he was removing signs of the blond woman. The killer came in and shot Poole—one round, no struggle. At that point, he could have exited without much risk of leaving anything of himself. But instead he straightened the suite, put everything away, vacuumed the carpets. He missed a couple of blond hairs on the floor and stuck to Poole’s clothes.”
“The blond hairs on the suit don’t mean somebody cleaned the place. Maybe that’s all there were.”
“You said the Mighty Maids were all black or Hispanic, and they cleaned the hell out of this place twice every week. That takes hours of hard work, a lot of it on their hands and knees. So where are the fibers from their uniforms? Where are the dark hairs?”
“Oh, God,” said Hobbes. He was right. Damn him. “What if she was what it was about?”
“Could be. Maybe some other man came here to take her—or take her back.”
“I’ve got to find that girl.”
6
The girl felt some sadness, but she was satisfied. She had thoroughly experienced Dennis Poole, so she was not disappointed in herself. She was proud of herself for overcoming her shyness and fear in the hotel bar in Aspen, and being the first to speak. That alone was an accomplishment. She had found something about him appealing—his tall, slightly awkward body, the clothes he wore that seemed to be right out of the box, as though he had never worn anything all year but a business suit. She had sat in the bar at a small table near the window that looked out on the mountains, then feigned surprise to find him sitting nearby and said, “What a wonderful sky. I love the color of the sky just after sundown.” How could he not reply?
After she had talked to him for a few minutes, she had found that she almost instantly knew what to say to him and how to say it. There had never been more than a few moments when she had needed to doubt herself. She had listened to him carefully, begun to accumulate a small trove of facts about who he was and what he liked, and then made herself the woman that he wanted. He owned a small, dull business and he was on vacation, so she became a perfect vacation companion. She was the lively girl who was always happy, always on the edge of laughter, ready to go to the next place just to see what was there.
She had experimented with liking him—pretended to find him more interesting than he was, better looking than he was—and found that after a couple of days she actually did like him. She looked back on it now and missed him. She remembered the cool, clear nights of early summer, when they walked out on the balcony of his suite and looked up at the stars and there seemed to be about three times as many as usual.
As she drove along the gently curving highway, she said aloud to the image of Dennis, “At least we had a good time.” Her face felt so right when she said it that she held the expression, and flipped down the sun visor to look at her reflection in the makeup mirror.
Perfect. The full lips pouted, the sparkly blue eyes were wistful and wise. She revised the words slightly. “At least we had fun.” The way the row of small white teeth touched the lower lip to say “fun” was worth going for.
She flipped the visor back up and returned her eyes to the road. The darker hair she had given herself made her look a bit more serious than she had looked as Tanya, too sophisticated to bleach her hair platinum blond. She liked the subtle reddish highlights.
She felt good today. There was something hopeful about driving south, away from rain and toward warmth and sunshine and flowers. She had saved enough money from the month with Dennis Poole to be happy for a while. As soon as she had met him, she had begun pointing a finger at expensive, shiny things in stores and wishing aloud. She had loved it when he had bought them for her, and had rewarded him with affection.
Sometimes she would be about to leave him for the spa or the pool and ask him to give her some money for tips or drinks. A couple of times she had taken money from his wallet while he was asleep. After he had persuaded her to visit him at his house in Portland, she had come with only one suitcase, let him talk her into staying longer, and got his permission to pay for the extra clothes she would need by borrowing one of his credit cards. Dennis had been a satisfying experience, but Dennis was over.
Who to be now? Being a brunette made her feel sedate, understated, aristocratic. Her new name should be something old-fashioned, even biblical, but Anglo-Saxon—no Catholic saints, and nothing faux French. Sarah would be good, or Rebecca. No, both were too common. Rachel. That was just about right.
She had always favored names that sounded like rich people’s names, but nothing too heavy-handed. She didn’t want to call herself a name that was also the name of a company: it would be hard to pass as a Ford or a Pillsbury. She thought about her new self for a few minutes, and decided that she should have roots in New England. Maybe a place-name. Stamford? No. Sturbridge. That felt right: Rachel Sturbridge—how do you do?
Rachel Sturbridge held the car to the south, and began to wonder where to stop. San Francisco was the next city she had heard about along the way, so she decided to aim for it and stop to see if it felt right. She drove half the night and reached the city at three A.M., then parked the car in a big structure near Union Square. She made her way downhill to the square, then walked around staring at the big buildings, the quiet, lighted entrances to hotels and the dark display windows of stores. She loved seeing a city late at night, after all of the superficial busyness and crowding and knotted traffic had been stripped away. She decided that she would stay. Then she returned to the parking structure and slept in the back seat of her car until people began starting the cars near hers and driving off.
In the morning Rachel used her Tanya Starling identification to rent a small furnished house, then added the name of Tanya’s roommate, Rachel Sturbridge, to the lease. That afternoon she rented a post office box in both names, then placed a fictitious-business-name statement in the ad section of the
Before the banks closed at six she managed to start a Singular Aspects bank account with the two women as signatories and a deposit of four thousand dollars. At the end of each day for the next two days she made another cash deposit. When the balance reached twelve thousand dollars, she made out an application for a business credit card in the name of Singular Aspects. She flirted a little bit with the manager on duty, a young man named Bill, and he took the application without asking any embarrassing questions.
Dennis Poole had been dead three days. On the way home that night she bought the Portland newspapers at a newsstand and searched for stories about what the police were doing, but there was no mention of an investigation. There was only a short obituary that said his death had been declared a homicide. Since there was no mention of a woman, she supposed that meant her part in the episode was over, and decided that in the future she would remember only the good parts.
The next morning Rachel went to a copy center and selected a pack of ten sheets of heavy white paper with high rag content and a blank CD. She paid for them at the counter, rented a computer, and went to a Web site that she had found once before. It was a fan site devoted to every aspect of the life of the actress Renee Stipple Penrose. There were pictures of her parents’ home in Barnstable, Connecticut, including some taken by a camera aimed through the windows, pictures of her elementary school and her high school, and—because there was a controversy about her real birth date—a clear and sharp image of her birth certificate.
Rachel copied the image to the computer and removed the original names and dates without altering the signatures or seals. She copied the blank birth certificate onto the CD for future use, and put the CD into her purse. Then she selected a matching type font and filled in the form to record the birth of Rachel Martha Sturbridge twenty-five years ago, and printed the new certificate onto one of her sheets of official-looking paper.
Rachel still had a driver’s license she had obtained in Illinois as Tanya Starling. Now she found a matching type font, typed her new name a few times, and printed it out on a sheet of thin white paper.
When she was in her house that night she patiently scratched the old name off the license with a razor blade. She took the printout with the name Rachel Martha Sturbridge on it, cut it out in a narrow strip, placed it in the groove on the license she had created with the blade, and used a drop of clear glue to hold it there. In the morning, when it was dry, she placed a laminating sheet over the front of the license, and trimmed it carefully.
Two days later she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office, flashed her Illinois license and her birth certificate, took a written test, and received a new California driver’s license in the name Rachel Martha Sturbridge.
