“It’s a nice idea, but death would be a nasty setback,” Lucas said.
“Won’t happen,” she said confidently. “I’ve got eight cops, twenty-four hours a day. No way he’ll get to me.”
Or if he got to her, there was no way he’d escape, Lucas thought. “I hope they’re setting you up with some sort of emergency alarm.”
“Oh, sure. We’re working that out right now. It’s like a beeper and I wear it on my belt. I never take it off. As soon as I hit it, everybody comes running.”
“Don’t get overconfident. Carla Ruiz never saw him coming, you know. If she hadn’t been worried about going out on the street alone and if she hadn’t been carrying that Mace, she’d be dead.”
“Don’t worry, Lucas. I’ll be fine.” McGowan’s voice dropped a notch. “I’d like to see you, you know, outside of work. I was going to mention something, but now, with twenty-four-hour surveillance . . .”
“Sure,” he said hastily. “It wouldn’t be good if the chief or even your people found out how close we are.”
“Great,” she said. “I’ll see you, good old Red Horse.”
“Take care of yourself.”
Detectives from narcotics, vice, and sex set up the direct surveillance, backed by out-of-uniform patrolmen who were assigned unmarked cars on streets adjacent to McGowan’s. Lucas stayed away the first night, when the posts were established. Too many cops, too much coming and going, would draw attention from the neighborhood. The second night he went out with a vice cop named Henley.
“You ever seen her place?” Henley asked.
“No. Pretty nice?”
“Not bad. Small older house across the street from Minnehaha Creek. Two stories. Lot and a half. There’s a big side yard on the east with a couple of apple trees in it. There’s another house on the west, maybe thirty feet between them, all open. Must have set her back a hundred thou.”
“She’s got some bucks,” Lucas said.
“Face like hers on TV, I believe it.”
“She said you’re on both sides?”
“Yeah. We’ve got a place directly across the street in front and one across the alley in back,” Henley said. “We’re watching from the attics in both places.”
“We renting?”
“The guy on the Minnehaha side didn’t want any money, said he’d be happy to do it. We told him we could be there a couple months, he said no problem.”
“Nice guy.”
“Old guy. Retired architect. I think he likes the company. Lets us put stuff in the refrigerator, use the kitchen.”
“How about in back?”
“That’s an old couple. They were going to give us the space, but they looked like they were hurting for money, so we rented. Couple hundred bucks a month, gave them two months. They were happy to get it.”
“Funny. That’s a pretty rich neighborhood,” Lucas said.
“I was talking to them, they’re not doing so good. The old man said they lived too long. They retired back in the sixties, both had pensions, they figured they were set for life. Then the inflation came along. Everything went up. Taxes, everything. They’re barely keeping their heads above water.”
“Hmmp. Which one are we going to?”
“The architect’s. We park on the other side of the creek and walk across a bridge. We come up behind a row of houses along the water, then into the back of his house. Keeps us off the street in front of the place.”
The architect’s house was large and well-kept, polished wood and Oriental rugs, artifacts of steel and bronze, beautifully executed black-and-white etchings and drypoints hung on the eggshell walls. The vice cop led the way up four flights of stairs into a dimly lit, unfinished attic space. Two cops sat on soft chairs, a telephone by their feet, binoculars and a spotting scope between them. A mattress lay on the floor to one side of the room. Beside it, a boombox played easy-listening music.
“How you doing?” one of the cops asked. The other one nodded.
“Anything going on?” Lucas asked.
“Guy walked his dog.”
Lucas walked up to the window and looked out. The window had been covered from the inside with a thin, shiny plastic film. From the street, the window would appear to be transparent, the space behind it unoccupied.
“She home?”
“Not yet. She does the ten-o’clock news, cleans up, usually goes out for something to eat. Then she comes home, unless she has a date. For the next couple of weeks, she’s coming straight home.”
Lucas sat down on the mattress. “I think—I’m not sure—but I think if he hits her, he’ll come after dark but before midnight. He’s careful. He won’t want to walk around at a time when people will notice him, but he’ll want the dark to hide his face. I expect he’ll try to get in the house while she’s gone and jump her when she comes back. That’s the way he did it with Ruiz. The other possibility would be to catch her right at the door as she’s going in. Sap her, push her right inside. If he did it right, it would look like he was meeting her at the door.”
“We thought he might try some kind of con,” said one of the surveillance cops. “You know, go up to the door, say he’s a messenger from the station or something. Get her to open the door.”
“It’s a possibility,” Lucas said. “I still like the idea—”
“Here she comes,” said the cop at the window.
Lucas got up and half-crawled, half-walked to the window and looked out. A red Toyota sports car pulled up to the curb directly in front of McGowan’s house, and a moment later she got out, carrying a shopping bag. She self-consciously didn’t look around and marched stiffly up to the house, unlocked the door, and went inside.
“In,” said the first surveillance cop. The second shone a miniature flashlight on his wristwatch and counted. Thirty seconds. A minute. A minute and a half. A minute forty-five.
The phone rang and the first surveillance cop picked it up.
“Miss McGowan? Okay? Good. But keep the beeper on until you go to bed, okay? Have a good night.”
“You coming up every night?” Henley asked casually.
“Most nights, midweek. For three hours or so, nine to midnight or one o’clock, like that,” Lucas said.
“You do it for too long, you wind up brain dead.”
“And if the surveillance doesn’t do it, this fuckin’ elevator music will,” Lucas said. The easy-listening music still oozed from the boombox.
One of the surveillance cops grinned and nodded at his partner. “Compromise,” he said. “I like rock, he can’t stand it. He likes country and I won’t listen to all that hayseed hillbilly tub-thumping. So we compromised.”
“Could be worse,” Henley chipped in.
“Not possible,” Lucas said.
“Ever listen to New Age?”
“You win,” Lucas conceded. “It could be worse.”
• • •
“Oh, God damn, folks, she’s doing it again.”
“What?” Lucas crawled off the mattress toward the window.
“We thought maybe she didn’t realize there’s a crack in the curtains,” the cop said. His partner had his binoculars fixed on McGowan’s house and said, “C’mon, babee.” Lucas nudged the first cop away from the spotting scope and peered through it. The scope was focused on a space in the curtains on a second-story window. There was nothing to see at first, then McGowan walked through a shaft of light coming from what Lucas supposed was a bathroom. She was brushing her hair, her arms crossed behind her head. She was wearing a pair of white cotton underpants. Nothing else.
“Look at that,” whispered the cop with the binoculars.
“Give me the fuckin’ things,” said Henley, trying to wrench them away.
“Goddamn one-hundred-percent all-American TV-reporter pussy,” the surveillance cop said reverently, passing the binoculars to the vice cop. “You think she knows we’re watching?”
She knows, Lucas thought, watching her face. It was flushed. Annie McGowan was turned on. “Probably not,” he said aloud.
Five days of surveillance produced nothing. No suspicious cars checked her home, no approaches on the street. Nothing but falling leaves and cold winds rattling the tiles on the architect’s roof. The curtain never closed.