The Funhouse

the parking area. Two people got out of it and went into an apartment two doors away. At the same time a man left yet another apartment, got into a Volkswagen Rabbit, and drove off. When all was quiet again, Conrad went out to the Omni, took the tarp from the trunk, and carried it inside, hoping that no one was watching him from a window in one of the other apartments.
        He took the tarp into the small bathroom and opened it there. Taking care to keep himself clean, he lifted the canvas and dumped the contents into the bathtub. There was still a great deal of blood trapped in the torn body cavity, and he spread some of the viscous stuff around, smearing it on the walls and the floor.
        He took a macabre pride in the cleverness of his plan. If he had left the dead woman in the il bedroom, the police pathologists would have realized at once that she hadn't been killed there, for they wouldn't have found enough blood on the carpet to support that theory. (Most of her blood had been spilled in the funhouse, on the gondola tracks, and had soaked into the boards there.) But when the cops found her here, in the bathroom maybe they would think that the missing pints of blood had simply gone down the bathtub drain.
        Conrad remembered the VIP badge on her blouse. He fished that out of the tub and stuck it in his jacket pocket.
        He also retrieved her hard hat, flashlight, and notebook, which were spotted with blood. He cleaned those off at the sink, then took them out to the foyer closet and put them on the shelf above the coatrack. He didn't know whether that was where she usually kept those items, but the police wouldn't know either, and it seemed a likely enough place.
        He folded the empty tarp.
        In the kitchen, in the harsh glow of the fluorescent lights, he inspected his hands carefully. He had washed them in the bathroom, when he had cleaned the articles that he'd taken to the foyer closet, but there was still some blood caked under his fingernails. He went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands once more, vigorously.
        He found the drawer in which the dead woman had kept her dish towels. He wrapped one of the towels around his right hand and took another one to the kitchen door. He opened the door, which had three small, decorative windows arranged in the center of it. He looked out at the parking lot; under the stark light of the sodium-vapor lamps, there was no sound or motion. He put the folded dish towel against the exterior surface of one of the door's little panes, and then he struck the interior surface with his wrapped right hand, trying to make as little noise as possible. The glass broke with only a dull crack, and he used the folded towel to push the fragments inward onto the kitchen floor, so that it would look as if the killer had smashed the pane from the outside in the process of forcing entry. Conrad quietly closed the door, shook the dish towels to be certain there were no slivers of glass clinging t o the fabric, refolded them, and returned them to the drawer in which he-had found them.
        He suddenly realized that threads from the dish towels might be snagged on the shards of glass. He stared down at the bright fragments. He didn't have time to examine each of them. Likewise, he didn't have time to study the trunk of her car with a magnifying glass to see if there were spots of blood in it. There were probably other loose ends, too. He would just have to do the best he could and trust in the protection of the dark god who guided him.
        He left Janet Middlemeir's car keys on the kitchen counter and picked up the folded tarp. As he stepped out of the apartment he wiped the doorknobs with his handkerchief. He didn't have an arrest record, his fingerprints weren't on file anywhere, but nevertheless he was cautious.
        He walked away from the apartment complex. The fairgrounds lay nine miles to the west, but he wasn't going to cover the entire distance on foot. He intended to call a taxi to take him back to the carnival, but he didn't want to risk summoning a ride from anywhere near the Middlemeir apartment, the cabdriver would keep a record of the trip and might even remember his passenger's face. A mile from the woman's place, he disposed of the tarp in a big trash bin behind another apartment building. After walking another mile, he came to a Holiday Inn. He stopped in the hotel bar, had two double Scotches, and then took a cab to