someone else to this story. But she also knew that she was no more immune to the lure that Anne had held out than anyone else would be. How often did any reporter anywhere get a chance to go after a murder story where she herself might be one of the intended victims? They would, indeed, sell a lot of papers. “All right,” she said. “Keep on it. But be very careful, and keep in mind that I’m going to be going over every word you write with a fine- tooth comb. Keep it fair, keep it objective, and you can keep the story. Agreed?”
Anne stood up. “Agreed.” She started out of the editor’s office, already composing a mental list of the phone calls she needed to make. But then she turned back, and her eyes met her boss’s. “Thanks,” she said quietly.
Vivian Andrews gazed steadily at her. “Anne, I hope you’re smart enough to realize that all this should be scaring you to death.”
“I am,” Anne replied. “Right now, I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life. And I don’t even know why this guy’s mad at me. What could I ever have done to him?”
“What makes you think you did anything to him at all?” Vivian Andrews asked. “It’s probably not even about you, Anne. It could still all be just a coincidence. But even if it isn’t, don’t start thinking it has anything to do with something you did, or even didn’t do. It’s just him, Anne. It’s just some nut.”
Anne left the editor’s office and returned to her desk, where she riffled through the short stack of messages that had come in overnight, then checked her E-mail, half expecting to find a duplicate of the note that had been left on her computer at home. She wasn’t sure whether she felt relief or disappointment when she found nothing.
Nothing in the way of a note, and nothing pertaining to the murders of either Shawnelle Davis or Joyce Cottrell.
Lots pertaining to the rapid transit mess, which she rerouted to Vivian Andrews for reassignment.
She was about to reach for the phone to call Mark Blakemoor when she changed her mind: it had long been her experience that people found it far easier to lie over the phone than in person, a phenomenon she attributed more to her own ability to read people’s facial expressions and body language than to any peculiar compunctions on the part of those she was interviewing.
Face-to-face, she could reel in practically any fish. On the phone, they could wriggle off the hook.
Retrieving her coat from the rack that served her own and half a dozen other desks, she scooped up her gritchel, slung the strap over her shoulder, left the office, and headed downtown.
Twenty minutes later — her car maybe-not-quite-completely-illegally parked in a passenger zone whose white paint was sufficiently worn away for her to think she might be able to argue the case — she entered the Public Safety Building and strode directly to the cramped office Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly shared.
“They’re not here,” a detective whose name Anne couldn’t remember said as she was about to knock on the closed door. He grinned at her, his eyes glinting with malicious humor. “Would you believe they’re down at the M.E.’s office, checking out a dead cat?” Not bothering to reply, Anne turned on her heel and walked out of the Homicide Division. She did, however, make a mental note to find out the detective’s name, just in case she ever got the opportunity to make fun of him in the paper.
She arrived at the medical examiner’s office, only to be told there was no more chance of her attending the autopsy of her cat than there would be of her attending that of a human being.
“But it’s a cat!” Anne protested. “And it’s my cat! Doesn’t that make any difference at all?”
The young man behind the desk, whose name was David Smith according to a chipped plastic plaque propped up against a pen holder, shook his head. “Not around here. The rules are the rules. Only our staff and other authorized personnel can attend an autopsy.”
“Come on,” Anne began, using her best wheedling and subservient tones. “Surely just this once you could let me—”
“No exceptions,” David Smith told her in a voice filled with the kind of smug self-satisfaction that only career bureaucrats seem capable of producing.
Frustrated, but certain that there would be no changing David Smith’s mind, Anne dropped onto a hard bench, prepared to wait for the rest of the morning if that’s what it took. It turned out to be only forty-five minutes before Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly emerged from the double doors that led to the labs from which Anne had been denied admittance.
There was an uncomfortable moment as the reporter and the two detectives regarded each other uncertainly, their long-standing professional relationship having suddenly taken on a new aspect.
“Why don’t I meet you back at the shop,” Mark Blakemoor told his partner, breaking the silence. “I’ll have a cup of coffee with Anne and fill her in.” Lois Ackerly gave him a strange look, started to say something, then seemed to change her mind.
“See you when you get there,” she said. Nodding a greeting to Anne, she disappeared out the main door.
Mark led Anne to a small room equipped with two Formica-topped tables, a half-dozen chairs, and a counter on which sat a grease-splattered microwave oven and a crusted coffeepot. Fishing two mugs out of a badly stained sink, the detective rinsed them out, filled them with coffee, and handed one to Anne. “Not exactly a latte, but so far no one’s been able to convince Starbucks to take over this space. Sit?”
Anne settled onto a flimsy vinyl chair; Blakemoor leaned against the counter.
“So what’s the deal?” Anne asked. “What did you find out?”
“Nothing conclusive,” the detective replied. “In fact, no one’s even willing to say the same person who did the women did the cat, too.”
Anne’s brows arched as she recognized what she suspected was only the first of a series of noncommittal statements. Before she could begin questioning him, Mark Blakemoor went on.
“Here’s how it lays out,” he told her. “We’re pretty sure the same guy did both women. We’re pretty sure Shawnelle Davis let him into her apartment voluntarily — probably she picked him up thinking he was going to be a score. As for Cottrell, we found a key with a thumbprint on it, and the print isn’t Cottrell’s. So either she gave him the key or, more likely, he found it hidden in one of the usual places — the doormat, a planter. Everyone knows where to look, right?” Without waiting for Anne to reply, he went on. “Anyway, the only thing we really have to go on are the cuts, and they’re pretty much alike on both women. He used knives he found in their own kitchens, so the wounds aren’t exactly alike. But they’re close enough that Cosmo — that’s the M.E. who’s working this for us — is willing to say it’s the same perp in both homicides.”
“And my cat?” Anne asked as Blakemoor finished.
“That’s another story.” The detective’s expression tightened. “There are similarities to both the women. But the cut is—” He hesitated, then used the same word that had come into his mind the previous day, when he’d first examined the cat. “It’s a neater cut. Cosmo says it was done with a sharper instrument — a razor blade, possibly a scalpel. And he says the incision is straighter.” He paused again, his eyes avoiding Anne’s when he finally went on. “He says it could be the same guy, and that by the time he got to the cat he’d had more practice.”
“I see.” Anne felt numb.
“Or someone else could have done the cat,” Blakemoor finished. There was something in his voice that made Anne look up.
“Someone else, like my husband?” she asked, still remembering the silence that had fallen over Blakemoor and Ackerly as Glen had returned from the house with the plastic bag. When Blakemoor made no reply, Anne decided it was time to tell him about the note on her computer. “Whoever killed poor Kumquat put the note there,” she finished. “And whoever put the note on my computer knew a lot more about programming than Glen does. He can operate a couple of programs, but he doesn’t know the difference between an autoexec.bat and a config sys. At our house, I even install the programs.”
“But you thought of him,” Blakemoor pointed out.
Anne almost wished she hadn’t told the detective about the note at all. But it was too important to keep from him. “How could I not have?” she countered. “He was there by himself all day.” A dark and hollow sound that wasn’t quite a chuckle emerged from her throat. “I even searched the house, looking for signs that someone else had been there.”
“And you didn’t find anything,” Blakemoor surmised.
Anne shook her head. “So what’s next?” she asked.
“The same thing that’s always next in a case like this,” Blakemoor told her. Though she’d heard the words before — practically knew them by heart — this time they made Anne’s blood run cold. “We keep looking, even though we don’t have much of anything to go on.” He stopped speaking, and it was Anne herself who finished the
