by Thomas Perry
He read with intense interest the police interviews with Nicole Kelleher. She had shown the detectives only the grieving young wife-to-be. She had been planning to see Steve at noon that day. He had told her they were going to look for a present for her, and she thought he was planning to take her to pick out her engagement ring. They were that kind of couple. Steve would never have bought her a ring in advance and slipped it on her finger when she had said yes to his proposal. In families like theirs, the ring would be a lifetime investment and cost a lot of money, so the shopping was a serious task.
Winslow’s father, Steve Senior, was the owner of a company that sold protective clothing for people who handled toxic substances, and he had done well. His son Steve would have taken over when he retired. Nobody in the family had anything helpful to say about Steve’s associates, his activities, or his habits. The detectives had left notes to indicate that Steve had been charged with assaulting a woman at the age of seventeen, but the charges had been dropped when the victim changed her mind about testifying. It was clear to Till that the father had paid off the victim. There had also been a record of speeding tickets, two disorderly conducts, and a DUI. The father said those were all just the result of high spirits, that Steve was a great source of pride, and that Nicole would always be considered a member of the Winslow family.
By then Till had learned a few more lessons about human behavior, and the assault charge and the disorderly conducts had made him consider the possibility that the reason Nicole had wanted Steven to meet Jack Till was that Steven had taken up hitting her when he was displeased. At that point, Till closed the murder book, returned it to the cold-case archives, and never looked at it again.
Jack Till and Ann Donnelly hiked across the derelict field toward the road. His legs were long, and he had moved a pace ahead of her, ostensibly so they could walk single file in the tire tracks instead of fighting through the tall weeds.
“Have you ever been married?” she asked.
“Not lately.”
“What does that mean?”
“I wasn’t very good at it.”
“I don’t think it’s about skills. I think it’s about attraction and connection. There’s no skill to those things.”
She walked on for a few steps, and Jack Till began to think she was satisfied for the moment. He was relieved. He had kept the story of Rose’s leaving him a secret for so long because he felt he needed to protect Holly. The story seemed to belong to her, not to him.
“So why did you really decide to come and bring me back?”
“Because Eric Fuller was arrested for your murder. Maybe I felt some responsibility.”
“And maybe you feel a connection with me.”
“Maybe. Maybe I think that you and I share the responsibility.” Lights were visible ahead, and Jack Till waved his arms over his head and trotted toward the highway. After a moment the police car stopped, and a bright spotlight swept the field and found him. He held his arms out from his sides, then half-turned to call to her. “Show him you have nothing in your hands. I don’t want any doubts about who the good guys are.”
HOURS LATER, Till stood by a tree on the edge of the dry creek bed and watched the oversized tow truck drag his rental car up the incline toward level ground. The winch tightened and he saw the hook slip and scrape the bottom of the car, but that hardly mattered. Somebody’s insurance company was going to be paying the cost of a new car. There wasn’t much glass left, the front end seemed to be cocked to the right, and there were bullet holes in the trunk and in some of the sheet metal at the rear of the car.
He turned away from the car when the older cop walked back to talk to him. Till could see that his partner was still sitting in the police car beside Ann Donnelly. The older cop said, “Well, she verified your crazy story in all its particulars. I guess that surprised me more than it surprises you.”
“Maybe a little,” Till agreed. “This has been pretty stressful for her.”
“I checked you with the LAPD,” the cop said. “It seems that maybe what I ought to be asking is just what we can do to help you.”
Till held his eyes on him. “I was trying to drive her to the DA’s office in Los Angeles without being spotted, but that didn’t work out. So I would appreciate it if you would do a couple of things for us.”
“What are they?”
“Get her fingerprints and take her picture—front and side mug shots ought to do it. That way, if for some reason we don’t make it, then at least Eric Fuller won’t get convicted of killing her.”
“We’d be happy to do that,” said the cop. “Just tell me where to send it.”
“If you’ll give me your notebook, I’ll write it down for you.”
The cop handed him a small notebook and a pen, and Till talked as he wrote. “Sergeant Max Poliakoff, Homicide Special. Here’s his number, and the address at Parker Center.”
The cop accepted the notebook and turned his flashlight on it. “You have a good memory.”
“Not that good. It was my desk before it was his.” Till looked over at the police car, where Ann Donnelly was still sitting with the other police officer, and turned away so she couldn’t read his lips. “The other thing you can do is drive me to a place where I can rent another car. I want to find a quiet place where she and I can stay out of sight for a day or two, then take her into Los Angeles when I think the time is right. And I’d appreciate it if nobody writes down where we went. The man who’s hiring these people won’t give up while she’s alive.”
27
SYLVIE DROVE THE CAR up the long, steep, curving grade, past a convoy of slow trucks climbing toward Los Angeles. Even in the predawn darkness she could feel the change in climate. At the bottom was Camarillo, where the air was cool and damp from the ocean, but up here at the top was Thousand Oaks, where the air was dry, still heated up by yesterday’s sunshine. She knew that if she could have stopped the car and put her hand on the pavement, it would feel warm. As she drove past the green sign at the Los Angeles County line, she hit an invisible wall of frustration.
