Lock Every Door(64)

“I feel the same about you,” he says.

I give him a wry smile. “At least we’re on even footing. Now, tell me everything you know about Erica Mitchell.”

“How much do you know?”

“That she was in 12A before me. She lived there a month before deciding to move out. Now she’s missing and you’re putting up posters looking for her. Care to fill me in on the rest?”

“We were . . . friends,” Dylan says.

I note the pause. “You sure about that?”

We walk to another diorama. This one shows a pair of leopards hidden in a copse of jungle trees. One of them keenly watches a nearby bushpig, ready to strike.

“Okay, we were more than friends,” Dylan says. “I ran into her in the lobby on her second day at the Bartholomew. We started flirting, one thing led to another, and we started hooking up on a regular basis. As far as we knew, that wasn’t against the rules. But we also didn’t broadcast it, just in case it was. So if you’re looking for a definitive relationship status, I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t really know what we were.”

I get a flashback to last night with Nick and can instantly relate.

“How long did this go on?”

“About three weeks,” Dylan says. “Then she left. There was no notice. She didn’t tell me she was leaving—or even thinking about it. One day, she was just gone. At first I thought something might have happened. An emergency or something. But when I called, she never answered. When I texted, she never texted back. That’s when I started to get worried.”

“Did you ask Leslie what happened?”

“She told me Erica wasn’t comfortable with all those stupid apartment-sitter rules and decided to move out. But here’s the thing—Erica never once mentioned the rules to me. She certainly never talked about being bothered by them.”

“Do you think something changed?”

“I don’t know what could have changed overnight,” Dylan says. “I left her apartment a little before midnight. She was gone in the morning.”

I note the similarities between her departure and Ingrid’s. They’re hard to miss.

“Did Leslie say she specifically spoke to Erica?”

“I guess she left a note,” Dylan says. “A resignation letter. That’s what Leslie called it. She said she found it shoved under her office door, along with Erica’s keys.”

I stare at the diorama, unnerved by the way the leopards are posed. While one of them stalks the bushpig, the other appears to be staring out of the diorama, directly at the people watching from the other side of the glass.

I look away, resting my gaze on Dylan. “Is that when you started looking for Erica?”

“You mean the missing posters? That was a few days after she left. When two days went by and I didn’t hear from her, I started to get worried. I went to the police first. That was useless. They told me—”

“That you needed more information,” I say. “I got the same thing about Ingrid.”

“But they’re not wrong,” Dylan says. “I don’t know enough about Erica. Her birthday. Her address before she got to the Bartholomew. For the poster, I guessed her height and weight. My hope was that someone would recognize her picture and call to tell me they’d seen her. I just want to know she’s okay.”

We move to another diorama. A pack of wild dogs hunting on the savannah, their eyes and ears alert for prey.

“Have you tried tracking down her family?” I ask Dylan.

“She doesn’t have any.”

My heart skips a single, surprised beat. “None at all?”

“She was an only child. Her parents died in a car accident when she was a baby. Her only aunt raised her, but she died a couple years ago.”

“What about you? You have any family left?”

“None,” Dylan says quietly, looking not at me but at the pack of dogs. There are six of them. Their own tight-knit unit. “My mom’s dead, and my dad might be. I don’t fucking know. I had a brother, but he was killed in Iraq.”

Dylan is yet another apartment sitter who doesn’t have parents or family nearby. Between him, Erica, Ingrid, and myself, I’m sensing a trend. Either Leslie chooses orphans as some weird act of charity, or she does it because she knows we’re more likely to be desperate.

“How much are you getting paid?” I ask Dylan.

“Twelve thousand dollars for three months.”

“Same,” I say.

“But don’t you think that’s weird? I mean, who pays that much money to let someone stay in their fancy apartment? Especially when most people would do it for free.”

“Leslie told me it was—”

“An insurance policy? Yeah, I was told that, too. But when you add in that, plus all those rules, something about the situation just seems off.”

“Then why haven’t you left?”

“Because I need the money,” Dylan says. “I’ve got four weeks to go until I collect the whole twelve grand. Once I do that, then I’m out of there, even though I have nowhere else to go. It was the same thing with Erica.”

“And Ingrid,” I say. “And me.”

“One of the things Erica did talk about was the Bartholomew and how, well, fucked-up it seems. Have you heard about some of the shit that’s gone down there?”