Nightlife: A Novel

by Thomas Perry

  Their cruelty to victims wasn’t personal; it was detached, almost scientific. They studied their victims’ reactions and their own, and as their studies progressed, the cruelty became more pronounced. A few months ago, Tanya had pulled a trigger and shot Dennis Poole in the back of the head. She had given him the easiest way to die—no fear, no time for the pain to reach the consciousness before the brain was obliterated. Last night she had tried to burn Catherine to death.

  When Catherine arrived at the office, she saw that the first of the phone messages on her desk was from Joe Pitt, but she didn’t have time to call him now. She had to work on Tanya’s photographs. The one thing she had done that had shown any effect was to circulate Tanya’s picture. Tanya had been recognized at least once in Flagstaff, and in Los Angeles before that. She needed to get the pictures out, and to be sure that the television stations that were running tapes of her house burning on the noon news would also show Tanya’s photograph.

  Catherine went to work preparing another set of circulars with the pictures of Tanya and the pictures of Rachel Sturbridge. This time, to the list of suspected crimes, she added arson and the shooting of Calvin Dunn. As she studied her computer screen, trying to make the pictures as large as possible, she became aware that someone was behind her. She turned, and saw the captain. “Hi, Captain.”

  “Hobbes. My office.”

  She saved the image and followed him to the big office at the end of the hall, then sat on the couch across from his desk where his visitors sat. He said, “I see you got some clothes with the emergency fund. Is there anything else you need?”

  “I’ve ordered duplicates of all my papers. I’ve requested a new weapon and a new ID and badge. Nothing will come for a day or two.”

  He picked up the phone, looked at a list of numbers taped to the desk beside it, and dialed an extension. “This is Captain Farber in homicide. I have an officer here who had her house burn down last night in an attempt on her life. Right. Catherine Hobbes. I need to have her working cases, so I would like a new sidearm, badge, and identification card for her as of ten minutes ago. Can you possibly speed that up for me? Thanks. It’s much appreciated.” He hung up. “They’ll bring it all to you in an hour. Who torched your house?”

  “Tanya Starling.”

  “Not the guy who stuffed his wife in the trunk of his car?”

  “John Olson? No. He’s been denied bail, and he’s a solitary nut with no chance of getting any money to pay anyone else to kill me. This was Tanya Starling. She is—or was—in Portland.”

  “Based on what?”

  “I gave my business card to her landlady in San Francisco, and she gave my numbers to Tanya. She’s used both my cell number and my home number to call me. I guess she converted the home number to an address. It’s not hard. Anyone can do it on the Internet. Then there’s the arson. The fire department investigators tell me it amounted to soaking the outside of my house with barbecue fire starter and lighting it up with a book of paper matches. She hasn’t done any fires before. If it had been a professional there would be a timing device so he could have been a hundred miles away when the fire started, or it would have been set up to look like an accident.”

  “Do I need to say that’s inconclusive?”

  “There will be more. I think Calvin Dunn is the best evidence for the moment.”

  “What about him?”

  “I was in the interrogation after he killed Tyler Gilman. Dunn said that he had been watching my hotel that night because he thought Tanya would show up to kill me. When somebody started firing at my car with a rifle, Dunn went after the shooter.”

  “So?”

  “He went after the shooter because he assumed it was Tanya. He was hired to get her, and not to save me, so he didn’t try. He didn’t do anything to help me get to cover, and he didn’t return fire to keep the sniper’s head down. He didn’t call the police. He wanted the rifle shots to continue as long as possible, so he could spot where the sniper was and get to her. Last night, I’m pretty sure he did the same thing. He saw that my house was on fire, so he drove off trying to find her.”

  “If that’s true, then he should have succeeded. Have any idea how she killed him?”

  “I might. It’s possible that he saw the fire, then saw a woman running from it. He couldn’t be sure it wasn’t me. Maybe he hesitated to be sure he wasn’t shooting the wrong woman, and she got him first. Or maybe he saw who she was but didn’t know she had brought a gun on a trip to set a fire.”

  “I’m not sure I’m buying this.”

  “The point is, if anybody but Tanya—anybody at all—had burned me to death in my sleep, he would not have gone after them.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes. He and I already lived through this once in Flagstaff. You notice that last night he didn’t do anything else—didn’t try to save me, didn’t call the fire department, didn’t wake the neighbors. If I had managed to die, he would have gone to the funeral to see if she showed up.”

  He stared at her for a few seconds. “Would you like to be removed from the case?”

  “What? No, of course not.”

  “Would you like to have someone assigned to work the case with you?”

  “At the point where there’s a fresh lead to follow, I’d like a task force. An army. But at the moment, all that can be done is to circulate her pictures to get people to recognize her while she’s still in the area, or tell us where and when they saw her.”

  “What do you think the chance is?”

  “I don’t know. People have recognized her before, but every time she turns up she makes fewer and fewer mistakes. I have her fingerprints, but having them doesn’t help me find her, because they don’t match any that are contained in the databases. She’s never been arrested, served in the military, or applied for any professional license. I think that if I ask enough people and circulate her picture enough, somebody is going to remember seeing her, and tell me exactly where she is.” She stood up. “I’ve got to get her soon, Mike. She’s killing people faster now, and she’s getting better at it.”

