Justine sat in the car, looking in her rearview and side mirrors, then staring ahead through the windshield every few seconds in a repeated sequence, trying to look in every direction at once but also to breathe slowly and deeply to get her heart to stop pounding. She kept experiencing the light-headed feeling that came after a big scare and the rush of adrenaline and then feeling the weight of the exhaustion coming on. She kept seeing the body of the man who had been on the floor when she had dashed from the elevator to the front door.
He had been face down with an entrance wound in the back of his head. He had light brown hair, darkened because the wound on his head had bled so much. She tried to figure out which of the men in the building he had been. He’d been wearing a sport coat, something nobody in the building did very often, and blue jeans, which men did to say, “Don’t take the coat too seriously.” The shirt had been dark blue. The outfit seemed to be the kind of thing men in their forties wore, because the kinds of jobs they had tended to fit that look. Art Grosvenor was too old; Dave Campbell was about that height and shape, but his hair was dark brown. So was Sam Melendez’s, and Charles Tucker was Black. They were all decent guys who didn’t deserve to have anything bad happen to them, so there was some relief, but then who was it? This was terrible. Whoever had gotten killed was dead because Justine had run inside and locked the door.
Just as she felt herself sliding into the guilt, she saw the cop cars. The first was a plain blue sedan. That stopped beside her car. Was it to shield her from the shooter or to keep her from opening her door? The second pulled up behind her car, and the third came around the next corner and stopped right in front of her grille.
She couldn’t tell if they thought she was still in imminent danger or thought she was the danger. It took only a few seconds before she knew. The two cops from the patrol cars got out and stood on the grass parkway above the curb with their right hands resting comfortably near their belts, not looking at her, but not looking at anything else either. Detective Kunkel finished saying whatever he had been saying into his car radio, got out, and stepped to her window.
She rolled the window down. “Hi,” she said. “Thanks for coming.”
“Can you please step out and come with us? Leave your keys in the car.”
He sidestepped out of the way so she could open her door and get out.
She said, “Is somebody going to my building?”
“A SWAT team was dispatched before you called me.”
“Good. Great. Did they—”
“We’ll have plenty of time to get to everything. Don’t forget your purse.”
She turned, snagged the strap and pulled it off the passenger seat, backed out, and closed the door. “Are we going to the station? I’d be happy to drive myself.”
“It’s not procedure in a case like this.”
“You have somebody to drive my car to the station?”
“That’s not procedure either. There’s a tow truck on its way. Don’t worry, one of the officers will wait for it so your car is safe.”
She went with him to his car and stood aside while he opened the backseat door. She had been expecting the back seat because of his tone. This was all going to be by the book. She extended her hand toward the seat belt, but then imagined the menagerie of microbes that were likely to be on the belt in the back of a police car and thought better of it.
Detective Kunkel said, “Seat belt, please.”
She tugged it across her body and clicked it in place. The tow truck was just coming up the street as they pulled away. She was fairly certain that this towing stuff was really about wanting to search her car without asking permission. There was nothing compromising in it, but this was another of several warnings that any of her dealings with the police could be adversarial from now on, and they were very good at making everything move fast and keeping people from objecting or even thinking clearly until things were accomplished.
She said, “Have your colleagues caught the shooter in my building?”
“Not yet.”
Justine knew that this meant they weren’t going to. He had been in the building, had fired his pistol about four times—no, five—and probably would have even broken down her door to get to her. If he had gotten out and eluded all the cops after that, how could they even recognize him if they saw him? She said, “Do they know the name of the victim?”
Detective Kunkel said, “I’m sorry to say it was your next-door neighbor, Mr. Grosvenor. That’s got to be kept quiet for now, because Mrs. Grosvenor isn’t home and doesn’t know yet.”
Justine admitted to herself that she had guessed it was him, but that her mind had not allowed him as a possibility because she wasn’t ready for it to be him. She was not going to allow that again. All she had was her brain, and there could be no delusions or she was not going to survive.
