Five
He stared at the piece of wood that she’d lodged in the groove of the sliding window. It looked like the sawed-off handle to a broom or a rake. He smiled. His leading lady was very clever. She’d caught on to how he’d been breaking into her place. She’d changed the locks on him, too.
It was kind of sweet, really—her thinking she could keep him out with that puny piece of wood and a new dead bolt.
He stood on the walkway at her front door. He had a good view of the Space Needle from here, but the Needle’s lights were off right now. It was five-fifteen in the morning.
He’d last been inside her apartment five nights ago. There was something very romantic about that walk in the rain when he’d dropped off the tape of
He’d spent far more time than he’d intended figuring out how to break into the Broadmoore Apartments and planning his date with Cindy Finkelston. Of course, she hadn’t known about it.
She hadn’t been expecting him at all.
She hadn’t expected to die Sunday morning.
Smiling again, he touched Hannah’s front door and brushed his fingertips against the doorknob. The newspaper carrier would be around soon. And in about ninety minutes, Hannah Doyle would be waking up. She would drop off her kid at the day care place, then go to the video store. On Tuesdays, she worked nine to five.
He liked watching her at work. He had hours and hours of videotape footage of Hannah at the video store.
She might not notice him today. She wouldn’t be expecting him. But he would be watching her every move.
Guy’s class was taking a field trip to the Woodland Park Zoo. When Hannah dropped him off at Alphabet Soup Day Care that Tuesday morning, she pulled the teacher aside and asked her to be extra-vigilant with Guy. “I’ve got this—stalker situation,” Hannah explained. “I don’t think he’d go after Guy, but—well, I’ll feel better knowing you’ve got your guard up, Pam.”
Pam was a tall, athletic woman in her mid-twenties with short-trimmed blond hair. “Well, I’ll keep an eye out, Hannah,” she assured her. “Do you know what this creep-o looks like?”
“Um, no. It’s, um, a telephone talker thing.”
“Have you contacted the police about it yet? Maybe they can put a trace on your line.”
Hannah nodded. “Yes, they’re doing that,” she lied.
“Good. Can’t be too careful,” Pam said. “We have extra people for this trip. And I’ll keep close tabs on Guy. Don’t you worry about him.”
“Thanks, Pam.”
Hannah spent her break time that afternoon at the Broadmoore Apartments, six blocks from the store.
She gazed up at the row of windows along the top floor of the five-story slate-colored structure. She wondered which window Cindy Finkelston had fallen from. Did her body land in the shrubs on the east side of the building, or in the parking area along the front and west sides?
Hannah took a pad and pen from her bag as she approached the lobby doors. She studied the list of residents’ names on the keypad of buzzer codes. There were close to fifty names. Hannah recognized some of them as customers at Emerald City Video. She started scribbling down the names of Cindy Finkelston’s neighbors.
She was down to the last few when someone snuck up behind her and cleared his throat. Hannah swiveled around. Staring back at her was a tall, gaunt man in his fifties. He had a dirty-gray mustache and very thin, long hair that he’d pulled back in a ponytail. He was nearly bald on top. He wore a denim shirt and jeans, and leaned on his broom. “Can I help you with something?” he asked.
“Oh, hi,” Hannah replied, caught off guard.
“Are you one of those insurance people again?”
She nodded. “Yes, um, I’m—Rosemary Farrow with Northwest Fidelity Life. The—ah, late Cindy Finkelston had an account with us. I’m a claims adjuster, here doing a little preliminary poking around. It’s very sad what happened. Are you the building manager?”
For a moment, he gave her a cool, sidelong stare. Hannah had to wonder if he’d bought any of it. Finally, the tall man puffed out his skinny chest a bit and nodded. “I’m Glenn, the caretaker here,” he said. “You’ll probably want to talk to me.”
“Oh, yes. I imagine not much gets past you, huh?” Hannah said.
“Not much at all. I knew the deceased as well as anyone else around here, which isn’t much. I don’t think too many people liked her. But I don’t believe in speaking ill of the dead, so that’s all I’m saying about that.”
“Do you know how it happened?” Hannah asked.
He glanced up at the west corner of the building’s roof. “You know, I’m the one who heard her scream. I was working around back. I heard this shriek, and then something went thump. That was her body hitting the car. There’s a gate back there, so I had to go all the way around the other side of the building. Otherwise, I would have been the first one to get to her. But a couple of neighbors beat me to it.”
Hannah gazed over at the parking area on the west side of the building. “She landed on a car?” Hannah asked; then she remembered her cover story. “Um, they didn’t mention that in the report,” she added.
Glenn nodded and reached back to scratch under his gray ponytail. “A brand-new silver Mazda. She hit the edge, then rolled off. Smashed the roof and windshield. You should have seen all the blood and glass.” He shook his head. “A goddamn mess. They finally took down the police tape and towed away the car yesterday morning.”
“What about the people next door to her?” Hannah asked. “Did they hear anything? Maybe someone was in the apartment with her.”
Glenn shook his head again. “Neighbors didn’t hear diddly. And from what I caught the police saying, it looked like she was alone in the apartment when she went out the window.”
“So they don’t think she was pushed out?” Hannah asked.
He let out a little chuckle, then pointed to the roof. “Take a look up there,” he said. “Top floor, second window from the end. See it?”
Hannah squinted up at the long, narrow window along the fifth floor. “Yes, I see it.”
“That’s where she fell from. Now, go over one window, and you see her balcony. Check out the sliding glass door, the low railing. If I was gonna give somebody the heave-ho from up there, that balcony would have been a much better place. Why go to all the trouble of opening up that window and tossing her out when you got a whole balcony to work with? You wouldn’t even have to leave the living room. It’s a short balcony. One good shove and she’s gone.”
“You should be a detective,” Hannah said, buttering him up. “Listen, I’m not supposed to ask this, but what do you think happened? Do you think it was an accident?”
Scratching his chin, he gazed up toward the building’s top floor. “Like I say, if it was anything intentional— suicide or homicide—why not use the balcony and make it easier? Why the window?”
Hannah thanked Glenn, saying that she and Northwest Fidelity Life were both grateful to him for providing his expertise. As she walked back to work, the caretaker’s remark haunted her.
Hannah suddenly knew the answer, and with that realization, a shudder passed through her. Cindy Finkelston’s death sentence had been carried out to the letter.
The girl who died in
