Your Heart Belongs to Me

featured a standard deadbolt lock operated from inside by a thumbturn and from outside by a key, and each also had a blind deadbolt with a thumbturn on the inside but nothing to mark its existence on the outside. Both locks on both doors were engaged.
    After brushing his teeth, toileting, and changing into pajamas, Ryan considered taking the pistol from the safe. Counseling himself to maintain perspective and not to let his imagination overrule his reason, he returned unarmed to the bedroom.
    On his pillow lay a piece of jewelry, a gold heart pendant on a gold chain.
     

 
    THIRTY-FOUR

    I n the closet, Ryan pressed a hidden switch. A panel slid aside, revealing the eighteen-inch-square steel face of the wall safe.
    Using the lighted keypad, he hurriedly entered the lock code. When the liquid-crystal display announced ACCESS , he opened the safe, snatched up the 9-millimeter pistol, closed the door, and stood for a moment thinking, the weapon gripped in both hands, muzzle pointed at the ceiling.
    The checked grip felt rough against his palm. The weapon seemed too light for an instrument of mortal consequences.
    He did not want to kill anyone, but he had not survived this far to die easily.
    Barefoot, in pajamas, he left the closet, crossed the bedroom, and entered the retreat. He flipped up the light switch with one elbow as he crossed the threshold.
    The amboina-wood Art Deco desk. Bookshelves. Entertainment center. Small bar with an under-counter refrigerator.
    At the door to the first deck, he found the blind deadbolt still engaged from the inside. No one had left by this exit.
    Two windows provided a view of the deck. He drew up the pleated shades on the first, then on the second, half expecting a pale and hooded face at the glass, a milky-eyed stare, a wicked grin, whoever had been circling toward him around the black lake. No presence awaited him, and both windows were locked from inside.
    Off the retreat lay a windowless half bath. No one in there. His reflection in the mirror, his mouth pressed in a flat grim line, his eyes wild. The gun so huge.
    Returning to the bedroom, at the door to the second deck, he found the blind deadbolt engaged. No one had departed by this exit, either.
    Three windows, one inoperable. The other two locked. A gust of wind, a shatter of rain against the glass caused his heart to jump.
    Nowhere to hide except under the bed. Although no one but an anorexic model could slip under a low-profile king-size job with sideboards, Ryan dropped to his knees anyway and peered into that space, where because of the superb housecleaning he found not even a ball of dust.
    The foyer. The main door. Blind deadbolt locked.
    Bathroom. A large open space. The marble floor cold under his bare feet. Nothing moved but Ryan’s nervous reflections. A door led to a water closet, another to a walk-in linen storage. No one in either space.
    His expansive personal closet had no open shelves, only drawers for folded items. Hanging clothes were behind cabinet doors.
    By pushing the suits and shirts aside on the rods, a grown man could have hidden in any of a dozen different compartments. Ryan opened all the doors but confronted no intruder.
    To have left the pendant on the pillow after Ryan had locked himself in the suite for the night, someone must have been in there with him. Yet no one remained; and no exit had been opened.
    He returned to his bed, holding the pistol at his side, and stood staring at the pendant.
    A patter like a pack of scurrying rats in the attic. He looked up. Not rats, rain. On the slate roof, rain.
    If anyone had come into the suite from a deck, through a door or a window, they would have dripped on the carpet. Ryan would have felt the moisture under his bare feet.
    No one had been here. Someone had been here. Unreason.
    As if the pendant were bewitched and to touch it would ensure the transmission of a curse, Ryan hesitated to pick it up. But curiosity kills more than cats.
    As it lay on the pillow, the gold heart revealed a single side, softly burnished. In his hand, dangling from the chain, the other side came into view. Two words, engraved: BE MINE .
    The pendant was not a locket. He was relieved that it was not a locket. If it had been a locket, it would have contained something that he would not have wanted to see.
    BE MINE .
    As he wondered at those words, recalling the tiny candy hearts, a memory troubled him: the open wall safe as, in the grip of fear, he had snatched up the