I checked the peephole and saw a man I didn’t recognize. “Police, ma’am,” he said when he heard me on the other side of the door. He held up a badge to the glass.
Devon, I thought.
I pulled my zip-up sweatshirt tightly around myself and opened the door. “Yes?”
“You seen your neighbor tonight?” he asked, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “Across the way.”
He was gesturing to Devon’s apartment. The light was on in Devon’s window, and as I watched, the door opened and a uniformed cop came out. They were inside his place—the cops were inside Devon’s apartment.
For a second, I ran through all of the things crime TV had taught me over the years. Could they do that? Didn’t that require a warrant? What had Devon done that got the cops a warrant?
I looked back to the cop to see him watching my shocked reaction. He looked bored. He’d probably seen a lot of dumbass civilians with the expression I wore on my face right now.
“Your neighbor,” he prompted. “You know him?”
I shook my head, my face numb. “No.” That wasn’t entirely true, and I didn’t want to lie to a cop, so I added, “I’ve seen him around, in the corridors, the parking lot. That’s all.”
The cop nodded. “You seen him tonight?”
“Tonight? No.” God, I felt like I was lying. Why did I feel like I was lying when I wasn’t?
“Today?” the cop prompted.
“What did he do?” I blurted.
He barely bothered to acknowledge this. “Today?” he asked me again.
“Um.” I thought about it. “This morning. When he was leaving for work.” When I was standing at my window, watching him leave and wondering whether I should talk to him.
“Mm-hmm.” The cop pulled out a notebook and flipped a page. “How did you know he was going to work?”
“What?” Oh, God, he was right. If I didn’t know Devon, I didn’t know he had a job. Then again, maybe he hadn’t been leaving for work—I had no way of knowing. “It was just that it was eight o’clock in the morning, and I was going to work myself, so I guess I just assumed.”
“Huh,” the cop said, still looking down at his notebook. I wondered for a crazy minute if it was a prop. “And not since?”
“N—no.”
“He ever talk to you?”
Lie, Olivia, lie. Just do it. “No.”
“He have friends in the building that you know of?”
“No.” I’d never seen him talk to anyone except me. “I don’t think so. No.”
“Uh huh. And how long have you lived here?”
“Um.” If I wanted to sound stupid, I was doing a convincing job. “Two months.”
He nodded, glanced at me, then down at his notebook again. “You ever go to Pure Gold?” he asked.
My jaw dropped open. I passed the place every day—it was half a mile up the street. “The strip club?”
“Sorry, I have to ask,” he said, breaking the shell of his boredom for a minute. “Some of the girls in this complex work there.” He eyed me up and down—jeans, t-shirt, zip-up sweatshirt, no makeup, hair down—and looked at his notebook again. “I need to know if you’re one of them.”
A stripper? Was he asking me if I was a stripper? Well, strippers wore jeans and sweatshirts sometimes. Still, I’d never been asked that question in my life. “No,” I said. “I’m not a stripper. I work at Gratchen Advertising.”
What the hell did Devon have to do with the Pure Gold strip club? I felt like an idiot, a sheltered child. I’d had a crush on him, but the cops were at his place and he had something to do with strippers. Devon wasn’t some sweet harmless boy in a boy band. He’d never pretended to be one, either—he’d warned me almost from the minute I got in his car.