She raised her face to him. Her eyes were cold, as though she were looking at him from a great distance.
He said, “I brought you a little something.” He took a velvet jewelry box from his coat pocket and held it out to her. “Will you please forgive me?”
Seeing another jewelry box nettled her, partly because it showed he thought she was childish enough to be mollified by it, and partly because she wanted whatever lay inside the box. Her expression didn’t change. “I waited here for you only because I felt that I should say something to you for the sake of clarity. If you’ll remember, I never asked you to invest in my business.”
“I never meant to imply—”
“Please let me finish. I won’t be long.” She glared at him, holding him in silence for a breath before she continued. “It was a purely personal relationship, from my point of view. I never offered you anything or asked you for anything. When you asked questions about my business I answered them. When you offered to invest, I repeatedly refused your money. You called in detectives anyway and had me investigated. Well, that was a deal breaker. I’m leaving now. I want you to tear up my telephone number and forget my address.”
“But Rachel.” He tried to sit beside her, but she recoiled and stood up. He held out his hands. “Can’t we talk about this?”
“No. We can’t. If you want to do something for me you can order your detectives to shred whatever files they have on me. Beyond that, I have no further interest in anything you do or say.” She turned, walked to the bedroom, grasped the handle on her suitcase, and pulled it to the door on its wheels.
David Larson stood up, looking pained. “Please don’t go, Rachel. It was a terrible mistake. I’m trying to make it up to you.” As he raised his arms in supplication, he noticed the velvet box in his hand, and held it out. “This was for you. Won’t you at least take a look at it?”
“No, I won’t. Good-bye.” She pushed the door open, dragged her suitcase out, and let the door swing shut behind her. She went down the steps and up the paved drive to the main lodge, and had the concierge call her a cab.
On the long drive to San Francisco she contemplated what she had done, and decided that leaving David Larson had been her only possible choice. She couldn’t continue the relationship after he’d had her investigated. If she stayed, he would have the detectives resume their poking and prying. It was quite possible that they would find out that she had once been Tanya Starling, and maybe even that she had known Dennis Poole. It was also a bit late to allow him to buy into her imaginary magazine, and then make the money disappear on imaginary expenses. Now that the detectives had been called in, she couldn’t even continue to play him for gifts and support.
Her only possible move had been to sever any connection with him. The paradox was that his having her investigated had made her want to kill him, and the only thing that was preventing her from doing it was that he’d had her investigated. Before his body could cool, his detectives would be there to give the police a whole dossier on her.
The next afternoon at one, there was a knock on her door. She looked out the window to decide whether to answer, and saw it was the Federal Express man. She opened the door, signed for the thick envelope, and took it inside to open it.
The envelope contained three items. The first was the typed report that David Larson had received from the Averill Detective Agency in Dallas, Texas, saying that there wasn’t much about Rachel Sturbridge to know. The second was a file folder, stamped AVERILL AGENCY: CONFIDENTIAL. It had
The third item in the package was a note from David Larson. It said, “You asked that I destroy the background check. These are the only copies. Please accept my apologies. David.”
Rachel searched the kitchen drawers until she found some matches. She took the note, the file, and the report out to the tiny square of concrete below her back steps, then made a small bonfire. She looked at each piece as she added it to the flames.
The detective had been called off, and she was watching the collection of incriminating information burn up, page by page. She was confident that David was feeling contrite and apologetic, not suspicious of her. But this wasn’t enough. She looked at the rented house, then down the hill at the city. She picked up a stick to stir the ashes and make sure there was nothing left of the paper. She would have to disappear.
7
The videotape was grainy and distorted, and the colors seemed faded. It had been taken through a plastic dome that covered the video camera in the hotel hallway. The shot angled down from the ceiling. A white-haired couple walked under it and up the hallway to the elevator alcove. A few seconds later, a man appeared, coming from the direction of the elevators. “That’s him. That’s my cousin Dennis,” Hugo Poole said.
A thin blond woman caught up to Dennis while he stood at the door of his hotel room.
“Look at the hair,” said Sergeant Hobbes.
“It’s just about the right length,” Joe Pitt said.
On the monitor, Dennis slid a key card out of his wallet. The woman stood facing Dennis, talking to him, waiting for him to push the card into the lock and turn the handle. Hugo Poole waited impatiently for the girl to show her face. Dennis Poole opened the door to let the girl in ahead of him. “Turn around, for Christ’s sake,” Hugo said. “Turn around!”
The girl half-turned to go inside, and Detective Hobbes froze the tape. The blond woman was held in place, her image quivering slightly, a band of static moving upward from the bottom of the screen, disappearing, then reappearing at the bottom. Her face was attractive but not distinctive—just small, regular features. She seemed to be one of those women whose eyelashes and brows were light, so that her eyes disappeared into her face until she put on her makeup each morning.
Detective Hobbes turned to look down at Hugo Poole, her expression controlled. “Well, Mr. Poole? Have you seen her before?”
“Never.” He kept staring at the girl’s image, scowling.
Joe Pitt asked, “How did you get this tape?”
“Dennis Poole had been on vacation until two weeks before he died,” said Hobbes. “His credit card slips gave us the hotel in Aspen where he had been staying. We asked the hotel for their security tapes, and I went down to watch them. The ones from early in his stay were all erased, but a few of the later ones survived. This is the clearest, I’m afraid.”
“Do you know who she is yet?” asked Pitt.
“Her name is Tanya Starling. She was registered at the hotel for two days before he arrived. After he had been there for about three days she canceled her room and moved in with him.”
“Did the hotel have a home address for her?”
“Yes,” she said. “An apartment in Chicago. The phone number was out of service, so we asked the Chicago police to find out whether the number had been changed, but the whole account was closed. They checked with the company that manages the place and found she had moved out before she left for Colorado. She left no forwarding address.”
“Is the apartment still vacant?”
“No such luck. It’s a fancy high-rise with a view of the lake, and there was a waiting list. They cleaned and repainted it right away and new people moved in a couple of days later. There’s no chance of lifting prints now.”
Hugo Poole broke his silence. “It’s not right.”
Catherine Hobbes frowned. “What’s not right, Mr. Poole?”
“I know you don’t like me, but I’m trying to tell you something about my cousin.”
“And I assume you don’t like me, but I’m listening.”
“The girl shouldn’t be like that.”
“Like what?”
