by Thomas Perry
He had made only a halfhearted attempt to hide his departure from Los Angeles, because he wanted to see who was following. Tonight he had given them opportunities to reveal themselves, but there still was no sign of them. He had stopped once for coffee and once to change cars, but no other car had stopped, too.
He turned the car onto Hollister Avenue and doubled back into Santa Barbara. He took a couple of turns onto small streets, parked for a few minutes and waited, but there were no cars that showed any inclination to follow. He returned to Hollister and kept driving. Hollister turned into State Street, and brought him into the center of town to Figueroa. He parked near the police station.
Till stepped into the front entrance and up to the counter and said to the female officer behind it, “I’m Jack Till. Sergeant Kohler was going to leave something for me to pick up.”
She said, “May I see your identification, please?”
He removed his LAPD identification card from his wallet and held it with his index finger over the word “retired.”
She looked at the picture on it, then at his face, and said, “Come with me.” She came around the counter, opened a swinging door, and called over her shoulder to a male officer at a desk, “I’ll be right back.”
Till followed her to an open office with five desks, where several plainclothes police officers were at work. She stopped at one of the desks, picked a manila envelope off the blotter and handed it to Till. “He said you were welcome to look at it here, if you’d like. You can use his desk.”
“Thank you,” said Till. He sat down, opened the envelope, and extracted a packet of papers. The heading on the first page was “Southwest Airlines Flight 92, Departure Santa Barbara 7:05 A.M., arrival San Francisco 8:35 A.M.” Each sheet recorded a different flight. Kohler had requested the passenger lists for all of the flights that had left Santa Barbara on August 30 six years ago.
Till had known Kohler slightly in the old days. He had been one of the young detectives coming up in the department, and Till had spoken to him only a few times, but he had left a good impression. Till remembered he had been big, with an open expression and a reputation for hard work. When Till had called Max Poliakoff to ask about the passenger lists, Max had mentioned that Kohler was in Santa Barbara, and that a request for lists from flights out of Santa Barbara would raise fewer questions if it came from a Santa Barbara cop. Till had decided to presume on the acquaintance.
As Till went through the airline-passenger lists he remembered something Wendy Harper had said on the day when she had come to his office.
She had said, “Why did you quit the police department?”
He had said, “Because of the money.”
What had really happened was that Till had simply looked up from the body of a fourteen-year-old boy lying on the street as the morning light was almost imperceptibly altering the deep darkness of night, thought about how many bodies he had seen like this, and realized that it was time. He had not told Wendy Harper about that, but remembering it had helped him understand the decision she was making. She not only believed that leaving Los Angeles was necessary, but as soon as she had begun contemplating it, she had realized it was time. That part of her life was over.
He finished sorting the passenger lists. He had set aside all of the flights that had taken off before noon on August 30 because he had left her at the airport right at noon that day. He studied each of the later flights: three to San Francisco, three to Las Vegas, five to Los Angeles. Those were all possibilities because in any of those airports she could have switched to a plane to anywhere in the world. If she had changed planes, she would have stayed up on the second level past the security checkpoints and not gone down to the ticket counters and baggage areas, where it was dangerous. He had taught her that if she had to wait in an airport, she should stay in a ladies’ room because the people she had to fear would almost certainly be men.
His problem now was that he had also taught her a few ways to get false identification papers that weren’t exactly false. People loitering in MacArthur Park every afternoon could produce a fairly good-looking California driver’s license for two hundred bucks, but the license would be too crude for a person to use to start a new identity. She needed real documents.
Till had gone with her to take out a marriage license. Then he had taught her to forge the last name of her husband to give him—and herself—whatever new name she wanted. Almost nobody ever tampered with the names on marriage licenses, so they had not been made difficult to alter. All she had to do was take the marriage license and her driver’s license to the DMV and pay a fee to get a new license in her husband’s last name. As soon as she was settled somewhere else, she could exchange the California license for a driver’s license in her new state. She could repeat the process there, and end up with a second new last name. Any artifice could be unraveled, but no conceivable inquiry about Wendy Harper was likely to lead a hunter through two states and three names to her new identity.
The Social Security number was just as easy. She had to obtain a genuine birth certificate for herself, change the surname and birth date, and apply for a number for a newborn daughter with a name that was a variant of her own. Since the card didn’t carry a birth date, she could use it.
Once she had the major documents, there were hundreds of ways of bolstering her new identity: Open a bank account, rent an apartment, and pay her utility bills for a month, and she would be a new person. Applying for a library card, a health-club membership and a few other easy cards would fill out her identity. She didn’t need to fool a squad of FBI agents, just the kid handling the desk at Blockbuster Video or the lady who worked part-time at the gift shop.
Till could still see her face, giving the incredulous look. “It’s that easy?”
“The key is avoiding resistance.”
“What kind of resistance?”
“You don’t just go around in a flurry applying for things. You wait until somebody asks you and then sign up. You wait for those letters that say ‘Your acceptance is assured.’ It’s not, but they’re hungry for your business. Deal with people who want to help you fool them.”
