“She’s wrong for Denny. He was a forty-two-year-old computer geek. He had a stupid laugh, he was tall in the wrong way—kind of big-footed and narrow-shouldered. He didn’t talk about anything women could stand to listen to.”
Joe Pitt said, “That sounds like a million guys, most of them married. If she moved in, she was interested.”
“Too good-looking,” said Hugo Poole. “When I saw him with women, they were always on the same step of the food chain that he was on. She should be a nice fat girl with bad teeth.”
Catherine Hobbes studied Hugo Poole. “What do you think was going on? Do you think she’s a hooker?”
“I doubt it. She was with him for, like, three weeks,” said Hugo. “He’d have died broke and still owed her money.”
“That’s what I thought,” said Hobbes. “Besides, the Chicago police would probably have picked up that kind of information. She could have been some single woman willing to give a guy like Dennis a little slack. His spending a lot of money on her would be flattering. She was on vacation, so the rules and standards sometimes slip a little. Somebody she wouldn’t go out with at home might do for an evening in a strange place.”
“Okay,” said Hugo. “Lightning strikes and guys like Dennis get lucky. But there’s no way a woman like that would stay for more than one night unless something besides Dennis was the attraction.”
“All right, you two have convinced me,” said Pitt. “There was a hidden reason why she was with him. So what was it? If she moved out of her fancy apartment in Chicago and took off for Colorado, maybe she was hiding. Maybe Dennis got killed by somebody who was after her.”
“You mean an old boyfriend or a jealous husband?” said Hugo. “Dennis Poole killed by a jealous husband?”
“It might explain what she was doing moving in with him,” said Catherine Hobbes. “Living with somebody who’s paying for everything makes a woman hard to spot. She could also have been the one who killed him.”
Pitt said, “Do you know whether any of his money is gone?”
“Nothing so far,” said Hobbes. “He had some charges from jewelry stores, and some women’s clothing stores. We’ve found about twenty thousand dollars’ worth.”
“Are you sure he was the one who made all of the charges?” asked Pitt.
“He was alive on those dates,” Hobbes said. “And he didn’t report a lost credit card.”
“Then I’ll go with the odds,” said Pitt.
“What are they?” asked Hugo.
Pitt said, “That when you have a murder scene and a woman is missing, it’s not because she was the perpetrator. Usually when you find her, she’s the second victim.”
“Thanks for coming up to Portland and cooperating with us, Mr. Poole,” said Catherine Hobbes as she turned off the tape and took the cassette out of the VCR. “I’m sure that Mr. Pitt will let you know the minute we find anything else.” She walked out of the interrogation room.
A half hour later, Catherine Hobbes sat alone in the interrogation room in front of the monitor, watching the videotape of herself, Hugo Poole, and Joe Pitt watching the hotel security tape. She studied the reactions of both men to everything that was seen or said. Then she got to the part she had been waiting for: the sight of herself walking out of the room.
She watched the tape of Hugo Poole as he stood up and looked at Pitt. “What the hell did you do to
Pitt went to the door ahead of him and reached for the knob to open it. “I went to work for you.”
“I was expecting her not to warm up to me. This was about you. Whatever you’re doing to her, you ought to either cut it out or do it better.”
On the monitor, Catherine Hobbes watched the two men walk out the door. If either of them had anything enlightening to say about the murder of Dennis Poole, he had not been foolish enough to say it inside the Portland Police Bureau.
8
Rachel Sturbridge emptied the vacuum cleaner bag into the garbage dumpster outside her rented house. She went inside, put on disposable rubber gloves, and walked one last time through her house with a bottle of Windex and a roll of paper towels. She stood at the window that faced north. Between two apartment buildings she could just see the taller office buildings along Market Street. She stepped to the side, sprayed the glass, and wiped it once more. It was important to be sure that she had not missed any surface as smooth as a windowpane.
She sprayed and wiped all of the handles, knobs, and latches, then took broad swipes over all of the flat surfaces where she might have rested her fingertips in the past few weeks. If David Larson had been lying about calling off his detectives, the least she could do was to deny them the gift of her fingerprints.
Rachel took a final look at the furniture that Mrs. Halloran, the landlady, had supplied with the house, trying to find any hairs that she might have left on a cushion. She wrote “Eve Halloran” on an envelope, slipped her house key into it, and left it on the mantel. Then she picked up her suitcase, went out the door, and pressed the lock button. Only after she was outside the house and in her car did she take off her thin rubber gloves.
She was out on Highway 101 by noon, driving south, away from the city. San Francisco had been a terrible disappointment to her, and she wanted to get away, but she had no destination in mind. Today it seemed to Rachel that the world was a cold and treacherous place, and the only act that was appealing was to keep moving.
For a few hours she drove and thought about her dissatisfaction with David Larson. He was a foolish man, one who had no idea what a wonderful future he had thrown away when he had betrayed Rachel Sturbridge’s trust. He really deserved to die, and it bothered her that she had been forced to let him go. It didn’t seem fair.
When she began to feel hungry, she looked at the clock on the dashboard and noticed that it was five o’clock. She stopped at a restaurant in Pismo Beach and stared out at the highway while she ate, wishing she could see the ocean.
She refilled the gas tank and drove all the way to the Los Angeles County line before she stopped again. She found a hotel off the Ventura Freeway in the west end of the San Fernando Valley and registered with her Rachel Sturbridge credit card. When she awoke in the morning, she showered, ate, and dressed, then settled her bill in cash. It was time to begin making herself safe from whatever problems David Larson might have caused.
She needed to be anonymous for a time while she rested and decided what she wanted to do next, and the nondescript neighborhood where she had stopped looked like a good place for that. All of Los Angeles seemed featureless to her, a vast sameness. A young, white middle-class woman could avoid notice for a very long time if she paid attention and didn’t do anything stupid. She rented an apartment in Woodland Hills not far from the Topanga Canyon shopping mall by putting down money for the first month, last month, and security deposit in cash.
She went to a copying store, just as she had in San Francisco, rented a computer and printer, and took out the CD where she had stored the blank birth certificate. During the long drive from San Francisco she had been thinking of using the name Veronica, but the girl who waited on her was pretty and energetic, and she was wearing a badge that said, “Nancy Gonzales, Sales Associate.” The name Nancy seemed cheerful, so that was the one that she chose. She filled in the blank with the name Nancy Mills.
Next she bought a hair dye kit and lightened her hair again, then went to a salon to have it cut. She had worn it long and loose as Rachel Sturbridge, so now it had to be shorter. Long hair gave her an advantage with men, but she had decided it would be better if she didn’t attract any more of them for a while. On the way home, she went to an optometrist’s shop in a strip mall and bought some nonprescription contact lenses in different eye colors.
Two days later, when she went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to apply for a new driver’s license, she wore the brown contacts, so in her license picture she had brown eyes and shoulder-length, light brown hair. She thought of the look as drab and ordinary, which was exactly what she wanted.
She sold Rachel Sturbridge’s car through the
