Kill Me (23 page)

FORTY-FIVE

I was on the sixteenth floor. If I rejected the option of taking a flying leap off the balcony that faced the Hudson, the apartment had one exit.

Given those limitations, I couldn’t see any margin in advancing.

So I retreated.

Back into the master bedroom, back to the closet, back to the phone. Why? I had to quiet the damn thing before whoever was on the other side of the door finally finessed Lizzie’s locks, made it inside, and heard the phone ringing.

I allowed myself the luxury of believing that the intruder was Gaston, the doorman, coming to warn me. The thought calmed me just a little, until I realized that if Gaston had hustled up to the sixteenth floor to warn me, the situation had already seriously deteriorated.

I opened the phone to kill the call and was about to shut it again when I heard my name from the tiny speaker. Twice.

I moved the open phone to my ear.

“Are they there yet?” she asked.

Lizzie.

They?

At worst, I’d been hoping for a “he.”

Shit.

“Yes,” I whispered. “At the front door. Someone’s trying to get in.”

“The locks stick. It’ll take them a minute to figure it out. You’re in the closet? My bedroom?”

“Yes.”

“You’re not good at listening, but I need you to listen to me now. Do you understand?”

Was I tempted to argue? Of course. Instead, I said, “Yes.” I was all ears.

“Reach behind the stack of drawers that’s directly in front of you with your right hand. Feel for a small handhold toward the back. A slot where you can stick your fingers.”

I switched the phone to my left hand and felt behind the drawer unit with my right.

Nothing.

“Got it?” she said.

“Not yet.”

“Go lower. Pretend you’re my height. Five-seven.”

Five-seven?
I thought you were taller.

Focus!

I slid my hand lower.

“Now?”

“Yes. I have it.”

“Pull. Hard! Jerk it.”

I heard the distant clunk of the dead bolt releasing in the front door.

“They’re almost in,” I whispered.

“Pull,” she said. “Do it.”

I yanked. The entire shelving unit rolled forward about ten inches. It was on some kind of track system.

“It moved.”

“Squeeze in behind it. There’s room back there, I promise; you’ll fit. Go! Don’t trip, there’s something on the floor inside.”

I felt for the opening and squeezed in, my shoes banging hard into whatever it was that was on the floor.

“Stand facing toward the closet. Now grab in front of you — straight in front of you. Get a grip on one of the shelves and pull — gently this time — the whole unit toward you. It will slide.”

I did. It did; the drawer unit clicked back into its original position.

“There’s room for you to step behind you a couple of feet or so. Back up slowly until you feel the wall. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Then feel to the side with your right hand, waist high. My waist, remember? You’ll find a light switch. Flip it. Yes? Now you can see where you are. Don’t worry, no light will escape.”

I followed her direction, found the back wall, and the light switch, and flicked it.

I saw where I was.

I didn’t process what I was seeing right away. At first, I managed nothing more than a stammered “Oh my God.” Then further recognition descended and the pieces began falling into place. I stammered, “Are you — Do you —”

She said, “Shhhh. Later. It’s not soundproof. Put on the headphones you see on the shelf.”

“Is all this for —”

“Shhhh,” she said. “Don’t let them find you. You won’t like what happens.”

She hung up.

I whispered, “Lizzie?”

One of three small color monitors right in front of my eyes showed the front door of her apartment opening and two men that I’d never seen before entering Lizzie’s apartment.
“Young and buff. Don’t-fuck-with-’em types.”
That’s how the newsstand man had described them from the night before.

I quickly decided that I didn’t disagree with his assessment.

I added them to the roster of Death Angels in my head and thought,
And then there were six
.

As directed, I pulled on the headphones that were resting on the shelf in front of me at eye level. Instantly, I was listening to the array of sounds emanating from the rest of the apartment.

The two men separated in the living room. The huskier of the two started marching through the apartment and began doing a quick but thorough surveillance of the space. He was looking for someone.

For me,
I worried.

The other man — he was tall and thin and had wireless glasses and a prominent square jaw — stood by the window looking out at the river. His feet were roughly shoulder-width apart. He held his right wrist with his left hand behind his back.

He struck me as a guy who wanted to be seen as a serene, patient man with an edge. But I suspected that his demeanor was covering a nascent explosiveness. The legs-apart stance told me he was maybe ex-military or ex-law enforcement.

He also gave off a vibe that he wasn’t expecting the other guy to find anything during his search.

