Her window showed black against gray, no light inside. It was still early evening, so she wouldn't be asleep, insomniac creature of the night that she was. Damn. He'd hoped he'd be able to walk down the stairs and knock on her door like a normal boyfriend, not have to burglarize the place.
He crouched low under first-floor windows and duck-walked until he huddled next to the leg-breaker well that let daylight into her basement room. No sound inside. He gnawed at his lip, remembering her rude habit of shooting blind. That splintered hole in her door, the crater in the concrete beyond. His palms felt clammy inside the gloves, and he swallowed twice to clear his mouth.
Time for a little finesse. His fingertips scouted the foundation wall, verifying brick above grade even through his gloves. Plenty of mass to stop a slug.
Out with the flashlight, quick glances along the slot between buildings, toward the street and then the alley behind him, all clear. He reached around the window frame, set the flashlight lens flush against the glass to minimize side-splash, and flicked the light on, cringing tight against the brick in case she filed a .45 caliber objection to people who aimed lights through her window.
Silence. He took a deep breath, let it out, and eased his head along the foundation wall until he could see inside. Nothing. Literally nothing — bare walls and floor, an open closet door, empty hanger bar. No curtains. He knew he'd seen curtains on her windows, ragged and faded and stained but still opaque and fitting tight. No way any nosy neighbors could see in. He blinked and shook his head. She wouldn't haul that baggage with her when she ran.
He flicked the light off and sagged back against the wall. No gunshots yet. He caught up on his breathing, since he still could breathe. But he had to take a bigger chance.
The front door wasn't locked. It should have been locked, she'd told him that was about the only rule the landlord set, but nobody obeyed it. He inched down the basement stairs, feet close as possible to the wall and over the stringers to minimize squeaks, and sniffed. Tenement stink, rodent and human and dry rot and damp plaster. Last time he was here, he'd smelled girl. Now he smelled industrial-strength cleaning fluid.
He tested her door. It wasn't locked. It wasn't even latched. He crouched low to one side and nudged it open with the toe of one boot, jaw clenched at the creaking complaint of the hinges. No shots. The smell of cleaning fluid turned into a reek, and he edged around the door frame and flipped his flashlight on again. Empty room.
Really empty, just like the view from the window. Even the light bulbs and glass covers were gone from the ceiling fixtures. Walls clean, floor clean, window clean, scrubbed from floor to ceiling. Gary checked the closet, back into the dark corners by the baseboards. Checked the tops of the door frames.
Clean. Like, somebody had dug into the cracks with a frigging toothbrush clean.
Nobody is that thorough. Not unless they're afraid of evidence.
He retreated from the room and from the vision it gave him. Blood and a body. Her blood, her body.
No.
The kind of murder you'd find in this neighborhood, the killer would leave the body lie until someone complained of the smell. These weren't think-ahead people. Jane, now, Jane might clean up the place like that. She'd learned more caution in the last five years. She might have come back and found what's-his-name from upstairs poking through her stuff. She'd kill him and wipe out every trace, like whoever burned down that derelict hotel after Dad sniffed it out.
Gary wrinkled his nose against the stink of cleaning fluid. They must have used a gallon of the stuff. And then he realized he was thinking "they" rather than "she."
She wouldn't have come back.
But he did see a signature he recognized. He knew a family just that obsessive-compulsive about leaving clues behind. He'd learned some of the habits himself. That was why he'd worn gloves to turn the pages in her purloined files. This apartment reminded him of Ben Morgan shredding a computer disk and then burning the plastic sawdust. Not just destroying evidence, but destroying the evidence that evidence had been destroyed.
And then burning trash in the same stove to cover up trace chemicals in the ash and soot. Most rural Maine families burned their trash . . . .
Obsessive. This apartment reeked of Ben Morgan.
Gary snarled under his breath. He left, pulling the door closed behind him but not locking it or latching it, leaving it exactly as he'd found it because he'd just spent the entire summer learning the Morgan way of doing business. Learning how his ancestors had dodged the hangman's noose.
Outside, full night had fallen, and with it thicker mist and fog. He walked through it, just another of the faceless moving shadows huddled into themselves against the clammy chill forerunner of coming winter, invisible. He'd made a date, set it early enough that no hypothetical eye would see anything strange about a student in that place at that time. Or maybe two students. If he was lucky. If she had even read the message, much less decided to risk doing what it asked.
Back to the campus, back into the labyrinth of walkways and buildings and colonnades and shadowy architectural follies that commemorated this class or that, of shrubs and trees that were oh-so ornamental but