It was Art Grosvenor. Her killer had made Art open the door to get to Justine and then shot him through the skull. The Grosvenors were the benevolent older couple who had bought their unit at least a decade ago and knew everybody and could show her how to make things work. They invited any newcomer to dinners and barbecues so they could be introduced and feel welcome. That had been why Ally Grosvenor had been able to give a reporter her picture. In a way it had been the same impulse: Justine is such a nice young woman that you should know her too. Justine felt sorry for Art Grosvenor, and now she was also beginning to be heartbroken about Ally.
“Does that hit you hard?” Kunkel said.
“I liked him, and I like his wife. This is going to ruin her life.”
Kunkel paused, then said, “Look, I know you didn’t murder anybody. You were protecting the Pinskys. But we still have to ask you all the logical questions. It’s the way the system works. It’s intrusive and sometimes unpleasant, but it protects the rights of everybody equally. The only advice I can give you is that your answers have to be serious and, above all, complete and true.”
“Thank you,” she said. “But I wouldn’t have lied anyway.”
“I didn’t think so. It’s just that some perfectly fine people get nervous when the police ask questions, and then they make mistakes.”
“I guess I am nervous,” she said. “There are people hunting me. A man just ambushed me at my condo building, shot at me when I was running to get inside, forced my kind neighbor to unlock the door for him, and then shot him to death anyway. I guess I’m not at my best. Do you think we should do this at another time?”
“I’m sorry, but I have orders to get this investigation going right away. And now it’s even more urgent. This is a new murder, and the killer is still loose and armed. We have to try to stop him while we still can. That’s to your advantage, the Pinskys’, Spengler-Nash’s, and the victims’.”
“What victims?”
“All the people who have been shot. It’s just a common term in a shooting investigation.”
“Ben Spengler was a victim. Art Grosvenor was a victim. The two men I shot weren’t victims. They were attackers. The common police term might be suspects. Something like that.”
Detective Kunkel nodded, but said nothing. That confirmed for her that he was recording their conversation.
For the rest of the ride to the police station she volunteered nothing. Whenever Kunkel made an attempt to get her to say something she would give him an answer that was as much for his recording as his question was.
“You know, you’re lucky I came in early enough to get your call,” he said. “What were you doing up so early?”
“I like the early morning sunshine.”
When they reached the station, she followed him into an elevator and up to the floor where he worked. The interrogation room was approximately what she had expected it to be—small, a table, cameras mounted in the upper corners, no windows. She supposed the idea was to use the sense of confinement to make the civilian want to get out, at first mildly and later desperately.
Kunkel, in a fair imitation of politeness, pulled out a chair for her, presumably to place her in the spot where she would be best seen in the video. He sat in the chair to her left. A large man came in wearing a pale blue shirt and a tie that he wore without buttoning the top button of his shirt.
“This is Detective Wright.”
The man nodded and mumbled, “Miss Poole.” He sat across from her, making her feel hemmed in left and center.
Justine had been thinking since she’d learned that Kunkel wanted to talk to her about what this moment would be like. So far, she had been right. Next, she thought they would say, “Could you please tell us about the night when you went to the Pinskys’ house?”
The answer she wanted to give was, “I know what you’re doing. You’re supposed to lock me into telling the story to record my exact words and then compare those words with the words I used on the night of the attempted home invasion right after it happened, and then if there is the tiniest difference you can say I’m lying now, or that I was then, depending on which words are worse for me. Let’s skip that and just play over the first recording.” She would not say that. It would change their crafty, subtle manipulation into open hostility in an instant, and the next sixteen hours would be as hellish as they could make them in front of the cameras.
Wright said, “I’m pleased to meet you. The average person never gets into a situation where he has to take on the biggest risk to protect somebody else, so they don’t know what it’s like.” He studied her face. “What happened today?”
She said, “I guess you both know that the night after the thing at the Pinskys’, my boss Ben Spengler got murdered. I’m pretty sure the one they were looking for was me.”
“Why do you think that?”
“Because since then, a man has been stalking me. He was at the Spengler-Nash building when the night shift—my shift—ended one morning, broke into my condo and the one belonging to my next-door neighbors the Grosvenors, and turned up at the hotel where I was staying because I was afraid to sleep at home and he tried to follow me. This morning when I went to my condominium building to get some fresh clothes and things, he shot at me. I made it into the lobby and shut the door, so this man forced Art Grosvenor to open the lock so he could get at me and then killed him, probably because he was a witness.”
