to kick, and her kicks were starting to hurt-on the shin and two or three times in the stomach.
Then she was free.
Screaming.
Falling backwards out of the car.
Panic blinded him for a moment And paralysis.
He looked down and saw her hit the dirt path they'd pulled onto. But before he could move to do anything, she was scrambling to her feet and running down the road in the direction they'd just come.
Little bitch.
Jerking the car into reverse, whipping around so he would have a straight shot at her, he started down the road.
She looked as if she were crazy. She ran with her arms flailing and her voice so shrill, she was probably giving herself a sore throat.
He knew then what he'd have to do. He aimed the car to the left-hand shoulder of the road, directly at the point she was running. Even a glancing blow from the car would stop her. Maybe not kill her. But stop her. And he could finish the job himself. Hell, at this point, given all that she had done, he wanted to.
She was smart, the little bitch.
Just as his hood ornament matched up with her spine, she surprised him by pitching herself straight down in the gully running beside the road. She vanished.
He had to fight with the brakes to keep the car from going down into the gully, one of those slow, fishtailing, stomach-turning halts that you're not sure will work till the very last second.
In the splash of his headlights, he saw her scrabbling up the dusty gully on the other side. When she reached the top, she grabbed on to some rusty barbed wire, crying out as her hands were cut, then hurling herself through the strands of wire. She landed with a dead thump he could hear all the way from where he was. But then she was on her feet and running across a cornfield.
He whipped the car as close to the edge of the gully as possible, killed lights and engine, and took off, running.
Down the gully, up the gully, through the barbed wire (not cutting himself as she had), and then into the cornfield proper. With the stalks all dead and lying on the ground, he had no trouble seeing her. His first impression was that she was running to nowhere in particular. Just running to escape him.
But as he bore on-chest heaving, heart pounding, a million vile words for the little bitch filling his mind-he finally saw what she obviously saw.
The twinkling lights of a farmhouse on the low, dark horizon.
Only then did he begin to notice the wind and the rain that was fast becoming sleet
Only then did he begin to notice that she was outdistancing him very badly.
Only then did he begin to notice that he would never catch her.
Bitch.
Fucking bitch.
Exhausted, he fell to his knees in the dead cornfield, stalks crackling beneath him like snapping plastic.
Sleet washed his face; wind took the sweat from his scalp. He took off the wig and the beard then, right there in the cornfield.
She would report a man with dark hair and a Vandyke beard. She would also report a car that within the hour would be returned to the rental agency.
Nothing to go on.
Absolutely nothing.
Then he felt in his back pocket for the wallet he'd planned to plant near the murder scene (just far enough away that it looked accidental). It was gone.
And then, there in the cornfield, he started laughing. There was panic in the laugh and frenzy, but there was also ironic satisfaction.
The little bitch had taken Brolan's wallet.
11
In all, Brolan and Wagner spent five hours working through the files on Emma's machine. What emerged there-for Brolan, at any rate-was a portrait of a very lovely but very naive farm girl who had soft, private dreams of being some sort of princess. Her writing was filled with references to the great Disney animated movies, Snow White and Cinderella and The Lady and the Tramp. She rented these for home video and watched them again and again. These movies-and the old copies of Photoplay and Modern Screen from the thirties that Wagner had loaned her-seemed to be her principal reality. About the men she went out with she had little to say. This or that man might be 'nice,' this or that man might be 'nervous,' this or that man might be 'rude,' but beyond that they had neither faces nor souls. They were just what she did for a living and nothing more. A few times she talked about the possibility of getting a venereal disease or even perhaps AIDS but she confided to her diary that she knew that 'God just wouldn't let that happen.'
Most of the names were there, most of the meeting places. It was a mosaic of the Twin Cities-occupations ranging from department-store head to doctor to policeman. Meeting places that included the Walker Art Centre, the Civic Centre, and the St. Paul Cathedral. Mention of bitter winter, soft spring, fiery summer. A compliment here for a certain after-shave, a compliment there for a well-cut suit. There was a man named Mr. Pinkham for whom she developed a great affection. He was mentioned at some length at least thirty times.
Around four o'clock in the morning, Wagner having fixed them eggs and toast, they came to a file marked Advertising. Brolan's eyes did a cartoon-pop. Advertising? What the hell could that be all about?
'You're getting excited,' Wagner said.
'Damn right I am.'
'I'm hurrying as fast as I can.'
'I know, I know,' Brolan said, leaning over Wagner so he could read the screen.
The first two pages were prose. She talked about how glitzy she expected the advertising world to be. But for all its surface glitter, she'd found it a noisy, vain, empty world, people strutting around in dinner jackets at ceremonies where ad people constantly gave each other awards for their so-called creativity. John had set all this up. She said this three times. John had set this up.
Brolan said, 'Who's John?'
Wagner paused. 'Her… friend.'
'Her pimp, you mean?'
Wagner said, 'I was hoping we could be a little gender, Brolan. She was a decent woman.'
Brolan noticed two things: (a) that he was no longer 'Mr' Brolan, and (b) that he'd hurt Wagner's feelings.
'I'm sorry,' Brolan said.
Wagner looked up at him and smiled. 'You try awfully hard to be an asshole, but you can't quite seem to make it, can you?'
Brolan laughed. 'I guess that's a compliment.'
So they went on. More adventures in advertising. One executive had her get underneath his desk and do him while he was talking on the phone. Another executive had her do a striptease behind a huge blow-up of himself which had been used in an awards ceremony, asking her to kiss the blow-up and push herself against it. A third executive had asked her to let him beat her. She had refused.
It was somewhere in this sad melange of hired sex and kinky turns that the name Tim Culhane first appeared. When he saw it, Brolan's heart started pounding.
'Tim Culhane!' he said.
'You know him?'
'He's one of our art directors.' He was the man Brolan had looked at videotapes with that afternoon.
'Let's see if there's anything else about him.'
