Officer McGuire made notes on a pad as Lori spoke, stopping her a couple times to clarify some points. When Lori was finished, Rauch returned to the living room.
“The bedroom door was forced open,” he said. “Caused some slight damage. I’m going to look at the patio door, see if there are any signs it was forced open too. Then I’ll check the deck and take the stairs down to the ground, see if I can find anything.”
McGuire nodded, and Rauch walked toward the open patio door. As he passed the couch, Lori noticed two things about him. One was that there was a trio of lines on the side of his neck. At first she thought they were wrinkles of some sort, although the man seemed too young for that. But when he drew in a breath, the lines parted, and she realized they were openings in his flesh, like a fish’s gills. They closed once more when he exhaled. The second thing she noticed was that the nail on the pinky finger of his left hand had been painted red.
She’d taken Fiorinal while she and Larry had waited for the police to arrive, but now she felt a sharp, stabbing pain between her eyes. She began trembling, shaking so hard that tea sloshed over the side of her mug. She tried to put the mug down on the coffee table, but her hand was shaking so badly that Larry rushed forward to help her. He gently removed the mug from her hand and placed it on the glass surface of the table. A small pool of spilled tea gathered around the base of the mug, almost as if it were leaking. Or bleeding, she thought.
She watched Rauch push the vertical blinds aside with the back of his hand, probably to avoid leaving fingerprints. He examined the lock on the patio door for a moment, and then stepped out onto the deck. When he released the blinds, they swayed back and forth, clacking softly against one another. She heard the heavy tread of his boots on the wooden deck, followed by the sound of him going down the stairs.
McGuire said something then, but her words didn’t register on Lori’s consciousness. She was still staring at the swaying blinds, thinking about Rauch’s opening and closing gill slits, and especially about his red pinky nail.
“Ms. Palumbo?”
McGuire spoke louder this time, and Lori’s head jerked in her direction.
“I’m sorry. What did you say?”
“I asked if there are any details you can give us about the intruder. Gender? Race? What the person was wearing? Did the person say anything?”
It wasn’t one intruder. It was at least a half dozen, and they weren’t human. They were monsters made entirely out of shadows, with multijointed limbs and clawed hands. Oh, and they made these weird whispery sounds, like they were talking, but if they were, I couldn’t understand anything they said.
“None of the lights were on,” she said, “so I didn’t get a good look at whoever it was, and the person didn’t say anything. Sorry.”
McGuire’s lips pursed, as if she was irritated by Lori’s answer, but she dutifully jotted it down on her pad.
Lori regretted calling nine-one-one now. She’d done so in a panic, but now that she wasn’t gripped by mortal terror, she could think more clearly. What good could the police possibly do? If she’d hallucinated the shadow creatures, she needed a psychologist, not a cop. And if the things had been real, what could human police officers do to protect her? But that wasn’t the worst. The worst part was the gills on Rauch’s neck and his crimson pinky nail. By calling nine-one-one, she’d invited one of them into her apartment. She had no idea who they were, exactly, but she knew they were connected to the shadow creatures somehow.
Her eyes narrowed as she scrutinized McGuire. Was she one of them too? She looked the woman over from head to toe, trying to ascertain if there was anything odd about her. One of her nostrils was larger than the other, and she had a small scar at the right corner of her mouth. Neither feature was on a par with neck gills in terms of weirdness, though. It didn’t appear that McGuire was one of them. Unless she was simply better at disguising her true nature than Rauch was. But if she wasn’t one of them, wouldn’t she have noticed her partner’s gill slits? They weren’t the sort of feature that was easily overlooked. Maybe you didn’t have to be one of them to work with them.
McGuire turned to look at Larry.
“And you didn’t see or hear anything when you came in?” she asked.
“That’s right. I put my guitar down and headed for the hall bathroom. I thought I heard Lori crying. Her bedroom door was open – which I thought was strange since she never leaves it open when she sleeps – so I went inside. The bedroom was empty, so I knocked on the bathroom door. A moment later, Lori came out.” He shrugged then, as if to say he had no idea what had happened here tonight.
“And your relationship to Ms. Palumbo is…?”
“I’m her ex-boyfriend. We’re just friends now, and I’m staying with her for a while until I can get my own place.”
McGuire made a few more notes on her pad. She then looked to Lori once more.
“How would you describe the way your relationship to Mr. Ramirez ended?”
Lori frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Was it a mutual thing, or did one of you bring up the subject first? Would you say the breakup was civil or was it acrimonious?”
Lori exchanged a puzzled look with Larry before answering.
“Like Larry said, we’re friends now. Good ones. I know that’s rare, but….” A thought occurred to her then. “Are you asking if Larry was the intruder?”
“Not necessarily,” McGuire said. “But if Mr. Ramirez does harbor any resentment toward you, he might’ve been tempted to scare you as a way of getting back at you. And it could have had nothing to do with your breakup, could simply have been a practical joke that went too far.” She faced Larry once more. “Maybe when you discovered she’d already called nine-one-one you were too embarrassed to tell her you were the one who scared her. If it was you, this is your chance to confess before this goes any further. Admit you did it, apologize to Ms. Palumbo, and we all call it a night. What do you say?”
Lori wanted to defend Larry, to tell McGuire that he’d never play such a cruel joke on her, no matter how much anger and resentment he might have felt. He wasn’t that kind of person. But she couldn’t speak. Something that McGuire had said – one word, actually – had stopped her cold. That word was confess. McGuire hadn’t put any special emphasis on the word, but it had stood out to Lori nevertheless. She remembered what the woman – Goat-Eyes – had said to her. Confess and atone – or suffer.
Larry looked at her as if he expected her to stick up for him. When she didn’t, his expression fell, and he faced McGuire once more.
“I wouldn’t do anything like that to anybody, let alone a friend.”
McGuire looked at him for a moment, as if trying to gauge whether or not he was telling the truth. Finally, she nodded. “Have either of you touched anything since you reported the incident? The bedroom door? The patio door? The table or chairs?”
“No,” Lori said.
“Me neither,” Larry said.
McGuire jotted their responses down on her pad.
Lori heard the sound of boots on the wooden stairs outside. Rauch was returning.
He pushed his way past the blinds as he reentered the apartment. The lines of his gills were faint now, so much so that she almost couldn’t make them out. She dropped her gaze to his left hand. The nail of his pinky finger remained just as red, though.
Rauch stopped when he reached McGuire.
“The bedroom door was definitely forced open,” he said, “and the lock on the patio door is broken. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary on the deck or stairs. Nothing on the ground at the foot of the stairs, either.”
When Rauch finished speaking, his neck gills opened and closed one time, the action occurring so quickly, Lori almost missed it. She looked at McGuire’s face and then at Larry’s. Neither showed any reaction. Maybe she was seeing things, minor hallucinations brought on by the stress of everything she’d experienced tonight. But the shadow things hadn’t been hallucinations, though, had they? Rauch said both the bedroom door and the patio door showed physical signs of having been opened by force. If the shadow creatures hadn’t been real, then who or what had broken into her apartment?
“I’m going out to the cruiser,” Rauch said. He looked at Lori. “We need to get a crime scene tech in here to take photos of the evidence and dust for prints.”
