James Patterson - The 6th Target

I sighed, unclipped my cell phone, and called the crime lab. I got the night-shift supervisor on the line and told him we needed him.

"You have someone you can stay with tonight?" Rich was asking Blaustein.

"Maybe."

"Well, you can't stay here. Your apartment's a crime scene for a while."

Blaustein looked around the wreck of his apartment, his young face sagging as he cataloged the destruction. "I wouldn't stay here tonight if you paid me."

CINDY, RICH, AND I CONNECTED THE DOTS during the elevator ride down to the lobby.

"The dogs, the piano, the treadmill…" Rich was saying.

"The Web-meister's apartment…" Cindy added.

"It's all the same thing," I said. " It's the noise ."

"Yep," Rich agreed. "Whoever this maniac is, noise makes him a little bit violent."

I said, "Rich, I'm sorry I snapped at you before. I had a bad day."

"Forget it, Lindsay. We close this case, we'll both feel better."

The elevator doors slid open, and we stepped out again into the lobby. At the moment, the space was packed with about two hundred freaked-out tenants, standing room only.

Cindy had her notepad out and moved toward the board president as Conklin used his body as a plow. I drafted behind him until we reached the reception desk.

Someone yelled, " Quiet !" and when the rumble died, I said, "I'm Sergeant Boxer. I don't have to tell you that there have been a series of disturbing incidents in this building -"

I waited out the heckling about the police not doing their jobs, then pushed on, saying that we were going to reinterview everyone and that no one was permitted to leave until we said it was okay.

A gray-haired man in his late sixties raised his hand, introducing himself as Andy Durbridge.

"Sergeant, I may have some useful information. I saw a man in the laundry room this afternoon whom I'd never seen before. He had what looked like a dog's bite marks on his arms."

"Can you describe this man?" I asked. I felt a new kind of tension in my gut. The good kind.

"He was about five six, muscular, brown hair going bald, in his thirties, I think. I looked around already, and I don't see him here."

"Thanks, Mr. Durbridge," I said. "Can anyone here pin a name on that description?"

A petite young woman with caramel-colored bedspring curls waded through the crowd until she reached me.

Her eyes were huge, and her skin was unnaturally pale – something was frightening her half to death.

"I'm Portia Fox," she said, her voice quavering. "Sergeant, may I speak with you privately?"

I STEPPED OUTSIDE the Blakely Arms with Portia Fox.

"I think I know that man that Mr. Durbridge was referring to," Ms. Fox told me. "He sounds like the guy who lives in my apartment during the daytime."

"Your roommate?"

"Not officially," the woman said, casting her eyes around. "He rents my dining room . I work during the day. He works at night. We're like ships crossing, you know?"

"It's your apartment, and this man is a sublet, is that what you're saying?"

She bobbed her head.

"What's his name?"

"Garry, two Rs, Tenning. That's what's printed on his checks."

"And where is Mr. Tenning now?" I asked.

"He's at his job with a construction company."

"He works in construction – at night?" I asked. "You have a cell phone number for him?"

"No. I used to see him every day for about a year in the Starbucks across the street. Sometimes we'd say hello, share a newspaper. He seemed nice, and when he asked if I knew of a place he could rent cheap… well, I needed the money."

This child had let a stranger move into her apartment. I wanted to shake her. I wanted to report her to her mother. Instead I asked, "When do you expect Mr. Tenning home?"

"Around eight thirty in the morning. Like I said, I've always left for work by the time he comes in, and now that I've got a coffeemaker at work, I don't go to Starbucks anymore."

"We're going to want to search your apartment."

"Absolutely," she said, pulling her key out of her handbag and offering it to me. "I really want you to. My God, what if I'm sharing my place with a murderer?"

"JUST LIKE MINE," Cindy said as we walked into Portia Fox's apartment. The front door opened into a large living room facing the street – roomy, sunny, furnished in office-girl modern.

There was a galley-style kitchen off the living room, but where Cindy's dining room was open, Ms. Fox's had been boxed in with plasterboard walls and a hollow-core door.

"He stays in there," Ms. Fox told me.

"Any windows in his room?" I asked.

"No. He likes that. That's what sealed the deal."

It was too bad that the dining room had been walled off, because now we'd need either permission from Tenning to enter it or a search warrant. Even though Tenning wasn't on Fox's lease, he paid rent to her, and that gave him legal standing.

I put my hand on the doorknob to Tenning's room on the off chance that it would turn, but no surprise – the door was locked.

"You have a friend you can stay with tonight?" I asked Ms. Fox.

I put a patrolman outside the apartment door while Portia gathered up some things.

I gave Cindy my keys and told her to go to my place. She didn't even fight me.

Then Rich and I spent another two hours questioning the tenants of the Blakely Arms. We returned to the Hall at ten p.m.

As grim as the squad room was during the day, it was worse at night, the overhead lighting giving off a deadening white illumination. The place smelled of whatever food had been dumped into the trash cans during the day.

I threw a container of cold coffee into the garbage and turned on my computer as Rich followed suit. I called up a database, and although I was prepared for a long search for Garry Tenning's life story, everything we needed flashed onto my computer screen in minutes.

There was an outstanding warrant for Tenning's arrest. It was a small-potatoes charge of failure to appear in court for a traffic violation, but any arrest warrant was good enough to bring him in.

And there was more.

"Garry Tenning is employed by Conco Construction," Rich said. "Tenning could be patrolling any of a hundred job sites. We won't be able to locate him until Conco's office opens in the morning."

"He have a license to carry?" I asked.

Rich's fingers padded across his keyboard.

"Yep. Current and up-to-date."

Garry Tenning owned a gun.

THE NEXT MORNING a heavy gray torrent came down on San Francisco like one of the forty days of the flood.

Conklin parked our squad car in a vacant construction zone on Townsend in front of Tower 2 of the Beacon, a residential high-rise with retail shops on the ground floor, including the Starbucks where Tenning and Fox had met.

On a clear day, we would have had a good view of both the front doors of the six-story redbrick Blakely Arms and the narrow footpath that ran from Townsend along the east side of the building, leading back to the courtyard and rear entrance.

But today's rain nearly obliterated our view through the windshield.

Inspectors Chi and McNeil were in the car behind us, also peering through the downpour. We were scanning the locale for a white man, five six with thinning brown hair, possibly wearing a uniform and probably packing a Colt revolver.

Unless he changed his pattern, Tenning would stop at the Starbucks, then cross Townsend, arriving "home" sometime between 8:30 and 9:00.

We were guessing that Tenning would take the footpath to the rear entrance of the building, use a key to the back door, and take the fire stairs, avoiding tenants.