Read Online Shadowkiller by Wendy Corsi Staub - Free Book Online

use. I’d be happy to show you how to use the World Wide Web for your research. There are all sorts of things you can look up if you—”
    â€œNo, thank you,” Carrie cut in curtly, and turned away from the librarian’s expression of surprised dismay.
    She never returned to that branch. She didn’t need anyone looking over her shoulder, asking questions about where she was going, or why.
    All that research, conducted the old-fashioned way, paid off. She rarely got lost once she got to Manhattan, and hands-on experience quickly provided some additional navigational skills. For example, whenever she emerged from a subway station onto an unfamiliar midtown street, all she had to do was find the twin towers on the skyline. They acted as a reverse-compass point: if she was facing the towers, she was facing south.
    She liked looking at them—from far away, from close up, from inside out. She liked their symmetry, their unbroken lines and perfect right angles, their no-frills construction and gridlike facades. They didn’t seem to belong downtown. They should have been midtown buildings.
    Should have been . . .
    So damned many should-have-beens.
    But you’d drive yourself crazy dwelling on them. Carrie preferred to think about the many things that had gone right.
    Like the fact that just a few weeks after her arrival, she found herself working as a secretarial temp in one of the twin towers, having landed a short-term assignment at the global financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald. The assignment was extended by a week, and then another, and she’d been offered a permanent position in February.
    Now she, Carrie Robinson, was actually employed in one of the most famous buildings in the entire world. She belonged there. Heady stuff: almost—but not quite—heady enough to eclipse the real reason she was in New York.
    Lots of other positive things had happened since she got the job, leading up to the extraordinary weather tonight, which—she didn’t even realize at the time—was about to send even better things her way.
    The last time she ventured into Washington Square Park, she found it a frozen wasteland; tonight, it was a churning sea of pedestrians, skateboarders, Rollerbladers, joggers, musicians. Kids frolicked on the playground; dogs romped on the dog run; chin-stroking chess players pondered moves at the chess tables; withered elderly people in wheelchairs reminisced together as their nursemaids chatted with each other.
    Carrie hadn’t yet experienced a New York City spring, but she was, of course, familiar with the seasonal climate statistics. As she strolled along the paths inhaling the warm evening air, she reminded herself that it could very well snow again soon, and for another whole month, maybe even two. Yet it seemed jarring, in this warm weather, to see that the grass was dull and patchy and that the tree branches, like the flowerbeds, were bare, not even a hint yet of buds.
    Around the big fountain, she spotted hordes of chanting protesters and remembered that today was Super Tuesday—the presidential primary election. Here in New York, Gore was expected to capture the Democratic vote, and on the Republican front, McCain might give Bush a run for his money. But Carrie didn’t care much about politics. There were plenty of other things to worry about.
    Like Allison Taylor.
    Carrie had learned, last summer, that Allison had graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and moved to New York, presumably to find a job in the fashion industry.
    Where are you now, Allison?
    Casting her eyes up at the midtown west skyline, Carrie listened for her instincts.
    Was it her gut telling her that Allison was probably out there—up there—somewhere? Or was it just common sense? Most of the showrooms were in the West Thirties, in the garment district.
    Carrie had spent hours wandering that neighborhood when she first got into town, scanning the face