Prescott studied the small, unmarked metal door at the side of the building. It was the one where he had seen Jeanie and Hobart watching him depart one afternoon three months ago. It was closed, and he was sure it was supposed to be rigged not to open from the outside. Its purpose was as a fire exit, not an entrance. But Prescott had learned early in life that a great many of the things that were supposed to operate under strict rules did not. When Jean and Hobart had come out that day, no alarm had sounded.
He went to the door, tested the thumb latch, and tugged the handle. He remembered the kitchen door at the rear of the restaurant in Louisville. This one reminded him of it. He was not absolutely certain that the two were identical, but they were at least similar. In Louisville, the killer had gone back there and found the door propped open. He had slipped inside and killed the cook. But the part of that night that mattered to Prescott right now was not what the killer had done. It was what he had been expecting to do. The killer had locked and chained the front door of the restaurant, and only then had gone to the rear of the building. Even if he had come up the alley earlier and seen that the door was propped open, he could not have known that it would stay open. He had been certain—not guessed, but known—that if he had come back and found it locked, he would be able to open it.
Prescott turned his head to survey the parking lot. He could see no shape of a head in any of the cars or trucks on this side of the building, and for the moment, there was no sign of a man on foot. He knelt by the door, extracted the pick and tension wrench he carried in his wallet, and worked on the lock. It took only a moment to line up the pins along the cylinder, but he did not open the door. He stood, leaned casually against the wall as he returned the pick and tension wrench to his wallet, shifted the pistol in his belt at the small of his back to make it easier to reach, and surveyed the parking lot again.
Prescott moved his right hand to his back, opened the door with his left, and stepped inside. The concrete hallway was unoccupied. The music was louder, the thumping bass beat that some of the girls liked to dance to because it kept them on rhythm when the lounge was full and the crowd was noisy. He took his first steps along the hallway. To his right was the door to the dancers’ dressing room. His face was familiar at Nolan’s. If he stepped in and the killer was not there, he could apologize drunkenly that he had been looking for Jeanie while he backed out. If the killer was there, Prescott’s sudden appearance might be enough of an edge. He put his left hand on the knob, held the gun under his coat, and pushed.
The door opened a couple of inches and he heard a woman’s voice. “So he moves out, and what does he take with him?”
Another woman’s voice said, “You’re kidding.”
“Nope. The dog. The very same dog that he’s been whining and complaining about for three months. Supposedly the reason he was leaving in the first place.”
Prescott closed the door quietly and went on. He had no idea who the woman was, but he recognized that the voice had no tension in it. She was talking to one of the other dancers. There was no chance that if the killer had chosen to hide in there, one of them would not have noticed him.
He stopped at the entrance to the stage. He would have liked to try to check the crowd from behind the black curtain, but he knew it was too risky. The dancers sometimes did it, but that was the reason he knew it was difficult to do without being seen. The girls knew that it didn’t matter if the customers saw the quick sparkle of a feminine eye appear at the edge of the curtain and vanish. It probably helped build the suspense that was part of the appeal of the show. But Prescott could not afford to be seen.
He moved up the corridor to the door of Dick Hobart’s office, stepped to the side, and knocked. He listened, but the music from the main room grew louder, so he heard nothing. He knocked again, this time rapping his knuckles hard on the wood so he could hear it clearly over the music. He waited, but Hobart did not appear.
Prescott moved on, opened the door to the storeroom, and switched on the light. The tall shelves shone white with stacked rolls of paper towels and toilet paper for the rest rooms. On the lower shelves there were bottles of floor wax, cans of metal polish, mop heads, sponges. The empty spaces on the floor held buckets, mop wringers, brooms propped against the wall. There was no way for Prescott to know whether anyone had been here who didn’t work here, but he could see there was nobody here now. He turned off the light and went out.
Prescott moved toward the door near the side of the stage that led out into the public part of the building, then stopped. There was still a room back here that he could not be sure about: Hobart’s office. He could not leave a room at his back that had not been searched.
Millikan had settled into his spot near the bar, where he could keep his back against the wall and not be jostled too often by the men who made their way past him to buy more drinks. The light in the margins of the cavernous room was red and dim: the stage lights were a bit brighter, a compromise between not paying enough attention to the lady who was working up there, and having a stage awash in white light that would make her skin look pink and raw, like flesh in an operating room.
Millikan was in a dim place that was not too visible, but he was not able to see the other customers well either. He concentrated on looking at every face that presented itself. Prescott had warned him that the crowd at night was young, and now he saw that it was making what he had to do more difficult and dangerous. Everyone he saw seemed to be twenty-five and in good physical shape, with shortish hair and an unlined, undistinctive face. It was their height that was bothering him the most at the moment. He had been aware that each generation grew a bit taller than the last. No forensics specialist could possibly not know that, and anyone who spent time on a college campus could see it. But there were few times when Millikan had found himself in such cramped quarters with an audience made up exclusively of young males. He craned his neck, he stood on his toes, he glanced between passing customers, but he never could see far enough to be sure he was seeing even a significant proportion of the men in the big room.
Prescott had told him that in Minnesota the killer’s hair had been dyed light brown—or maybe the first time, it had been dyed dark brown. It didn’t matter which was the natural shade, or if either was. Once it had been established that the man had ever changed the color, it was simply not something Millikan could use. He had to look directly into the man’s face to see if he matched his portrait, and how could Millikan possibly stare into the eyes without having the eyes stare back?
Prescott managed to push the fifth pin into line with the others on the cylinder of the lock on Dick Hobart’s office, then turn the cylinder. He gently pushed the knob to let the door swing inward, and in the first fraction of a second he received the first bit of disturbing news: the light was on. In the next fraction of a second, the door stopped. Prescott pushed the door again, and the sound was the one he had already begun to dread. What had stopped the door’s arc was the sole of a shoe. He pushed on the door harder, and the side of the shoe scraped against the concrete floor as he moved the heavy weight far enough to put his head in and look down.