Nightlife (26 page)

The young woman came back after ten minutes to find her slightly bored and tired. They talked for a few minutes longer, and both went to the ladies’ room. As soon as they returned, the young man who had danced with the blonde before asked her to dance again. At that moment, Anne caught the blonde’s eye, pointed at her watch, and waved. The blonde smiled and waved back.

She stepped outside into the cool night air and breezed past the doormen, feeling eager. It was going to work. She knew it was going to work. She walked back to her parked car, retrieved her real purse with the gun and money in it, and drove to a 7-Eleven store that had a pay telephone on the wall outside. She searched the directory for an all-night copy service that rented computers, then drove there.

When she reached the copy center, she was pleased. This seemed to be a business that served people from the university. The customers were all her age or younger, and there were at least two dozen of them, even though it was after midnight. There were a dozen using the self-service copying machines, paper cutters, and laminating machines. There were another dozen people using the computers. She claimed one and went to work.

She went to bank Web sites and found one that would allow her to apply for a Visa card online. She brought up the application and checked her notes to be sure it wasn’t one of the banks that had already given Laura Murray credit. She entered Laura’s name, address, birth date, social security number, and driver’s license number. She said Laura was an executive trainee, effective a month ago in case the credit check revealed some other job, and that she made approximately fifty-one thousand dollars a year. Then came the question “Have you moved within the past two years?” She said yes, typed in “Solara Estates,” the mailbox number, and the street address of the mailbox-rental store. She put the effective date as today, and clicked that address as the current one.

She had noticed that the application form she had filled out had asked, “Would you like to apply for a second card for another person on this account?” It gave her an idea. She applied for two cards in the name of Charles Woodward, the elderly man whose medical record she had stolen. After filling in his name, social security number, and birthday, she said he was retired. His annual income was eighty-seven thousand dollars. Yes, he did want a second card on his account. It was for one of the names she had made up for herself, Judith Nathan. She said her full name was Judith Woodward Nathan, and that they both lived at Solara Estates.

She checked to see that the copy center was still safe, then used the scanned images of her Illinois, California, and Arizona driver’s licenses to make the paper fronts of licenses for Judith Nathan and Laura Murray, and signed off. She used a copier to copy the backs of her licenses, used a laminating machine to join them to the front sides, and a precision paper cutter to trim them to size. They still were not good enough to fool a policeman in their home states, but if she put one of them into the plastic holder in her wallet, it looked real.

When morning came, she bought a
Denver Post
and searched for furnished apartments. The place she found was an old motel that had become less and less desirable to travelers and was living an afterlife offering rooms by the week at cut-rate prices. After a few days of sleeping during daylight in a park, she was not critical of the place’s faults. She was delighted to have a shower and a door with a lock on it, and there was even a television set.

She drove to a hardware store and bought four sliding bolts. Late on the first night she installed two of her sliding bolts at the top and bottom of the door, and one bolt on each of the two windows. When she had done that, she slept with Mary Tilson’s gun under the spare pillow beside her head.

She slept ten hours a day, exercised, took long showers, gave herself facials, treated her skin with moisturizer, and did her nails. She watched television, thought, and planned. She went out only to buy food and newspapers and check her Solara Estates mailbox.

On the tenth day, she found her first credit card, in the name Laura Murray, in her mailbox, and on the thirteenth, the one for Judith Nathan. By the twenty-first day, she was ready to drive again. Judith Nathan packed her suitcase and began the long drive toward Portland, Oregon.

35

I
t was five-thirty in the morning. Catherine Hobbes stood at the big window of her dining room, sipped her coffee, and stared down at the city of Portland. Each morning since she had returned from Albuquerque, she had gone to work at five-thirty so she could spend an hour or two before her shift trying to follow cold leads to Tanya. It had been a month since Tanya had made the call to this house from Albuquerque and then disappeared again, and Catherine had begun to let a new possibility enter her mind.

Not all serial killers got caught. Catherine had thought Tanya would turn up in Albuquerque, but there was no guarantee she would ever be recognized again anywhere. At some point people would say, “Maybe she died.” Or, “Maybe she’s in a prison somewhere for something else.” But she wouldn’t be, and from time to time, when the urge came on her again, she would kill someone else.

