Identity Crisis (Sam McRae Mystery 1)

Out in the hall, the sounds of conversation and movement were dying down. A door slammed. I heard footsteps, getting closer. The bathroom door opened. A click and the room went black. The door shut. The footsteps receded.

In the dark, I strained to listen and could have sworn I

heard someone talking nearby. I thought it was my imagination, until I heard someone say, “Good night.” I waited, I can’t say how long. The room was so dark, I felt like I’d disappeared, become a noncorporeal presence in a black hole. I didn’t like it, but didn’t want to turn on my flashlight until I was sure everyone had left. The hard, but oddly comforting, rim of toilet seat was the only thing keeping me oriented.

Ever since my parents died, complete darkness has made me anxious. I can’t sleep without a night-light or some small spark of illumination from a window. I think it was the night in the shelter that did it. I remember when the NYPD came to our apartment in Brooklyn. They explained that my parents were not coming home, because the plane they were on had “gone down.” I remember their words. Gone down. I wondered if there was a reason they hadn’t said it crashed. Maybe “gone down” meant it landed in a strange place, and they just couldn’t find it. I asked them about that, several times, until they finally sighed and said “gone down” and “crashed” were the same thing. For a moment, I hated them for giving me that faint hope. Why couldn’t they have just told me it crashed?

They took me to a shelter somewhere across the river. I slept in a big room full of cots with other children. It was dark, so dark I might as well have been alone, except I could hear the other kids breathing and the occasional squeak of bedsprings as someone turned over. I kept wondering if it was bedsprings or rats. At times, I thought I felt rats or something, crawling over my bed. When I told people about this later, they said I must have been dreaming. They said the health department would never allow children to sleep en masse in a totally dark room full of rats. Maybe I was dreaming, but that’s how I remember it.

Back in the bathroom of Aces High, minutes ticked by. I guess it was minutes, because the darkness had effectively wiped my watch out of existence. I kept listening. Was that someone moving? Was it one last straggler, left behind to lock up? Or was it rats? I shivered. Anything but rats, I thought.

It occurred to me that Rhonda might have locked her office. I put my noncorporeal head in my unseeable hands. I wondered if my brain had disappeared into blank space also. OK, it was possible she didn’t feel the need to lock her office. Yes, it would provide an extra level of protection for the computer equipment, but was someone going to break into a strip joint for that? Of course, the office probably had a safe, too. And important files that hadn’t made it to the computer.

This was a really stupid idea, I thought.

I heard the rest room door open. Snap. Light washed the room. I blinked and my heart thumped double-time in my chest. The door shut and someone walked my way, coming to a halt outside my stall. Under the door, I saw a pair of worn tennis shoes at the ends of a pair of blue-jeaned legs.

I hadn’t even dreamed this dump would merit a security guard. Shit.

Whoever it was tried the door.

I waited.

Then there was a knock. The old bump-bah-da-bump-bump followed by, “Come out, come out wherever you are.”

I knew that voice.

“Duvall?” I said.

“Do I have to huff and puff and blow your house in?”

I unlocked the door and yanked it open. The private investigator stood there, grinning.

“This reminds me of that thing they used to say about facing intimidating people. You know, about imagining them in a certain, um, position.”

I unfolded my legs and stood up, trying to compose myself, but feeling the heat of a blush in my face.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

Duvall threw back his head and laughed. “Oh, that’s good. What the hell am I doing here? I could ask you the same thing.”

“You don’t seem surprised to see me.”

“I’m not.”

“Well, I’m surprised to see you. Why aren’t you surprised to see me?”

“I don’t know. Maybe because your car is in the lot next door.”

I rolled my eyes. “I guess you would know my car.”

“Somehow, I didn’t think you had business in the industrial park at this hour. So—”

“So here we are. How’d you get in?”

He held up a set of lock picks. “Not exactly Fort Knox.”

“Weren’t you afraid of tripping an alarm?”