several other clubs the agent named where Lane had worked were all that type. How many such bars and clubs existed within the United States? Thousands? Hundreds of thousands?
Garreth sighed. Finding her in North Beach had been simple compared with the task that faced him now. Her bite gave him all the time in the world for hunting her but his bank account did not. He needed to find her before his money ran out. And he knew too little about her to narrow down her possible avenues of escape.
The blinking light on his answering machine caught his eye. Anger flared in him. Someone had been in the apartment today and plugged in the phone he unplugged on coming home from the hospital. Police, he felt sure… admitted by the landlord for a “welfare check” since he left untouched the notes they put on his door yesterday afternoon and evening. The department was looking for him, of course…not out of concern this time but to talk about the shooting. Something he could not endure right now.
As he had yesterday, Garreth unplugged the phone and deleted the messages without playing them back. Even if one concerned Harry. He could not bear to hear if Harry died, nor deserve to know if he lived.
Turning his back on the phone, he resumed considering what he had about Lane. Names, for one. She called herself Barber now, but the name on that envelope had been Bieber, and that on the car registration and driver’s license, Pfeifer. They sounded German. Did she choose those names from familiarity with them? Could she have come from an area populated by people of German descent?
As if an answer to that helped. There had to be hundreds of Germanic settlements across the country. Tomorrow — well, Monday, he needed to find someone who could tell him where large Germanic groups had settled. Maybe one with a 67-something or something-67-something ZIP code.
Or perhaps he could learn all he needed the one place she might shed her facade…home. He still had a couple of hours to daylight, time to search her apartment. Except…could he get in? It was a dwelling and his invitation in came before she killed him. Now…
Every fiber of him recoiled at the thought of facing that fire again. Better to take no chances and get someone to invite him in.
He made himself lie down on his pallet and rest…but not let daylight pull him into sleep. At eight o’clock he looked up the number of Lane’s landlady and called her. “Mrs. Armour, this is Inspector Mikaelian. We met at your home last week.”
“And you’re just as much an early bird today.” She paused. “Some people sleep in on Sunday.”
In the mild tone of reprimand he heard what he had not before, a touch of southern belle. So…give her a touch of gentleman in return. “I know that, ma’am, and I’m so sorry to disturb you…” Though picking up on the second ring revealed she had been awake. “…but this is a murder inquiry and we really need to look at her apartment again. Can you meet me there with the key?”
“I already gave a key to an Inspector Takananda,” she said in a puzzled voice.
“Yes, ma’am, but my partner is out on another case and left the key locked in his desk. It’s an big imposition, I know, but this is important.”
Her sigh came over the wire. “All right.”
He took the bus, leaving his conspicuous car at home. Experimentally approaching Lane’s door confirmed his fears about entering. Fire licked out at him before he even touched it. He backed off to wait for the landlady.
Mrs. Amour drove up minutes later dressed for church. Rolling down her window, she held out the key. “Will you return this as soon as possible? It’s the only other one I have to the apartment.”
Not helpful. Leaning down to the window, he pulled off his glasses, and, despite the searing memory of what this did to Harry, stared her in the eyes. “Please walk through with me.”
“All right.” She climbed out of the car.
He put back on his glasses. “I can see you’re going to church so I really appreciate this. It’s so helpful to have someone along who’s familiar with the apartment.”
She looked simultaneously flattered and impatient. “Will it take long?”
“It shouldn’t.” Once he was in, she could leave any time.
After unlocking the door, she pushed it open.
He kept back. “After you, ma’am.”
She walked in and began switching on lights. When he still hung back, she frowned over her shoulder. “Well, come on in. I don’t have all day.”
The pain vanished. Garreth quickly followed her into the livingroom. “Tell me if you think anything is missing. What she’s taken might give us some idea where she’s gone.”
Mrs. Armour turned around in the middle of the room. “She has lovely things, doesn’t she? She collected them from all over the world.”
Spent good money, too, Garreth judged. Though no art expert, he recognized quality in the paintings and some small pieces of sculpture. Toys resting on the bookshelves between sections of books drew more of his attention, however…several old-looking dolls, a miniature tea set, a cast-iron toy stove. Items from her childhood? He studied a type tray hung on the wall, its sections turned into shelves holding an assortment of small objects that reminded him of the “treasures” he had collected in an old tin tackle box as a boy.
She had no broken pocketknife, but there was a top — wooden, not plastic — and some marbles — more beautiful than any he had, he noted with envy — a big molar from a horse or cow, a tiny rodent skull, and various stones: colored, quartz-like, or containing shell and leaf fossils. He could not identify one group of objects, though. He took down the largest to study.
Held by its flat base, its large central point and two flanking smaller ones reached jaggedly upward, like the silhouette of a mountain range. A mountain dark and glassy as obsidian. Except for size, each object in the group looked identical.
“Shark teeth,” Mrs. Armour said.
He blinked at her. “What?”
“Miss Barber told me those are shark teeth.”
Black? His tackle box had never held anything that exotic.
Garreth put back the tooth and turned his attention to the books. Nonfiction outnumbered the fiction, but of the several hundred volumes covering a wide range of subjects, including extraterrestrial visitors and medical texts on viruses, only music, dancing, and folklore were represented by any substantial number of books.
He glanced through the folklore. All the books contained sections on vampires.
The publication dates as a whole went as far back as 1919. A couple of children’s books — printed with large color plates tipped in and black-and-white drawings, not the large print and easy vocabulary of the books he bought to give Brian — bore inscriptions in the front:
He went on to check for inscriptions in other books. Those that had them were clearly used books, inscribed with men’s names or pet names that would never apply to Lane and a pencilled or inked price in an upper corner inside the cover. It appeared no one except her parents gave her books.
He searched the desk. Not that he expected Harry or the lab boys to have overlooked anything useful but he wanted to make sure. He found nothing except blank writing paper and some ball-point pens…no checkbooks, canceled checks, credit card records, or copies of tax returns.
Moving on to the kitchen, he found it as bare as Harry and Serruto had described, nor did the bedroom yield information aside from the fact that she bought her clothes all over the world and with discrimination. He pursed his lips thinking of the price tags that accompanied those labels. She had expensive taste. How did she afford them on a club singer’s salary? Did she blackmail some of her “dates”?
“Can you tell me what clothes might be missing?” he asked.
Mrs. Armour frowned. “Now, how should I — well,” she amended as he raised a brow, “I guess I did peek in once. I think there used to be a blue Dior suit and some English wool skirts and slacks hanging at the end there.” She described those and some other items in detail.
The dresser had been cleaned out. So had the bedside table and the bathroom medicine cabinet.
“Can you think of anything usually in the apartment that you haven’t seen here today?” he asked.
From the bathroom doorway, Mrs. Armour considered the question. “I don’t know. I haven’t been here all that often, you know.”
“Keep looking around, will you, please?”
