kill anyone who walked in on him while he was disposing of the body.
He got out of the car, leaving the dead woman in the Omni’s trunk, and
he let himself into her apartment. A quick check of the closet in the
single bedroom was sufficient to convince him that Janet Middlemeir
lived by herself.
He stood at the kitchen window and watched as a car drove into the
parking area. Two people got out of it and went into an apartment two
doors away. At the same time a man left yet another apartment, got
into a Volkswagen Rabbit, and drove off. When all was quiet again,
Conrad went out to the Omni, took the tarp from the trunk, and carried
it inside, hoping that no one was watching him from a window in one of
the other apartments.
He took the tarp into the small bathroom and opened it there.
Taking care to keep himself clean, he lifted the canvas and dumped the
contents into the bathtub. There was still a great deal of blood
trapped in the torn body cavity, and he spread some of the viscous
stuff around, smearing it on the walls and the floor.
He took a macabre pride in the cleverness of his plan. If he had left
the dead woman in the il bedroom, the police pathologists would have
realized at once that she hadn’t been killed there, for they wouldn’t
have found enough blood on the carpet to support that theory. (Most of
her blood had been spilled in the funhouse, on the gondola tracks, and
had soaked into the boards there.) But when the cops found her here, in
the bathroom maybe they would think that the missing pints of blood had
simply gone down the bathtub drain.
Conrad remembered the VIP badge on her blouse. He fished that out of
the tub and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
He also retrieved her hard hat, flashlight, and notebook, which were
spotted with blood. He cleaned those off at the sink, then took them
out to the foyer closet and put them on the shelf above the coatrack.
He didn’t know whether that was where she usually kept those items, but
the police wouldn’t know either, and it seemed a likely enough place.
He folded the empty tarp.
In the kitchen, in the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights, he
inspected his hands carefully. He had washed them in the bathroom,
when he had cleaned the articles that he’d taken to the foyer closet,
but there was still some blood caked under his fingernails. He went to
the kitchen sink and washed his hands once more, vigorously.
He found the drawer in which the dead woman had kept her dish towels.
He wrapped one of the towels around his right hand and took another one
to the kitchen door. He opened the door, which had three small,
decorative windows arranged in the center of it. He looked out at the
parking lot, dnder the stark light of the sodium-vapor lamps, there was
no sound or motion. He put the folded dish towel against the exterior
surface of one of the door’s little panes, and then he struck the
interior surface with his wrapped right hand, trying to make as little
noise as possible. The glass broke with only a dull crack, and he used
the folded towel to push the fragments inward onto the kitchen floor,
so that it would look as if the killer had smashed the pane from the
outside in the process of forcing entry. Conrad quietly closed the
door, shook the dish towels to be certain there were no slivers of
glass clinging t o the fabric, refolded them, and returned them to the
drawer in which he-had found them.
He suddenly realized that threads from the dish towels might be snagged
on the shards of glass. He stared down at the bright fragments. He
didn’t have time to examine each of them. Likewise, he didn’t have
time to study the trunk of her car with a magnifying glass to see if
there were spots of blood in it.
There were probably other loose ends, too. He would just have to do