by Thomas Perry
“Okay,” he said. “It’s just that it’s a waste of time to get mad at me.”
“I’m not.”
“Or even at him.”
“I’m not mad. I’m a woman cop. I’m used to being ignored, and to much, much worse. I’m looking for the house number.”
“Okay,” said Pitt. He followed her along the street for another half block, until they came to a narrow one-story house.
They walked up to the steps and Hobbes rang the bell, then listened for a moment to the door being unbolted and unlatched. It swung open to reveal a woman around sixty years old with dyed red hair wearing a pair of jeans with knee pads over them.
“Mrs. Halloran?”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” the woman said. “I was just finishing up on the trim. Come on in, but don’t touch any woodwork. Everything else is dry.”
They went inside. The furniture in the small living room had been pushed together in the middle of the hardwood floor and covered with one large canvas tarpaulin. She pulled the canvas off on one side to uncover three chairs. “You must be Sergeant Hobbes.”
“That’s right,” said Hobbes. “This is Mr. Pitt. He’s a private investigator cooperating with us on this case.”
It was not lost on Mrs. Halloran that Joe Pitt was handsome, and closer to her age than to Hobbes’s. She kept her eyes on Pitt as she said, “Here, this is the only place we can sit right now.” Mrs. Halloran sat on one of the chairs. “You said ‘case.’ Tanya Starling is involved in a case?”
“We’re looking for her so we can ask her a few questions. A man she knew in Portland was the victim of a crime.”
“What’s his name?”
“His name was Dennis Poole.”
“Oh, my goodness,” said Mrs. Halloran. “No wonder she left in such a hurry. You mean you think she killed him, or that she’s in danger?”
Catherine Hobbes allowed some of her frustration to show. “We just want to talk to her. She knew him, and we would like to know anything she can tell us. She left Portland, so we haven’t been able to talk to her.” Hobbes reached into her folder and pulled out a photograph. “Can you identify the woman in this picture?”
Mrs. Halloran held the picture a distance from her face, then close up, then farther away. “Yes. That seems to be Tanya. But you should try to get a better picture. It’s so fuzzy.”
“It’s copied from a videotape. Did you talk to her much?”
“When I rented the house to her, we talked a bit. She said she was moving here from Chicago. Was that a lie?”
“No,” said Hobbes. “Her last permanent address was in Chicago. We think she was only in Portland for a short visit.”
“That makes sense. She had nothing much with her. Her roommate hadn’t even arrived yet.”
“What was the roommate’s name?”
“Rachel Sturbridge.”
“What was she like?”
“I never met her. She was going to arrive separately in a few days. I let Tanya sign the lease and add Rachel’s name to it, but Tanya paid the rent and security deposit in advance with her money, and initialed the lease to agree to all of the provisions, so for the time being, she was my tenant. I assumed that later on, as a matter of course, I would meet the other one. But as a rule, when you rent to young people, you don’t want to hang around all the time. You risk becoming a second mommy to them. And what you don’t know won’t hurt you.”
“And you didn’t see her when they moved, either?”
“No. They didn’t tell me ahead of time, and if they had—I don’t know—maybe I would have come to be sure they didn’t leave the door unlocked or walk off with any of my furnishings, but they didn’t anyway. They were perfectly nice. Later, when Tanya called and told me they had moved out, she said I could rent it to someone else right away. I asked if I could send her a refund at her new address, but she told me to keep the money for the trouble of renting it twice.”
“Very thoughtful,” said Catherine Hobbes. “Do you remember the date of the call?”
“Let’s see,” she said. “It must have been about a week ago.”
“Did she say where she was calling from?”
“No, I don’t think she did. She was in a hurry, and she said she was just taking the time to let me know about the vacancy, and had to go. I didn’t want to keep her on the line.”
Catherine Hobbes said, “Here’s my card, Mrs. Halloran. We’re very interested in talking with her, so if you hear from her again, or remember anything that might help us, please get in touch. You can call me collect. In fact, I’m going to add my home phone number so you can reach me anytime.” She quickly wrote it on her card.
Mrs. Halloran took the card, glanced at it, and stuck it into the pocket of her jeans. “All right,” she said.
“Thank you.”
As soon as they had walked far enough from the house to avoid being overheard, Joe Pitt said, “Are you getting the same feeling I am?”
“Oh, yes. She knows somebody is looking for her, and she doesn’t want to be found.”
“This Rachel might be helping her lose the guy who killed Dennis Poole—if they use Rachel’s car, and pay for things in Rachel’s name, he’ll have a hard time finding Tanya.”
“But we won’t,” said Catherine Hobbes. “Now that we know about her it gives us two chances for a hit. When we find one, we’ll have the other.”
10
Nancy Mills found her walks through Topanga Plaza relaxing. There were gangs of old people who did power walks every morning before the stores opened, going the length of the mall, then clambering up the stalled escalator to the upper galleries and striding along beside the railings. Nancy was more subtle than they were, but she had begun to use the place for conditioning too, weaving through the crowds after the stores opened.