Catherine put her coffee cup in the sink and went to find the lightweight hooded raincoat she kept for unpredicted rains. She slung it over her forearm, checked her watch, and appraised herself in the mirror near the stairs. The gray suit looked good, so she ran an inventory of the gear by touch: the belt with her gold badge clipped to the right of the buckle, the handcuffs at the hip, the pistol on her belt to the right side of her spine under the tailored coat.

She went downstairs and out to the garage, got into her teal blue Acura, and conceded that she was letting her mood weaken her. She had even failed to keep herself from thinking about what day this was. The divorce had happened long enough ago so the day shouldn’t matter anymore. It was the twenty-first of August—Kevin’s birthday. He would be—what? Thirty-five—today.

Each year had made her feel it less and less, and after eight years, Kevin was no longer real. He existed only as a part of her mind now, an altered point in her brain. What would the doctors call it? A lesion. Everything in medicine was a lesion, from a mild scratch to a fatal tumor.

The part that was hard to believe now was that Kevin had been the other half of the conversation for so long. She had been with him for years and talked without any dissembling, and eventually without filtering or even reserve. When, at any time during those years, she had said something funny or profound, he was the one who had heard it, and probably the only one. For years after the divorce there had been times when she would catch herself in a forgetful impulse to describe something, and then remember that he wasn’t there anymore. There were other times when she would be talking to someone else—a friend, a colleague—and realize that the point she was making was something that she had heard Kevin say.

The birthday was not a good memory. It had been on his twenty-seventh birthday that the quiet explosion had occurred. She had taken a half day off from her job at the brokerage. At just before noon she had rushed out, bought a birthday cake, and gone to his office to surprise him. She remembered that when she had grasped the doorknob of the office on the fifth floor, she had sensed that something was different. She had felt odd, almost dizzy, and she had attributed it to the elevator ride, but it didn’t feel that way. It had felt as though she were holding on while a subtle tottering of the universe occurred, a tremor.

She opened the outer door of the office and walked into silence. The sales center wasn’t the sort of place where customers simply walked in, because the company worked on enormous construction projects. Usually somebody stayed to watch the office during lunch, but the desks were empty. It occurred to her that maybe the whole office had shut down and taken Kevin out to lunch to celebrate. It was a young, social group, and Kevin was a popular manager. She should have called ahead instead of surprising him, she thought, and then she could have gone too. He would have loved that.

The thought gave her an idea. Maybe there was a notation somewhere, a scrawl that would tell her where they had gone. Paula, the receptionist, would be the one likely to have made the reservation, so Catherine looked first at the notepad on her desk, then the Rolodex, to see if the card that was showing was a restaurant. It wasn’t.

Catherine went past the empty desks in the outer office, through the bay past deserted cubicles, to the hallway that led to the offices of the sales executives. She knocked on Kevin’s door, then opened it.

He wasn’t there. She went to his desk to see if there was anything on his calendar. There were a few scribbled lines—his morning appointments, a meeting at four. She put the cake on his desk, then sat in his chair and typed on his computer, “Happy birthday, Kev. I just stopped by for a minute to tell you I love you. See you later, Catherine.” She highlighted it, made the type twenty-eight point and red, and left it on his screen.

She was pleased with that, because it implied that she had just breezed through in a rush, and not that she had blown half a day of work for nothing. He would feel happy instead of disappointed or guilty. She stood up, stepped out of the office, and heard something down the hall. It seemed to be a muffled female voice, as though one of the salespeople had stayed and was on the telephone. There was the voice again. It was definitely a woman’s. Maybe she would know where Kevin was.

She followed the sound to a door down the hall. She put her ear to the door. She knew. There was no way to introduce doubt, no way for Catherine to save herself. Catherine had no right to open the door, but she did.

It was Diana Kessler’s office, obviously. Diana was bent forward over her desk, her skirt up over her back, and Kevin was behind her. They didn’t hear Catherine open the door. She stood there, paralyzed and speechless, for two or three seconds before she took a step back and closed the door again. Catherine remembered the cold, empty feeling in her chest, the tightness in her throat. She had simply stood there, listening to their alarmed voices, the rapid, hurried rustling, and the quick footsteps.

When Kevin flung the door open and saw her, his eyes widened with what looked like fright. He tried to cover, forcing a smile. “Honey! Are you here to surprise me? I’m so glad to—”

“I saw,” she interrupted. “I opened the door while you were with her.” She turned and began to walk back along the hall toward the outer office.

“Wait. Please. Let me talk to you.”

“I don’t want to talk.”

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

S
he 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?”

“Yes. 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.