Dean Koontz - Surrounded

Kluger smiled. "That's right." He pointed to the folding chair that was set up on the other side of the card table. "Just sit down there and help me tie up a few loose ends. I'm sure we can let you go home shortly."

She sat down. "Why do I have to be questioned twice?"

Kluger settled into the other chair and folded his hands on the table. "Those other detectives are with homicide. I'm a burglary-and-theft man. So there are sort of two investigations going on at the same time." He felt slightly tongue-tied in her presence.

"Go ahead then," she said.

"You worked for Mr. Rudolph Keski?"

"Yes."

"He was the owner of this mall?"

"He owned most of it."

"What were you-his secretary?"

She smiled coldly. "Yes."

"Did you often work evenings?"

"Only on Wednesday nights," she said, recrossing her slim legs. "Every Wednesday Mr. Keski and his business associates ate an early dinner at Henry's Gaslight." She pointed to the restaurant that faced out on the lounge. "Then they came over to the office and discussed the week's finances until closing time. Mr. Keski and I always stayed another hour or so, attending to the details that had come up during the meeting."

"Was that one of his associates in there with him when he was killed?" Kluger asked.

"No. That was his bodyguard."

"I see." He thought about that for a while, staring unabashedly at her face, slender shoulders, and full breasts. Then he said, "Tell me what happened. How was Keski killed?"

She told him, quickly, succinctly.

"That was smart work, using that alarm pedal."

"It wasn't so smart," she said. "I was terrified."

He smiled at her, wondering how he could go about asking for a date. "Then they tied you up in the warehouse?"

"Yes." Unconsciously she rubbed her wrists where the wire had encircled them.

"I've already talked to the night watchmen," Kluger explained. "I won't waste a lot of time going over old ground."

"I am awfully tired," she said.

"I appreciate that, Miss Ledderson," he said, smiling and nodding to show her how sympathetic he was. "Or… May I call you Evelyn?"

She leaned forward seductively, then winked at him and said, "Why don't you just keep on calling me Miss Ledderson?" Her dark eyes bored straight through him and saw much more than he wanted her to know.

He colored, looked at his hands, glanced at the spritzing fountain, and felt like a schoolboy caught doing something filthy. "I understand… This must have been difficult for you. I was only trying to be friendly."

"I know what you were trying to be," she said.

At that moment, when he realized that she was not the sort of woman who could be easily fooled, Kluger lost all interest in her. Women who could hold their own, women who were sharp and perceptive and not afraid to speak their minds never had appealed to him. They offended his sense of tradition, of male-female lightness. He liked the soft and helpless type, the ones who needed support and guidance from sun up to sunset. He didn't want to have to compete with a woman in the bedroom. It never occurred to him, at least not on a conscious level, that he was afraid of losing that competition.

His voice had a nasty twist to it now. "You must have known that Rudolph Keski hasn't always been a legitimate businessman."

"Oh?" She seemed amused.

"He used to be in the rackets."

She smiled. "He was in jail, then?"

"Nothing was ever proved," Kluger admitted.

"Well, then, it's nothing more than hearsay." She sat back in her chair again. She was obviously pleased with Lieutenant Kluger's discomfort.

"Did you know about this 'hearsay' reputation of his?" the lieutenant persisted.

"If I did know," she said, "what possible difference could it make? It couldn't have anything to do with what happened here tonight." Her voice got hard. There was no longer any amusement in it. "You're angry because I saw through you, and you're just trying to irritate and frighten me. I won't sit here and be harassed much longer."

"You'll sit there until I tell you to leave," Kluger said, an ugly edge to his voice.

"I'm afraid not."

"You will-"

"Do you have any serious questions? Or are you completely stumped? If you have anything serious to ask, you'd better ask it right now," she said, pushing back her chair and getting to her feet.

Kluger looked down at his hands. They were curled into tight fists. He made an effort to relax. "The manhole cover was off the drain entrance in the warehouse. Do you think they escaped that way?"

"I wouldn't know."

"First they tied you up and left you on the north side of the warehouse. Then one of them used an electric cart to move you to the south side of the room. Why?"

"I guess they were going to be doing something on the north side of the room. Something they didn't want us to see."

"Could it be that they were going to leave by the drain and didn't want you to know?"

She shrugged. Her full dark hair bounced on her shoulders. "Why would it matter if we knew? We were all tied up. We couldn't do anything about it."

Kluger got to his feet because he didn't like to have her staring down at him. "I may want to talk to you again. What's your home phone number and address?"

"I gave it to the homicide detective," she said, tilting her head impishly to one side.

"I'll need it, too."

"You can ask them for it."

"I'm asking you for it."

"You can reach me here any weekday afternoon," she said, ignoring the implied command. "I'm an employee of the company and not just of Mr. Keski. Even if the new management hires another woman, I'll have to stay on a few weeks to help her get adjusted. I'm convinced you'll have this all wrapped up by then, Lieutenant." She turned and walked off across the lounge, entered the east corridor, and disappeared around the corner.

At 3:25, Kluger unfolded the blueprints on the card table and studied them more assiduously than he had before. He found no hidden rooms. No secret passageways. No air ducts. large enough to hold a man. Nothing.

At 3:40, a three-man search party that he had sent into the storm-drain system returned without having found anything worthwhile. So far as they were able to ascertain, the original blueprints were accurate in every detail. The entrances to the storm drain from the parking lot were all much too small to pass a man. There was only one way out: the one that Kluger's men, out in that patch of scrub land, had been covering from almost the start.

At 4:00, a representative of the largest local television station came in to bargain for filming permission. He was a short, blocky man who dressed too loud for Kluger's taste and talked too rapidly.

"I told you," the lieutenant said irritably, "that I'm not going to allow anyone in here."

"The media has a right-"

"As far as I'm concerned," Kluger said, "those bastards haven't left the mall."

The television man looked around, perplexed. "They're still here, you mean?"

"I know they are," Kluger said, like a religious man earnestly repeating the supreme tenet of his faith. "And I'm not letting you people interfere with a case when it's still a hot-pursuit item."

"Hot pursuit?" the man said. "Where?"

At 4:10 the lab technicians and the homicide detectives called it a night. They put up barriers in front of the bank and jewelry store, closed and sealed the room in which Keski and his bodyguard had been murdered. The chief detective on the case-a sallow, quiet little man named Bretters-came over to the card table by the fountain to see how things were with Kluger.

"You can't be leaving now," Kluger said. "They must be here just waiting for us to leave."

"They can't be here," Bretters said softly.

"But they can't have gotten out."