eyes again. He had touched her, made love to her. And now he was dead.
She ordered coffee, and though the taste nearly made her ill, she forced herself to drink it. She needed the caffeine, she needed to break through the dense fog of terror and think. For the first time she asked herself why—why was Keaton dead? Was it a burglary gone awry? There had been no sign of forced entry; the apartment hadn’t looked “tossed.” The murderer must be someone who knew him, Lake deduced. Keaton looked as if he’d been attacked as he slept. That meant someone had gone there with the sole purpose of slashing Keaton’s throat. And if she had been in the bed with him, she would be dead now, too. She let out a gasp at the thought. Her kids—it would have ruined their lives.
For a few moments Lake fought with the idea of calling the police after all. Her failure to get in touch before now wouldn’t be hard to explain—she’d fled in panic, worried that the killer had still been in the apartment. And the forensic evidence would confirm that she didn’t kill Keaton.
But would it? What if the weapon was still in the apartment—a butcher knife, for instance—and it had been wiped clean? They’d think she’d wiped it clean. It wasn’t hard to imagine the scenario the cops would form in their minds. A recently dumped, possibly drunk, possibly unstable divorcée sleeps with a hot doctor. She asks when she’ll see him again, he makes it clear he isn’t interested. In a drunken rage, she takes a butcher knife to him while he sleeps. Even if she weren’t arrested immediately, she would be a “person of interest,” like in those cop shows.
Jack would have a field day with that. He’d convince a judge to give him custody until her situation was resolved. And that’s what Hotchkiss had warned her about. He’d said that it was almost impossible to regain custody once it had been lost temporarily. So even if her name was cleared, she could end up without the kids.
That meant she couldn’t tell the police. She flashed back to Keaton’s loft, making certain in her mind that she’d grabbed everything of hers. There was still evidence of her there, of course. Her bodily fluids in the bed perhaps, her fingerprints on the cognac glass. But from what little she knew, she was pretty sure that the police couldn’t ask for her DNA or fingerprints unless they had legitimate reason to suspect her. And what reason could there be? She’d never spoken to Keaton at dinner and she’d left alone.
She wondered whether she should call someone—Molly, for instance—and ask for guidance. But wouldn’t that put the person in some kind of legal jeopardy?
What she did have to do, she knew, was to go to the clinic today—as horrible as that would be. She would have to act normal and be cooperative when the police arrived—as they surely would.
She stayed in the diner for another half hour. At seven-thirty she left and just walked, back and forth along the side streets, slowly making her way home to West End Avenue and Eighty-fourth—keeping her eyes down the entire time in case someone she knew was nearby.
Half a block away from her building, she stopped and positioned herself by a parked truck, watching the front. A light drizzle had begun, which was lucky for her. She could see that Ray, the morning doorman, was busy trying to flag down a cab for someone. Having no luck, he moved farther up the street to the corner. The person waiting stood under the building’s awning keeping an impatient eye on the corner. Fortunately Lake didn’t recognize him and she saw her chance. She bolted to the main door and slipped inside.
Rather than chance the elevator, she took the stairs, two steps at time. When she finally slammed her apartment door behind her, she let out the strangled sob that had been lodged in her throat for hours.
In the kitchen she poured a glass of water and gulped it down, and then, as she sat at the table, she let the tears come. A man who had made love to her had been murdered. And though she’d escaped death, she wasn’t safe. Everything in her life was in jeopardy now.
She showered, scrubbing her body red with a loofah, and then dressed in a white shirt and dark-blue pencil skirt for work. Staring at her reflection, she