Before the Dawn(25)

She heard a soft creak from inside Jinx's apartment. Frowning, she stepped closer to her friend's door. "Jinx?" She knocked on the door again. "You in there?"

Silence.

The place had been updated, but it was still a building that had been erected in the 1800s. Dawn heard creaks and bumps all the time as the place continued to settle. At first, those little noises had unsettled her, and then she'd slowly gotten used to them.

But...

She still had her phone in her hand. She swiped her finger across the screen and dialed Jinx. Even as she dialed, she put her head closer to the door. Dawn thought she might hear the phone ringing from inside her friend's apartment...

But she didn't.

Her call went to Jinx's voice mail. "This is Jinx. You know the drill."

"Uh, yeah, hi, Jinx," she said quickly as she straightened away from the door. What am I doing? Her friend wasn't in there, in some kind of desperate peril. She needed to stop letting the case wreck her mind. "Call me when you get this, okay? I need to ask you some questions. And...a friend of mine, Tucker, will probably be coming to your shop today. He looks like a Fed." She turned away from Jinx's place and made her way up the stairs. "Mostly because he is a Fed, but he's trying to help me out, so be nice to him, okay? I know you and cops don't exactly get along well..." Understatement. "But he's not a cop." The FBI was different. "And...like I said...he's my friend."

Or he had been. Once, he'd been nearly the only friend she had.

It was a shame their lives had changed so much.

Don't start something you don't intend to finish. She hurried up the stairs. Tucker might not be allowing her to participate in the FBI's investigation, but that didn't mean she couldn't do some digging on her own. The days of her just sitting on the sidelines of life, too afraid to make a move, were long gone.


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HE WAITED UNTIL Tucker left and...like clockwork, Dawn hurried out of her building just minutes after him. She jumped in her car and rushed off down the street.

When he saw her vehicle turn the corner, he headed toward her building. He had flowers in his hand. Fresh flowers that he'd made special arrangements to get. He hoped Dawn enjoyed them.

He keyed in the code that would allow him access to the ground floor. He'd learned that code long ago.

Jinx was helpful that way.

He stepped inside, immediately enjoying the cooler air. Then he turned to the left. He pulled the key out of his pocket and he let himself inside Jinx's place.

"Oh, honey," he called out, smiling, "I'm home."

There was no response. But then, he hadn't expected one. He put the flowers down on the kitchen table and then he pulled a pair of gloves from his pocket. After all, he didn't want to leave any prints behind. That would just be sloppy.

He walked toward the pantry. He could hear the low hum as soon as he opened the door.

Jinx had been such a helpful woman. She had a refrigerator in her kitchen, but...she did enjoy her frozen meats and ice creams. So she'd sprung for a big, 10.6 cubic foot freezer that she'd had delivered a few months back.

His hand slid over the surface of that freezer and he just had to lift the lid up for a moment.

He smiled at what he saw inside. "Perfect."

He shut the freezer and eased out of the pantry. After retrieving the bouquet from the table, he headed toward Jinx's bedroom. There was a naughty secret in there. One she'd made the mistake of telling him about. It had always been so easy to get Jinx to talk. The more alcohol she had, the chattier she became. And the harder it was for her to remember just what she'd said the next day. What she'd said and what she'd done. Because of her family trouble, Jinx had been drinking a lot more lately. He'd helped with that.

He went into her closet, and there he found the little passageway that waited. Once upon a time, it had been a dumbwaiter that connected to the upper floor. Dawn didn't realize the passage was there. Jinx had only found it by accident. A handy thing...

He slid inside, making sure to bring his flowers with him. The actual elevator part of the dumbwaiter had been removed long ago. All that remained now was an empty tunnel that connected the first and second floors. He'd left a rope in there before, so it was an easy enough matter to climb up. Hell, even without the rope, it was a pretty easy climb. But he'd wanted to be fast, and that rope made maneuvering so much easier. 

And soon he was just where he wanted to be. In Dawn's home.

All that security, love. You think you're so safe with all the alarms, but that system never lets you know when I'm inside. Because he didn't have to break in through the front door or sneak in from the balcony. He just walked right out of her closet and into her bedroom. He never made the mistake of going into her den. After all, tricky Dawn had a motion sensor in there.