"More like a lick," she said, shuddering. "I can remember it, like a dream."
"What about the actual entry?" Lucas asked. "Did he break the door?"
There hadn't been a sound, she said, and the door had been untouched, so he must have had a key. But she was the only one with a key-and the building manager, of course.
"What's he like? The manager?"
"Older man…"
They went through the list: who had the key, who could get it, who could copy it. More people than she'd realized. Building employees, a cleaning woman. How about valet-parking places? A few valets-"But I changed the locks again after the burglary. He'd have to get my key twice."
"Gotta be somebody in the building," Connell said to Lucas. She'd grabbed his wrist to get his attention. She was sick, but she was a strong woman, and her grip had the strength of desperation.
"If somebody's actually coming back," Lucas said. "But whoever it was is a pro. He knew what he wanted and where it was. He didn't rip the place apart. A cat burglar."
"A cat burglar?" Jensen said doubtfully.
"I'll tell you something: movies romanticize cat burglars, but real cat burglars are cracked," Lucas said. "They get off on creeping apartments while the residents are home. Most burglars, the last thing they want is to run into a home owner. Cat burglars get off on the thrill. Every one of them does dope, cocaine, speed, PCP. Quite a few of them have rape records. A lot of them eventually kill somebody. I'm not trying to scare you, but that's the truth."
"Oh, God…"
"The way the attack happened would suggest that the guy knows about you and Mr. Hart," Connell said. "Do you talk to anybody in your building about him?"
"No, I really don't have any close friends in the building, other than just to say hello to," Jensen said. Then, "Last night was the first time Evan stayed over. It was actually the first time we'd slept together. Ever. It's like whoever it is, knew about us."
"Did you tell anybody at work that he was coming over?"
"I have a couple of friends who knew we were getting close…"
"We'll need their names," Lucas said. And to Connelclass="underline" "Somebody at the office might have occasional access to her purse; they could get the keys that way. We should check all the apartments that adjoin hers, too. People in her hallway." To Jensen: "Do you feel any attention from anybody in your apartment? Just a little creepy feeling? Somebody who seems sort of anxious to meet you, or talk to you, or just looks you over?"
"No, no, I don't. The manager is a heck of a nice guy. Really straight. I don't mean, you know, repressed, or weird, or a Boy Scout leader or anything. He's like my dad. God, it gives me the shakes, thinking about somebody watching me," she said.
"How about an outsider?" Lucas asked. "Is there a building across the street where you could be watched from? A Peeping Tom?"
She shook her head. "No. There's a building across the street-that's the building where that woman was killed last week-but I'm on the top floor, which is higher even than their roof," Jensen said. "I look right across their roof into the park, and the other side of the park is residential. There's nothing as high as me on the other side of the park. Besides, that's a mile away."
"Okay…" Lucas studied her for a moment. She was very different than the other victims. Watching her, Lucas felt a small chord of doubt. She was fashionable, she was smart, she was tough. There was no hint of deference, no air of wistfulness, no feeling of time and years slipping away.
"I've got to get out of the apartment," Jensen said. "Could a policeman come with me while I get some things?"
"You can have a cop with you until we get the guy," Lucas said. He reached forward to touch her arm. "But I hope you won't leave. We could move you to another apartment inside the building, and give you escorts: armed policewomen in plain clothes. We'd like to trap the guy, not scare him off."
Connell joined in: "We don't really have any leads, Ms. Jensen. We're almost reduced to waiting until he kills somebody else, and hoping we find something then. This is the first break we've had."
Jensen stood up and turned away, shivered, looked down at Lucas, and said, "How much chance is there that he'd… get to me?"
Lucas said, "I won't lie to you: there's always a chance. But it's small. And if we don't get him, he might outwait our ability to escort you and then come after you. We had a case a few years ago where a guy in his middle twenties went after a woman who'd been his ninth-grade teacher. He'd brooded about her all that time."
"Oh, Jesus…" Then, suddenly: "All right. Let's do it. Let's get him."
The uniformed cop who'd been in the waiting room rapped on the door, stuck his head inside, and said to Jensen, "Dr. Ramihat is looking for you."
Jensen took Lucas's forearm, her fingers digging in, as they went back down the hall to the waiting area. They found the surgeon greedily sucking on a cigarette and eating a Twinkie. "There's an awful lot of damage," he said, in light Indian accents. "There aren't any guarantees, but we've got him more or less stable and we've stopped the bleeding. Unless we get something unexpected, his chances are good. There'll be an infection problem, but he's in good physical shape and we should be able to handle it."
Jensen collapsed in a chair, face in her hands, began to blubber. Ramihat patted her on the shoulder with one hand, ate the second Twinkie with his cigarette hand, and winked at Lucas. Connell pulled Lucas aside and said quietly, "If we can keep her in line, we got him."
They spent the rest of the morning setting it up: Sloan came in to work with Lucas, Connell, and Greave in checking people with access to Jensen's keys. Five women from intelligence, narcotics, and homicide would rotate as close escorts.
After some discussion, Jensen decided that she could stay in the apartment as long as an escort was always with her. That way, she wouldn't have to move anything out, and open the possibility that if the killer was in the building, she'd be seen doing it.
Hart came out of surgery at three o'clock in the afternoon, hanging on.
CHAPTER
23
Koop was still in a rage as he fled the lakes. He couldn't think of the guy in bed with Jensen without hyperventilating, without choking the truck's steering wheel, gripping it, screaming at the windshield…
In calmer moments, he could still close his eyes and see her as she was that first night, lying on the sheets, her body pressing up through the nightgown…
Then he'd see her on Hart again, and he'd begin screaming, strangling the steering wheel. Crazy. But not entirely gone. He was sane enough to know that the cops might be coming for him. Somebody might have seen him getting in the truck, might have his license number.
Koop had done his research in his years at Stillwater: he knew how men were caught and convicted. Most of them talked to the cops when they shouldn't. Many of them kept scraps and pieces of past crimes around them-television sets, stereos, watches, guns, things with serial numbers.
Some of them kept clothing with blood on it. Some of them left blood behind, or semen.
Koop had thought about it. If he was taken, he swore to himself that he would say nothing at all. Nothing. And he would get rid of everything he wore or used in any crime: he would not give the cops a scrap to hang on to. He would try to build an alibi-anything that a defense attorney could use.
He was still in psychological flight from the attack on Hart when he dumped the coat and hat. The coat was smeared with Hart's blood, a great liverish-black stain. He wrapped it, with the hat, in a garbage bag and dumped it with a pile of garbage bags on a residential street in Edina. The garbage truck was three blocks away. The bag would be at the landfill before noon. He threw the plain-pane glasses out the car window into the high grass of a roadside ditch.
Turned on the radio, found an all-news station. Bullshit, bullshit, and more bullshit. Nothing about him.