Justifiable Means

  Dizziness washed over her, along with an overwhelming feeling that she wasn’t alone. She looked around slowly, warily, as if he were in the apartment somewhere, listening to this call.

  “Melissa?”

  “Yeah, Mom. Uh . . .” She tried to backtrack through the conversation, to give the response her mother needed. “I don’t know what he was talking about. I told you, he’s just some idiot. Probably drank too much and thought he’d get a good laugh.” She knew her voice was trembling, and she was giving away too much, alarming her mother.

  “Melissa, are you sure you’re all right? Maybe you should come home for a while.”

  “No, I can’t, Mom. I have to stay.”

  Her mother was crying now, and she could hear the subtle difference in her breathing, the grainy sound to her voice. “But this is how it happened before…”

  As hard as she’d tried to shelter them from this, she was causing them grief anyway.

  “Melissa?” Her father had taken the phone, and Melissa knew she couldn’t hide anything from him without a Herculean effort. Trying to sound upbeat, she said, “Hi, Dad.”

  “Honey, I want you to tell me the truth. Is something wrong? Are you in some kind of danger?”

  “No,” she said. “Really. Everything’s fine. I just moved yesterday, so my phone was disconnected. Dad, those phone calls—they’re just a guy at work.” As she spoke, she broke into a sweat. Slowly, she walked into the bedroom, looked nervously around, then cautiously checked the closet. “It’s really no big deal. His pride is hurt because I wouldn’t go out with him…” The bedroom was empty, so she walked out of it, crossed the living room, and went into the kitchen.

  “Melissa, I got a recording device today. I’m going to tape the calls from now on. Maybe you should too.”

  “Just relax, okay? Stop worrying. I have everything under control.”

  “Melissa, does this person have something to do with why you moved so suddenly?”

  She hated lying to her parents, but she had no choice. “No. I told you. My sink was stopped up, and the manager wouldn’t fix it. I got fed up and moved. No big deal.”

  The kitchen was clear, so she headed for the bathroom. “Dad, I love you. Tell Mom I love her, too. And calm down. I’m sorry about the calls, but they really don’t mean anything.”

  “All right, honey. But if we get any more calls, we’re going to ...”

  She stepped cautiously into the bathroom as her father continued to talk. The shower curtain was closed, and she couldn’t remember closing it herself. Her heart began to palpitate, and her blouse began to stick to her. Clutching the phone tighter, she grabbed the edge of the curtain and jerked it open.

  Empty.

  Breathing a sigh of relief, she turned slowly around and leaned against the sink. This was crazy. He couldn’t know where she was. He couldn’t know who she was. It was just a coincidence. The caller was someone else.

  “Melissa, did you hear me?”

  “Yes, Dad. You said if you got any more call—”

  Her voice stopped cold as she looked up and saw the writing on her mirror, big red letters made with the lipstick she had left on the sink that morning. She gasped and jumped back, and her throat constricted.

  “Melissa? What is it?”

  She couldn’t speak, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think. For a moment, she only stared at the words, bold and big:

  Next time for real.

  In a high-pitched, breathless, wavering voice, she managed to get the words out. “Dad, I’ve got to go. Bathtub—overflowing—”

  She turned the phone off and dropped it, then grabbed her purse and her keys and fled the apartment.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Larry was eating a TV dinner and watching the news when a sudden banging on his door startled him. He grabbed his gun, which he’d laid on the table, and approached the door quickly but cautiously, sliding along the wall.

  Through the peephole he saw Melissa and threw the door open.

  Sobbing hysterically, she grabbed him and spoke so rapidly that he could barely understand her. “Help me! He was there. In my new apartment. I don’t know how he found it, but he was in there. He wrote on my mirror, Larry! I’m not safe anywhere!”

  He pulled her in and made her sit. Kneeling in front of her, he tried to calm her. “Tell me again. Who was there? Soames?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “I moved yesterday, but he found me.” She grabbed both of his arms. “He was in my apartment, Larry! He wrote in lipstick on my mirror. And he’s been calling my parents! I don’t know what to do. There’s no place to go!”

