Midnight Voices Read Online Free PDF Page A

were no witnesses. Next time he might not be so lucky, or his victim might not die.”
    Which meant that he might be right here, right now.
    Watching her?
    Could he know who she was?
    Of course not! She was being ridiculous. The man hadn’t even known Brad—hadn’t known his name, or anything about him. But that wasn’t true—he’d taken Brad’s wallet, so he’d known a lot about him if he’d taken the time to go through the wallet instead of just grabbing the money and credit cards. Brad’s driver’s license had been in the wallet, so he’d had their address. And pictures. There’d been pictures of her, and of the kids. At least the pictures of the kids were old ones: Ryan hadn’t been more than four, and Laurie six or seven. But Laurie, at least, would still be recognizable, and so would Caroline herself.
    Once again she scanned the people moving through the park, and felt an almost irresistible urge to grab the kids’ hands and take them back to the safety of the apartment.
    Paranoid!
    She was getting paranoid like Brad, and it had to stop before she turned into one of those terrified women who never let their children out of their sight for fear that something would happen to them. Caroline knew the fear was irrational; she’d read the statistics herself and knew that children were just as safe on the streets now as they’d ever been. Despite the hysteria of the media, there weren’t monsters lurking everywhere, waiting to victimize every child that came down the sidewalk. Those things happened, certainly, but they weren’t nearly as commonplace as Caroline had once believed. But on the other hand, she wasn’t ready to let Ryan go off by himself in the park. Not yet. In fact, she wasn’t ready to go into the park herself quite yet. At least not here. “Let’s just go down a few blocks, okay?” she said.
    She saw Laurie and Ryan lean forward just enough to glance at each other, and was almost certain they were rolling their eyes, disgusted that she was treating them like four-year-olds. Forcing herself to relax her grip on their hands, she crossed 77th and started south.
    Then, at the corner of 70th, it was Ryan who suddenly stopped, his hand tightening on hers. Caroline looked down at him questioningly.
    “Can we cross the street?” he asked.
    She glanced ahead, searching for whatever had made him stop. Had he seen something? Or some
one
?
    Or had someone been looking at him?
    Her heart skipped a beat, but as she scanned the smattering of people on the sidewalk ahead—there weren’t more than half a dozen of them—nothing looked amiss at all. Just a few people going about their business. Then she heard Laurie giggle. “Is there something going on that I don’t know about?”
    Laurie’s eyes twinkled. “He thinks witches and vampires live in the building across the street,” she said.
    “I do not!” Ryan flared, but his face turned beet red, belying his words.
    Caroline glanced up at the building across the street, and suddenly understood.
    The Rockwell.
    It was a big old pile of a building, combining enough different styles of architecture that most people referred to it as “The Grand Old Bastard of Central Park West.” One of the oldest buildings in the area, it was also showing its age, for the stone blocks from which it had been constructed had never been cleaned—at least not in Caroline’s memory—and the entire façade of the building was blackened with the accumulated grime of decades, if not centuries. As she gazed up at it, she was suddenly reminded of a house two blocks down the street in the town in New Hampshire where she’d grown up. It had been big—though nowhere near as big as the Rockwell, given that it had been designed for a single family—but it had been constructed out of the same kind of stone that covered the Rockwell, and that had been just as badly stained. The family that had built it had dwindled down to one old lady who lived alone in the huge stone