Back into the corridor, sweeping the Glock left, right, left again. No
one.
Next along this side of the hall was a bathroom. Even with my eyes
narrowed to slits to filter out the dazzle of porcelain and glass and
mirrors and yellow ceramic tile, I could see into every corner.
No one was waiting there.
As I reached inside to switch off the bathroom lights, a noise rose
behind me. Back toward the master bedroom. A quick rapping like
knuckles on wood. From the corner of my eye, I saw movement.
I spun toward the sound, bringing up the Glock in a two-hand grip
again, as if I knew what the hell I was doing, imitating Willis and
Stallone and Schwarzenegger and Eastwood and Cage from a hundred
jump-run-shoot-chase movies, as if I actually believed that they knew
what the hell they were doing. I expected to see a hulking figure,
demented eyes, an upraised arm, an arcing knife, but I was still alone
in the hallway.
The movement I’d seen was the master-bedroom door being pushed shut
from the inside. In the diminishing wedge of light between the moving
door and the jamb, a twisted shadow loomed, writhed, shrank. The door
fell shut with a solid sound like the closing of a bank vault.
That room had been deserted when I left it, and no one had come past me
since I’d stepped into the hallway. Only the murderer could be in
there-and only if he’d returned through the bathroom window from a
porch roof where he’d been when I’d discovered Angela’s body.
If the killer was already in the master bedroom again, however, he
couldn’t also have slipped behind me, moments earlier, to turn on the
second-floor lights. So there were two intruders. I was caught
between them.
Go forward or back? Lousy choice. Deep shit either way, and me
without rubber boots.
They would expect me to run for the stairs. But it was safer to do the
unexpected, so without hesitation I rushed to the master bedroom
door.
I didn’t bother with the knob, kicked hard, sprung the latch, and
pushed inside with the Glock in front of me, ready to squeeze off four
or five shots at anything that moved.
I was alone.
The nightstand lamp was still lit.
No bloody footprints stained the carpet, so no one could have reentered
the splattered bathroom from outside and then returned here by that
route to close the hall door.
I checked the bathroom anyway. I left the penlight in my pocket this
time, relying on an influx of faint light from the bedroom lamp,
because I didn’t need-or want-to see all the vivid details again. The
casement window remained open. The smell was as repulsive as it had
been two minutes ago. The shape slumped against the toilet was
Angela.
Although she was mercifully veiled in gloom, I could see her mouth
gaping as though in amazement, her wide eyes unblinking.
I turned away and glanced nervously at the open door to the hall. No
one had followed me in here.
Baffled, I retreated to the middle of the bedroom.
The draft from the bathroom window was not strong enough to have blown
the bedroom door shut. Besides, no draft had cast the twisted shadow
that I had glimpsed.
Although the space under the bed might have been large enough to hide a
man, he would have been uncomfortably compressed between the floor and
the box springs, with frame slats banding his back. Anyway, no one
could have squirmed into that hiding place before I’d kicked my way
into the room.
I could see through the open door to the walk-in closet, which
obviously did not harbor an intruder. I took a closer look anyway.
The penlight revealed an attic access in the closet ceiling. Even if a
fold-down ladder was fitted to the back of that trap door, no one could
have been spider-quick enough to climb into the attic and pull the
ladder after himself in the two or three seconds that I had taken to
burst in from the hallway.
Two draped windows flanked the bed. Both proved to be locked from the