Criss Cross

Chapter 18

The following night, Sampson and I camped out in an unmarked squad car outside the Chantilly Hooters while Marlene Rogers worked her shift.

We were on the lookout for a big, lean balding guy or a big, lean guy wearing an obvious toupee, but we saw no one meeting either of those descriptions. I began to wonder if the waitress felt like she was being watched or followed because she’d been conditioned to feel that way.

I considered that idea. I’d been to a seminar earlier that year in which a speaker asked how many of the men in the room had felt physically or psychologically threatened during the previous month. Maybe four men out of the two hundred there raised their hands. When the two hundred women there were asked the same question, a hundred and seventy or so raised their hands.

I’d been shocked by that, and it had given me a new appreciation for what women, including Marlene Rogers, went through on a daily basis. I decided she’d probably been sexually harassed enough to know when a guy posed an actual threat, so if she said someone was following her, I believed her.

Around nine, Rogers, no longer in her Hooters uniform and with a heavy purse over one shoulder, came out the back door of the restaurant. She climbed into her Toyota Prius and drove out of the parking lot. No one followed her except us.

“She’s headed to her mom’s place to pick up her son,” I said. “Let’s go sit on her condo and make sure she gets inside, then we’ll call it a night.”

“Works for me,” Sampson said.

Rogers lived in the upper right unit of a two-story, fourplex rental near the Walmart Supercenter off I-66. We parked across the street and down the block.

I used binoculars to scan the cars on the street but saw no one in any of them. Rogers rolled in ten minutes later, parked the Prius in her normal spot — nose in against a cedar hedge — and carried her sleeping son up the stairs and into the apartment.

We watched for a few minutes, and I was about to call it when Rogers came back out and hurried to her car. She opened the door, ducked inside, and emerged with her purse. Slinging it over her shoulder, Rogers turned to head back to her apartment.

A looming dark shape slipped from the cedar hedge, took two steps toward her, and grabbed her from behind.