Page 93 of The Lie Maker

“Hello?” I said. “Anyone here?”

Which, of course, will always draw out a killer who’s hiding in the bathroom.

Reasonably confident that I was alone, I stepped in and closed the door behind me. I did a quick check of the place, glancing in the bedroom and the closet, as well as the bathroom and behind the shower curtain.

I concluded that my apartment was assassin-free.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge and paced the apartment while I drank it. Kept going to the window, looking at everyone that walked by, studying them in a way I never had before. Was that woman jogging by a cop? Was the homeless guy begging for change actually an undercover police officer? How about that elderly man walking his French bulldog? Was he watching for my father? Would he be calling that menacing-looking guy in Gwen’s phone if he saw my father turn up?

A few minutes before five I heard someone coming up the stairs. My heart started pounding. I glanced at the door to make sure I’d turned the dead bolt and put on the chain. Seconds later, there was a knock.

Why, I asked myself at that moment, had I never installed a peephole?

“Who is it?” I shouted through the door.

“It’s me!”

Lana.

I turned back the dead bolt and opened the door five inches, the chain taut across the gap. It was Lana all right, balancing a pizza box on her palm and holding a bottle of red wine with her other hand, her purse slung over her shoulder.

“Let me in,” she said. “I brought dinner.”

I closed the door, took off the chain, and admitted her, taking the pizza and setting it on the kitchen counter.

“What’s with the Fort Knox routine?” she asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said.

She set down the wine, quickly put her arms around me, and put her lips on mine.

“Have I got news for you,” she said.

“Same,” I said.

“What?”

“You go first,” I said.

“Okay, but get some plates,” she said. “I’m starving.”

She opened the box and the wine as I went for plates and glasses. She filled two of them, handed me one, and said, “Don’t overdo it. I think you might be going for a drive tonight.”

“What are you talking about?”

Lana grabbed a slice, bit off a chunk from the point, and tossed it onto her plate.

“Okay, let me start with the small stuff.”

“Small stuff?”

“I have a theory about who might be going after your father.”

If that was the small stuff, I wondered what the big news would be.

She told me about Abel Gartner’s twins. The son who now ran the linen company, and the daughter who’d recently died. Suggestions that they never got over the tragic loss of their father.

“How’s that for a motive?” she asked. “He blames your father for ruining their lives.”