IT WASN’T as hard as Patti thought it might be.
Amy Lentini left for work the next morning at seven—quite the early morning riser, but Patti wasn’t surprised. Amy was the kind of person who always put in the extra effort, determined and ambitious and single-minded as she was. First to arrive at the office, last to leave—as Amy demonstrated last night, leaving near ten o’clock.
Getting past the locked front door of Amy’s apartment building would be hard, but it just required the right timing and a few precautions. The timing part wasn’t difficult. The apartment building housed young professionals on a budget as well as students from city colleges who kept irregular hours. People were coming and going at all times of day.
She waited until noon, accepting the fact that there would never be a perfect time to break into Amy’s apartment. There was no such thing as perfect.
She screwed up her courage and got out of her car. The wind slapped her face, and the cold immediately penetrated her outer layers and chilled her skin.
But it only took a few minutes before someone came out of the front door. A student, presumably—a young, squirrelly kid with a goatee and nose ring, a backpack over one shoulder.
Patti made sure she was there to catch the door. That was the timing part.
The precaution part: she was wheeling a carry-on suitcase behind her. Looking the part of a young professional returning from a trip. Looking nothing like someone breaking into an apartment.
And she held her phone up to her ear with her other hand, talking into it, saying, “I’m finally home! What a nightmare of a trip!”
Those things together, the suitcase and phantom phone conversation—and, yes, the fact that she was a woman—meant that she did not present the slightest hint of a threat to the college kid, who barely paid her any notice at all as he held the door open for her.
And then she was inside!
She kept up the ruse with the fake phone call, laughing into the phone—“You’re kidding! She said that?”—in case anyone else was in the lobby.
But nobody else was. She was all alone. Her eyes scanned the spacious room. First she looked for security cameras—none. Shame on them, but good for her.
One wall was filled with locked mailboxes that looked like safe-deposit boxes at a bank. Some newspapers—the Tribune, the Sun-Times, and the Wall Street Journal—on the floor, wrapped in clear plastic.
A door to the left. Was it locked? Didn’t hurt to try, not as long as the lobby remained empty. It might lead to something good.
It wasn’t locked. And it led to something wonderful—a stairwell, the perfect way to get up to the sixth floor. Elevators were no good. There could be a security camera inside, and anyway it was cramped, confined, too easy to notice other people. The stairwell was far better. She picked up her suitcase by the handle—it was almost empty—and climbed the stairs.
She paused when she hit the sixth floor. Listened. Didn’t hear anything. Opened the door and stepped onto the cheap carpeting. A long corridor.
She oriented herself, realized that Amy’s apartment was right by the stairwell.
Picking the lock was the easiest part. A cheap pin-tumbler lock. A suspect she questioned once in a series of B and E’s who wanted her to like him—a lot of suspects did; she had no idea why they thought it would help—showed her how to pick a lock. She held her breath as she went to work and listened intently for any sounds. If someone came out of one of the other apartments on the sixth floor, she would have to put on her game face, quickly raise the phone to her ear again, pretend to be on a call, chat merrily, tell her nonexistent caller I can’t find my damn keys, and laugh. She would have to say and do things that wouldn’t arouse suspicion.
She was good at this. So good it scared her.
She worked in private, nobody emerging from any of the other apartments. Patti gently opened the door to Amy’s apartment and waited for the last hurdle—the possibility of an alarm.
No alarm. No sound when she entered. People in apartment buildings think their locked buzzer door on the ground floor is all the protection they need.
She closed the door behind her and felt relief swirl through her. She drew a long breath. Removed her winter gloves. Replaced them with rubber gloves.
Slipped out of her wet, slushy boots, too. They could leave footprints all over the apartment. Later, when it was time to leave, she would clean up the slush at the front door with paper towels and take the towels with her. She would leave no trace behind.
“Okay, Amy,” she said to the empty apartment. “Let’s get to work.”