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Bad things happened in groups of three, the old saying went. Dexter had been shot. Her old house had burned. And now this. If the old saw was accurate, her life should be peachy keen now.
But she hugged a blanket around her shoulders to fight off the chill she couldn't shake and tried to control a sense of impending doom. What else was going to happen?
"Ms. Whitlaw?"
It was one of the detectives, standing outside the drawn curtain of her cubicle. Her apartment had been swarming with detectives, uniformed policemen, medics, and people from IA, since any shooting by a police officer was automatically investigated. Outside the building, reporters and spectators had gathered. Every local television station had been represented.
"Yes, come in," she said.
He parted the curtain and stepped inside. He was middle-aged, his face shiny with sweat. How could he be sweating? It was so cold in here, the air conditioning must be turned on maximum. He sat down in the single chair in the cubicle, and Karen pulled the blanket tighter around her, shivering.
He watched her with that cool, assessing cop look, as if he didn't believe anything anyone told him. Marc had that look, too, she thought, and she wanted him here so much she ached inside. She had never felt safer than when she had been with Marc, and just now she needed that security.
"Detective Suter," he said by way of introduction. "Do you feel like answering some questions?"
They had taken a brief statement from her at the apartment, but since there was no question about the manner of the man's death, her importance to them was as a witness, not a suspect. The medics had wanted to transport her to be checked out, so they had let her go and taken care of more pressing matters.
"Yes, I'm fine," she said automatically.
He gave her an assessing look but didn't argue. He flipped open a small notebook. "Okay, in your previous statement, you said you were in the bedroom when you heard the suspect enter the apartment—"
"No, he was already inside. I didn't hear him enter. I heard him stop outside my bedroom door and look in." She knew what she had said, and it wasn't that she had heard him enter.
He looked back at the notebook and didn't comment. Maybe he had been testing her, to see if the details still matched.
"But he didn't see you?"
"No. He didn't come into the bedroom. I was standing off to the right, next to the window. The bedroom door opens to the right, so I was hidden from view unless he came all the way into the room."
"What did he do then?"
"After that, he wasn't as quiet. Since he didn't see me, he must have thought no one was at home. He went into the kitchen and began… searching."
"Searching?" He seized on the word.
"That's what it seemed like. He looked in the cabinets, because I could hear the drawers and doors opening and closing. He even looked in the refrigerator."
"What for?"
She raised her hands in a helpless gesture. "I don't know."
"Okay, what did he do then?"
"He turned the kitchen chairs upside down and looked under them." Her voice mirrored her bewilderment.
He wrote in his little notebook. "What did you do?"
"I—I didn't think I could get out of the apartment; from where he was, he had a clear view of the door. I tiptoed to the phone by the bed and put the receiver under a pillow to muffle the noise, then dialed nine-one-one."
"Good thing you did," he said. "The responding officers were less than a block away. They didn't know what apartment, but the street address was enough to get them there."
"They figured out what apartment," she said, staring blindly at the floor. "It was the one where shots were being fired."
He cleared his throat. "Uh—yeah. What happened then?"
"I tried to sneak into the bathroom, because that's where I keep my hairspray."
He gave a brief smile, and for a moment he was a man instead of a cop. "Smart. That stuff gets in your eyes, it burns like hell."
