The door was closed. Locked, too. Easing my back against the wall and out of the line of fire, I reached over for the knob. It barely budged. Maybe the whiz kid, Owen, was wrong. They never came. They weren’t inside.
Maybe.
I took out my key — everything was one key or another now — and unlocked the door as quietly as possible. It was a losing battle. There was simply no preventing the audible snap of the dead bolt retreating. In the silence of the hallway, the way the sound echoed, it might as well have been a giant gong announcing my arrival.
I waited for a moment, trying to listen again into my apartment while staying clear of the door. I could hear every beat of my heart, every swallow, every breath I was taking — but nothing more. Each second passing was all the more reason to believe no one was waiting for me on the other side.
Still, that didn’t stop me from putting the duffel down on the floor and pulling out the Glock to go with my SIG Sauer. I was like the title of a badass wannabe country song. “Double-Fisted with Pistols.”
I peeled my back off the wall, my shirt damp with sweat and sticking to my body. Damn, it’s hot.
Whether I was steeling my nerve or just stalling, I suddenly found myself counting back from ten. That, and thinking of Dante once again and the final line of the inscription he encountered on the Gates of Hell.
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
Chapter 41
I stepped back, raised my right foot, and let it fly, my heel hitting the door dead center with a deafening bam! The door flew open and my duffel bag quickly followed as I kicked it into the foyer to draw their fire. But the only noise I heard was the bag sliding across my hardwood floors.
My turn.
Crouched low with both guns drawn, I angled around the door frame, my eyes darting left, right, and everywhere. Nothing moved. No one was there.
Correction. No one was still there.
Creepy isn’t bursting into your apartment to see it ransacked. It’s bursting into your apartment to see everything as you left it... and still knowing someone’s been there.
Owen wasn’t wrong; I’d had company. The vibe was immediate. The proof came soon after.
I’d already done a quick sweep of every room to ensure I was truly alone when I circled back to my foyer and tried to think how they would think. Owen had summed it up. They’d want to know as much about me — and what I knew — as they could.
I started in my library and the easiest egg in the hunt, my laptop on my desk. Gone.
Next was the fruit bowl in my kitchen, where my mail piled up instead of fruit. All the mail was there, but at the bottom of the bowl was where I kept a spare key to the apartment, as well as one for my car and my office at Columbia.
All three keys? Gone.
By then, the old yew-wood chest in my bedroom was a foregone conclusion. I pulled open the top drawer on the right, which held my passport along with the lone weapon I kept in the apartment for protection, a 9mm Parabellum.
Gone and gone.
They had my hard drive. They had access to my home, my office, my car. They had one of my guns and the only way I could leave the country. Maybe they’d taken a few other things, but by that point I’d stopped looking.
Then I just stopped.
I froze in the middle of my bedroom, trying to listen. I’d heard something. The sound was faint but definitely there, or at least somewhere. I couldn’t tell where it was coming from.
There it was again.
I took a few wrong steps toward the door out to the living room, only to turn around when I heard it yet again. The sound was coming from my bathroom. I was positive I’d already looked in there. It wouldn’t hurt to check again, would it?
I sure as hell hope not.
Guns up and elbows locked, I put one foot in front of the other and moved toward the bathroom. After a few steps, I had the sound pegged. It was water. Not running, but dripping.
There was no need to channel Chuck Norris again. The door to my bathroom was wide open. The only kick I needed was one to my pants.
After a few deep breaths, I slowly peered around the hinges... and saw everything I’d seen the first time. My sink. My toilet. My shower. Nothing and no one else.
Ker-plop.
Immediately, my eyes went to the shower. The sliding doors were two-thirds closed. I could see enough through the frosted glass to know the boogeyman wasn’t standing behind them. I simply hadn’t turned off the water all the way after showering that morning.
I should’ve known, though. The déjà vu alone was enough of a tip-off. Those motherfuckers...
After a few steps forward to reach for the knob, I took one giant jump back. I wasn’t surprised about anything they’d taken from my apartment, not at all.
It was what they’d left behind.
Chapter 42
“Detective Lamont, please,” I said, although the “please” was hardly polite. It sounded more like Right away, dammit! I couldn’t help it.
Not that it changed the officer’s answer on the other end of the phone. “He’s off duty, do you want his voice mail?”
No, I want his actual voice. I stared down again at the business card Lamont had given me, even flipping it over twice, as if somehow that would make his cell phone number magically appear. It wasn’t printed on the card.
“Is there a way you can reach him for me?” I asked. “It’s important.”
“Oh, wait a minute,” said the officer, his voice trailing off as if he were reaching for something. “There’s a note here. Are you Trevor Mann?”
“Yes.”
“Hold on a second.”
It was more like thirty seconds, but I hardly cared so long as the next voice I heard was Lamont’s. On second thought...
“What the hell were you thinking?” he immediately barked, skipping right past any pleasantries. The way he said “hell,” it pretty much rhymed with “truck.” He was pissed.
I knew he was referring to Bethesda Terrace. There were a few ways he could’ve found out already, but I wasn’t interested in asking. I had my own line of questioning, beginning with “Where are you?”
“At home,” he answered. “They patched the call from the precinct. Where are you?”
“At home as well.”
“I tried calling.”
“I just got here,” I said. “More importantly, how fast can you get here?”
“Why?”
“Because you’re not going to believe this.”
“You might be surprised,” he said.
“Not as much as I was. Claire’s killer is in my bathtub.”
I was expecting any number of responses from Lamont, all of them falling under the heading of disbelief. Instead, I got sarcasm.
“Is the guy still dead or is he doing the backstroke now?” he asked.
“You think this is funny?”
“Do you hear me laughing?”
No, I didn’t. This was about more than Bethesda Terrace. I was missing something.
“They must have put him there,” I said. “They’re trying to frame me.”
“They, as in the two federal agents who just left my apartment twenty minutes ago?” he asked. “The ones you shot at in Central Park?”
“They were there to kill me. Christ, what the hell did they tell you?”