“Then what? Am I going to have to lay low and go out only at night or something? Live some kind of half-life?”
He said, “At first you will have to lay low. It won’t be pleasant or easy. After a while, you’ll feel safe enough to be with people. Stay out of hip restaurants and bars. Go where nobody is going to be looking for you—get a job that keeps you out of sight in the day, go to night classes. From the first day, you’ve got to have a story about yourself, and you’ve got to stick to it. Once you have a friend or two, they’ll help keep you safe. You’ll go places with them instead of alone, and that will make you look different. They’ll introduce you to their friends and tell them your story, and the new people will believe it because they heard it from them, not you.”
He had made sure he didn’t know the name she chose for her first doctored marriage license, so now he had no idea what she had called herself on her airline ticket. He sat in the Santa Barbara police station at his borrowed desk and examined the passenger lists for flights that departed between 12:01 P.M. and 11:59 P.M. He began by crossing off the names of men and boys. That eliminated more than half. Then he went through again and found the names of women and girls who had seats beside people with the same surname. That was another third. The remaining names belonged to women traveling alone.
There were no Wendys. He had been expecting a Wendy. The method that he had taught her was to appear to have had her surname changed in a marriage, but that would still make her a Wendy. As he went over the lists again, wondering if he had missed one, he thought of another possibility. He took out his cell phone and looked at the card he carried in his wallet, then dialed Jay Chernoff’s home phone number. When he heard Chernoff’s voice say, “Hello,” he said, “What’s her middle name?”
“What?”
Till said, “Sorry to call you at night. But
I never heard her middle name, or if I did, I forgot it.”
“It’s on some of the court papers. The indictment will have it, if nothing else. Let me get my briefcase and look.” He was gone for at least a minute, and then he returned. “It’s Ann, with no e.”
“A-N-N. Got it. Thanks, Jay. I’ll try not to bother you again for a while.”
“Where are you?”
“I’d rather not say on the telephone, just in case they put something on your line. Let’s make them work for it.”
“All right. Then good luck.”
“Thanks.”
Till disconnected. As they were speaking, he had already begun running his finger down the lists of passengers looking for Anns. He knew that he had been right. She would have been able to use whatever new surname she had put on the marriage license, but her driver’s license would still say Wendy Ann Something. She could call herself Ann and still use the license as identification to get on the plane. There were plenty of people whose parents had inflicted names on them that they hated, so they used their middle names.
He found three women named Ann who had flown out of Santa Barbara that day traveling alone. There was Ann Mercer, who had flown to San Francisco. There was Ann Wiggett, who had flown to Los Angeles, and Ann Delatorre on a flight to Las Vegas.
He tried to put himself inside Wendy’s mind. The name Ann Wiggett sounded like Wendy Harper looked. Wendy was white-blond, with fine hair and very light skin that sometimes seemed transparent. She could easily be the sort of woman whose ancestors all had names like Wiggett and Hemsdale. But would Wendy choose that name?
Ann Mercer sounded like a practical name for Wendy Harper. Mercer was common enough to be unsurprising to the people she met, and it was the same length as Harper, easy to fit into documents she wanted to alter.
He swiveled in his chair and looked at the cop behind him, a young detective who was reading something that looked from a distance like an autopsy report. Till said, “Excuse me. I’m Jack Till, from Los Angeles. Kohler is helping me on a case.”
“I figured,” said the cop. “I’m Dave Cota.”
“I wondered if you had a phone directory I can use.”
“Sure. It’s up there on the table.”
“Thanks.” Till had intentionally not said he was a private investigator. He stood at the table and leafed through the book quickly. Regular telephone books had been useless for years because most people paid to keep their numbers unlisted. He had to use the special police directory that listed everybody while he was here in the station. He started with the name Wiggett.
There were three numbers, all under the name Howard Wiggett. He dialed the first Wiggett number, and a man who was probably Howard Wiggett answered. Till said, “May I speak with Ann Wiggett, please?”
“I’m sorry,” said the man. “Mrs. Wiggett has already retired for the evening. May I help you?”
Till decided to go for complete verification. “I’m calling from United Airlines. I have a record that on August 30 six years ago, Mrs. Wiggett flew from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Was there a piece of luggage belonging to her that was misplaced?”
The man hesitated. “Six years? That’s a long time. It’s quite likely that she was on the flight. She used to visit her parents in New York, and the flights usually stopped in Los Angeles. But I can’t recall her ever losing any luggage. Can I take your number and call you back tomorrow?”
“Certainly,” Till said. “800-555-0600. I’ll make a note that we spoke. Thank you.” Then he hung up.
He tried Mercer. There were four Mercers, including one Ann. He dialed her number and when a woman answered, he said, “Is this Ann Mercer?”
“Yes, it is.”
“I’m calling from Southwest Airlines, and there’s something I’d like to check with you. If you don’t remember, we’ll certainly understand. On August 30, six years ago, did you fly from Santa Barbara to San Francisco?”
“Wow. That’s a long time ago. Let’s see. I probably did. I fly up there a couple of times every summer. What’s the problem?”