  Larry got up, pulled on his shoulder holster, slipped his gun into it, then put his windbreaker on. “All right, let’s go back over there, and you can show me. What did he write?”

  “He wrote, ‘Next time for real.’ I don’t know what he means, Larry. But how could he have gotten in? Nobody knew where I was. Not even you!”

  “All right. I’m gonna call Tony and have him meet us there. If we can find proof that he was in your apartment, we’ll have him picked up again. This joker’s going back to the slammer until his trial.”

  She was a wreck, Larry thought as they drove back to her building. What if he’d been in her apartment while she was home? What if he was still there now? Would he be that bold? That stupid?

  Tony was waiting in his car when they drove up, and he got out and met them at the curb. Melissa was shaking and staring up at the window to her apartment.

  “She says he was there,” Larry said quietly. “Left a message on her mirror, in lipstick.”

  “Would he be that reckless?” Tony whispered.

  “Looks like he was.” He turned back to Melissa. “If you want to wait in the car—”

  “No!” she said quickly. “I don’t want to be by myself. I’m coming with you. I’ll show you where it is.”

  They opened the door quietly and carefully—not wanting to disturb any fingerprints he might have left—pulled their guns, and went in. Melissa waited by the front door as they searched the apartment. Satisfied that he wasn’t there, they came to the bathroom. “Was it in here?”

  “Yes,” she said, hanging back. “On the mirror.”

  There was a moment of silence, then Larry asked, “Did you clean it off?”

  “What?” She abandoned the front door and went in to see for herself.

  The mirror was clean.

  “No, it was there! Right there, in big letters!” She gasped and backed out of the bathroom. “Oh, no—he was back! He came back while I was gone. Or maybe he was here all the time! Larry, you have to believe me! He’s playing games with me. He was here! Dust for fingerprints! You’ll see.”

  But she could see that Tony didn’t believe a word, and Larry looked troubled and confused. “Melissa,” Larry said, “are you sure you didn’t clean it before you came over? You were upset. You might have—”

  “No! I was on the phone with my father, and I dropped the phone. See? Here it is.” She picked it up off the floor. “And then I ran out.” She turned to Tony. “Please, I’m telling you—he was here. You have to pick him up. You have to get him back in jail, or he’ll kill me.”

  “Is that what it meant—‘Next time for real’?” Larry asked. “That he would kill you next time?”

  “It must have,” she agreed quickly. “And how did he get in here? The windows are all locked. I had the door dead-bolted. And how did he find this apartment? He must have been watching me when I moved out—stalking me.”

  Tony looked at the mirror again. “Is this the lipstick you said he wrote it with?”

  She nodded, and Tony picked up the tube with a piece of tissue, opened it, and rolled the lipstick up. The tip was flat, as if it had been used for writing. Even so, Tony shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would he risk coming back to clean it up? Why would he risk doing it in the first place, when he knows he’s the first person we’d think of?”

  Melissa felt herself trem
bling with fear and frustration. “Detective Danks, if I were lying about this, I’d have just written something on there myself, and it would still be there. And anyway, why would I lie about this? Why would I set myself up to look like a lunatic? I’m telling you, it happened. He came in, he wrote on my mirror, and then he came back—or maybe he was here the whole time. Only—I looked in every room before I saw the mirror. He wasn’t here.”

  Larry left the bathroom and began looking around the apartment. After a moment, he said, “Tony, come look at this.”

  Tony and Melissa followed him. He stood at the far end of the hallway, pointing at a rectangular wooden door set into the ceiling. “It’s an attic,” Tony whispered.

  Larry questioned Tony with his eyes. Could Soames be hiding there?

  “Have you looked up there?” Larry whispered to Melissa.

  “No. I didn’t even know it was there.”

  “Do you have a flashlight?”

