Blake Crouch - Locked Doors

LOCKED DOORS

By Blake Crouch

Copyright 2005 by Blake Crouch

Cover art copyright 2010 by Jeroen ten Berge

All rights reserved.

LOCKED DOORS is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For more information about the author, please visit www.blakecrouch.com.

For more information about the artist, please visit www.jeroentenberge.com.

Locked Doors, from The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton. Copyright 1975 by Loring Conant, Jr., Executor of the Estate of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

For Rebecca, LOMFL

Acknowledgments

BEFORE we get started, I need to thank some wonderful people. My wife, Rebecca, has been there for me in every way possiblemuch love to the Becca . Linda Allen, Marcia Markland , Anna Cottle , and Mary Alice Kier are some of the savviest readers and kindest people Ive ever known. My writers groupShannon Richardson, Dinah Leavitt, Suzanne Tyrpak , Doug Walker, and Richard Kochprovided me with invaluable feedback and helped make this book readable for those who havent encountered Desert Places . Goddess of website design, Beth Tendall , conjured my internet presence with elegance and humor. Sandi Greene (how many mother-in-laws show up in the acknowledgements?) should be my North Carolina publicist. Andy Smith and Anne Walker gave me wonderful feedback. Bill Smith was kind enough to explain hypnosis to me and in the process damn near put me under. A double nod for the wonderful writer and inventor-extraordinaire, Doug Walker, who showed me how to build a homemade electric chair. My climbing buddy and master photographer, Paul Pennington, took some killer author photos. A standing ovation for the brilliant Detective Art Holland who walked me through the realities of crime scene investigation and inadvertently helped to unravel a crucial plot point. My brother, Jordan, inspired me immensely, particularly through the last hundred pages. And finally, a grateful bow to everyone at Marias Bookshop in Durango , Colorado .

L U T H E R

For the angels who inhabit this town,

although their shape constantly changes,

each night we leave some cold potatoes

and a bowl of milk on the windowsill.

Usually they inhabit heaven where,

by the way, no tears are allowed.

They push the moon around like

a boiled yam.

The Milky Way is their hen

with her many children.

When it is night the cows lie down

but the moon, that big bull, stands up.

Anne Sexton, Locked Doors

THE headline on the Arts and Leisure page read: Publisher to Reissue Five Thrillers by Alleged Murderer, Andrew Z. Thomas .

All it took was seeing his name.

Karen Prescott dropped The New York Times and walked over to the window.

Morning light streamed across the clutter of her cramped officequery letters and sample chapters stacked in two piles on the floor beside the desk, a box of galleys shoved under the credenza. She peered out the window and saw the fog dissolving, the microscopic crawl of traffic now materializing on Broadway through the cloud below.

Leaning against a bookcase that housed many of the hardcovers shed guided to publication, Karen shivered. The mention of Andrews name always unglued her.

For two years shed been romantically involved with the suspense novelist and had even lived with him during the writing of Blue Murder at the same lake house in North Carolina where many of his victims were found.

She considered it a latent character defect that shed failed to notice anything sinister in Andy beyond a slight reclusive tendency.

My God, I almost married him.

She pictured Andy reading to the crowd in that Boston bookshop the first time they met. In a bathrobe writing in his office as she brought him fresh coffee (French roast of course). Andy making love to her in a flimsy rowboat in the middle of Lake Norman.

She thought of his dead mother.

The exhumed bodies from his lakefront property.

His face on the FBI website.

Theyd used his most recent jacket photo, a black and white of Andy in a sports jacket sitting broodingly at the end of his pier.

During the last few years shed stopped thinking of him as Andy. He was Andrew Thomas now and embodied all the horrible images the cadence of those four syllables invoked.

There was a knock.

Scott Boylin , publisher of Ice Blinks literary imprint, stood in the doorway dressed in his best bib and tucker. Karen suspected he was gussied up for the Doubleday party.

He smiled, waved with his fingers.

She crossed her arms, leveled her gaze.

God he looked streamlined todayvery tall, fit, crowned by thick black hair with dignified intimations of silver.

He made her feel little. In a good way. Because Karen stood nearly six feet tall, few men towered over her. She loved having to look up at Scott.

Theyd been dating clandestinely for the last four months. Shed even given him a key to her apartment where they spent countless Sundays in bed reading manuscripts, the coffeestained pages scattered across the sheets.

But last night shed seen him at a bar in SoHo with one of the cute interns. Their rendezvous did not look work-related.

Come to the party with me, he said. Then well go to Il Piazza. Talk this out. Its not what you

Ive got tons of reading to catch up

Dont be like that, Karen, come on.

I dont think its appropriate to have this conversation here, so

He exhaled sharply through his nose and the door closed hard behind him.

Joe Mack was stuffing his pink round face with a gyro when his cell phone started ringing to the tune of Staying Alive.

He answered, cheeks exploding with food, This Joe.

Hi, yes, um, Ive got a bit of an interesting problem.

Whath ?

Well, Im in my apartment but I cant get the deadbolt to turn from the inside.

Joe Mack choked down a huge mouthful, said, So youre locked in.

Exactly.

Which apartment? He didnt even try to mask the annoyance in his voice.

Twenty-two eleven.

Name?

UmIm not the tenet. Im Karen Prescotts friend. Shes the

Yeah, I get it. You need to leave any time soon?

Well, yeah, I dont want to

Joe Mack sighed, closed the cell phone, and devoured the last of the gyro.

Wiping his hands on his shirt he heaved himself from a debilitated swivel chair and lumbered out of the office, locking the door behind him.

The lobby was quiet for midday and the elevator doors spread as soon as he pressed the button. He rode up wishing hed bought three gyros for lunch instead of two.

The doors opened again and he walked onto the twenty-second floor, fishing the key ring containing the master from the pocket of his enormous overalls.

He belched.

It echoed down the empty corridor.

Man was he hungry.

He stopped at 2211, knocked, yelled through the door, Its the super!

No one answered.

Joe Mack inserted the master into the deadbolt. It turned easily enough.

He pushed the door open.

Hello? he said, standing in the threshold, admiring the apartmentroomy, flat-screen television, lush deepblue carpet, an antique desk, great view of SoHo , probably loads of food in the fridge.

Anybody home?

He turned the deadbolt four times. It worked perfectly.

Another door opened somewhere in the hallway and approaching footsteps reverberated off the hardwood floor. Joe Mack glanced down the corridor at the tall man with black hair in a black overcoat strolling toward him from the stairwell.