“That’s the only place I haven’t looked.”
He returned to the dining room, Ana and Kirstie following, and opened one of the French doors, then passed through the pergola, breathing the thick, humid air. Around him lay white wicker lounge chairs, gleaming like bone in the colorless starlight.
Turning in a slow circle, he took in the rear of the house with its whitewashed facade and red-tiled roof-the low coral wall, draped with chalice vine, enclosing the patio and garden-the trellises of bougainvillea and beds of pink primrose and aster, hemmed in by stands of royal poinciana, gumbo-limbo, and woman’s tongue tree.
He checked the garden gate, which was locked, then poked around meaninglessly in the trees until he started to feel silly. “False alarm,” he said finally.
Kirstie nodded. “Must have been. Funny, though. Ana doesn’t usually get spooked in the middle of the night.”
“Well, she did, this time.” Steve petted the borzoi. “What was it, sweetie? Bad dream?”
Anastasia whined.
Kirstie had a thought. “Bet she’s still hung up over that frog she chased. It drove her crazy.”
“Sure. You’re right. That’s probably all it was.” Steve smiled, taking his wife’s hand. “A frog in the garden. Not a serpent.”
He kept his words light. But he couldn’t shake the uneasiness that had been with him since Anastasia’s lapping tongue pulled him out of sleep.
As he led Kirstie back to the patio, he found himself looking at the chain of lights that marked Upper Matecumbe Key.
Matecumbe. A corruption of mata hombre. Kill man.
The thought haunted him, and it was a long time before he finally drifted back to sleep.
10
“I still can’t believe it. Can’t frigging believe it.”
“It must have been a shock.”
“Oh, fuck, yeah. I mean, when I heard his name on KFWB, it was like whoa, hold on, you know what I mean?”
“Of course.”
“I’m driving home from the movies, and all of a sudden they’re talking about him, about Jack, and I’m like… holy shit. You know?”
“I know.”
Tamara Moore kept her voice neutral, her face carefully blank save for a practiced hint of sympathy in the eyes. She had been listening to Sheila Tate ramble on for forty-five tedious minutes, and despite the possible importance of the interview, she was thoroughly bored.
Sheila, as the FBI surveillance team had already known, had been carrying on a romantic relationship with Jack Dance, spending her nights with him on an irregular basis. She had been a top priority after Dance had disappeared.
Unfortunately, Sheila Tate proved impossible to find. The surveillance unit had followed Jack when he left for work; no one had bothered to put a tail on his girlfriend. It was assumed she would be working at Bullock’s, as usual; but as it turned out, Thursday was her day off.
A stakeout car waited outside her apartment in Santa Monica all day and into the night. She didn’t show. The task force was beginning to worry that Jack had added her to his list of victims when at ten o’clock the watch commander at LAPD’s West L.A. divisional station called with word that Sheila was there.
Apparently she’d spent the day in Malibu, working hard on her tan, then visited Century City to shop, eat, and take in a movie. She hadn’t heard any news until she was driving home. Panicking, she detoured to the police station, afraid to go home while Jack was still at large.
Two LAPD detectives interviewed Sheila long enough to learn the essentials of her story, then delivered her to the FBI field office in Westwood. Lovejoy asked Moore to talk with her privately in a conference room.
Rigid in a straight-backed chair, Moore studied Sheila Tate, sprawled bonelessly on the couch. She was twenty-eight years old, slender and hard-bodied like so many southern California women, with a lustrous suntan and waves of chestnut hair laced with oddly alluring threads of gray. She should have been beautiful, but wasn’t. Her looks were spoiled by her mouth, a sneering, angry mouth well suited to the frequent profanities it uttered.
“Did he really kill all those women?” she asked for the tenth time. Her lower lip still trembled with the aftereffects of shock.
“We believe so.”
“Shit. It might’ve been me next, huh? He might’ve done me?”
“Well, fortunately he didn’t.”
“Could have, though. Jesus, what a wacko. Crazy as the Dahmer guy, and I was practically shacking up with him. Who would’ve known?”
“Sheila, did Jack ever discuss what he did or where he went on the weekends when he was out of town?”
“Nah, and I never asked. Figured he was bopping somebody else on the side.”
“That didn’t bother you?”
“Not as long as he made nice with me. He was generous, you know? Real loose with his money.”
“Do you remember seeing any syringes around the apartment?”
“Needles? No way. Jack isn’t a user. He doesn’t even drink much.”
“Any items that might have come from other women-a ring, a bracelet, even a lock of hair or a button from a blouse?”
“Nothing like that. Why? Did he keep, like, souvenirs?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
The lip was quivering again. “He didn’t have pieces of them stashed in a drawer someplace, did he?”
“Don’t worry about it.”
The truth was that searches of Dance’s apartment, office, and car had so far failed to turn up any trophies or syringes. Conclusive evidence linking Dance to the murders continued to elude the task force. His fingerprints on the drinking glass at the Phoenix bar were not enough.
After the print run, it had been hoped that a surreptitious inquiry into Dance’s credit-card accounts and bank statements would yield a record of airline-ticket purchases that could be matched to Mister Twister’s weekend outings. But there was no record of any such purchases. He must have paid cash.
Then it had occurred to someone that Dance was unlikely to have left his Nissan Z in an LAX parking lot, notorious for poor security. LAPD detectives had made the rounds of the privately operated parking lots near the airport and had found the one Jack used. He had paid cash there, too, but that precaution hadn’t helped him; it was standard procedure at the establishment to log in every vehicle, recording the license number, make, and model. The Nissan had been left there each weekend when Mister Twister was at work.
The coincidence of dates still wasn’t sufficient to ensure a conviction. But it had persuaded a judge to sign the arrest and search warrants early this morning.
Now the arrest had been bungled, and the searches had come up empty. If Dance could not be definitely tied to the homicides, he might end up being prosecuted only on multiple counts of telemarketing fraud. After the publicity given to the manhunt, such a reversal would constitute a disaster.
“Was there anything in the apartment that was off limits to you?” Moore asked. “Any room he didn’t want you to enter? Any drawers you weren’t supposed to open?”
“No way. He couldn’t boss me around like that. What do you think, he had me tied around his little finger like some fucking bimbo?”
“Did you ever see him hide anything or cover up something he was looking at?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Did he have a scrapbook, photo album, Polaroids?”