They had failed. She said, “I assume you don’t want me to drive this car to our house. Would you like to dump it someplace before the sun comes up?”
“In time,” he said. “I figure checkout time at the hotel where we got the car is noon. The housekeeping people will go into the room and find the bodies around twelve-thirty or so. We’ll be fine for now.”
“If you say so.” She drove past the eternal tie-up at the junction with the San Diego Freeway, and took the Van Nuys Boulevard exit.
Paul said, “Pull into the mall and let me out.”
Sylvie pulled to the far end near the corner and sat there as though she were checking a road map while Paul walked the few blocks to their house and returned in the black BMW. He stepped close to Sylvie and handed her the keys. “I’ll drive that one, and you follow me.”
He drove the stolen car onto the 170 freeway to the Simi Freeway and up to Little Tujunga Road. He drove up into the dry hills for a couple of miles, then pulled over on a wide turnout, and Sylvie stopped behind him. Already Sylvie could detect a special quality to the air that was still not luminous, but was beginning to lose its darkness. She got out of the BMW and joined Paul at the stolen car with the rags and Windex that Paul had brought from home.
They sprayed and wiped off the handles, knobs and buttons, the trunk and the hood, the interior metal and plastic surfaces. They were efficient and quick because they had done this together before. The whole process took no more than five minutes. Then Paul went to the trunk of the BMW, took out the fire extinguisher, opened the passenger door of the stolen car, and sprayed the interior thoroughly with white foam to destroy any prints they had missed. Paul reached inside to shift the transmission into neutral, then pushed the stolen car to the edge of the turnout and let it roll down the steep hillside into the dense brush below. The car was difficult to see from the turnout, and it appeared no more important than any of the other
abandoned cars in gullies around Los Angeles. It looked as though it could have been there for years.
A few minutes later, they were in their BMW on the Simi Freeway going seventy miles an hour toward home. It was half-light when they approached the driveway of the house that Sylvie had inherited from Darren McKee. The garage door rose, Paul pulled inside, and the garage door closed behind them.
Neither of them spoke as they got out, walked through the doorway into the house, and locked the door behind them. One of the things that Sylvie loved about being married was that little talk was necessary at times like this, when they were both exhausted and disappointed and dirty. Two single people would think they had to fill the air with bright, insincere chatter. Sylvie stopped at the front door, glanced into the box she had put under the mail slot to catch the mail, but didn’t see anything that tempted her to look more closely. She walked to the master bedroom, opened the walk-in closet, stepped out of her clothes, took her robe off the hook, and went into the bathroom. In her peripheral vision she saw Paul doing something similar, and then heard him go two doors down the hall to the guest bathroom and close the door.
She stepped into the shower and turned it on. Usually Sylvie stood in the shower and passively let the water rush over her, but today she adjusted the temperature to be slightly hotter than usual, covered herself with soap, and scrubbed her skin. She washed her hair, then got out and ran the bath, settled into it, and lay there soaking. When she felt cleansed of the whole experience of the past few days she stood up, dried herself with a big, fluffy bath towel, and went back into the bedroom.
Paul had kept the blinds and curtains closed, so the room was dim and felt cool. Maybe he had turned on the air conditioning. He was lying in the bed with his back to her. She took off the robe and slipped under the covers beside him. She slid close to him, but she didn’t touch him. She closed her eyes.
When Sylvie awoke the room was still dark. She rolled over so she could see her clock radio. The red digits said 1:22. She reached behind her to verify the emptiness where Paul should have been. She lay there waking up. She smelled coffee. She caught a small sound in another part of the house that located him in her mind. She got up and went into the bathroom to brush her teeth.
As she passed the big mirror, she looked at her reflection, then took a step back to look again. Usually she saw only flaws, but today it seemed to her that she looked good naked. She brushed her teeth, then picked up a brush and began brushing out her hair in front of the big mirror instead of the makeup mirror as she normally did. She wasn’t twenty-five anymore, but she looked better than most women did at thirty, she assured herself. She finished her hair, splashed water on her face and patted it dry, then stepped to the makeup mirror and put on light daytime makeup, giving special attention to her eyes today because she had been sleeping, and then studied the effect. She looked even better. She looked terrific.
Sylvie decided to heighten the effect. Why not? She put on the eyeliner and mascara, and added eye shadow. Then she went into the closet and opened the lingerie drawers until she found what she had been picturing. She put on a sheer black lace baby-doll nightgown that had a bit of a push-up to emphasize her breasts. She turned in front of the mirror and looked at herself critically. The lace came down just to the spot where her legs reached her bottom, but didn’t quite cover her.
She and Paul had just spent too much time jammed into cars together, tracking that stupid woman and her private detective. It was time to remind Paul that she wasn’t just some partner, some other man who was a buddy of his. She was his wife. She took one last look and then walked out of the closet and let her senses guide her to him. He was in the kitchen cleaning guns.