“No problem at all, ma’am. We’re cross-checking our reservation system right now to match it with our security system, and using old flight information as a test. Thank you for your cooperation.”
“But what—”
Till hung up. He called long-distance information for Las Vegas, and asked for Ann Delatorre’s number. A recording came on: “We’re sorry, but that number is not listed.”
He stood up, gathered his passenger lists, waved good-night to Detective Cota, and walked out of the office to the lobby and the street.
He felt pride in Wendy Harper. She had done well.
11
SYLVIE TURNER had been staring at the lighted display on her laptop computer screen for two hours, watching the line of bright blue dots appearing on the map in their predictable progression, and her eyes were getting tired. She closed them for a moment, then turned her head to watch Paul drive. She still felt lucky whenever she looked at him. He was tall and slim and graceful, but he was also strong, the perfect dance partner, and for Sylvie, the dance was the sign and physical expression of all of the complex relations between a man and a woman. It was flirtation, shyness, flattery and affection, celebration, sharing, demand and compliance, and even possession by force. Dance projected all of her feelings, and let her act them out. She owed that to Paul, too. Dance was something she had lost, but he had restored it to her life.
Long before she met him, she had been a good dancer. Her mother had taken her to ballet class from the time when she was three until she was sixteen. She had loved it, but the discipline had been inhuman, an exercise that seemed to punish her body rather than build it. The toe shoes deformed her feet, and there was the look. A dancer was not a personality, but a fiction that had to do with the idea of perfection. Nobody had ever told Sylvie that she could not be a dancer if she ate, but it was obvious even to a small child that she shouldn’t eat. She stayed so thin that she had not begun her period when she was fifteen.
It had not bothered her particularly. Her slender flat-chested body had made her seem more like a dancer. She had kept training, practicing, dancing. She had outgrown four ballet schools by then, each one farther from home. Her mother had been driving her from Van Nuys to Santa Monica every day after school for her class at the latest and best school for nearly a year when Madame Bazetnikova had subjected the girls to her annual evaluation.
The first few girls who had gone into Madame’s office had come out smiling and crying at the same time, hugged each other and then collapsed. Madame was a difficult woman. She had been a dancer in Russia, not for the Kirov, but for a lesser company in Minsk. Her dancing career had ended in the 1960s, and by the time she defected she had been only a chaperone in a company touring Norway, and her government didn’t bother to protest her loss. But she had moved to Los Angeles and built a fanatical following among the ballet mothers of the city. As she reached old age, she had begun to look dramatic, the way they thought a ballet mistress should look. Each year she took a corps of twelve girls from all of her classes and toured the state for a week during Christmas break, presenting them in excerpts from Swan Lake and The Nutcracker.
After most of the other girls had been called into the office and come out, she called Sylvie. By then Sylvie expected to hear that she would be Odette in Swan Lake, or Clara in The Nutcracker. The others had come out happy, but none of them had said anything about being the lead. When Madame Bazetnikova had said, “Sylvie, come sit by me,” she had been certain. Madame had never spoken so kindly to her, or to any of the other girls in her hearing. She had been particularly fond of showing contempt with the mere raising of an eyebrow. This time her voice was soft and motherly. “Sylvie.”
“Yes, Madame.”
“You are a serious, hardworking girl. You have studied your labanotation, learned your steps, and practiced.” She stared at Sylvie for a second. “How long do you practice at home each day?”<
br />
“Two hours, sometimes more.”
“I’ll bet a lot of times it’s more. I’ve watched you, and so I know. And you know that in each girl’s fifteenth year, I make a decision about her. You are over fifteen now, but I needed more time for you. Now I’ve decided. You will never be a ballet dancer. It’s not your fault. You tried as hard as any girl, but your body is wrong. You don’t have the look. You’re nothing but bones, but you’re still too big.”
“I’ll try harder,” she protested. “I’ll practice. I’ll stop growing and—”
But Madame was shaking her head. “That’s the wrong thing to do. Stop trying. Dance for pleasure, for the joy of it. Eat. Or don’t eat and go be a model. I know the world of dance, and I can tell you that you have gone as far as you can go.”
“Can I still come and take lessons?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because it would make us both unhappy.”
Sylvie went out of the room slowly, took off her ballet slippers slowly, put them in her bag slowly, all the time hoping that something would happen to keep her from leaving. Nothing did. She went outside, walked alone to a diner down the street and used a pay telephone to call her mother, then waited in a booth for her mother to arrive.
For a year after that, she did nothing except go to school and do her homework. She ate and she grew. In a very short time, she stopped looking like an emaciated child and began to acquire curves. She grew taller, had her first period. Her resentment and sense of grievance seemed to be what transformed her into a pretty young woman over six feet tall.
Sylvie glanced at Paul again. He was driving with his usual graceful aggression, cutting in and out among the other cars, never making the others nervous, never attracting attention from the police because his coordination seemed to make his speed justified. His driving was like his dancing. When they met, she had not danced for almost ten years.
