Page 68 of Kill For Me Kill For You
Except now she couldn’t get down the alley.
It was sealed off with more police tape, crisscrossed along the entrance in such a way that there was no way to get past without ripping at least two or three strands.
She exhaled, turned round, checking the street. There were two people, two hundred yards further up, walking away with their backs turned to Amanda. She had come too far to turn back now. This was too important. No choice but to go on. She put on the gloves, took the pocketknife and cut the bottom strands of tape. Once they were loose, she crawled forward on her elbows, trying to save her injured knee. She stood on the other side of the police tape. There was no way to tape it back up. She hadn’t brought anything with her. She just had to hope nobody noticed, or that if they did they’d think the tape had just come loose and no more.
It was a risk. A sign that all was not secure.
Her flashlight sent out a narrow beam. On and off. Just to make sure the dark alley was clear. That there was no one waiting in a dark recess to grab her as she walked past.
It was clear.
She made her way along, feeling one side of the wall with her fingers as she went. Then she reached the back wall she’d climbed over the night before. She gently pushed at the back gate. It had not been fitted with a new lock. It opened maybe six inches then hit something on the other side. It told her a lot. The fact that there had been an attack in the property twenty-four hours earlier and the lock on the back gate had not been repaired meant that there was no one else living in the house. If there had been, they would’ve bolted it shut for security.
Probably the cops had just placed something in front of the gate to stop it opening. That, and sealing off the alley was all they could do.
She pushed harder. The gate bowed at the top, which meant the obstruction was on the ground, low down at the bottom of the gate. She leaned up against the wood, then used her full weight, keeping the pressure coming from her good leg.
There was a grating sound. Metal against the concrete path. Not loud. But audible nonetheless. It was heavy going, but she soon had enough of a gap to slip through.
A garden bench on the path. That was it. She kept low and moved toward the house. There was no light coming from the rear windows.
She was surprised to find the house looked largely the same as when she’d left the night before. The tool shed door was still open, hanging on its hinges and swaying slightly in the gentle breeze. There was a dark stain, about the size of a small, circular kitchen table, on the grass. The rear window was still broken. A few shards remained in the yard beneath it. Amanda had thought the NYPD would at least have got someone to come out and replace the window or board it up.
Maybe that wasn’t their problem.
She found herself looking back at the tool shed when she should’ve been concentrating on the house and possible points of entry.
There was something about the tool shed that stirred a lingering doubt in the back of her mind. She didn’t know quite what it was. She thought maybe she had meant to do something in the tool shed, but she had forgotten . . .
Forgotten.
Amanda ran to the tool shed, peered inside.
The burner phone Naomi had given to her to lure Quinn into the shed. It was gone.
Amanda knew straight away she had forgotten to retrieve the phone before she’d left. Now the police had it.
She thought back to yesterday. As far as she could remember, she had not touched that phone without gloves. Naomi had given her the phones while still in their wrapping. It was a mistake to leave one behind. She still had the second burner phone in her apartment, in a bag with the clothes she’d worn last night. Soon as she got home, she had to dump that bag.
Amanda swore under her breath, shook her head. She needed to get her mind back on business. Otherwise she might make another mistake.
She tested the back door of the house and found it locked. There were four glass panels in the upper half of the painted wooden door. The smashed kitchen window was much too high for her to crawl through. It still had sharp edges of glass. Too noisy to break those pieces off to get inside. It was either try the door with the screwdriver or go home. She placed the flathead at the door jamb, just below the lock, and pushed and wriggled it, scraping the paint and the wood, trying to slip it between the door and the upright.
No luck. She would need a hammer and a chisel to get through it. And it would be much too loud. She couldn’t risk alerting the neighbors.
Amanda had never broken into a house before. She’d never imagined it would be this hard. She stood still for a few seconds, thinking through the problem. Gently got onto her knees, biting her lip as her left knee took her weight. She brought out her flashlight, cupped a hand over it, and held it close to the lock. She looked through and saw that the key was in the lock on the other side of the door.
She stood, killed the flashlight. Quinn had probably left the key in the door as he made his way outside last night. The cops, who had to make the property in some way secure, would more than likely have just closed this door, locked it and left the key in the lock.
If she could break the lower right pane of glass, she could reach in and unlock the door with the key.
But breaking it would alert the neighbors.
Amanda walked back to the tool shed, went inside, looked around. It was too dark to make things out clearly and she couldn’t risk the flashlight.
Instead, she used her hands to feel around.
There was a stool beneath the workbench with a small cushion strapped onto it. With no time to waste, she cut away the straps with the pocketknife then found a roll of duct tape on a shelf.