  46

  Every day at eleven, when everyone else had gone to work and the halls were empty, Judith Nathan put on a sweatshirt and jeans and went to her mailbox in the lobby of her apartment building. Today there was an ad for a dating service, a sheet of coupons for local stores that carried things like lawn furniture and garden hoses, and one big brown manila envelope. She took it out, read the return address, and hurried back to her apartment to open it.

  The envelope was full of mail forwarded from her Solara Estates mailbox in Denver. She quickly shuffled through the junk mail and bills, and found one white envelope that she had been hoping for. She held it and let her fingers tell her that the answer to her application had been positive. She tore it open. There it was—her new credit card. It was the one she had ordered as a second card on the account of the young woman she had met in a club in Denver. And there was her name, embossed along the bottom: Catherine Hobbes.

  It was a wonderful thing to have. The billing address was the Solara Estates mailbox in Denver, so nobody but Judith would ever get a bill for it. Nobody else would ever know it existed. Judith held the card in her hand while she searched the desk under her printer. She found the driver’s license she had made to go with the credit card, and looked at it. There were some good touches on this one that she had added in the last batch of ID cards. This one had a little round sticker that said if she was killed she was willing to be an organ donor.

  Judith had been preparing for this day for a long time. She had taken out a library card in the name Catherine Hobbes at the library in Lake Oswego, a couple of miles outside Portland, and opened a health club membership. She had made a social security card. Now she put all of the identification into a small wallet, so that the driver’s license with her picture was behind the plastic window that was visible when she opened it. She practiced holding it open when she took out the credit c
ard, so an observer could see several other cards with the name Catherine Hobbes embossed on them.

  She went out during the afternoon to play with her new credit card. She considered the new name, repeated it to herself many times, and thought about the look she wanted. Judith drove to the mall and rode the department store escalator to the fourth floor, where the designer clothes were displayed, and was drawn to a tailored charcoal pantsuit because she had seen Catherine Hobbes on television wearing something similar. The only pantsuit she remembered ever owning was one she had bought to fly to New York once with Carl, and then never worn again. She had never worked in the sort of job where women wore suits. Most of her clothes had been dresses she had picked because they looked like they would be worn by someone she wanted to be—someone glamorous and feminine. During the day she had worn casual tops and pants. But as she stood in the dressing room looking at the four views of herself, she decided that she liked herself this way.

  Catherine Hobbes was a cop, and she probably carried a gun on her somewhere. Would one of these suits have room for a gun? Where? She raised and lowered her arms, tried turning around to get a better view. Some male cops wore guns in shoulder holsters, but that would be an impossible look on a woman in a close-fitting, tailored coat. She supposed Catherine Hobbes wore a small pistol in a clip-on holster, probably at the spine, where the coat would cover it when she stood up, or maybe slightly to the right, where it was easy to reach. Judith looked down at the pants. She could even conceive of Catherine Hobbes with a gun in an ankle holster. There was room.

  Judith kept trying on suits until she had found four that she liked. She selected the coats one size too large to give her extra room, then carried her purchases to the sales counter, where the girl at the cash register took her Catherine Hobbes credit card and asked, apologetically, to see her license. Judith opened her wallet and held it up so the girl could see it. The girl looked at it, said, “Thanks,” and charged the purchases to the card.

  Judith signed the slip, took the suits to her car, and went to lunch at La Mousse to celebrate her new card. Afterward she bought new shoes to go with the suits. She imagined that Catherine Hobbes would wear flats that were elegant but would allow her to run if she had to.

  When Judith got back to her apartment, she turned on her television while she hung up her new clothes, and listened until the five o’clock news came on. Then she stood and watched. The news man said, “For months Sergeant Catherine Hobbes, a homicide detective in the Portland Police Bureau, has been searching for a young woman who is suspected of killing local businessman Dennis Poole. Police now believe it was that young woman who set fire to Sergeant Hobbes’s Adair Hill home last night and shot to death a Los Angeles private investigator. Here is the most recent photograph of her, taken a few months ago for a California driver’s license.”

  Judith looked at the picture of Rachel Sturbridge on the television. The hair was long and looked almost black in the picture. The eyes were her original pale blue, and the face looked fat to her. The female half of the news couple said, “She is described as five feet five, one hundred and twenty pounds, with brown hair and blue eyes. She is to be considered armed and dangerous. If you do see her, police say, do not attempt to detain her. Just call nine-one-one, and the police will do the rest.”

  She watched with curiosity, but it was a detached curiosity. She had changed her hair color to match Ty’s in Arizona, so it was a sandy blond, and she had been wearing the blue contacts, so her eyes were a deeper blue. She had lost some weight since then and changed the kind of clothes she wore. She walked into the bathroom, looked in the mirror, and felt safe. She turned off the television and went to the telephone to call Greg at work.

  “Hey, Greg. Are you working late tonight?”

  “Not anymore. At least not if this is who I hope it is.”