She stopped in the living room so he could just catch sight of her in the corner of his eye, then moved toward the big leather couch along the far wall in front of the bookcases. She heard a sound—the scrape of his chair, then heard him get up, his feet coming across the kitchen floor, through the dining room, then onto the carpet. She kept her back to him, as though she had heard nothing.
“Wow,” he said.
She looked over her shoulder at him, smiled, and gave her bottom a comical little wiggle. “Oh, Mr. Turner,” she said in a fake southern-belle voice. “What can you be thinking?”
He seemed to swoop, coming across the room without sound, or enough time elapsing, and he had his arms around her. She enjoyed the powerful effect she had on him. He never spoke again, he simply made love to her. There was never anything routine or perfunctory about the way Paul Turner was with her, but this time he was irresistible. At times he was tender, gentle, and then he would be ardent and passionate, almost too physical, so she felt small and weak. It wasn’t that he seemed to be taking her against her will, but that her will was irrelevant because when she felt this way, he could make her want to do anything.
When it was over, she lay still, her muscles all relaxing, letting her heartbeat slow. She opened her eyes and was mildly surprised to remember that they had never left the living room. He was on his side, leaning on his elbow and looking down at her.
“What were you doing before I came in here to distract you?” she said.
“I was cleaning rifles. That pair of .308s we bought last year in South Carolina.”
“I had forgotten we even had those. I remember we sighted them in on the range, and never fired them again. Why did they need cleaning?”
“They didn’t, actually. It was just something to do while you were asleep. I’m glad you decided to get up.” A small self-satisfied proprietary smile formed on his lips.
She forgave him for the smile, even though she deserved every bit of the credit and considerable gratitude for what had just happened. That, she supposed, was another aspect of long marriages. When they had first found each other years ago, she had not been able to read that smile, could not have detected that mixed with the admiration was pride of ownership and self-satisfaction.
Sylvie got up and walked into the bedroom suite. She tossed the skimpy nightgown into the bin for delicate wash and stepped into the shower. She hummed, then sang in a quiet voice, because she was happy.
When she was out of the shower, she pulled on a pair of comfortable jeans and a T-shirt. She walked into the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee. Paul was just reassembling the second rifle, and she could see why she had forgotten he had bought this pair. She and Paul had at least two other pairs built on the Remington Model 7 pattern, all with dull gray synthetic stocks that wouldn’t reflect light or hold a fingerprint. There were a pair in .30-06 and identical ones in .22, so they could practice without spending tons of money for high-powered, deafening ammunition that made the gun kick her shoulder until it was bruised and sore.
She and Paul tried to get in lots of practice sessions. The thought reminded her that when she and Paul had gotten together she used to call it “rehearsal,” and he used to laugh at her. She watched him as he picked up the two guns and carried them toward the spare bedroom he used as an office, to lock them in the gun safe. She supposed there were things about her that annoyed him, but he almost never mentioned any of them. Maybe that was why she had bouts of free-ranging anxiety: She would notice signs in his face and body that signaled irritation, but since he hadn’t said anything, she had no way to limit what she imagined might be bothering him. It could be anything about her—or even everything—so she became defensive.
When Paul came back into the kitchen, she put her arms around his neck and gave him a kiss. “Well, what can I make you for breakfast?”
“Nothing. I’ll take you out to breakfast.”
“No, thanks. I want to be in my own house for a while and bask in blissful domesticity. How about some eggs and bacon?”
He shrugged. “Sounds good.”
She went to the refrigerator and took out the eggs, butter, and bacon while he cleared the table of his cleaning rods, patches, gun oil, and rags, and began to set it for breakfast.
She broke
one egg, then another into the pan, dropped the shells into the sink and looked back at him. “Before you answer the next question, I would like you to take a minute to think, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Do we really have to collect on Wendy Harper?”
He sat quietly for about five seconds, then said, “Yes. We pretty much do.”
“Pretty much?”
“That means yes. It’s a lot of money. We spend a lot, so we need to make a lot. And it’s a job for Michael Densmore. He’s been our best source of jobs for the past seven or eight years.”
“That’s true, but think about it a minute.” Her spatula lifted the eggs expertly and slid them onto a plate without breaking the yolks. “Do we actually need this money? We own this house free and clear. We paid cash for both cars. We each had savings from before we met. We have the money we’ve saved together, and we still have all of the money Darren left me about fifteen years ago, don’t we?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s got to add up.”
“Of course. We could quit now, and probably live a very comfortable life until we die.” He grinned. “Or until I die, anyway, which is all I need to worry about.”
“You’re so sweet.” His toast popped up, and she plucked it out of the toaster, dropped it on the plate, and set it in front of him.
“Seriously, we’re probably fine, as long as nobody gets sick, there’s no unforeseeable disaster, and all that. We have some investment income that we’ve been reinvesting for years. If you don’t like working, I’d be willing to stop after this job’s done.”
“Why not before? Why not today?”
“Because we took this job. Once we’ve met with the middleman and heard the whole story, we’re in. We’re obligated. We know too much to walk away.”
