Page 91 of Long Way Down

“But then my neighbor, Mrs. Paterson, said she ran into someone who wasn’t a resident in the lobby. She’s a real gossip and busybody, and so she asked him what he was doing, and he bolted. She said he’d been in front of the mailboxes, messing around with them, and he looked frightened when she spoke to him.”

“Did she get a good look at his face?”

Dana shook her head. “Not really. She’s ninety-three and near-sighted, wears glasses this thick.” She held up thumb and forefinger a half-inch apart. “She said he was wearing a hat, and that he was young. But fifty’s young to her, so he could have been any age.”

“Is there a camera in your lobby?” Contreras asked.

“Yeah, and the super showed me the footage. There was definitely someone in my mailbox who shouldn’t have been – but between his hoodie, and his hat, I never got a look at his face.”

“What about his hands?” Melissa asked.

“He’s white.” Dana’s smile was a humorless scrap of a thing. “That narrows it down, right?”

Melissa turned to Contreras. “We could print the mailbox.”

“Yeah,” he said, unconvinced. He was doubtless thinking what she was: that after this long, and this many comings, and goings, openings and closings, nothing liftable would be there to find.

“Ben was annoyed,” Dana continued. “Said I was being crazy and overreactive going to the super. Said he couldn’t believe he’d even let me watch the tape. I got somad,” she said, jaw tightening. “I didn’t know why he couldn’t understand that it was frightening, that I was…” She swallowed again, let out a short breath, and picked up her Coke. “I knew that he was being logical, that I was the one being nuts.”

Melissa snorted. “He tell you that? Typical man.”

Dana frowned. “No, it wasn’t – Ben’s real sweet. A little uptight, sometimes, but he’s always been good to me. Watches out for me. And I’m…paranoid. After what happened.”

After Osborn beat her unconscious and raped her.

“When I saw the video, I…” Her voice trembled a moment, before she gathered it up again. “I was convinced he was following me. I felt eyes on me in line to get coffee; heard footsteps behind me in the parking deck when I got off work. When a male customer stepped in too close, I’d start to shake. I…” She shook her head. “I wasn’t doing well. In my head it washim.”

“Osborn?”

“I saw him on every street corner and I heard his voice on the radio, and I just…” She tipped the Coke can back and found it empty, frowning. “I started drinking again. I quit two years ago – Ben helped me.” Here, a trace of a smile. Ben, again, Melissa thought, and wanted to assess him herself. “I’d been doing really well, but then, as spooked as I was…I’d have a few glasses to help me go to sleep. And then I started taking screwdrivers to work in a thermos. It’s…I’m doing okay. I’m better. I’m off the sauce again.”

Gently, Contreras said, “What inspired you to finally call the police? The break-in?”

“That.” She raked a hand through her carefully gelled hair, lips compressing. “When I got home the apartment door was ajar and Iflipped. After…before…I never went anywhere without triple-checking the door locks. I knew better than to go inside by myself. I went to my neighbor’s and called Ben to see if he’d been over and left in a hurry. He’d been at work all day, so then I called the police. Inside…”

Melissa shifted forward in her chair, envisioning tossed furniture, rifled-through drawers, an ugly message written across a mirror in red paint. “What’d they find?”

Dana gave an airless huff of a laugh. “Nothing. They didn’t findanything.” She looked as bewildered as she must have then, walking through her apartment with the police. “Nobody had touched anything. I’d been running late that morning, my coffee was still sitting on the counter, half-drunk. I’d left clothes hanging up to dry on the shower curtain rod and they were still there. It was…no one had been there.”

“Well, you’d been very stressed,” Contreras said, tone oh-so-careful. “Drinking again, you said, and in your own words, feeling paranoid. Maybe you forgot to secure the door and then forgot you’d done so.”

“Yeah,” she snorted. “That’s exactly what Ben said. Or that I’d already unlocked the door then forgot I had and called the police for nothing.”

Her tone left Melissa frowning. “Was he angry that you’d called the police?”

Dana’s gaze lifted up through her lashes, suddenly cautious. “He said I was wasting their time. And that, next time, when I really needed them, they wouldn’t come.”

“Dana, does he–” Melissa started, and Contreras interrupted.

“What happened then?” His next glance Melissa’s way was a clear warning to back off about the boyfriend. Melissa bit the inside of her cheek to keep quiet and sat back in her chair; she shot him an ugly look that he ignored. “Did you find the door open like that again?”

“No.” Her nerves returned in a visible rush, hands knotting, fingers twitching, breath rasping through an open mouth. “But a few days later, when I opened up the drawer where I keep my, um, my ‘special occasion’ underwear? Half of it was gone.”

Melissa felt her brows go up. “Gone as in–”

“Six pairs of panties,” Dana said, and it wasn’t the first time she’d said this, Melissa could tell, the words laced with bitterness and terror. “Expensive, silky, fancy stuff. Six pairs, just gone. Not in the laundry, and Ben swears he didn’t take them. So I don’t…” She exhaled and deflated, slumping down to put her elbows on the desk. “I don’t know,” she finished weakly. “I feel like I’m going crazy.”

“You’re not,” Melissa said. She checked with Contreras, grudgingly, to get his read on the situation.

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