He wasn’t sure what to do. For the first time in his life, he felt a lack of control. Would the face in that sketch turn out to be a figment of that crook’s imagination? Or would it bear a damning resemblance to what he saw in the mirror?
On the Internet, he had looked up the picture that had been in the newspapers of him and the others with Jonathan on that last dig. He had printed it out. If the sketch looks like me, I’ll show this to them, he’d thought. I’ll wave it in front of those detectives and say, “Look, this is where your sketch comes from.” It would be his word against that of a convicted felon who was bargaining for a reduced sentence.
But once the prosecutor’s office started to dig into his past, it might come out that Rory went to prison because she had stolen money from his aunt when she was her caregiver. Then, like a house of cards, his labyrinth of lies would fall apart. He had only visited his aunt once when Rory was working there, and Rory hadn’t recognized him when she came to work at Jonathan’s house. But I recognized her, he thought, and I used her when I needed her. She had to go along with me because I knew she had skipped parole, and she snapped at the money I dangled in front of her. She left Jonathan’s gun in the flower bed that night. She left the door unlocked for me.
He had taken Mariah and Lillian from the parking lot at the motel to his warehouse in the city. He had untied their hands and let them use the bathroom, then tied them up again. He left Lillian lying on the brocaded couch, whimpering. Across the room behind a row of lifesize Grecian statues, he had laid Mariah on a mattress on the floor. She had passed out again before he left. It had been a brilliant decision not to kill Lillian immediately. How else could he have convinced Mariah to come rushing out in the middle of the night? And long ago he had made it his business to be able to slip in and out of his apartment building without being seen. It really wasn’t hard if you wore a cleaning crew uniform, pulled a cap down over your face, and had a phony ID around your neck.
He had gotten back home just before daybreak. Now he didn’t know what to do except to act as if this was a normal day in his life. He was tired, but he did not go to bed and try to sleep. Instead, he showered and dressed, and had his usual breakfast of cereal, toast, and coffee.
He left his apartment shortly after nine and set about being visible in his normal routine. Trying to stay calm, he comforted himself with the realization that if that crook was lying about seeing anyone running out of the house, and if he had seen that picture in the newspaper, he could just as easily pick out one of the other three guys to describe to whoever was drawing the sketch.
Until he knew where this was going, he’d have to stay away from the warehouse. Mariah and Lillian, he thought sarcastically, I guess you’ll get to live a little while longer. But if the sketch looks like me, and they tell me to come in and talk to them again, they still won’t have enough at that point to arrest me. I’ll only become what they call “a person of interest.” They’ll probably start following me, but that won’t do them any good. I’m not going near the warehouse until I know where I stand.
Even if it takes weeks.