There was a set of folding doors to my left. I opened them and saw a washing machine and dryer.
To my right was the kitchen. I walked in and looked around. The refrigerator held a quart-sized skim milk, some yogurt, a Tupperware container of pasta, a jar of spaghetti sauce. Everything was clean, neat, efficient. A functional place, used for making and ingesting simple meals and for nothing more than that. It seemed that Crawley lived alone. Single, or divorced with no children. Children, with visitation rights, would have meant a bigger place.
The bedroom and bathroom offered more of the same. A queen-sized bed on a platform, but only one night table next to it, with a reading lamp and digital alarm clock. In the bathroom, men’s toiletries laid out neatly around the sink. A white bath towel hung on the glass shower door, the edges lined up. I removed a glove for a moment and touched it. It was slightly damp, no doubt from this morning’s shower.
I imagined Crawley coming home this evening. How he might navigate the room would determine where I should wait. Where would he stop first? Let’s see, come inside, drop the mail on the coffee table. It was cold out; probably he would have a coat. Next stop, coat closet?
There was a large closet off the living room. I checked it. Boxes for stereo equipment. A vacuum cleaner. A set of weights under a thin coating of dust. And a thick wooden dowel for hanging clothes, running the length of the space, with a handful of unused plastic hangers dangling along it. The dowel was supported at its center by an angle brace joined to the wall. I pressed down on it and was satisfied with its strength. Perfect.
But no coats. This closet seemed to be used for longer-term storage needs. I went back to the bedroom. On the wall adjacent to the bathroom was a closet behind a pair of folding doors. I slid the doors open. Yes, this was the clothes closet. Four suits, with an empty hanger for a fifth. Five dress shirts, five more empty hangers. One shirt on his back, I assumed, four at the dry cleaners. A dozen ties. One overcoat, one waist-length leather jacket. One more empty hanger.
I could see that he was a neat man, a man who liked things to be in their proper places. All right then, drop the mail off, then straight to the bedroom, hang the coat in the closet. Likewise for the suit, maybe use the bathroom, then back to the living room for the mail, turn on CNN or C-SPAN, maybe then the kitchen for something to eat. Fine.
I went back to the storage closet and took out the stun gun. I had already tested it on the drive from D.C. and it had worked as advertised, sending out a satisfying blue arc of electricity between its electrodes at the push of a discreet side trigger. I laid out some of the plastic along the closet floor, removed the other items from the briefcase, took off the windbreaker, folded it, and placed it and the briefcase items on the plastic. I didn’t want any carpet particles on my clothes. The galoshes, which I was already wearing over my shoes, would protect my feet. Then I sat on one of the leather chairs and waited.
The room lit up briefly as the sun set outside the picture window, then gradually darkened as night came. I turned the closet light on. Night vision mode wouldn’t be useful for this; Crawley would turn the lights on when he came in and I didn’t want to have to adjust.
Every half hour I stood up and moved around to stay limber. The coffee was making its presence known, and three times I had to urinate. I used the bathroom sink for this purpose, letting the water run as I did so, avoiding the possibility that the toilet might still be running when Crawley came in and alert him to the presence of an intruder. Failing to flush would be unacceptable for similar reasons.
At eight o’clock, just after one of these quick trips to the bathroom, I heard the sound of a key in the lock. I got up noiselessly and moved to the closet. I held the door open a crack and turned off the light, the stun gun ready in my right hand.
A moment later I heard the apartment door open. The lights went on. Soft footfalls on the carpet. There he was, moving past me. Noting the curly, wheat-blond hair, the thin features I had seen in the photos Dox had taken, I watched him walk into the living room. He tossed the mail on the coffee table. I smiled. Call me psychic.
He shrugged out of an olive trench coat, grabbed a magazine, and made his way past me again, toward the bedroom. A minute passed, then another. And another.
He was taking longer to return to my position than I had expected. Then I realized: he was on the can, probably reading the magazine. I had planned to wait until he was back in the living room, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up. I picked up the spare sheet plastic and the duct tape and moved out of the closet.
I eased inside the bedroom and stood just outside the open door of the bathroom. I saw the trench coat, a suit, a dress shirt, and a tie on the bed. I set the plastic and duct tape down on the carpeting.
Another minute went by. I heard him stand up. The toilet flushed. I held the stun gun in my right hand at waist level, my thumb on the trigger. I breathed shallowly through my mouth.
I heard footsteps on the tile, then saw his profile as he emerged from the bathroom, wearing only a white tee-shirt and matching boxer shorts. I stepped in. His head started to swivel toward me and his body flinched back in surprise and alarm. I jammed the unit against his midsection and depressed the trigger. His teeth clacked shut and he jerked back into the doorjamb.
After four or five seconds, enough time to ensure that his central nervous system was adequately scrambled, I released the trigger and eased him down to the floor. He was grunting the way someone does when he’s taken a solid shot to the solar plexus. His eyes were blinking rapidly.
I laid the plastic out on the floor and rolled him onto it. I placed his arms at his sides, then I wrapped the plastic around his body and secured it with duct tape, first at wrist level, then the ankles. He started to recover, so I zapped him again with the stun gun. By the time the effects were wearing off for the second time, I had him pretty well mummified in plastic and duct tape. Other than his head and toes, he was immobilized.
I grabbed a pillow off the bed and propped it under the base of his skull so he could see me better. Also so that, if he started thrashing, he wouldn’t bruise the back of his head. My concern had less to do with consideration for him than it did with what might show up in a forensic examination.
I squatted down next to him and watched his eyes. First, they blinked and rolled. Second, they steadied and regained focus. Finally, they bulged in terrified recognition. He tried to move, and, when he found he couldn’t, he began to hyperventilate.
“Calm down,” I said to him, my voice low and reassuring. “I’m not going to hurt you.” Which I supposed was the literal truth, after a fashion.
The hyperventilating went on. “Then… then why have you tied me up?” he panted.
Not an unfair question. I decided to level with him, at least partly. “You’re right,” I told him. “Let me amend what I said. I’m not going to hurt you, if you tell me what I want to know.”
He swallowed hard and nodded. His eyes were still wide with terror, but I could see he was making an effort to pull himself together. “Okay,” he said. “All right.”
I paused to give him a moment to more fully appreciate his new reality. This guy was obviously no hard case. Sure, he was Agency, but the college-boy type, not one of the paramilitaries. The last violence he’d seen firsthand had probably been on the grade-school playground. And now, suddenly, he was tied up and helpless, with a known killer squatting next to him, looking at him like he was a frog about to be dissected. Of course he was terrified. And that was good. If I managed his terror correctly, there was a reasonable chance that he would tell me what I wanted to know.