'Amanda at work? Anorexic Amanda?'
'I'm sorry, Kris.'
She thought of Amanda Gilbert's sympathetic cooing when told that Howard might be unfaithful, her promise to sit down for a nice heart-to-heart.
She made a mental note to have the bitch fired.
'You could have done better,' she said simply.
'I already did. I was too stupid to know it.'
Kris knew he was hoping for some encouragement or forgiveness. She would not give it to him.
'I think you should go,' she whispered.
'I didn't do it,' Howard said.
Martin advised him not to say anything more.
The two patrolmen were easing him toward the door when he turned back, grief written on his face.
'I never even wanted her. It's just that she was available' and, well, she was-' 'Young,' Kris said. It sounded like an epitaph.
He left with the others. Before Courtney shut the door, Kris heard the whir of a chopper overhead.
Somebody was getting first-rate footage of Howard Barwood as he was led down the garden path to the police car.
It would lead the late news on some local station. Kris hoped it wasn't
KPTI.
The office tower was hemmed in by cyclone fencing, but the side gate had been forced open, allowing access to the grounds. Abby led Travis directly to it, explaining that she'd already reconnoitered the area and found the way in.
Travis silently admired her diligence. Except for her one blunder in the Corbal case, she really was quite good at what she did. It would be almost a shame to lose her.
But even one blunder was more than he would permit.
The lobby of the office building was two stories high, enclosed by wide windows, one of which had been smashed. Travis stepped through, kicking away wedges of glass that clung to the frame. Abby followed.
The glow of streetlights penetrated only a few feet into the building.
The rest of the lobby was dark.
'Bring a flash?' Abby whispered.
'No.' He should have thought of it, but he'd had other things on his mind.
'I've got one.'
She rummaged in her purse and removed the mini flash Its beam swept the room, highlighting a quarry tile floor, curved metal-lath walls partially finished in plaster, and a high coffered ceiling.
Dropcloths, ladders, and worktables on sawhorses were distributed throughout the cavernous space.
'No Hickle,' Travis said.
Abby shrugged.
'If he were down here, we would have been dead the minute we stepped inside.'
The beam found a doorless opening in an alcove, with a steel staircase visible inside. She led Travis to the stairwell and played the beam up the shaft, illuminating the concrete walls and steel landings.
'Empty,' she said, 'at least as far as I can see.'
'Then up we go.'
'Just a minute.' She shifted the flashlight to her left hand and reached for her purse.
'I'm starting to feel a little naked without my thirty-eight.'
He couldn't allow her to get the gun in her hand. He had to make his move now.
'Don't do that, Abby,' he whispered.
His tone stopped her for a moment, which was all the time he needed to pluck the Colt from his waistband and press it into her rib cage.
Abby's gaze ticked down, registering the gun in her side, then rose to his face.
Travis studied her expression. He expected to see shock, fear, anger.
He was looking forward to it.
But she disappointed him. What he saw was only a look of sad reproach.
'So it really was you,' Abby said quietly.
'I'm sorry, Paul. I was hoping I was wrong.'
Abby watched Travis's eyes narrow as his mouth formed a bloodless line.
'You knew?' he whispered, his voice returning in soft echoes from the corners of the stairwell.
'I suspected,' she said calmly.
'I wasn't sure. I guess I didn't want to believe it.'
The muzzle of the gun was a hard circle of pressure against her ribs.
She felt the pistol trembling slightly, perhaps with her own breath or with Travis's pulse.
She waited for whatever he would do next.
'Hold your hands up,' he said finally. She obeyed, her movements deliberately slow, like the subtle progressions of a tai chi exercise.
'Now give me the flashlight/ She let him take it with his left hand. He took a half step back, the gun shifting to the spot between her shoulder blades.
'All right,' Travis said, 'let's go.'
'Where?'
'Up.'
'Is there some advantage to killing me on a higher floor?'
'As a matter of fact, there is. Now get going.'
Abby climbed the stairs, guided by the flashlight and the gun in her back.
'I'm betting that gun isn't silenced,' she said.
'True.'
'When it goes off, the report will echo through the building. Hickle will hear it. He'll panic and flee, maybe take a different stairwell.'
'And I may not be able to intercept him. Very good.
You get an A plus.'
'I'm not your student anymore, Paul.'
They reached the third-floor landing and continued higher. Abby noticed that the fire doors on the landings had not yet been installed.
Dark halls lay beyond the doorways. They looked like the narrow passageways of a pharaoh's tomb, the kind of place where ghosts walked.
But there were no ghosts here. Not yet.
'It's Howard Barwood's gun,' she said quietly, 'isn't it? You stole it from his bungalow this morning, after you left the hospital.'
'That's right.'
'Was that before or after you planted the cell phone in the beach house?'
'Oh, I took care of that chore several weeks ago, during one of my visits to Kris to update her on the case. The phone, of course, is registered in the name of Western Regional Resources, though poor Howard never knew anything about it.'
'If you planted the phone back then, how did you use it to call Hickle on Thursday night?'
'I didn't. I used a different phone, which I'd programmed with the identical code. It's not hard to do.
Some people make a nice living by stealing cellphone codes.'
'What happened to this other phone?'
'It's at the bottom of the canyon behind my house. I threw it off the deck earlier this evening. I had no
