Andrea sighed. “I’m sure you think I was just manipulating me. That he didn’t want me in a courtroom because I might say too much. But you’re wrong.”
“Am I? Then why did he send those thugs into your house yesterday?”
She knew the answer to that. “Because I screwed up.”
Abby looked at her. “You?”
“I started going to his events. I didn’t think he would recognize me, not after all these years, with a wig and dark glasses. But he did. I broke the rules.”
“What rules?”
“He promised to help me only if I gave my word I would never try to see him again.”
“If you gave your word, why did you start…?”
“Stalking him?” Andrea almost smiled.
“Attending his campaign rallies,” Abby said diplomatically.
“I don’t know. Something made me want to do it. It didn’t make sense. It was like-like I couldn’t stay away. Like I just had to see him.” She was touching her hair again-a nervous habit, but one she’d never noticed before.
“Did you hope to get back together with him?” Abby asked.
A shudder coursed through her. “No. No, of course not. I knew that could never happen.”
“Then… why?”
“I don’t know, Abby. I just don’t.”
“Okay, okay.” Abby reached out to steady her. “Sorry I pushed. It’s an occupational hazard for those of us with a psych degree. We keep trying to peel the onion.”
Andrea wiped her eyes. “Peeling onions makes me cry.”
“Yeah, I got that. But at least now you can mince garlic with no problem.” This was a joke, but Andrea couldn’t find the strength to smile. “Look,” Abby said more seriously, “go home, lie down, close your eyes. Just keep that phone nearby and turned on.”
“Okay. I still don’t understand, though. I don’t see what you could possibly need me for.”
“It all comes back to you, Andrea. Everything comes back to you.”
That was true, of course. Reynolds and the killers who invaded her home, and the FBI people watching her and tapping her phone, and Abby’s involvement-all of it came back to her, and to what she had done twenty years ago, her ineradicable past, which she could never escape.
Abby seemed to catch her mood. She smiled. “Hey, no worries. I’m on the case. I’m handling everything.”
“I wish I could be as confident as you are.”
“It’s a gift. Now get going. Those G-men must be getting antsy. And don’t do anything to show you’re on to them. Just act normal.”
“Normal.” This time Andrea did smile. “Yes, that’s me.”
She left the restroom, taking care not to look for the FBI men, as Abby had warned. But they were there, anyway. She knew it now, knew it even without seeing them.
They would always be there.
33
Tess arrived at the crime scene shortly before noon. The neighborhood was as unprepossessing as she’d expected. Crandall, in the passenger seat of the Bureau car, glanced up at the two-story apartment building in distaste.
“I lived in a place like this when I was starting my own business.” His expression indicated that the memory wasn’t a happy one.
“Didn’t you start more than one business?”
“Three in all. No success with any of them. I guess I was meant to be a fed. It’s in my genes.”
“There are worse things to be.”
“True. I could be a biker, like Dylan Garrick.”
“You could be dead, like Dylan Garrick.”
“That, too.”
It was the most he’d said to her today. He still mistrusted her for keeping Abby’s secrets. Tess couldn’t really blame him, but he would have to work with her now. Hauser, trying to keep a low profile on MEDEA, hadn’t wanted a swarm of L.A. agents descending on Santa Ana. He’d authorized only the two of them to check it out, while the rest of the squad worked the case from the field office in Westwood.
They climbed the stairs to Garrick’s apartment, identifiable by the yellow crime scene tape across the door. Tess stripped away the tape and unlocked the door with a key she’d obtained from the Santa Ana resident agency.
From behind her on the landing, Crandall said, “Carson wanted us to wait for him before we went in.”
Carson was the supervisory agent who managed the RA. He’d been driving behind them when they left Civic Center Drive, but apparently they’d lost him along the way. Tess wasn’t going to wait. “He’ll be here soon enough. Let’s look around on our own.”
She pushed open the door and went in, trailed by Crandall. The first thing she saw was the bloody stain on the futon where Dylan Garrick’s head had lain. There were spatter patterns on the wall. More dried blood was dimly visible on the soiled short-nap carpet. The body was gone, as were Garrick’s handgun and the pillow used to muffle the two shots.
Criminalists had gone over the apartment, dusting for prints and bagging fibers and other trace evidence. Tess saw black ferric oxide on some surfaces, silver nitrate on others. The walls and larger objects in the room had been decorated in more elaborate shades, from gaudy Pinkwop and Redwop powders that were processed with a portable laser, to fluorescent greens and oranges that luminesced in ultraviolet light. Whoever dusted the place had been thorough. Tess wondered if Abby’s prints had been among those collected.
In her career she had visited many crime scenes, enough of them to make the experience almost routine. But there was one she had never forgotten-the bedroom of the house she’d rented in a Denver suburb, where Paul Voorhees had been murdered by the serial killer Mobius.
Other shocks had shaken her life, but finding Paul was the one that lingered. She’d never felt the same about a murder scene. Other people could crack jokes and act casual in the presence of death. Not her. She stood in Dylan Garrick’s apartment as she would stand in a church-hushed and solemn.
In one hand she carried a folder of crime-scene photos from the morning conference. She slipped out a picture of the body and studied it, getting a better sense of how Garrick had been positioned. He’d been beaten before he was shot-pistol-whipped with his own firearm. The photo showed the damage to his face, including a broken nose that left a trail of dried blood snaking down to his upper lip. The gun itself, dropped on the floor, had dried blood on the barrel.
Could Abby have hurt him that way? Cracked the gun across his face, crunching bone? Tess wanted to say no. Yet she couldn’t forget Abby at the Boiler Room, carving her steak with grim enthusiasm, the knife gripped tight in her hand. She’d been riding a wave of rage and hate, and there was no telling how far she’d ridden it later that night.
Of course she’d denied everything. But she had no alibi. And although there was no obvious way for her to track down Garrick, she was resourceful. She could have figured something out. She could have come here.
If she had, she came as Garrick’s guest. The lock on the door had not been tampered with. Garrick let her in-or came home with her. Typically, in her work with stalkers, Abby would arrange to meet the guy in some seemingly accidental way, ingratiate herself with him, gain access to his home. She wasn’t above holding out the promise of sexual favors. She…
Tess looked more closely at the photo. “You see this?” she asked Crandall.
“What?”
“Garrick’s pants. They’re open. Unzipped.”