  “Yes,” she said, and ran to get it. When she came back, she saw that they were both preparing to open the ceiling door. “Stand back,” Larry said, and pulled out his gun again. Tony did the same. Larry reached up and grabbed the hook on the door, and Tony held his gun aimed at it in one hand, the flashlight in the other.

  In one rapid motion, Larry pulled the door down. They held their guns aimed for a moment, but nothing happened. Slowly, carefully, Larry reached up and unfolded the narrow ladder. Tony shone the flashlight through the black hole, revealing how small the space was.

  Cautiously, Larry climbed the stairs, still aiming his gun, and stepped onto the board floor of the small crawl space. It was big enough for a man to sit in, he thought, though there was no sign that anyone had been here. He touched the floor, felt the dust, then had an idea. Stepping back onto the ladder so that only half his body intruded into the dark space, he shone the light around on the floor. A thick coating of dust covered it, but where he had just stood the dust clearly showed his footprints. He looked carefully around for any more disturbances in the dust.

  There it was—the faint outline of the bottom of a sneaker. Beyond that was a wiped place, as if someone had slid across the floor.

  “Tony, there’s dust all over the place up here,” he called down. “But in one place, it’s wiped up. Like somebody was sitting there. And there’s a shoe print in the dust.”

  “Let me see.”

  They traded places. “I see what you’re talking about,” Tony said, “but it could just be where the previous tenants had a box or something sitting.”

  “The edges aren’t that clean,” Larry said. “Looks to me like someone was sitting there.”

  Larry watched as Tony crawled farther into the attic, shining the light all around. After a moment, he came back to the opening. “Larry, come up here. You’ve got to see this.”

  Larry glanced at Melissa. She stood trembling at the end of the hallway, hugging herself and waiting. As Larry began to climb, she took a few steps closer to the ladder.

  Tony was shining the light at a place on the attic floor. It was an opening around one of the inset lights in the ceiling of the bathroom. The plate that had been on the back was missing, as was the bulb, and they could see through the glass covering straight into Melissa’s bathroom, to the sink and mirror and the area in front of them.

  “Still skeptical?” Larry asked.

  Tony shook his head. “He was here, all right,” he said in a voice too low for her to hear, “watching her discover what he wrote on the mirror.”

  “Let’s dust the apartment for prints.”

  “Okay. But what about her? He’ll be back.”

  “She can’t stay here tonight,” Larry said. “I’ll think of something.”

  They climbed back down, then both hesitated to tell her what they’d found.

  “Well?” she asked.

  “It looks like he might have been up there while you were here,” Larry said. “He probably left because he knew you were going to get help.”

  The color drained from her face. “But he’ll come back! He’ll come back!”

  “We’re going to call the ID techs to come dust for prints, Melissa. As soon as we run it through the computer and make a match, we can get him.”

  She waited, tense and quiet, as the apartment filled up with police photographers and ID technicians. As they dusted for prints, she sat like a little child waiting to be told her fate.

  “He was probably wearing gloves,” Larry said. “But maybe not.”

  “He’s smart,” Melissa said in a hopeless monotone. “He knows you need evidence. He knows what kind. So as long as he doesn’t leave any, he can do whatever he wants.”

  “We’ll pick him up anyway,” Larry said. “For questioning. We’ll put a little scare into him.”

  “But can’t we just tell the judge he was here? Can’t we tell him Soames called my parents?”

  “It wouldn’t help,” Larry said. “Not unless we could prove he was here with a print match.”

  She ran her fingers through her bangs. “I can’t stay here. I don’t know where to go.”

  Larry looked at Tony and saw the censure in his eyes, as if he knew that Larry would jump in and rescue her. Larry didn’t let it stop him.

  “I could take you to a hotel for the night.”

  She thought for a moment. “I guess so. I’m just afraid that he’ll find me there, too. I can’t believe he found me this time, and so soon.”

  “Look, we’ll send someone now to pick him up for questioning. We won’t move you until we have him in custody. That way we’ll know that he can’t follow you.”

  “All right,” she said. “But then what? I can’t come back here.”