I spent most of the next minute watching the first man make his rounds through the apartment as he paced down the hallway, and into the guest bedroom, master bedroom, master bath, and closet.

One of the three monitors in front of me carried a fixed shot of the living room, and one carried a fixed shot of the master bedroom. The third, however, presented the output of a more sophisticated setup; the image automatically followed the man walking through the apartment and changed its view as he moved from place to place. I guessed that motion detectors were sensing his progress through Lizzie’s flat and signaling specific cameras to pick up his progress. After a quick search of the apartment he marched back into the living room, stopping a half dozen feet from the other man, who continued to gaze out toward the river.

The man who had been searching said, “Not here.”

“Go back out and check the fire stairs,” the boss man said, confirming my suspicion that he was in charge. “First go all the way up to the roof, then all the way back down to the basement. I want to hear from you every three minutes. And make sure none of the fire doors leading to any floor are blocked open.”

“How could —”

“I don’t know. That’s one of the things we need to figure out, right? But first? We need to complete our search. Go.”

After the other man was out the door of the apartment, the boss man went to the kitchen and poked around in Lizzie’s refrigerator. Unfolded some white deli paper. Wasn’t pleased with what he found sliced inside.

Looked like cheese to me. Muenster or jack. But the camera resolution wasn’t great. It could have been smoked turkey.

My eyes followed him as he reached in and grabbed the organic raspberries Lizzie had bought the night before. He flicked open the box and scanned the contents carefully. Apparently convinced of the berries’ freshness, he pulled a sheet off a roll of paper towels, stepped back out of the kitchen, and resumed his position at the windows in the living room. He began popping the berries into his mouth one by one, as though he was eating popcorn at the movies.

FORTY-SIX

The man ate about half the raspberries before he set the box on the tea table by the chaise and wiped his fingertips with the paper towel. He folded the towel into thirds as though he was preparing a letter to slide into an envelope, and began a casual stroll through Lizzie’s flat. Unlike his compatriot, this guy wasn’t searching for anything specific.

He was merely intent on seeing whatever was there to see.

Using the folded paper towel as insulation, he pulled a few titles — I thought at random, but there was no way to be certain — off the bookshelves behind Lizzie’s desk, flipped them open, allowing the pages to fan from end to beginning, and then left the books in a haphazard pile on top of the lower cabinets. Those credenzas interested him, as they had me, and he felt around in obvious places for a release that would prove that the flat panels were indeed doors.

He couldn’t get them to open, either.

I kept waiting for him to lift something heavy to use as a hammer to obliterate the panels and reveal their secrets. He didn’t.

The cabinets, if they were cabinets, retained their mysteries.

The spare bedroom interested him more than I thought it should have. He stood dead center in the room and slowly rotated three hundred and sixty degrees, almost as though he couldn’t believe that the room held nothing more than some out-of-season clothes and a couple of discarded chairs.

Lizzie’s bedroom received even more of his attention. He sat on the edge of her bed as he rifled through the single drawer on the bedside chest. He examined a box of condoms with surprising curiosity, almost as though he’d never seen one before. He read the label on an amber bottle of prescription drugs, and took off the top to examine the contents. He dropped one of the tablets into the pocket of his shirt before he shut the drawer.

He lifted one of her bed pillows to his face and inhaled its scent. There was nothing at all sensual or prurient in the act; he seemed more like a bloodhound filing the aroma for future reference.

He wasn’t wasting any time; his entire perusal of the master bathroom took less than a minute.

Next he came into the closet.

I held my breath. He’d stopped in front of the tall drawer unit deliberately, as though it had been his destination all along. I thought he seemed to be staring right into the lens of the camera, which was obviously built somewhere into the drawer unit behind which I was hiding. It felt as though he was looking right into my eyes.

Does he know about this space? Does he know about the cameras? Does he know I’m back here? Did Lizzie —

A squeal filled my headphones, and I almost yelped.

The man grabbed at his hip and then flipped open his phone in a smooth, practiced motion. He held it in front of his face like a walkie-talkie. He hissed, “I said every three minutes.”

“Sorry, I lost track of —”

“I don’t care. When I say three, I don’t mean five. Did you find anything? Where are you?”

“Nothing on the way up to the roof. I’m on my way back down, passing the doors on five. I’ll be in the basement soon.”

“Call me when you get there.” He closed the phone and stuck it back into its holster.