Kunkel said, “Do you know who this man is?”
“No,” she said. “But I have a picture of him from a surveillance camera mounted in the Spengler-Nash garage. It’s a light-enhanced camera, so it’s a little odd, but I recognized him right away when I saw him.”
The cops looked at each other. Wright said, “Were you planning to show it to us?”
“Of course.”
“When?”
“This morning is my first chance. Until a few minutes ago I was busy trying to live through his latest attempt on my life, so it wasn’t the first thing I thought of. It’s on my computer.”
“Where is your computer now?”
“I don’t need it. I can send the picture to you on my phone.” She reached into her purse.
Kunkel held out his hand. “I’ll take it.”
She sat still.
“What?” he said.
She said, “Since this started, the police have asked for and I’ve given them everything I had to protect myself. They took my firearm—okay, you needed it for the ballistic tests. That was legit. They took my work phone, which not only had all my work information but also lots of other things, including the numbers of people who might be willing to help me stay safe—work friends, clients, and so on. Now you’re working up to taking my personal phone. That will put me in even more danger and you know it. That’s the part that disturbs me—that you know it. Without my phone, I could die today.”
“Send me the picture,” Kunkel said. He sat back in his chair with his arms folded.
Justine found the email with the photographs attached. “What’s the number you want to receive it?”
He recited the same number that was in her phone. After a moment she said, “There. You should have the pictures.”
He took out his cell phone, looked at the first image, scrolled to the next and the next, stood up, and went out of the room, still looking at it.
Justine sat with her purse on her lap for a minute, then dropped the phone into it and set it on the floor by her feet.
Wright said, “Just to be clear, that picture is the same man who shot Mr. Grosvenor this morning?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“And the one who has turned up at other places and followed you.”
“Yes.”
Kunkel seemed to be taking a long time. She glanced at her phone again, then put it back in her purse. She had noticed that the screen said it was twenty-eight minutes after ten. She wondered what could be keeping Kunkel, and then she supposed that could be another police tactic too. It didn’t matter what time it was. Time was theirs, not hers.
The door opened and Detective Kunkel came back in holding a folder, but he did not come to the table or sit down. He kept the door ajar. He said to Justine, “Your attorney just showed up. He’s waiting outside.” He looked down at his folder, as though there were something written on it, but there wasn’t. “What are you waiting for? You’re free to leave. This interview is over.”
Justine stood and said, “I was wondering, is my car in the lot downstairs, or what? Are the keys in it, and how do I find it?”
“You don’t.”
“Why not?”
“We’ll have to hold it for the forensics people. It might have the answers to questions about this morning’s incident.”
“The killer was never in it or near it. How can that be necessary or even useful?”
“We’ll have to let you know after it’s been examined for evidence. You were at a murder this morning.”
“The killer never even saw my car.”
“He found you somehow.”
“Is this because I called a lawyer?”
He shrugged. “Every choice costs something.”
She looked at him for a moment, then walked to the door. He stepped aside and opened it wider for her and she went out into the broad, open space of the office.
There was a man standing in front of her looking at the watch on his wrist. It wasn’t one of those heavy ones with little extra circles that were tachometers and timers. It was a slice of white gold, thin as a coin with a plain white face and a brown leather band, like the ones she’d seen on some of her clients. He was wearing a light gray suit that seemed to complement the gray hair he wore slightly long that she thought of as prematurely gray but probably wasn’t. He looked up and said, “Justine.” It wasn’t a question. “I’m Aaron de Kuyper.”
Of course he would have looked up her picture. She said, “Hello. Thank you for coming.”
“Happy to help. Shall we go?”
She went with him for a few steps, but a voice came from behind them. “Miss Poole!”
She turned. Detective Wright hurried to her. “We’ll still need your phone.”
She looked at Aaron de Kuyper. He shrugged, pantomiming that it was something to be endured, but said to Wright, “You’ll send me the inventory of the belongings you’ve collected, right?”
“Right,” Detective Wright said. His hand was still out, so Justine placed the phone in it, and he walked off.
De Kuyper glanced at her, and she could tell it was a diagnosis. “We’re going to the office. The car is out front.”