  “Well, I hope it is too, because if it isn’t, then you’re hoping for somebody else,” she said. “I’ll tell you what. If you’ll come right over here after work, I’ll take you out tonight.”

  “Take me out?” he said. “You don’t have to do that.”

  “Not have to, want to. You’ve been taking me everywhere for weeks, so it’s my turn to take you.”

  “Well, okay,” he said uneasily. “What do you want me to wear?”

  “Whatever you have on now. I said I wanted you to come right from work.”

  An hour later, when he rang the bell, she said to the intercom, “Did you come straight from work?”

  “Yes.”

  She pushed the button to unlock the front door and waited for him in the hallway. When he came up the carpeted stairs, she saw that he was carrying flowers again. She let him in and closed the door. “So, you raise flowers at work?”

  “Well, no. They sell them on the way, though.”

  “You’re not very sure of yourself, are you?”

  “I guess I’m not,” he said. “I keep wondering if I’ll wake up and you won’t exist.”

  “If you do, don’t tell me. Come on. We’re going to dinner.”

  She drove him to a restaurant called Sybil’s. She had chosen it because it was quiet and the lights were dim. While Greg was in the men’s room, she moved the candle away from the center of the table so the light would be off their faces, and studied the place. She had gotten into the habit of looking at the faces of people around her to detect signs of recognition. She was comfortable tonight, because it was too early to be crowded, and the waiters sat the first customers to arrive in the dim private spaces along the walls, leaving the center tables empty and the aisles clear for serving. Later the dining room would fill up.

  She knew that Greg always felt best when the light was dim. As they ate, she judged that he was happy because they were at this remote table, and thought how pathetic it was that such a good person should be so self-conscious about his scarred face. She knew that he was grateful to her for keeping him out of the light. He probably thought she was the most sensitive, considerate person he had ever met, because she arranged to protect him without ever alluding to it. It would never occur to him that she had done it because she didn’t want people looking too closely at her face, either.

  When the check came in its leather folder, Judith palmed her Catherine Hobbes card, put it on the bill, and clapped the folder shut. The waiter snatched it up quickly and disappeared. A few minutes later he was back with it, she signed the slip, and she and Greg left.

  After dinner they walked and she pretended to discover a club called the Mine, where promising music groups came to test new songs on a live audience. But tonight was a weeknight, so the band was an unenthusiastic, workmanlike group of middle-aged men who covered old rock hits. It didn’t matter that they weren’t inspired, only that Judith was out at night with a man who adored her, and she was paying for everything with a Catherine Hobbes credit card.

  She ordered Greg a scotch and herself a martini. As they drank, she watched him, and decided she must get the maximum amount of pleasure out of him, even if she had to risk losing the use of him. As soon as they finished their drinks, she made Greg get up and dance with her. Like nearly all tall men, he was an awkward dancer, but at least his movements were only stiff and abbreviated. He was aware that his purpose was to provide a partner so she could dance, so he dutifully remained on his feet until she let him sit down and have another drink.

  She drove Greg to her apartment, and then kept him for the night. She loved being out so much that she forced him to go out every night for the rest of the week. She insisted that every second time she be permitted to pay, and when she did, she paid with her Catherine Hobbes credit card.

  The following Tuesday, Judith went out and bought a pile of magazines. She drove home and spent hours looking at pictures of women until she found the right one. Then she cut the page from the magazine and took it to a hair stylist’s shop. She had the stylist copy the cut and strawberry-blond color in the picture exactly. It was a three-step process and she had to endure
the stylist’s lectures about the damage that frequent dyeing had done to her hair. When she came out, she drove back to her apartment and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, holding up a hand mirror so she could see from every angle. “Catherine,” she whispered.

  47

  Catherine Hobbes’s insurance company helped her rent an apartment not far from the police bureau. It was on Northeast Russell Street, about two blocks east of Legacy Emmanuel Hospital. The apartment building tenants all seemed to be young nurses, interns, and medical technicians. They used the place in shifts: no matter what time of the day or night she entered, there were people in medical uniforms coming in or out.

  Catherine had not yet decided what she wanted to do about her burned house. The fire insurance would pay to rebuild it, but she was not sure if that was what she really wanted. At times she would awaken in the night and feel the same panic she had felt the night when she had seen flames glowing beyond the closed blinds. At those moments it felt good to her to be living in an apartment in a big building surrounded by people, and to hear the reassuring sounds of their footsteps in the hallway at all hours.

  Catherine had been a cop for seven years now. She had seen traumatized people—witnesses and victims—suffer various kinds of aftereffects, and she recognized that hers was a very mild one. But she also knew that as long as Tanya Starling entertained some fantasy of killing her, it was not a great idea to rebuild the house and live in it alone.

  When she had talked to Joe Pitt on the telephone about her burned house, she had started to cry. He had said, “What’s the matter? Are you hurt or something?”

  “No. I guess I’m crying about my house.”

  “What about it? Wasn’t it insured?”

  “Of course it was. I just miss it.”

  “So you’ll rebuild it, exactly the same, except maybe fireproof and with a great alarm system.”

  “It won’t be the same. And besides, I don’t even know if I want to. It wasn’t that great, objectively. I just loved it.”