Dead Certain

three floors of the building. Elliott and the two homicide detectives followed me down the steps single file like a Boy Scout outing. We stopped at the walkway that led between our building and the one next door.
    “Look,” I said. “None of the buildings on this block were built with the first floor on ground level. They were all designed to sit high up off the street to make them seem more grand. The first floor is actually a full story above street level. Front and back, you have to walk up a flight of stairs to get to the door, and then inside, there are more stairs. And see here where the steps go down to the basement?” I pointed to the concrete stairs that ran beside the exterior wall of the building and led into a deep well like a concrete bunker surrounding the basement door. “Take a look. What’s that directly above them?”
    All three men looked up at the building. “Your kitchen window,” said Blades. “The one without the burglar grille.”
    “That’s why there was never one put on that window. It’s almost impossible to reach. There’s a twenty-foot drop underneath it. You’d have to put a ladder in the stairwell in order to get in, but it’s not wide enough to give you enough of an angle to support a ladder that tall.”
    Blades pulled a flashlight from his pocket and trained its beam down the concrete stairwell toward the basement door. “And here’s where all the glass fell when he broke it,” he observed.
    “Yeah,” said Elliott, “but there’s much more glass outside than inside, so what does that tell you?”
    “That it was probably broken from inside the apartment,” offered Blades. “Meaning that whoever broke it Was trying to make it look like a botched burglary.”
    “Which explains why the front door was left open,” I said.
    “How do you figure that?” asked Elliott.
    “Because Claudia let her killer into the apartment. It was someone she knew. Most likely the murderer left this way, through the back door. That’s why he forgot that the front door was open.”
    “Why would she have left the door open?” asked Kowalczyk, obviously not buying my theory.
    “I don’t know,” I replied. “Maybe she wanted to keep open a line of escape....”
     
    In the end I had Elliott take me to the new apartment downtown. It was closer than his place, and even though I’d never spent much time there, at least it was more familiar than a hotel. Besides, with the doorman in the lobby and security otherwise tight, it was one of the few places where I thought I might be able to feel safe. I just prayed that Claudia had never mentioned the address to Carlos.
    If Danny was surprised to see me showing up in the middle of the night with bloodstains on my clothes and a strange man at my side, he was too well trained to show it. He merely touched his gray-gloved hand to the bill of his cap and wished us a very pleasant good night.
    Upstairs it smelled of fresh paint and new carpet. Elliott hadn’t seen the apartment since it had been finished, and I could tell that even through his fatigue, he liked what he saw. Empty, it had been a beautiful place; now it was simply stunning. But tonight the whole world, no matter how physically perfect, seemed out of joint and beyond my understanding.
    There were plenty of beds but no sheets. I really didn’t care. Elliott followed me into the master suite and took off his jacket and his tie. I stripped down to my silk blouse and underpants and curled up on the bed, struggling to keep my eyes open long enough to see Elliott disappear through the door. He came back a few minutes later with the matelasse coverlets that had been ordered for the guest room. He tucked me in carefully and gave me a chaste kiss on the top of my head.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, lying down beside me fully dressed and wrapping his arms around me.
    As I closed my eyes I noticed that he’d put his gun on the nightstand within easy reach.
     
    The next morning I woke up to the smell of coffee and the sensation that someone had come in the night and hollowed out my heart. I opened my eyes and saw Elliott. He was sitting at the writing desk in front of the big arched window that looked out over the lake. He looked freshly shaved and showered and was dressed in a pair of khaki pants and a light blue oxford cloth shirt. There was a Starbucks cup at his elbow, and on the desk in front of him lay the Browning 9mm he always carried and what looked like a box of ammunition.
    I