“Good luck with that,” she replied. “He took off last night, and good riddance if you ask me.”
“Why is that?”
“The noise that comes out of that place, it’s been terrible. And then all of a sudden it stopped, and that was worse in a way.”
“What do you mean by noise?”
“Sounded like a hell of a fight.”
“Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Not that I know of. He’s creepy, as in creepy-creepy. I don’t know why anybody would want to spend any time with him.”
“Well, just because we don’t understand relationships doesn’t mean that they didn’t have a reason for hooking up.”
“Of course they do.”
Kate questioned her further. “Do you know who he is, like what his name is?”
“You’re the cops. You can find out.”
“I can,” she agreed. “I just wondered if you knew who he was.”
“Sure, but he’s a bit weird.”
“Weird in what way?”
The woman leaned forward. “He brings men home.”
At that, Kate realized why the woman was having such a hard time with it.
Going through the same motions with each person at the rest of her targeted apartments, Kate slowly walked away from this fifth building of nineteen, looking at the surrounding area. It wouldn’t be the right area for a torturing murderer, as far as she was concerned. How would you get a body in and out? How would you handle the screaming?
And then of course she thought about the vocal cords and winced. That’s the way that you would handle it. Inside these four walls, nobody would know the difference. Depressed, she headed back to her car and sat in her vehicle for a long moment. Then on a whim she contacted Rodney. “Any updates?”
“No, nothing yet. How did you do?”
“Hit five so far,” she shared. “None look really possible.”
“But, with the vocal cords cut,” he reminded her, “there won’t be any screams to be heard.”
“I know. The first building was just super sweet, as in absolutely nothing could possibly go wrong there.”
He snorted at that. “Yeah, that sounds like a perfect place to look closer.”
“And yet nothing really to look at. Short of a warrant I won’t get into any of the apartments. And we have nothing other than a picture of a church window.”
“And we don’t even have a picture,” he reminded her, “nothing you could put in front of a judge.”
“I know, and that just adds to it, doesn’t it?”
He nodded. “And we can’t ever forget that. We must have something that’s usable in a court of law. It can’t be something that we’re pretending to make good use of.”
“No,” she agreed, “I get it. At the same time, I’ve got five more not too far away, so I’ll do a quick check on them before I call it a day.”
“Good enough,” Rodney replied, then disconnected the call.
With that, she turned and headed in the direction of the next building. Five down, fourteen more to go. If she had help, she could get them all done. And, if she was fast, she could get well over half done today. She’d take it. With that, she pulled out into the traffic and carried on.