licks a paw.

“I don’t speak cat,” Cordova says. “Is that a yes?”

Denise straightens up. “It means I’ll consider it.”

More than twenty floors below, an ambulance races down Central Park West; the chirp of its siren cuts through the air, momentarily loud and then gone.

Cordova picks up the champagne bottle, carefully fills both glasses, and hands one to her. He holds up his in a toast. “To committing the perfect crime.”

Although Denise holds up her glass, she doesn’t drink.

Cordova finishes his in three gulps and grins. “Worried I’ll poison you?”

“It crossed my mind.”

He wipes his mouth and sets his glass down on the table near the bottle. “Poison is too easy to find in the autopsy.”

Cordova drops low, wraps his arms around Denise Morrow’s legs, twists hard to the right, and rises back up, lifting her off the ground. With a grunt, he heaves the writer over the railing.

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

MORE THAN TWENTY stories up.

More than two hundred feet.

Falling at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared, she reaches the ground in approximately three and a half seconds. She screams all the way down and hits the pavement with a sickening thud. Her champagne glass shatters about six feet from her body, coating the sidewalk in glistening shards. A puddle of black blood slowly spreads beneath her.

“That’s for Declan, you pretentious bitch.”

Breathless, Cordova wants to watch what happens next but knows he can’t; he can’t risk anyone seeing him. As the first bystander’s scream comes from below, he stumbles back fromthe railing and trips over Denise’s cat, who’s jumped off the chair and is now running around the terrace yowling, a god-awful noise.

He gets back to his feet, knowing he has to move fast.

His own three-card monte.

Cordova retrieves his champagne flute, takes it to the kitchen, quickly washes and dries it, and places the glass back in the cabinet where he found it. He’s not worried about prints—he never took off his gloves. The only prints they’ll find on the bottle belong to Denise Morrow and whoever handled it before her.

His heart is beating wildly.

He goes to Denise Morrow’s couch and retrieves his cell phone—not his personal phone but the burner he bought earlier. His personal phone is currently in Harrison’s pocket along with Saffi’s and Daniels’s phones. If anyone feels the need to pull their location data for tonight, they’ll find all four of them at the Jets game. He powers the cell on just long enough to send a group text to the burners Saffi and Daniels are carrying—Go Jets!—then breaks the phone in half, slips the pieces in his pocket, and heads down the hall to Denise Morrow’s office. The damn cat follows him the whole time, meowing in distress.

In the office, he finds Denise’s MacBook powered on and beeping incessantly.

Beep!

Beep!

Beep! Beep! Beep!

“What’s that all about?” he asks the cat, but the cat is in nomood to answer. He’s staring up at Cordova with a look of hatred on his face.

Cordova opens a new Microsoft Word document and quickly types five words:

I’m sorry. I can’t anymore.

Not his best work, but hell, she’s the writer, not him. He makes the font a little bigger, centers the text, then clicks Print. Denise’s laser printer hums to life and spits out the page. He’ll leave the note under the champagne bottle.

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