Stolen Prey

door was wooden, but had a long, narrow glass window down the middle. He looked through the glass and could see anempty atrium and an intersecting hallway, and the bottom of a curving stairway. He thought the chances of kicking the door in were remote—it was a solid chunk of wood with heavy brass hardware. Kicking it would make too much noise, anyway.
    He leaned on the management doorbell again, got no answer, then took the end of his gun, pressed it against the glass in the door, and pressed it until the glass cracked and finally fell away, inside. He broke out more glass until he could reach through to the inside handle, and popped the door open.
    Sanderson’s address said apartment 344, so she’d be up two flights. He ran up the first flight, looked both ways, and then a voice said, “Hey,” and he turned and saw a square-faced woman, red glasses, dishwater-blond hair, who saw the gun and said, “No, no,” and turned as though to run.
    Lucas said, sharply but quietly, “I’m a cop. Did you just see two Mexican-looking guys come through, going to Kristina Sanderson’s?”
    “Yes, I just … Oh, my God, are they…?” She looked up the stairs.
    “Which way to her apartment?” Lucas asked. “Which way?”
    “Top of the stairs, to the left.” She pointed.
    “Did they go in?”
    “They were just going to knock…. I left them when they were walking down the hall.”
    “You’re the manager?”
    “Yes. I’m Pat.”
    Lucas went up the stairs, saying, as he went, “There are more cops on the way. Let them in.”
    He took the stairs in five seconds, peeked down the hall to theleft. Nothing. He looked right. Nothing. Had they gone in? Was Sanderson home, maybe not answering her phone?
    He hurried down the hall, checking off the numbers on the doors, got to 344. The door was closed, no sign that it had been forced. The door across the hall was also pristine. He continued down the hall, to an exit sign, went through a fire door, looked down the stairwell, heard and saw nothing at all.
    He went back: Where had they gone? If they were in the apartment, they might be torturing her … although the place didn’t look substantial enough to smother a scream….
    At the door, he stood quietly for just a second, then pressed his ear to it. He got back an almost unearthly silence. The whole building was quiet.
    Kick the door? He looked at the door, and again, as with the door below, he doubted his ability to get through it. The door looked like it was metal, set in what was probably a concrete block wall.
    He was still looking at it when he heard some scuffling on the stairway, and he padded back down the hall, and a cop peeked around the corner at him. Lucas held up a finger and continued that way and said, quietly, “Davenport, BCA,” and the cop said, “I know you. They in there?”
    Lucas recognized him, but didn’t remember his name. “I don’t know. I kind of … I’m just not sure.”
    “What do you want to do? We’ve got more guys on the way.”
    “Set up and wait five minutes, until we’ve got the place blocked off, and then knock and see what happens.”
    That’s what they did. A SWAT team showed up, and Lucas was talking to the commander when Pat, the manager, said, “Kristina’s out on the sidewalk. Do you want to talk to her?”
    “Yes, I do,” Lucas said. To the SWAT commander, he said, “If she didn’t let them in, and if they didn’t have a key … then they left. We missed them. We gotta check, but I think we’re wasting our time.”
    “We’ll get a key and check it,” the SWAT guy said.
    “I’ll be outside,” Lucas said. “Goddamnit, anyway.”

14
    K ristina Sanderson had left her car down the block and walked to the apartment, to see why the cops had blocked it off. But in her heart, she knew. “I live here,” she told one of the uniformed cops, who’d used their squad cars to block the street. “What’s happening?”
    “We’re looking for a couple of people,” a cop said. “You’ll have to wait awhile. If you have some shopping to do…”
    Instead of shopping, she drifted to the side of the street with a cluster of other rubberneckers, including two that she recognized as other residents of the apartment building. They nodded to each other, agreed that they hadn’t heard anything. The manager, Pat, walked out the front door with a police officer and talked to him for a moment. At one point, Pat looked across the street and saw them, and Kristina waved