‘‘We can protect witnesses,’’ he said.
‘‘They’re not coming after me, Lieutenant. I got here too late.’’
‘‘But she contacted you,’’ Boldt reminded. ‘‘They may know that. How often do they sweep the station for surveillance devices?’’
‘‘That’s ridiculous.’’
‘‘I’m willing to trade tapes, Ms. McNeal,’’ Boldt repeated, hand on the door handle. ‘‘Offer stands. The offer of protection stands as well.’’
‘‘Someone to drive me home would be nice. I’ll take you up on that.’’
‘‘Well, that’s a start,’’ he said. ‘‘You think about the rest.’’
CHAPTER 45
tevie arrived at her apartment exhausted and afraid. Melissa had gone missing, Klein had been found dead, and the link between them was obvious, and worse, a link that Stevie herself had pursued despite warnings. She locked her apartment’s front door behind her and armed the security system. She drank Armagnac from a snifter, the bottle clutched under an arm, as she first locked and checked her bedroom door, then the door to the bathroom suite, before finally running bath water and undressing. The drink did nothing to quell the image of Klein’s body slumped in the chair. She could still feel the woman atop her in the mud, lukewarm and stiff, her own sense of helplessness trapped beneath it—not a person, not any longer. She had known this woman, she had spoken to her. It was no longer an image, but something warm and visceral.
She stayed in the tub for a long, long time, running the warm water continuously and allowing it to spill out the overflow drain. She scrubbed and soaked but never felt clean, the alcohol as warm inside her as the water on her skin. She refilled the snifter with slippery fingers hoping to purge her demons, but each time she closed her eyes she felt Klein on top of her. She caught herself wishing that she lived with somebody, wishing for a roommate or lover or husband, some companion to pamper or comfort her. Her aloneness caught up to her and caused an ache that nothing could reach, nothing could numb.
At last she dragged herself out and toweled off, surrounding herself in a sumptuous terrycloth robe, wondering why she allowed herself to feel so vulnerable and threatened. She let herself out of her sanctuary to where she had a commanding view of the Sound and the city’s night skyline. She could tell it was the weekend by the number of small boats out there. She longed to be tired, but this was not a night for granted wishes. She thought of all that shipping traffic coming and going, of all the thousands of containers en route from one place to another, the body bags hauled out of the recovered container, the families of the victims, the chain of events begun by that discovery. She wanted them all back; she didn’t give a damn about the power or impact of the story; she wanted Melissa safe and warm and sharing this view. She ached for her return. She cried about it, cried hard, finishing up the contents of the snifter and looking around for the bottle that she had left by the tub. She heard voices and wondered if they were in her head or far below on the street. She cried some more.
Feeling chilled, she checked to see if she’d left any windows open, walking around the darkened apartment in a state of shock and remorse. The night air that blew off the Sound was her favorite part of the apartment, though on this night she sought warmth. She found nothing open, except the front of the robe. She tied the robe shut, checked the lock on the balcony—something she never bothered to do, being she was the penthouse—and headed to bed.
She saw a shadow out there and jumped, only to realize it was one of her tropical plants in the sea breeze.
The walk back to the bedroom seemed to take too long and included a stop at the front door just to make sure. She wished she had something more than a keyed entry, dead bolt or not, but the building regulations specifically prohibited any such extravagance. (The building’s old-timers claimed this resulted from a lawsuit brought by the family of a man who had died of a heart attack. Though he had called 911, he had left his apartment door chained from the inside, delaying the response time of the emergency service.) The hallway to the master bedroom stretched impossibly long past a coat closet, a linen closet, a guest suite and a half bath. Never before had it seemed so far away. She locked her bedroom door, slipped out of the robe and into a pair of cotton pajamas. The pajamas held their own significance for her—she usually slept with no clothes on. She refilled the snifter and took it to bed with her, knowing she must be drunk, or close to it, but not feeling anything. This she also took as a signal because Armagnac typically flattened her. Afraid to make the room dark, she watched TV, surfing from one channel to the next, in what turned out to be an endless parade of commercials. In the black screen pulses and pauses between her switching channels she saw only Klein’s discolored face and swollen tongue. She saw death. Time seemed to be both moving slowly and running out at the same time. She caught her heart racing and thought maybe the booze was having some effect. She drank some more and decided it was not.
The phone became her enemy for it teased her, taunted her. Anyone she called would respond—she felt certain of it—from friends who lived nearby, to half the Seattle Police force; but she wouldn’t pick it up, she wouldn’t admit to her own fear, much less speak it to another. She could imagine the resulting laughter behind her back, the jokes that would circulate in the industry. There was no way she was going to subject herself to that. Boldt had given her his card—she could invent something she had remembered from Klein’s, she could drag him into a hopelessly long visit until his presence convinced her she was safe or the booze finally wore her down.
As it happened, she simply fell asleep, the television remote cupped in her hand, one of the independent stations airing a colorized film. She slept half sitting up, her neck bent awkwardly, her head arched as if falling. She slept with the snifter half empty and her mind half full, the bedside light ablaze, the television’s volume muted—for a string of ads during which she had passed out—a cotton blanket pulled up to her waist, the bedside clock counting the passing minutes. She slept half in, half out of consciousness, a deadly combination of visions of Klein and an alcohol-induced coma. The dreams, vivid and dangerous, leaving her only partially asleep and very much in the grips of an endless nightmare.
Held down by the wine, she awoke to the vague but distinctive rumble of the building’s elevator, believing it at first to be the growl of a ship’s horn, and wondering why either would awaken her. The clock: 3:20, a small light indicating A.M. She shook her head gently awake. Her penthouse was on a controlled floor; the elevator required an electronic key to access the floor, and only she and the building’s doorman or night watchman had access. Not even maintenance. But why would Edwardo, the night watchman, come up unannounced at this hour? It seemed inconceivable to her. Unexplainable.
The digital display switched to 3:21, and to her it was as if someone had winked at her. Slowly her mind came into focus, the sounds sharpening. It was just plain wrong: the wrong hour, the wrong floor—everything wrong. Her ears pricked, suddenly able to hear everything: the ventilation, the city hum, her own breathing, her heart pounding in her chest. She found herself out of bed and moving wraithlike across the floor, a specter of fluid pajama and flailing limb dimly lit by ambient light that slipped in through shuttered blinds.
Her fingers deftly turned and unlocked the dead bolt to the bedroom door, no thought to the added security this extra door provided. If that corridor had seemed long before, it seemed twice as long now, extending from her toward the front of the apartment like a tunnel. Her bare feet captured the raised nap of the carpet. She remembered fighting the decorator over this carpet—the station didn’t want to go the extra nine dollars a yard, but the decorator’s job was to please her. She scoffed at such notions—self-serving importance, the struggle for absolute control. What did any of it matter—the quality of the carpet included—as she hurried down the hallway fearing for her safety?