It was nearly midnight when his patrol route returned him to the apartment complex from the night before. He drove slowly through the parking lot, seeing nothing unusual. He brought the car to a stop beside the same garbage enclosure where he parked the day before. A startled cat darted across his headlight beams, a quick black and white dappled flash of motion, before disappearing into the shadows of the landscape shrubbery.
John stared up the stairway toward the apartment. It seemed to be dark. At least, no light came from either the small kitchen window, or from the large sliding door that led to a narrow balcony. If lights were on deeper within the apartment, he could not see them.
I probably wouldn’t want to be alone in there either right now, he thought with a vague shiver.
He wondered if she was alone up there, and whether he should check on her.
I could call it in as a welfare check.
He settled back into the seat to think about it, recognizing that he really had no justification to make such a call.
I’ll probably take eight sorts of shit for it too, he knew, thinking of at least one fellow officer would persist in making rude and suggestive remarks about John and the young woman.
She wasn’t that bad looking, he decided.
It had been difficult to tell for sure between the robe and her puffy face and eyes. There had been something about her face, though. Even through the blotchy complexion brought on by fear and crying, it had been oddly familiar, as if he had seen it somewhere before.
Thinking through his collection of friends and acquaintances, he knew that perhaps one or two of them might live somewhere in this part of the city, but he had never visited this apartment complex before the last night. His uncertainty told him that he was probably looking in the wrong place. If he had ever seen her before, it had not been among his friends.
Where then?
“Car Twenty-Seven, what’s your ten-twenty?”
The dispatcher’s voice broke him from his thoughts.
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