The Skin Collector by Jeffery Deaver

Author:Jeffery Deaver [Deaver, Jeffery]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Hachette Digital, Inc.
Published: 2014-05-13T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 35

A good workout.

As he walked from his health club back to his apartment on East 52nd Street to collect his car, Braden Alexander was counting the crunches he’d done. He’d given up after a hundred.

Counting them, that is. The crunches themselves? Plenty. He’d forgotten how many.

Alexander had a sedentary job – writing code for one of the big investment firms (one that actually had not been the subject of an investigation) – and the thirty-seven-year-old was determined to stay in good shape, despite the eight-hour days at his workstation – and the one-hour reverse commute to Jersey, where his company’s IT headquarters building was located.

And the curls? With the thirty-pound bells? Maybe two hundred. Damn, he sure felt it. He decided he’d take it a bit easier tomorrow. No need to push too far. It was more important to be consistent, Alexander knew. Every day he made the trek from his apartment west to the health club on Sixth Avenue. Every day, the stationary bike and curls and squats and, yeah, crunches, crunches, crunches … What do we think, 150?

Probably.

He glanced at himself in a window and thought: The weight’s okay. His skin seemed a little pale. Not so good, that. He and his family would get to an island soon. Maybe after Thanksgiving. Anyway, who wouldn’t look sickly on a day like this? The sleet had let up but the light was gray and anemic. He was actually looking forward to getting into his cubicle. He found it cozy, a word he wouldn’t use with anybody but his wife.

Today there was something else to look forward to. He’d be picking up a bicycle at his brother’s house in Paramus. Joey’d gotten a new mountain bike and was giving his old one to Alexander’s son. The boy was ecstatic and had texted twice from school, just to see how ‘everything was going?’

The impatience of youth.

He looked south and caught sight of the new Trade Tower, or whatever it was going to be called. He’d been working at his first job, crunching code for a bank, when the attack had happened, 2001. The new structure was impressive, architecturally more interesting than the simple rectangles of its predecessors. Still, nothing could ever match their grandeur, their style.

What a time that was. His first son had been born the day after the attack. Alexander and his wife had abandoned plans to name him after her father and had picked instead Emery, after the architectural firm Emery Roth & Sons, which along with Minoru Yamasaki had designed the original Trade Towers.

Alexander continued east back toward his apartment, where he’d collect his car and head to work. As he paused for a red light he happened to look back and caught a glimpse of someone behind him, head down. Some guy, young, in dark clothes and stocking cap. A bag or backpack on his shoulder. Was he the same one who’d been sitting in a coffee shop across the street from the health club?

He following me?

Alexander had lived in the city for fifteen years.

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