Flight

The gatekeeper was a cheerful, middle-aged man whose girth was wedged nearly miraculously into a tall armchair. Frank wondered how, if a pursuit were necessary, the fellow would ever get to his feet.

When he gave the man his name, the gatekeeper responded with a knowing smile and said, “That Polly is something, isn’t she?” He handed him a clipboard, then went back to reading a crumpled copy of Hustler. Frank wrote his name illegibly and handed it back. The guard didn’t look at it. He picked up a phone and dialed a number.

Frank’s cell phone rang while the guard was talking to someone inside the building.

“Hi,” Irene said. “I made it home, safe and sound.”

At that moment, the guard leaned out and handed him a visitor’s badge, saying in a loud voice, “Here you go, lover boy, a pass to see Polly Logan. But a word to the wise — with the stuff that’s going around these days, you’d better wear a rubber — that broad has laid more pipe than the local plumbers’ union.”

He heard Irene disconnect.

He drove through the gate, parked in the nearly empty lot, and tried calling home. He got the answering machine. “Irene, I know you’re there. Please pick up the phone.”

Nothing.

“You aren’t going to let one loudmouthed knucklehead cause us problems, are you?”

He heard her pick up the receiver — and set it right back down in the cradle.

He swore, turned the phone off, and headed for the building’s back entrance.

The cloying scent of Polly Logan’s perfume hit him before he saw her. She stood waiting for him, a blond beacon at the end of a dimly lit hallway — a narrow figure clad in a dark blue suit and high heels that would have made a stilt- maker proud. At six four, he was a tall man, but he thought he was only about half a foot above being eye-to-eye with her. In this semidarkness, she bore at least some resemblance to the woman on the mural. He knew better. In her efforts to stay in front of the camera, Polly Logan must have spent most of the money she had made there on cosmetic surgery. The results were now in the waxworks stage — her blue eyes had that wide-open, perpetually startled look that was a by-product of too many facelifts, her mouth and chin so stiff as to make a ventriloquist’s dummy’s seem more supple, and her satiny, wrinkle-free face was, alas, perched atop her original, aging neck, making her look as if her head had been transplanted to the wrong body.

“Frank,” she said, extending a hand, “good to see you.”

The hand was smooth but dry and bony, so that he felt as if he were grasping an albino bat’s wing. He let go before the bat did. “I appreciate your willingness to help me out.”

“I’m sure I’ll be able to think of a way for you to return the favor,” she said with a smile.

He thought he might have grimaced in response.

She didn’t seem to notice and sauntered toward a door at the end of the hallway. “Come along, I’ve set this up in one of the conference rooms.”

She aimed a remote at a television set attached to a VCR. When the set came on, she immediately pressed a volume button, so that the sound was nearly muted. “I don’t want to attract a lot of attention to what we’re doing in here,” she said. “Not just because you’re a cop, but because — well, I’ve taken a lot of crap around here about keeping these.”

“These?” he asked, wondering how long he’d be trapped here with her, watching videotapes.

“The original footage, I mean. The clips I copied to make this one for you.” She smiled. “A labor of love.”

“How long is the final product?” he asked.

“Two hours,” she said, and pressed the play button on the remote.

The first few minutes were made up of footage from about a dozen years ago, she explained. “I shot most of this myself.”

Fleeting images of Lefebvre went by. There was an almost voyeuristic quality in them that Frank found unsettling. Most of the time Lefebvre clearly wasn’t aware he was on camera. The woman was all but stalking him.

“He had the most interesting eyes,” she said softly, after a close-up.

The rest of the tape had been shot by other camera operators. Frank glanced at Polly as she narrated in a low voice. “This was after he solved the Berton case.” Then “This is at the courthouse, after he testified against Hunter.” She gazed at the screen, caught up in memories, giving a running commentary that prevented him from hearing the soundtrack of the tape.

He half listened as Polly droned on. When the press conference in Seth Randolph’s room came on the screen, Frank found himself distracted to see Irene, ten years younger. Although younger, she had dark circles under her eyes. She seemed tired, he thought, a little down, and — what was that quality he saw in her face? Vulnerability. Yes, she seemed more vulnerable then.

The camera went back to Tory Randolph, but Frank was still thinking of Irene. He remembered her comments about getting to know Lefebvre during her father’s long, final illness. Rough days. But for all this, when the camera next was on her, he saw a familiar impishness in her eyes — she was calling out a question.

“Ex-husband, correct?” she asked on the tape.

He could see the amusement of some of the other journalists before the camera went back to Tory Randolph, who was saying something about not thinking of Trent Randolph as her ex-husband. Frank shook his head. From reading the files, he knew that within a few months of this press conference, Tory Randolph remarried. She married Dale Britton, a man who had worked in the crime lab. They had already met by the time of the press conference — Britton had been one of the criminalists on the case.

Polly had asked him a question, he realized. “Pardon?”

“Tory — have you ever seen such a stage hog?”