  “I’ll talk to the manager about letting you put your own dead bolts on the door, so that there isn’t an extra key anywhere. And we’ll go around and reinforce the windows, make absolutely sure that they can’t be broken into. Maybe even put up burglar bars.”

  “I never thought I’d wind up being a prisoner in my own apartment,” she whispered.

  “We’ll put enough fear into him that he won’t come near you. I’ll even tell him he’s being watched.”

  “You said that before. But he didn’t care.”

  “He’ll care this time. And who knows? Maybe tomorow we can find a witness who saw him around here. And the pattern of that shoe print was pretty distinctive. If we can find that shoe, maybe it’ll be enough evidence to convince a judge he was here.”

  She nodded without much hope. “I’ll go pack a few things,” she said, and disappeared to the back.

  Larry turned back to Tony. “All right, I know what you’re thinking.”

  “She does have to have a safe place to stay,” Tony conceded. “But try not to get too involved.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Larry picked up the phone, dialed the station, and asked to have Soames picked up for questioning.

  Melissa came back out with a suitcase, her expression strained and distracted. “You know,” he said quietly, “maybe you should go home to Pensacola for a while. Spend some time with your parents.”

  “No, I can’t,” she said. “I don’t want to drag them into this.”

  “Into what?” Tony asked.

  “Into danger. If he comes after me there—” She stopped and tried to steady her emotions. “My parents still don’t know about what happened to me. I can’t tell them.”

  “But won’t they hear when it goes to trial?”

  She shook her head. “I haven’t thought that far in advance. All I know is that they don’t have to know yet.”

  “But if he’s calling them, they already are involved.”

  “I told them it was a prank. I told them my sink was stopped up, and I argued about it with the manager, so I moved. That’s all they need to know.”

  The phone rang, and Larry answered, instead of Melissa. “Yeah? You got him already? He was home?” He shot a look at Tony. “What alibi? Well, how long did she say she’d been there? W
ell, have you checked her out?”

  He sighed and rubbed his temples. “Well, take them both in for questioning. And keep them separated, so they don’t compare notes. Check her out, to make sure she’s not lying for him. Oh, and check to see if she has a roommate or a neighbor, anybody who can confirm how long she’s been gone.

  “What kind of shoes does he have on, by the way? Yeah, I thought so. Get a picture and a print of the bottom of both shoes, will you? And keep him there until we get there.”

  He hung up, and Melissa sank down on the couch. “He has an alibi?”

  “Some woman he was with. Says he’s been with her there in his apartment for the last three hours. But it looks like he’s got on our shoes. Anyway, they’re keeping him until we can question him, so we have some time to get you to a hotel. He can’t follow you.”

  “All right,” she said, grabbing the handle of her suitcase, but Larry took it from her.

  “I’ll get this,” he said. “Are you sure this is all you need?”

  She looked around and shivered at the thought that he might have gone through her things. “No,” she said. “I’m fine. Let’s go.”

  Larry took her key and locked the door behind them.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  We’ve got to let him go,” the officer who had picked up Pendergrast told Tony and Larry when they got back to the precinct. “The woman he was with confirmed his alibi.”

  Larry glanced into the room where the woman sat. She was several years older than Pendergrast, had garishly dyed hair, and wore cheap, tight clothes. She sat flipping through a magazine, swinging her foot with bored nonchalance and popping her gum. “She’s not his type,” Larry said.

  Tony shrugged. “His type may be anything in a skirt.”

  “Well, I don’t think he found her at that yuppie club you like so much. My guess is he’s paying her to be his alibi.” He turned back to the cop. “Did you tell her he’s been indicted for rape?”

  “Yep. She says he’s innocent. It really didn’t faze her.”

  “And she insists that he was with her? For how long?”

  “Hours.”

  Tony leaned against his desk and thought that over for a moment. “We don’t really know what time he wrote on her mirror. Even with the alibi, he still could have done that. But if Snow White here is telling the truth, he wouldn’t have been there to wipe it off while she was coming to find you.”