He began to rifle through the drawers. The angle of the lens prevented me from seeing where his attention was focused. After he was done with the drawers, he turned and began to touch Lizzie’s hanging clothes, patting them, squeezing them. I thought he was exceedingly gentle with the garments, as though he was a lover lamenting the loss of something he feared he would never see again.

Was he her lover?
I wondered. I tried to imagine them together, but I couldn’t see it.

I told myself it didn’t matter.

Occasionally, he would pull a sleeve of a shirt or sweater toward his face, adding some new variation of Lizzie’s scent to that olfactory library in some primitive part of his memory.

The squeal from his phone shocked my ears all over again.

He grabbed the phone from his hip, stepped from the closet, and said, “Yeah.” With the phone in front of his face, he marched across the bedroom and down the parquet hall.

“Nothing. You want me to come back up and start to knock on doors on her floor? See if the neighbors saw anything?”

“No point in going that route. There’re too many units in the building. Wait for me in the lobby. I’ll be down in a minute.”

I exhaled.
Thank God, he’s leaving.

He stepped toward the door, but instead of exiting the apartment, he spun and retraced his steps down the hall, across the master bedroom, and back into the adjacent bathroom. He stared for a few seconds before he opened the medicine cabinet — even though the camera had him in profile, I could tell that he was frowning at the contents — and then he pulled open the fluted-glass doors of a tall narrow cupboard. Linens. Toilet paper. Tissues. A filigreed silver tray of bottles and lotions and creams. Nothing remarkable that I could recognize. He closed the doors gently, poked his head into the shower stall, and then he backed out of the room.

Immediately, he came back into the closet.

This time he was looking for something specific.

Something that he thought should have been someplace in the bathroom, but wasn’t. Something he’d expected to find in the apartment that he hadn’t found.

What?

He reopened the closet drawers. Every one of them. I couldn’t see him feel around inside the drawers but I could
feel
him feeling around inside the drawers. He slammed the last one shut.

He kicked it with his foot.

I’d been right. The guy was tightly wound. Only a small frustration away from explosion.

It was clear that he still hadn’t found what he’d thought he should find.

He marched back to the kitchen and methodically began to open all the cabinets and drawers. He stared into each space for a few seconds before he shut the door or drawer and moved on to the next.

Once again, it didn’t appear that he discovered what he was looking for.

He left the folded paper towel on the kitchen counter.

Within seconds he was gone from the apartment. He didn’t bother to relock the dead bolt, which meant he didn’t care if Lizzie knew that someone had been there.

Given the unique way he’d folded the paper towel, I considered the possibility that the tri-fold was a personal signature, and that he was leaving Lizzie an unmistakable message that he had been there.

My knees were weak. Would he come back?

I didn’t know.

But I didn’t dare move.

What I suspected he’d been looking for in the master bathroom and the closet and the kitchen was surrounding me in my cubby.

The tiny space where I was hiding — the open area was no more than three feet square — was lined with narrow shelves on two sides. Melamine, I thought. Antiseptically white and unadorned.

The closet within a closet was a hidden pantry, really.

A tiny refrigerator, smaller even than a dorm fridge, was built in below the shelves on the right side.

The shelves — all of them except for the one that supported the surveillance monitors and related electronics — were lined with medical supplies, medical journals, medical textbooks, and vertical files of medical records.

An IV pole took up half the floor space. Its heavy rolling base was what I’d kicked as I squeezed into the space. The attached pumps and infusers intruded into the hiding place’s volume, forcing me to stand back against the wall.

On the shelves were vials of drugs, bottles of pills. Racks of files. Dozens of texts. A stack of journals.

Sealed packages of syringes, needles, tubing, connectors, gauze, alcohol pads, bandages.

On the bottom shelf opposite the refrigerator was a monitor for pulse, respiration, oxygen saturation. Other things, too. An automated blood pressure cuff sat beside the monitor.

The smells were familiar. The sights were familiar. Even the labels on some of the drugs were familiar.

I lifted the top file from the stack of the medical records — there were maybe five files total — and I began to read.

The names of the patients on the file tabs were all different.

None of the first names were Lizzie, or any of its obvious variations.

But each of the patients was a thirty-seven-year-old unmarried female.

With breast cancer.

I came to the reluctant conclusion that Lizzie had directed me to hide from the Death Angels in her tiny, secret, nursing station in her own very private cancer treatment clinic.

I suspected that the only patient being treated in the clinic was Lizzie.

I also suspected that she was the clinic’s only physician.

Why was it all so secret?

I had a guess.