Nightlife: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  His voice became jocular, but it was unconvincing. “Come back. I don’t know what you think you saw, but you misinterpreted it. You’re wrong.”

  She stopped walking and turned to glare at him. “Kevin. You don’t seem to have heard. I saw. I am not ‘wrong.’ ”

  His brows were knitted in worry and unhappiness. He put his hands on her arms, as he had a thousand times, and looked into her eyes. “Diana can tell you. It’s a misunderstanding. Let’s talk. The three of us.”

  He seemed to have lost his mind. “I don’t want to talk to Diana, and Diana doesn’t want to talk to me. Now let me out of here.” She shook his hands off her arms, spun, and walked out of the office. That had been the explosion, and it had propelled her away from his presence, his life.

  When she thought about it, she usually summarized the story as though she had caught him one day and never seen him again. It wasn’t that simple. There had followed months of surreal scenes with him. There were meetings with him to sign off on the property settlement, two meetings that were supposedly by chance when he was clearing out, and others she couldn’t quite bring to mind now. But she had been forced to hear his denials, then his excuses, then his anger.

  During those months all of their mutual acquaintances seemed to discover the need to unburden themselves of their knowledge about some girl who had slept with him. Two had even admitted to having done it themselves. They felt that they, too, belonged to a larger category of women mistreated by Kevin. It had all ended eight years ago, and every one of those people had vanished from her life.

  36

  She drove through the city, toward the bureau. Portland was not huge, so if she was up early enough she never had much trouble getting across the river and into the homicide office in fifteen minutes.

  She was there before six, and went to work immediately on the next phase of the search. Today she was sending copies of the photographs of Tanya Starling to Department of Motor Vehicles offices in major cities all over the country, warning them that Tanya Starling would probably soon be applying for a new driver’s license somewhere.

  Catherine was nearly finished with the flyers for the motor vehicles departments when she looked up and saw Captain Farber approaching her desk. “Catherine, I need to assign you to help Tony Cerino this morning.” Cerino specialized in missing persons complaints. She could see him standing beyond Mike Farber’s shoulder in the entrance to the homicide office, so she didn’t protest. Instead she turned to Cerino. “What can I do, Tony?”

  He stepped closer. “I’ve got a three-day missing person. It’s pretty straightforward on the surface, but when Ronny Moore did the interviews, he thought there was something hinky about the whole thing. I want to bring a homicide officer with me to the second interview.”

  She shrugged. “It feels that wrong?”

  “Well, the husband says she’s only been gone for three days. The parents say that she usually calls every day, but she hasn’t in a week. They filed the report.”

  She put her circulars into a file folder and stuck it into a desk drawer. “Let’s go.”

  The house was a low bungalow painted green with a roofed porch in front. It seemed identical to most of the others on the street, but this one had a chain-link fence along the sidewalk. Catherine had been a police officer long enough to open the gate cautiously and wait to see what sort of dog responded, but Cerino said, “The dog belonged to the previous owner.”

  Cerino knocked on the front door, and a man came to open it. He was small but muscular, with sandy hair combed to the side over his balding head and the sort of expression that Catherine classified as habitually dissatisfied. He was wearing blue jeans and a short-sleeved pullover that seemed tight over his biceps. She manufactured a smile. “Are you Mr. Olson?”

  “Yes,” he said. He was somber, but she noticed that he looked relaxed and well rested.

  “My name is Sergeant Hobbes, and this is Sergeant Cerino. We wondered if we could come in and talk to you.”

  He opened the door and let them in, then went to sit in a worn wing chair in the living room. The gesture made Catherine almost feel reassured about him, because it was so human: he was in a nightmare, and he instinctively went to the chair for comfort. But there was something about his movements that made her uneasy. His limbs seemed to be rigid, mechanically stiff. “Have a seat,” he said.

  Cerino sat on the couch to the left, and Catherine moved to the chair directly in front of Olson. She kept her back straight and both feet on the floor.

  “You found her body, didn’t you?” said Olson.

  Catherine looked into his eyes and she knew. She had no evidence yet that this call concerned anything more than a woman who had taken three days off from a lousy marriage. The missing woman’s parents had told Ronny Moore, the first officer on the case, that she had gotten into arguments with her husband and left him before, so this could easily be just another spat. But Catherine knew it wasn’t.

  She shifted almost imperceptibly in her chair to keep the back of her coat from impeding her reach for her gun. “No,” she said. “We’re just conducting a preliminary inquiry. We’re hoping that she hasn’t come to any harm. Usually if somebody’s missing for only two or three days, they come back on their own.” She paused. “Do you know if there is any reason to believe she might not have left of her own free will?”

  His face assumed an expression of frustration, as though he were trying to make himself understood by people who barely spoke the language. “She left here on her own. She went grocery shopping. She should have been home two hours later at the most, but it’s been three days. What I think happened is that there was a guy in the parking lot waiting for somebody like her. She went to put her bags in the trunk or something, not paying attention to what was going on around her, and there he was behind her with a gun.”

