“How the hell long?” Aidan repeated.
“About…six months,” the man responded quickly. “Look, I work nights at the gas station down the road—’til three o’clock sometimes. I’ve been trying to save up for a place.” The little man was speaking very fast. “I’ve got to get enough money for a car before I can find a real place to live. I never broke into anyplace else, honest. I’ve never set foot up in the big house. I just come here to sleep. To stay safe.”
Harmless bum? Or homicidal maniac?
Jimmy was skinny as a rail. His eyes were huge in his face. He didn’t look like he had the strength to kill a fly, much less kill and dismember a woman.
Aidan tucked the gun into his waistband. “You’ve been living here for six months?”
“I swear, I didn’t hurt no one, and no one even knew I was here. Look, I’m a coward. I walk down the road fast as I can, come in here, then close the door and pray for morning.”
“Why do you pray for morning?” Aidan asked.
The little man shook his head. “I don’t look out the door. I don’t see nothing.”
“What are you going on about?” Aidan asked with exasperation.
“Please, I’ll just get my bag and go.”
Aidan didn’t move from the doorway. “Not so fast.”
The man started shaking. “Please don’t get me arrested for trespassing. I’ll lose my job. I need that job.”
“I can’t just let you walk away,” Aidan said quietly.
“Why in God’s name not?” the fellow pleaded.
“Because there was a human bone in your pile of trash the other day,” Aidan told him.
Jimmy gasped; he looked as if he would fall flat with the slightest breeze. This man was no killer, Aidan thought.
“I swear to God, I ain’t never hurt nobody in the whole of my life,” Jimmy whispered. “I’m Jimmy Wilson. I work down at the gas station. You can tie me up to keep me here, then go down with me come tomorrow. They’ll tell you. They’ll tell you it’s the truth. There might have been a chicken bone, mister. I try to remember to pick up the trash. Just sometimes, I’m so tired. It’s a long walk both ways. There was nobody at all here for so long, and before that, just the old lady, and I never bothered her none, I swear it.”
Aidan wasn’t sure what to do with the man. He was pretty sure this pathetic wretch had never hurt anyone. But if he’d been living out here all that time, he might have seen something.
Amelia’s lights already made sense. She had seen the flicker of the flashlight or a fire, just as he had done tonight.
“Please, just let me go. I swear, I won’t come back here no more, just don’t call the cops on me.”
“Ex-con?” Aidan asked.
Jimmy stared at him. “Drugs. I was an addict. I stole stuff, but I never hurt no one. I got caught, I did my time and I’m clean. Beer, that’s it. But if I get in trouble again…it’ll kill me to go back. I’ve been clean, I swear it.”
“Why did you say you come here, close the door and pray?” Aidan asked. “What are you hiding from?”
Jimmy stared back at him, looking as if Aidan had just asked him the most idiotic question in the world.
“Why, the ghosts, of course.”
“Kendall, stop! It’s me.”
She was halfway down the block; she’d moved like lightning, glad she’d put on sneakers that morning. But she knew the voice.
She turned around and trotted back, her heart still beating like a drum. “Vinnie, what the hell’s the matter with you? You just scared ten years off my life,” she accused him.
He stared at her, perplexed. “I was just sitting on the step, waiting for you,” he told her.
Maybe he had just been sitting on the porch. But he was wearing his long black cape, and he’d risen like a mountain of evil.
She shook her head, walking past him to the door. Her fingers trembled as she put her key in the outer lock. “You scared me,” she said again.
“Well, I didn’t mean to. And you’ve never jumped like a scaredy-cat over the slightest little thing before. Sheesh, Kendall. What’s the matter with you?”
She didn’t reply to that. “What are you doing here? You’re obviously supposed to be working.”
“I’m on a half-hour break, and I’ve just wasted most of it sitting on your steps,” he told her. “Thank God, it doesn’t seem as if the neighbors heard you scream or the cops would probably be arresting me now.”
“I doubt it. You know half the force, at least,” she told him. “And it was stupid of you to come here in the first place. Why would you assume I’d be home?” She was opening the door to her apartment at that point, and then she stepped back, allowing him to step inside ahead of her. She realized that even though he had scared her to death, she was glad to see him.
“So why were you waiting for me?”
“Because I’m your friend.”
She arched a skeptical brow to him. “All right, because I’m broke. I had to pay my bar tab.”