Nancy Mills didn’t go on shopping binges the way Tanya Starling often had, and Rachel Sturbridge did once or twice. Nancy still owned all of their new clothes from Aspen, Portland, and San Francisco, and at the moment, her activities were too simple to require a big wardrobe. But she liked to look at clothes.
It was Thursday morning. The plaza was sometimes unpleasantly crowded on weekends, but Thursday was still perfect. She was in Bloomingdale’s trying to decide which jar of bath salts had the right scent when she became aware that a man at the next counter was staring at her. He was in his early thirties, well groomed and nicely dressed. He wore a dark sport coat and shined Italian shoes. She assumed he must be a store floor manager or a salesman for one of the cosmetics lines, but she couldn’t see from this angle whether he had a name tag without actually staring at him. Part of his job was to hang around being friendly to customers, so she dismissed him from her mind.
The saleswomen behind the counters were eager because Thursday mornings were slow, so one of them came right away to sell her the bath salts while another tried to raise the stakes by showing her the rest of that company’s line of products. Nancy resisted the pitch and paid in cash, as she always did. As one of the women counted out her change and the other put her receipt in the bag, Nancy became aware that the man had not gone away.
She turned to look, their eyes met, and she had a horrible moment when she wondered if she knew him, then another when she had to endure his smile. It was at once shy and hopeful. There was even a trace of the conspiratorial, as though he and she shared a secret. He looked so familiar. Could she possibly know him?
She turned away, irritated. She wanted to say aloud, “I wasn’t looking because I was interested. I just sensed that someone was staring.” She took her bag, pivoted away from him, and walked back into the mall. She moved past the first couple of stores, then felt an uncomfortable sensation. She stopped and looked at the next store’s window display, then quickly turned to walk to the other side of the mall.
She had been right. There he was again, a grown-up, smartly dressed man, following her around a mall like an awkward teenager. She supposed she should be flattered by t
he attention, but his behavior was very bad news: she had shortened her hair, dyed it a dull shade of brown, and worn clothes that weren’t supposed to be eye-catching. All that seemed to have accomplished was to make her appealing to creepy, awkward men.
Nancy turned again, intending to leave him behind, but he was already at her shoulder, so when she turned she was nearly face-to-face with him. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped to the side.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was almost sure I recognized you, and I wanted to check. I’m—”
“I don’t think we know each other,” she said, and took a step.
“Regal Bank? San Francisco?”
She froze. Now she remembered who he was.
“I was the man who helped you open your commercial account at the bank. Bill Thayer. I’m the branch manager.”
“I do remember you,” said Nancy. “What are you doing down here?”
“I have family here. I’m visiting. What about you? Are you expanding into the Los Angeles area? I still remember the name of your business—Singular Aspects. Right?”
He didn’t seem to know that she had closed the account. She had to be extremely careful, because if he got curious, he could look things up when he got back to the office. “No, actually, we decided that San Francisco wasn’t right for us, and we’re thinking about starting the business here instead. Well, nice to see you.” She stepped off.
“Miss Starling? Wait.”
She stopped walking. This was awful. She had forgotten that to open the account in San Francisco she had called herself Tanya Starling so she could cash Tanya Starling’s check from the old account in Chicago. This Bill Thayer didn’t know it yet, but he already possessed enough information to destroy her. He had seen her in this mall in Woodland Hills, just a few blocks from where she lived.
He said, “I wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight.”
“Gee, Bill,” she said. “I can’t tonight.”
“I know it’s kind of sudden, but I won’t be here long, so I thought I’d better take a chance.”
She was afraid: she was afraid to be with him, and afraid to let him walk away. She knew that dinner was impossible. He would go to his parents’ house and say he was going to miss dinner tonight because he had a date. Unless they were comatose, one of them would say, “What’s her name?” He would tell them who she was and where he had met her. She smiled. “I do have some time now, though, if you’d like to have coffee.”
“That sounds good,” said Thayer.
“Do you have a car?”
“You can’t go anywhere in L.A. without one. I rented it at the airport.”
“Then you can drive. There’s a really great little place on Topanga just south of the freeway.”
They walked out of the plaza to the parking lot. His rental car was parked about a hundred yards off, almost by itself. When she saw it she was surprised. It was a Cadillac that looked enormous to her. “Wow. Do you drive your mom and dad around when you visit?”
“Not much,” said Thayer. “They think I’ve gotten rusty driving up north, so they don’t trust me. The big car is for taking clients around. Whenever I come down I usually try to see a couple.”
They drove down Topanga past the freeway, and she said, “Keep going. It’s quite a bit farther, toward Malibu.”
“Is it on the left or right?”
“The right. Oh, look. There’s a nice little park up there. Can we stop for a minute?”
“I guess so,” he said doubtfully. “Sure.” Thayer drove off the road and stopped on the shoulder beside a grove of trees with picnic tables in it.
Nancy got out of the car with her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve been looking for a good place to have a small party. I wonder if I could do it as a picnic, right here.”
Thayer didn’t seem to know what to do. He got out of the car slowly, and scrutinized the ground before he took each step, as though he were afraid of getting his shoes dirty.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a better look.” She took his hand playfully and began to walk among the trees.