  Catherine kept her face attentive and sympathetic, and recognized that she had just heard the story he was going to be pushing. She knew too that when his wife’s body was found, it would have bullet holes. “I certainly hope that’s not what happened,” she said. “Please excuse this, but we have to ask some personal questions. It’s part of the procedure. Has she ever left you like this before?”

  “No,” he said. “She hasn’t left me now. She’s missing.”

  “I mean, has she ever gone away without explaining where she was going, and possibly stayed away overnight?”

  “I just answered that. She hasn’t ever done that. Three days ago she said she was going to the supermarket, and never came home.”

  “Which one?”

  “The Safeway, on Fremont Street. At least that’s where she usually goes.”

  She turned to Cerino. He answered, “We’ve checked the lot and all of the parking areas nearby.”

  She turned back to Olson. “Did you have any kind of disagreement during the day or two before she went shopping?”

  “No. We didn’t. We always got along just fine.”

  “You never had arguments?”

  “Once in a while. But never anything that mattered much, and nothing that day,” he said. “Look, if I had any reason to believe that she had just gotten pissed and run off, I wouldn’t call the police and embarrass myself, would I?”

  “Did you call the police?”

  “Well, no. I guess her parents called first, but I would have today.”

  “But you had thought she would be back in an hour or two. After a day passed, weren’t you scared? Afraid for her?”

  “Yes. But I always heard the police don’t consider anybody missing unless they’ve been gone for at least three days.”

  “So you didn’t call us. What did you do?”

  “I called some other people. I drove around to the store to see if her car was there. Things like that.”

  “Whom did you call?”

  “Let’s see. Some people she worked with. The neighbors across the street.”

  “Did you call her parents?”

  “Y
es. No. I think they called me first.”

  She handed him a pen and a piece of her notebook paper. “Can you write down for me the names of all of the people you called?”

  “Gee.”

  “And if you can remember their phone numbers, that would help too.”

  He frowned and began to write, then crossed something out, then wrote some more. “This isn’t as easy as it looks. I was in a real panic, and I’m probably forgetting some.” He glared at her. “What’s this for, anyway?”

  She took the paper. There were only three names, one of them crossed out. “If you think of anyone else, you can add the name later.”

  He shrugged. “Why aren’t you out looking for her?”

  “There are other people doing that,” she said. “They’ll be interviewing lots of people, asking questions and comparing notes.”

  “Oh, I get it. I’m going to be the suspect, right? Whenever somebody gets killed, it’s the husband.”

  “I certainly hope not,” she said. “Most of the time when we receive a missing person call, it has a happy ending. People get depressed. They get upset or overwhelmed by something in their lives. They go off by themselves for a while to think. Those are possibilities we always have to look into.”

  “All right. I understand. I’m just worried about her, that’s all.”

  Cerino took his turn. “Was your wife on any medication? Insulin, lithium, antidepressants, anything she had to have regularly?”

  “No.”

  “No recreational drug use? Alcohol wasn’t a big factor?”

  “No.”

  “You said your marriage is in good shape,” Cerino said, looking down at his notebook as though he were checking off items on a list. “Does that include all aspects? Neither of you had a sexual relationship outside the marriage that you know of?”

  “Absolutely not.”

  Catherine caught Cerino’s eye. “I’d like to look around a bit.”

  Cerino turned to Olson. “With your permission, we’d like to examine the house to see if there’s anything that will point us in a new direction.”

  Catherine watched Olson. His shirt was tight across his chest, and she saw his breathing stop for a moment, then start again. She nodded to Cerino.

  Cerino said, “Do we have your permission?”

  “What do you want to search here for? I told you she left to go shopping, and she hasn’t come back.”

  Catherine said, “It’s just one of a few dozen steps we have to take in a case like this. It’s part of the checklist.”

  “I can’t think of one reason for you to search my house.”

  “I can think of a lot of reasons. A wife who has been secretly planning to leave her husband might very well leave signs of it somewhere—correspondence from another man, brochures about some destination. A suicidal person might leave a note or a secret journal.”

  Olson’s forehead was moist now, his jaw muscles working. He looked as though the room temperature had suddenly risen twenty degrees. “My wife could be less than a mile from here right now, pleading for her life.”

  Catherine knew she was hearing small hints of what had really happened, his mind simply throwing out the first thing it stumbled on. The wife really was less than a mile from here. Maybe she had begged him to spare her life. Catherine said, “All you have to do is say yes, and we’ll be able to get started. Your quick cooperation might make all the difference.”

  “It’s not logical,” he said. “You’re not trying to find her.”

  Catherine looked at Cerino. She had found a weakness, so she increased the pressure. “Sergeant, would you mind calling in our request for a forensic team on the radio? If you go to the captain, I’ll bet we can have them here in fifteen minutes.”

  Cerino wasn’t sure he understood what she really wanted. He stared at her as he slowly got to his feet, reluctant to leave her alone with Olson.

  Olson said, “I just told you, I don’t want you people in here tearing up my house.”

  Catherine said, “They won’t tear up your house. They don’t have to.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “They can eliminate certain things quickly. They can spray luminol on a surface, and it will show if there’s ever been any blood on it. The spot glows in black light. It doesn’t matter how thoroughly it’s been washed. It will still glow.”

