(And not surprising given the kind of buggage you’ve got in your wiring.)
Someplace he had read that there was no real mystery to déjà vu—nothing metaphysical, no ESP or romantic intimations of past lives. In the time it took for one side of the brain to inform the other side of the experience being recorded, it seemed like two different events, though separated by mere nanoseconds. Kind of bad news for the full-mooners of the world.
Electrochemistry, not déjà voodoo.
He shook away the sensation, got out of the car, and headed toward the building. The place was still, the windows of the second-floor apartment were dark. The pink and white geraniums in boxes on the upper porch looked out of place.
He walked around back. Mrs. Sabo was apparently out since the garage was empty. Terry’s navy blue Ford Escort had been confiscated for examination by forensics techs. He returned to the front, and with a duplicate house key from Mrs. Sabo he let himself inside. The door locked automatically behind him and, according to Mrs. Sabo, it always remained locked—a requirement spelled out in contracts to tenants.
Steve looked up the twelve blue carpeted stairs to the second landing. In a moment of vague anticipation he waited, but felt nothing. And the moment passed.
To his right on the wall was a two-button switch plate, still showing fingerprint powder. One turned on the interior light above the top of the stairs. He opened the front door again and flicked the other switch. The porch light above the front door went on. He then pressed the second-floor doorbell and heard the chimes upstairs. Unless Terry had left it unlocked, the killer had to have rung and waited until she came down. Through the peephole Steve could see the houses across the street. With or without the porch light she would have recognized her visitor as someone safe to bring upstairs.
He climbed to the landing. A strip of police tape still hung from the frame like an old party streamer. Dusting powder was on the door and doorknob. With another key he let himself into the apartment and closed the door behind him.
The place looked exactly as it had the day before except emptied of police and personnel. He moved to the center of the living room where Neil had stood talking baseball with the others. Their voices had yielded to a sucking silence.
On Sunday, he had inspected every inch of the place, shot photos, collected samples, dusted surfaces, scoured for hairs and fibers. Then, maybe a dozen people moved about with technical kits and collection bags. The place was a crime scene, and he had clicked into cop mode and had done his work as at any crime scene. But now the place was dim and as lifeless as a tomb. And like a tomb the space had a near-sacred feel about it. All around lay the affects of the woman Terry Farina had been—furniture, lamps, glass paperweights, seashells, watercolors, books on psychology and Italian art, wall hangings, photos of her with her brother and sister, their children, their parents. Things once important to her. Now artifacts of a dead woman.
His eyes fixed on a photo of her posed alone, a pair of sunglasses perched on top of her head. He picked it up, feeling a strange resonance that he could not locate. He put it back.
As he moved through the living room toward the bedroom, he became aware that his heart was racing. In fact, his whole body was throbbing with the kind of adrenaline surge that came when poised with a SWAT team outside a door they were about to ram through, not knowing if they’d open up to blasts from the barrel of some badass felon.
He passed the bathroom—a space in white and chrome. A shelf was lined with hair products and skin lotions, aerosol cans of feminine deodorant and hairspray. Hanging over the sink was a large mirror framed with frosted lights. Nothing. Nobody in the shower stall.
As he moved down the hall toward the bedroom, the thudding got stronger. In reflex, his hand slid to his weapon, half-expecting someone to spring on him from a closet.
That was nuts, of course. Nobody else was here. His reaction was purely irrational, he told himself. And the reason was that this was the first of hundreds of homicides where he knew the victim. This was not a stranger’s place. And that’s where the jitters arose from. Terry Farina’s presence filled the place, leaving him with an ineffable sense of guilt. Guilt that he was going through her now dead world. Guilt for being a cop and not preventing her death. That was it, he told himself. Some variation of survivor’s guilt.
He stopped at the threshold to the bedroom.
Because the shades were still drawn and the sun was behind the trees, the interior was dark. As he stepped inside, his innards made a fist. An almost palpable sense of evil lingered in the space. He glanced at the now stripped-down bed, and like a flash card his mind lit up with the image of her noosed against the headboard, her dead, purple head gawking at him like a gargoyle.
He flicked on the lights.
Traces of dusting powder were everywhere. All the topical surfaces that a killer might have made contact with—headboard, nightstand, television, air conditioner, switch plate—had a white veneer, latent prints being cross-checked with anyone known to have visited the apartment. No matches so far had been made with anyone in the IAFIS, a fingerprint database. The killer had been careful to touch very little and wiped clean what he had.
He clicked off the lights and moved into the room, the sound of his shoes against the polished hardwood floor startling the gloom. He stepped across the Berber rug between the bed and the small sofa to the rear of the room then put his back against the window. Everything was in place except for the bedding, which was now at the lab. The bare block of mattress looked sacrificial.
He closed his eyes and held them shut for a full minute and gathered himself to a pinpoint of concentration. He cleared his mind, aware of nothing but the thump of his heart.
Terry Farina had been dressed in a black summer dress with spaghetti straps, black stockings, with black low-heeled sandals, her auburn hair giving her an incandescent blush. According to Katie Beals, she had no boyfriend. And given that they were leaving early the next morning, she had no plans for a night on the town. She had dressed for romance with her guest.
Ottoman had given a twelve-hour time-of-death window—from three P.M. on Saturday to three A.M. Sunday. The later hours didn’t count since she was leaving at eight. Plus her telephone records showed that she took the last call at 2:14 Saturday afternoon. After forty-six interviews, they had no witnesses to anybody entering or leaving her apartment at any time on Saturday, June 2.
Mrs. Sabo said she had spent the day at her sister’s place in Woburn and returned a little after seven. The first thing she’d done was turn on the TV and change into her bed clothes. In bed she had watched Dateline then Law & Order, which ended at ten when she clicked off the set. That meant for the few minutes before nodding off she would probably have heard movement or voices directly above her. So, most likely Terry Farina was already dead, and the killer gone. That put her murder between 2:14 and 10:00 P.M.
As if he were watching a video inside his skull, Steve heard the doorbell chime and saw Terry with her thick red hair and black satiny dress pass through the living-room door and down the stairs to let in her guest. Either Mrs. Sabo was not home yet or her television drowned out any sounds as Terry and visitor moved into the apartment, exchanged preliminary chitchat, probably in the living room. Maybe there was some kissing and fondling on the upholstered couch since matching fibers were found on her dress. Because the killer’s time window was small, the preliminaries were probably short-lived. In a consensual decision, she led them to the bedroom, Terry in her sandals hard against the floor, the killer most likely wearing something softer—sneakers—and clothes that left no fibers, like Gortex. Mrs. Sabo claimed that she could hear Terry walk in heels. But not that night.