The Night Crew

with a little music that he couldn’t place. Old music, the kind you hear late at night when you’re driving out in the desert.
    People on a porch, he thought, in the next house. He measured the unexcited voices, then slowly, carefully unhooked the fanny pack, unzipped it, took out the screwdriver and the roll of duct tape.
    He knew from the last time where the lock was. He planned to break out the glass again, but more carefully. He’d hold the pieces in place with the tape, rather than letting them fall inside.
    But when he got to his knees on the porch, he found a piece of plywood covering the window. He tested it with the screwdriver. The plywood moved. Huh. More pressure—and when he pried hard enough, he could feel the wood give.
    He dropped the duct tape and worked the screwdriver around the perimeter of the plywood plug. After a minute, the top and left edge were free. He worked on the bottom edge, then pushed his hand through the slot and it opened like a little door.
    He stopped to listen again, then reached inside. He had to stretch, to go in all the way to his shoulder, but the deadbolt was there and he flipped the handle; the door opened easily.
    Inside, he listened again, then pressed the plywood window plug roughly into place. He used the penlight to navigate across the kitchen, followed the light down the hall, around the little office, then up the stairs to the bedroom.
    The bedroom smelled of her: her perfume, or just her body.
    He listened, then probed the bedroom. Went through the chest of drawers, through the closets, looked at photographs in a grass basket, dug through a trunk, through a jewelry box; smelled her perfume, dabbed some of it on his throat.
    Stretched out on her bed; turned his face into her pillow.
    Hated her; but still loved her, too, he thought. He was still there, on the bed, when she got back.
    Felt a finger of panic: then remembered the closet.
    Crept into it, made himself small, in the back, with the shoes, behind the hanging lengths of the hippie dresses.
    Took the gun out, placed the long, cool length of it against his face.
    Heard voices: she was with a man. The bodyguard.
    He’d wait until he was gone, and take her.
    End her.
    And if the bodyguard stayed?
    He worked it out: Take the bodyguard first. No warning, just step up and do it.
    Then her.
    He tried to control his breathing, but found it difficult.
    Hate/sex/death/darkness. The odor of Chanel. The silken feel of her dresses on his face . . .
    He waited.

twenty-six

    Louis found the kid’s name—Charles McKinley. An address was listed in the university directory, but when Louis called it, the phone had been disconnected.
    ‘‘Student,’’ Louis said to Anna.
    ‘‘We need an address,’’ Anna said. When she got off the phone, she said to Harper, ‘‘We’ve got to go after this kid. This little stunt he pulled . . . there’s something in here. A couple of different personalities, or something.’’
    ‘‘It won’t hurt to take a look at Clark while we’re waiting,’’ Harper said. ‘‘If Louis says the kid’s not in the directory, then it’ll take a while to find him.’’
    Anna shook her head, but said, ‘‘I guess.’’ Harper made sense, but the gloom was on her. She dreaded the idea of spying on Clark.
    Harper pulled away from the curb and headed down the hill, into the campus, silent, knowing that she was working through it. She stared out the window at the passing landscape
    and wondered why the idea of surveillance worried her so much.
    She turned the question in her mind until she arrived at the nexus: If we get back together, I’ll have to tell him. And if I tell him, I’ll be admitting that I thought he might be this killer. But only if we get back together, and we won’t. But if we do . . .
    The thoughts tumbled over each other, always running into the paradox: we won’t, but if we do . . .
    A barefoot man in a ragged winter coat, the kind people wore in Minnesota, stood on the corner by the Shell station and held up a cardboard sign hand-lettered with Magic Marker: will work for drugs . He laughed crazily, drunkenly— or maybe somebody had dropped some acid on him—at the passing cars. Harper guided the BMW past him, wordlessly, glancing at Anna from time to time.
    ‘‘That’s where the trouble started,’’ Anna said, looking at the gas station as they went by.
    ‘‘What?’’ ‘‘That’s where we picked up the woman who took us into the animal rights thing