‘Good evening,’ I replied. ‘I’m afraid I might not make it home at all tonight. Would it be inconvenient for you to keep the boys at your house until the morning?’
‘Not at all, dear. They just sleep on the couch when I go up to bed. Are you chasing a maniac?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘A maniac,’ Mrs Comerforth repeated. ‘It seems you are always trying to catch some maniac who is doing something evil and twisted.’
I could not recall ever discussing my work with my neighbour, but then my line of work is hardly a secret. I had to assume I was talked about in whatever circles she moved or maybe she just reads the paper.
To give her an answer, I said, ‘Yes, I guess you could say that.’
‘Well, take care then, dear. Try not to get hurt. I’ll bring them around in the morning if your car is on the driveway.’
That was the dogs taken care of then. With the call ended, I asked, ‘How much longer to our destination?’
Hilary picked up his own phone and poked it to bring it back to life.
‘Fourteen minutes.’
‘Can you call Amanda for me, please?’
Hilary switched phones again, set it to speaker and held the phone in the middle of the car. ‘Hey, babe,’ Amanda’s all too sexy voice filled my car’s interior. It wasn’t her intention to use a bedroom voice, only that my brain heard it that way. All the time. It is so distracting.
I glanced at Hilary to find his cheeks burning. Maybe it wasn’t just in my head then.
‘Are you at Karen’s yet?’ she asked.
‘Nearly. A few more minutes. I’ll confirm when I have her.’
‘Are you planning to bring her back to the office?’ Amanda sounded surprised by the concept.
‘Yes. I need her to look at pictures. Plus, if she is with us, I will know not to worry about her. She’s been in hiding for weeks which makes this the first time she has raised her head above the parapet since she fled her house. That has to make her nervous.’
‘I guess.’ Amanda sounded less sure. ‘What do we do with her if we all leave the office. If we get an address for the Sandman, she is not going to want to come with us.’
That was a fair point.
‘We give her to Big Ben?’ I suggested.
It got a laugh from my girlfriend at least. Big Ben would charm Karen’s knickers off in under a minute. However, if we were to raid the Sandman’s lair, he would be coming with us. Heck, I doubted I could leave him behind if I tried. Plus, he is like employing a siege weapon. I wouldn’t want to break into anywhere without him because that would be like owning a bazooka and opting to not take it to a battle.
Coming up with a better plan, I said, ‘We can have Patience pick her up, or leave her with Jagjit and Alice. It’s not an issue I need to deal with yet, so I guess I am happy to ignore it until I do.’
Amanda had no argument to offer and more pressing things to tell me. ‘We’ve been looking at neighbours for the ladies in Jane’s file. We went through relatives and jobs, co-workers etcetera. So far finding any kind of pattern or link is defying us. They all come from different areas, they all had different jobs … there’s nothing we can find that would tie them together or single them out.’
‘But unless his targets are completely random, he found a reason to target each of these women,’ I concluded the point she was making.
‘That’s right. Whoever he is, he came into their lives and chose to kill them. That they all look alike cannot be coincidence either and there has to be something in that.’
‘Except you cannot find anything that links them so far.’
‘No,’ she agreed, sounding frustrated. ‘Not so far. That’s why we are looking at neighbours. It goes back to what you said about someone having a key. It feels like a long shot though. Big Ben has a theory about the Sandman being a locksmith.’
‘Not exactly a theory,’ I heard Big Ben’s voice in the background. ‘More of a wild stab in the dark.’
I ran the idea through my head. ‘I guess that makes sense. A locksmith would be able to pick a lock or know how to get around one.’
Amanda said, ‘It’s on our board. It’s another reason we are looking at neighbours, but I worry that Big Ben could be right. If it’s a locksmith doing this, then he might have met the women on a callout to fix a lock and there will be no traceable record of that happening.’
I pursed my lips and wished I had something to kick.
Changing the subject, I asked, ‘Anything from Jan yet?’
Jane’s boyfriend would drop whatever he was doing and race to help us I had no doubt. Only if we got hold of him though.
Amanda’s voice came back with a side order of severely irked. ‘No, and it’s starting to bother me. I called the station again; he’s not on shift tonight. I’m thinking of going to his apartment to hammer on the door.’
‘I’ll go,’ offered Big Ben, his voice easy to make out as it came through Amanda’s phone. ‘There’s a key to his apartment on Jane’s bunch. I noticed it when I took them from her car.’
‘Did you hear that?’ Amanda asked.
A cop in our corner wouldn’t hurt at all. ‘Do it.’ It might
