“Anyone?”
“Roger that. Send Billy to Doc Becca’s for crowd control. Stat.” She indicated the building. “Let’s go.”
“Front is locked.” I headed around the side. My back door still gaped open.
“I’ll assume it wasn’t like that when you came home.”
“Please do.” I wasn’t an idiot. My parents might not have locked their doors since the dawn of time, but I did.
“Was the door locked?”
“I used my key.” I frowned. I’d just assumed I was opening it. Might it have been closed and unlocked? I had no idea.
Maybe I was an idiot.
“Don’t touch anything.” Deb used her shoulder mike again to ask for Ross Quinleven, Three Harbors Police Department’s version of CSI.
“My prints are going to be everywhere already.” It wasn’t like I dusted the doorknob or the railing on the staircase. It wasn’t like I’d dusted anything in a long, long time, which Deb was going to see for herself in a minute. I should probably be more embarrassed about that than I was.
“I know, but you don’t want to smudge anyone else’s.”
“He wore gloves,” I repeated.
“We’ll still follow procedure. Maybe he took them off so he could pick your lock.” At my incredulous glance, she continued: “You’d be surprised what criminals do that they shouldn’t.”
“Like picking door locks then trying to kill people?”
“There you go.”
I took the stairs to my apartment carefully. Once you were told not to use the handrail, suddenly the handrail seemed a lot more necessary than you realized.
The sight of the tossed bedcovers, the pillow on the floor, the table in pieces, the lamp tipped over, made me shiver. I’d always felt safe here. My mistake.
“Take me through what happened.”
“Joe dropped me off.”
“After Watley’s?”
“Yes. No.” I was so tired I was getting shaky. Or maybe my being shaky was making me more tired. “Owen dropped me at my parents’ after Watley’s.”
“He was with you all night?”
“Yeah.”
She lifted her eyebrows. I didn’t elaborate. I only had so many more words left before my brain shut down. I wasn’t going to waste them trying to explain something I didn’t understand already.
“He dropped you at your parents’ at what time?”
“Seven maybe? I had breakfast, and Joe brought me here.”
“You didn’t notice anything off when you came in? Anything where it shouldn’t be? Doors closed when you thought you’d left them open, or vice versa?”
“You think he was already inside when I got here?”
“You tell me.”
My gaze wandered the apartment. “It’s a little small to hide in.”
Kitchen, living, bedroom were all one. The only doors were to the outside, the bathroom, and the closet. Shit. The closet. Had he been in there watching me undress? My shiver became a shudder.
Deb set her hand on my arm, and I jumped. “Calm down. It’s over.”
“Is it?”
That depended on why someone had tried to kill me. Because I was there? Did that mean once I wasn’t, I was safe? I didn’t think so.
Deb gave me an awkward pat. “What happened next?”
“I went into the bathroom, brushed my teeth, and … stuff.”
“Shower curtain?”
“Yes. I mean no. Yes, I have one. No, I didn’t look behind it.” Had the intruder been behind my shower curtain watching me pee? This just got better and better.
Did people peek behind their shower curtain every time they went into the bathroom? Paranoid much? Maybe I should be paranoid more.
“Go on,” Chief Deb urged.
My attention kept drifting. From the ease with which Deb brought me back to the topic, I wasn’t the first victim to do so.
I was a victim. I didn’t like it.
Deb snapped her fingers in front of my nose.
Whoops.
“I … uh … put on…” I indicated my scrubs. “Lay down and the next thing I knew someone was smashing a pillow on my face.”
“That pillow?” She pointed.
I nodded.
“Why did he stop?”
“I—” Should I mention the wolf or shouldn’t I? Probably had to.
“There’s this wolf…” I began. “She … uh … likes me.”
“A wolf likes you,” the chief repeated. “Why?”
That I didn’t know. “She just does. She hangs around. Follows me when I run. Stuff like that.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
“She scared the guy away.”
Her eyes widened. “A wolf came in the apartment?”
“The door was open.”
Deb blinked. “You’re sure?”
“That the door was open? Yeah. How else would she have gotten in?” I wiggled my fingers. “She doesn’t have thumbs for the doorknob.”
Which got me thinking—for Pru to have gotten in someone had to have left the door open and it hadn’t been me. The intruder?
Or Henry.
“Very funny.” Deb set her hands on her hips. “Is this wolf black, with weird eyes?”
“You saw her?”