She froze. Now she remembered who he was.
“I was the man who helped you open your commercial account at the bank. Bill Thayer. I’m the branch manager.”
“I do remember you,” said Nancy. “What are you doing down here?”
“I have family here. I’m visiting. What about you? Are you expanding into the Los Angeles area? I still remember the name of your business—Singular Aspects. Right?”
He didn’t seem to know that she had closed the account. She had to be extremely careful, because if he got curious, he could look things up when he got back to the office. “No, actually, we decided that San Francisco wasn’t right for us, and we’re thinking about starting the business here instead. Well, nice to see you.” She stepped off.
“Miss Starling? Wait.”
She stopped walking. This was awful. She had forgotten that to open the account in San Francisco she had called herself Tanya Starling so she could cash Tanya Starling’s check from the old account in Chicago. This Bill Thayer didn’t know it yet, but he already possessed enough information to destroy her. He had seen her in this mall in Woodland Hills, just a few blocks from where she lived.
He said, “I wondered if you would have dinner with me tonight.”
“Gee, Bill,” she said. “I can’t tonight.”
“I know it’s kind of sudden, but I won’t be here long, so I thought I’d better take a chance.”
She was afraid: she was afraid to be with him, and afraid to let him walk away. She knew that dinner was impossible. He would go to his parents’ house and say he was going to miss dinner tonight because he had a date. Unless they were comatose, one of them would say, “What’s her name?” He would tell them who she was and where he had met her. She smiled. “I do have some time now, though, if you’d like to have coffee.”
“That sounds good,” said Thayer.
“Do you have a car?”
“You can’t go anywhere in L.A. without one. I rented it at the airport.”
“Then you can drive. There’s a really great little place on Topanga just south of the freeway.”
They walked out of the plaza to the parking lot. His rental car was parked about a hundred yards off, almost by itself. When she saw it she was surprised. It was a Cadillac that looked enormous to her. “Wow. Do you drive your mom and dad around when you visit?”
“Not much,” said Thayer. “They think I’ve gotten rusty driving up north, so they don’t trust me. The big car is for taking clients around. Whenever I come down I usually try to see a couple.”
They drove down Topanga past the freeway, and she said, “Keep going. It’s quite a bit farther, toward Malibu.”
“Is it on the left or right?”
“The right. Oh, look. There’s a nice little park up there. Can we stop for a minute?”
“I guess so,” he said doubtfully. “Sure.” Thayer drove off the road and stopped on the shoulder beside a grove of trees with picnic tables in it.
Nancy got out of the car with her purse over her shoulder. “I’ve been looking for a good place to have a small party. I wonder if I could do it as a picnic, right here.”
Thayer didn’t seem to know what to do. He got out of the car slowly, and scrutinized the ground before he took each step, as though he were afraid of getting his shoes dirty.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get a better look.” She took his hand playfully and began to walk among the trees.
Thayer looked a bit doubtful, but he began to stroll with her in the deserted grove, past picnic tables and trash cans. Nancy let go of his hand and moved off a few feet to disapprovingly rock a picnic table that was set on uneven ground. He strolled on, and got a few steps ahead of her.
She looked at her watch. It was nearly ten-thirty. It wasn’t surprising that people weren’t here in the morning, but someone could arrive before long to set up a picnic lunch. She looked back at the road. There were no cars going past, and she couldn’t hear any coming. There was nobody nearby yet. It would have to be now. She let him get a few more steps ahead of her as she reached deep in her purse.
He suddenly stopped and turned to look back at her. He said, “What are you looking for?”
She smiled brightly at him. “My camera. I want to take a couple of pictures so I can compare it to some other places.”
He turned away and walked on.
Nancy Mills gripped the pistol and lifted it out, then held it tight against her thigh as she walked to catch up with him. She took one last look over her shoulder and listened for the sound of a car on the road. Then she raised the gun and fired through the back of Bill Thayer’s skull.
His head bobbed forward in a sudden nod and his body followed it, toppling straight onto the ground. She squatted beside him to take his wallet out of his back pocket, then pushed him over on his back so she could reach his car keys in front.
She stood and walked calmly to the car, started it, and drove back the way she and Thayer had come, north on Topanga Canyon. She parked his car in the mall parking lot, wiped the steering wheel and door handles clean with one of the alcohol-soaked antibacterial wipes she carried in her purse, then picked up the bag containing her bath salts and walked away.
Nancy thought about the morning’s events as she headed back toward her apartment. She had not wanted to harm Bill Thayer, but he had made it impossible not to. He’d had no right to keep pestering her. What could he possibly have been thinking?
Of course, she knew what he had been thinking. When he had seen the woman he thought of as Tanya Starling, it had probably made him feel excited. He already knew her slightly. She was a small business owner, and he was the manager of her bank. Not only could she be sure he was respectable, but he was powerful. He could raise her credit limit and get her loans approved. He could also get in her way, make things difficult for her. He was a shy, quiet man who had made so little impression on her the first time she’d met him that she had not recognized his face when it was three feet from hers this morning. But he had exercised his power over her, following her from the store, making her talk to him, keeping her from leaving, then making her agree to go somewhere with him. She’d had to get rid of him.
When Nancy reached home, she put on a pair of the rubber gloves she wore to do the dishes and sat at her kitchen table. She took Bill Thayer’s wallet from her purse and examined it. The credit cards were too risky to keep, but he had also been carrying almost a thousand dollars in cash when she had killed him.
A lot of people carried extra cash when they were traveling, but this was better than she had expected. Nancy took the money, wrapped the wallet in a paper towel to disguise its shape, and put it in an opaque trash bag.
Somewhere in the back of her mind was a feeling, almost a physical sensation that had not yet developed into a coherent thought—something pleasant, even titillating.
Her need to end the fear had been like an ache. When she had at last been able to pull out the pistol and blow a round through Thayer’s head, there had been a feeling of release. When she had left his rental car in the plaza parking lot and walked off with her Bloomingdale’s bag, she had felt herself smiling.
Nancy had not allowed herself to acknowledge it yet, but she had been missing the excitement that she took from men. She had missed the anticipation of watching and waiting for the right one, and then the care and calculation of drawing him to her. She had missed the thrill of the next phase, the charged, anxious period of flirtation and speculation, and then the longer game of divulging and concealing, withholding and succumbing. She had especially missed the sweet, warm, lazy time after that, when she was secure in the man’s love, soaking in the attention and the luxury.
Now she was beginning to notice the puzzling fact that she liked the bad parts too. When Dennis had begun to disappoint her, the resentment and anger had made her feel powerful and dangerous and clean—not like a victim, but like a judge and avenger. The building anger had made her feel energetic and purposeful. The single shot had been the best possible climax to the relationship.
She had liked the killing. The breakup with David Larson had shown her that perfectly. When David had betrayed her, she had enjoyed the process of getting angry and rejecting him and punishing him. Seeing his devastation had given her the chance to know how beautiful and desirable she could be. But it wasn’t enough. What
