* * *

Eric wasn’t looking forward to this. He could have sent someone else to do it, but it was Blaine Wagner who’d asked him personally, and he was stuck.

He jumped in his car and drove down to the building, then headed inside, and rode the elevator up to the eighth floor, and down to 802. He paused outside the door and inhaled, but didn’t smell anything resembling a rotting body, so he rang the doorbell and waited. And then waited. Then he rang it again and waited. And waited some more.

Satisfied there wasn’t going to be an answer, he put the key in the lock and turned it. Only afterward did it occur to him that it could have set off a security alarm. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was met with silence.

The air conditioning was on, so there was no musty smell as he called out.

“Cathy! Cathy Wagner! Anybody here?”

Silence.

At that point, he began walking through the rooms, choosing the kitchen first and went straight to the refrigerator. There were a couple of leftover cartons of food that had molded and a partial bottle of milk that was almost two months out of date. He closed the door and went through the living room and into the office. There was a laptop on the desk but when he checked, it was off, and the battery had gone dead.

He moved into the bedroom, and the first thing he saw was her purse sitting on the bench at the foot of her bed. He looked inside and when he realized everything she would have carried was still in it—her wallet, her ID, credit cards, car keys, sunglasses, even makeup—his heart skipped a beat. No woman willingly left all of this behind. Now he was getting concerned.

He went straight to the big walk-in closet. It didn’t take but a few moments to notice there were no empty hangers to indicate she’d packed clothes. There was no sign of a struggle, nor of any kind of abduction. She was just gone.

Eric was still in her bedroom he called Blaine. He must have been waiting for the call, because he answered on the first ring.

“This is Blaine.”

“It’s me, Eric. I’m in her apartment, and I don’t really know what to tell you except that she’s not here. There’s food in her refrigerator that has molded. The milk is out of date almost two months. The laptop in her office is off and when I tried to turn it on, the battery was dead. I’m standing in her bedroom right now, and her purse, with her wallet, money, credit cards and ID are still in it. Her car keys are in it. I checked her closet. There’s no sign of her packing any clothes because there are no empty hangers. It’s as if she just vanished. Do you want me to call the police?”

Blaine’s heart skipped a beat. He knew exactly what she’d done! The bitch! She’d walked away from it all to get away from him, and he’d never seen it coming.