I WATCHED THE FRONT DOOR of my condo open. Sprawled on the bedroom floor, I couldn’t move a muscle to respond. My eyelids were heavy, my skin clammy, while my stomach continued to roll queasily. Flu-like symptoms, except it wasn’t the flu. It was carbon monoxide poisoning.

Charlie Sgarzi strode into my apartment. He no longer wore his oversize trench coat. Instead, he was clad in well-tailored tan slacks, a button-down pin-striped shirt. He looked both smaller and sleeker. Less a caricature, more a focused predator, finally moving in for the kill.

On his face he wore a mask that covered his mouth and nose. He also carried with him a dark-green duffel bag that contained items I knew too much about. Especially the surgical-grade scalpel and the mason jar already prepared with formaldehyde.

After closing and securing the front door behind him, Charlie slipped the copy of the key he’d obviously made for my condo back into his pants pocket.

Then he came to me.

“Paul Donabedian,” he announced, his voice muffled through the mask. He stuck out his hand. “Pleased to meet you. I rented a unit in this building two months ago. Gives me plenty of reason to enter and exit without arousing suspicion. And once a person is past the doorman, well, no one’s watching anymore, right? I’ve been taking the stairs up to your condo for weeks, scoping out the unit, making a master key, then, of course, installing my little cameras. But you found them, didn’t you, Adeline? Had a little snit and taped my lenses. As if such a thing would really stop me.”

He stepped over my body. I should move. Roll over, lash out at him. Or at least stumble for the door. My chest felt unbearably tight. A sense of building pressure as my lungs fought with increasing desperation for oxygen.

Charlie set down his duffel bag on the bed. Then he crossed to the electric heating unit next to the bed, reaching behind it to flip the kill switch. Next, he opened the two windows set on the far side of the room, airing out the space.

I willed my lungs to expand, to inhale the first tendrils of fresh air. But the windows were too far away. Or I was already too far gone.

“Don’t want the carbon monoxide levels to be too high,” Charlie stated. “Might affect me, too. Not sure, really, how good these masks are. Besides, removing the obvious carbon monoxide levels will make things more interesting for the investigating officers. A renowned doctor, intelligent, insightful, forewarned, a woman who really should’ve known better, still found murdered in her own bedroom. Think of the drama of such a scene. Readers will go nuts.”

He returned to his duffel bag. Unzipped.

On my right hand, my fingers twitched. Signs of life. Or simply the beginnings of a seizure due to my oxygen-starved brain?