  The more she spoke, the more his face went limp and blank, like the face of a poker player. She knew she had hit another of the vulnerabilities. Whatever had happened, it had been here. There had been blood somewhere in the house. She said, “Go ahead, Sergeant. I guess we’ll need a warrant.”

  Cerino walked out the front door.

  Olson’s anger was more apparent now that he was alone with Catherine. “You don’t seem to be hearing me. You can’t do this.”

  “Mr. Olson,” said Catherine. “I’m sorry you haven’t decided to cooperate, but this isn’t a violation of your rights. There’s the suspicion of a crime, and my partner is requesting a search warrant. As soon as it’s granted, we’ll be—”

  Olson’s lunge came so quickly that she was barely able to react. She ducked sideways and down, and his fist caught her forehead instead of her nose and mouth. She dodged off the chair to the floor before his spring brought him into it. He went over her, hitting the chair back and taking it with him to the floor. He pushed himself away from it and stood, then turned and took a step to begin his run toward the back of the house.

  Catherine swept out her leg, caught the tip of his right foot, and tripped him just as he was bringing it forward for the second step, and he went down. As he sprawled on the hardwood floor, Catherine heard Cerino fling open the front door.

  Catherine flopped across Olson’s legs and clung to them while he tried to kick free, and Cerino dashed to straddle Olson’s back. The three struggled in silence for a few seconds. Catherine snatched her handcuffs off her belt and handed them to Cerino, who closed one on Olson’s left wrist, then dragged the right behind his back to force it into the other cuff.

  Catherine recited the Miranda warning, then said, “Do you understand these rights?” She poked his leg hard with her knuckle. “Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  Cerino twisted his body to look at Catherine. “You okay? Looks like you got hit in the head.”

  “I’ll live. Give me your handcuffs.”

  “Here,” said Cerino.

  She took them and closed them on Olson’s ankles. “That ought to do it. Watch him for a minute, okay?” She got up and took a few steps away from them, and when Olson didn’t move or try to struggle, she trotted out to the police car and made the call. “This is One-Zebra-Fifteen. We need a unit to transport a prisoner and we need a forensic team. The address is 59422 Vancouver.”

  She went back into the house and entered the kitchen. She didn’t touch anything at first, simply looked. The kitchen was extremely clean and tidy. Everything seemed to be in its place, freshly washed and put away. She opened the refrigerator without touching the handle. The shelves were packed with closely arranged items—jars that still had the plastic around the tops because they had not been opened, fresh fruits and vegetables. She looked through the transparent side of the meat drawer at the packages on top. There were a steak and lamb chops dated September 19. That was two days ago.

  Catherine kept going. She went up the stairs to the bedrooms. There was a guest room that was neat and empty, with a well-made bed, the sheets pulled tight and tucked with hospital corners beneath the bedspread. She moved to the master bedroom. The room had been cleaned. There were two dressers, but only the tall one without the mirror—the male one—had anything on its surface. She looked into the closet. There were clothes for Olson and his wife on hangers, with an empty space between them.

  She moved to the bathroom. There were items that had to belong to the missing wife, but they had all been moved to a small space at the far end of the long tile counter.

  She was sure
that he had wanted to get rid of his wife’s things, but doing so would have been evidence that he knew she wasn’t coming back. As soon as her body was found, he would have been able to do it. But Catherine had another intuition about Olson. He had been calm and controlled until the final moment when he had been sure he had lost the argument and she was going to order a search of the house. Then he had panicked. The reason he had decided to run was that there was something here that he knew would convict him. It was something big and obvious that a search could not miss. She had an idea of what it might be.

  Catherine went downstairs and then into the garage. There were two vehicles in it, and an empty space for the Toyota Camry Myra Olson had supposedly taken to the supermarket. Catherine looked at the floor, and she could see the faint images of stains on the concrete that had been cleaned. They didn’t seem to be blood, but she could not be sure. She turned her attention to the two vehicles. One was a Lexus sedan, and the other a big Cadillac Escalade.

  She walked toward the Escalade. Catherine had worked homicides for four years, and she knew exactly what she was looking for. In the back of the SUV near the tailgate, there would be a plastic tarp or a rug, and it would be rounded, probably tied. Maybe there would be a shovel. She opened the driver’s door so that the light went on, flicked the switch to unlock the rest of the doors, and looked. The back was empty, except for a neatly folded blanket on the floor of the rear cargo area. She slammed the car door.

  She heard something. It was a low whining sound. It seemed far away, but it couldn’t be. She stood still and listened. Then there was a faint knocking sound.

  Catherine followed it. She walked slowly, listening, her heart beating fast. The sound stopped, and she stopped too. She put her hand on the trunk of the Lexus. This time when there was a rap, she felt it from the heel of her hand and up her arm like an electric shock. “I hear you,” she shouted. “Hold on.” She patted the surface, then turned and ran into the house.

  Cerino had lifted John Olson so he could sit on the couch, but his wrists and ankles were still cuffed so he couldn’t attack Cerino. Catherine said to Cerino, “Did you find any car keys on him?”