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“Nooners are good anytime between nine and five,” the woman said, with a rattling cackle. “Especially when it saves you eight hundred bucks a month.”
“Could you call him, and ask him to come up here with a key?” Virgil asked.
The woman said she could and closed her door after saying she didn’t want any strange men in her apartment. “I’ll come back, one way or the other, after I call.”
“We’d appreciate it,” Virgil said.
They waited three or four minutes before she came back, still speaking through the cracked-open door. “I got him. Told him the marshals were here, and they wanted to talk with him. He’ll be over as soon as he gets his pants on.”
“He say that?” Virgil asked.
“No, he didn’t say that, you dummy,” the woman said. “He thinks nobody knows about his little hobby. What do you want Doreen for?”
“Some questions about her job. She’s not answering her door, so we’re a little worried.”
“Didn’t hear no gunshots,” the woman said.
“That’s a good thing,” Virgil said.
—
The manager,a rotund man with sparse brown hair and a pointed, ratlike nose, with a ratlike mustache beneath it, came hustling down the hall five minutes later. Lucas and Virgil identified themselves and asked him to open Pollard’s apartment.
“Can you do that without a warrant?” He was wearing a plastic name badge that said “Warren.”
“We can if we think there may be a crime in process, or that one has been committed,” Lucas said. “We’ve been told she’s home. We’ve knocked, and she hasn’t answered.”
“I haven’t heard her either,” the elderly woman said, “though I did a while ago. She’s still in there.”
“Okay, sounds reasonable,” Warren said. He kept his keys on his hip, with a pull-out retractable cable. He pulled out the key ring and sorted through the keys.
Virgil: “Is Warren your first name, or your last?”
“Warren Dodd,” the manager said. He found the pass key, slipped it in the lock, and unlocked the door.
Virgil said, “You know...” He carefully reached behind the doorknob and used the knob’s shaft to open the door. When it unlatched, he used an elbow to push the door open.
Doreen Pollard lay on a rag rug inside the door, face-up. Most of her skull above her nose had been crushed, and her eye sockets were islands of liquid blood.
Virgil blurted, “Jesus,” and Lucas turned away and said, “I hate it when this happens.”
“Not funny,” Virgil snapped, walking backwards into the hall.
“I wasn’t trying to be funny,” Lucas snapped back. “That’s the worst.”
Dodd peeked around Lucas’s shoulder, his ratlike nose twitched, and he said, “Holy fuck knuckles.”
The old lady, still behind her door, asked, “What do you see, Warren?”
“Somebody killed her. She’s... this is awful. Beat her head in. This is gonna kill our rep.”
—
Lucas stepped overto the body, careful not to get blood on his shoes. Blood and pieces of bloody skull bone were on both the rag rug and the tile floor around it. He looked at Pollard’s chest, to see if there was any sign that she was breathing; there wasn’t.
“She’s dead. Let’s close it up,” Lucas said, backing toward the door. “We need the West St. Paul cops, Gary Durey, and the BCA crime scene guys.”
They made the calls from the hallway. When everybody was on the way, they sent Dodd down to the parking lot to direct the cops and the BCA.