Thayer looked a bit doubtful, but he began to stroll with her in the deserted grove, past picnic tables and trash cans. Nancy let go of his hand and moved off a few feet to disapprovingly rock a picnic table that was set on uneven ground. He strolled on, and got a few steps ahead of her.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly ten-thirty. It wasn’t surprising that people weren’t here in the morning, but someone could arrive before long to set up a picnic lunch. She looked back at the road. There were no cars going past, and she couldn’t hear any coming. There was nobody nearby yet. It would have to be now. She let him get a few more steps ahead of her as she reached deep in her purse.
He suddenly stopped and turned to look back at her. He said, “What are you looking for?”
She smiled brightly at him. “My camera. I want to take a couple of pictures so I can compare it to some other places.”
He turned away and walked on.
Nancy Mills gripped the pistol and lifted it out, then held it tight against her thigh as she walked to catch up with him. She took one last look over her shoulder and listened for the sound of a car on the road. Then she raised the gun and fired through the back of Bill Thayer’s skull.
His head bobbed forward in a sudden nod and his body followed it, toppling straight onto the ground. She squatted beside him to take his wallet out of his back pocket, then pushed him over on his back so she could reach his car keys in front.
She stood and walked calmly to the car, started it, and drove back the way she and Thayer had come, north on Topanga Canyon. She parked his car in the mall parking lot, wiped the steering wheel and door handles clean with one of the alcohol-soaked antibacterial wipes she carried in her purse, then picked up the bag containing her bath salts and walked away.
Nancy thought about the morning’s events as she headed back toward her apartment. She had not wanted to harm Bill Thayer, but he had made it impossible not to. He’d had no right to keep pestering her. What could he possibly have been thinking?
Of course, she knew what he had been thinking. When he had seen the woman he thought of as Tanya Starling, it had probably made him feel excited. He already knew her slightly. She was a small business owner, and he was the manager of her bank. Not only could she be sure he was respectable, but he was powerful. He could raise her credit limit and get her loans approved. He could also get in her way, make things difficult for her. He was a shy, quiet man who had made so little impression on her the first time she’d met him that she had not recognized his face when it was three feet from hers this morning. But he had exercised his power over her, following her from the store, making her talk to him, keeping her from leaving, then making her agree to go somewhere with him. She’d had to get rid of him.
When Nancy reached home, she put on a pair of the rubber gloves she wore to do the dishes and sat at her kitchen table. She took Bill Thayer’s wallet from her purse and examined it. The credit cards were too risky to keep, but he had also been carrying almost a thousand dollars in cash when she had killed him.
A lot of people carried extra cash when they were traveling, but this was better than she had expected. Nancy took the money, wrapped the wallet in a paper towel to disguise its shape, and put it in an opaque trash bag.
Somewhere in the back of her mind was a feeling, almost a physical sensation that had not yet developed into a coherent thought—something pleasant, even titillating.
Her need to end the fear had been like an ache. When she had at last been able to pull out the pistol and blow a round through Thayer’s head, there had been a feeling of release. When she had left his rental car in the plaza parking lot and walked off with her Bloomingdale’s bag, she had felt herself smiling.
Nancy had not allowed herself to acknowledge it yet, but she had been missing the excitement that she took from men. She had missed the anticipation of watching and waiting for the right
one, and then the care and calculation of drawing him to her. She had missed the thrill of the next phase, the charged, anxious period of flirtation and speculation, and then the longer game of divulging and concealing, withholding and succumbing. She had especially missed the sweet, warm, lazy time after that, when she was secure in the man’s love, soaking in the attention and the luxury.
Now she was beginning to notice the puzzling fact that she liked the bad parts too. When Dennis had begun to disappoint her, the resentment and anger had made her feel powerful and dangerous and clean—not like a victim, but like a judge and avenger. The building anger had made her feel energetic and purposeful. The single shot had been the best possible climax to the relationship.
She had liked the killing. The breakup with David Larson had shown her that perfectly. When David had betrayed her, she had enjoyed the process of getting angry and rejecting him and punishing him. Seeing his devastation had given her the chance to know how beautiful and desirable she could be. But it wasn’t enough. What was missing was that she had not gotten to kill him.
She took the bag with the wallet out with her garbage late that night and stuck it in the bottom of the dumpster behind an apartment building three blocks from hers. Her gun stayed in her purse. It would be foolish to get rid of her gun just when she had started to enjoy it.
11
Hello? Mrs. Halloran?”
Eve Halloran wasn’t quite sure, but the young female voice made her think it just might be. “Yes?”
“This is Tanya Starling calling. I’m very sorry to bother you, but I wondered whether anyone had tried to get in touch with me since I left, or asked about me. There might have been a man named David?”
“No, dear,” said Mrs. Halloran. She spoke with barely suppressed excitement. “I haven’t heard from anyone like that. But a couple of days ago I did have a visit from a pair of police officers.” She stopped, waiting for a reaction.
“Police? Why? What did they want?”
