around him and pressed herself against his back, rocking slightly from side to side. “That was really nice,” she whispered.
He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh. “Yes.”
She felt her muscles tighten. “That’s all? You don’t want to say something sweet to me?”
He turned, and that disengaged her arms from him. He placed his hands on her shoulders and held her there while he looked into her eyes, then kissed her forehead. “I loved this evening. I think you’re a really special person, and I feel lucky to have met you.”
“But?”
“I should have told you before. I have a girlfriend back in Miami. She and I have been together for over two years.”
Nancy shrugged, knowing it made her look good and that the top of the bathrobe would open a bit wider. “I’m really not that naive, Brian. I knew when I saw you that I wasn’t the first girl you’d ever met, and it’s not like I thought that other girls wouldn’t be interested in you.”
“I really haven’t been honest with you, or with her. I loved tonight, but I didn’t really have the right to be with you. I was standing here thinking how unfair I’ve been.”
She embraced him tightly. “I understand. This was just a one-time thing. It was only for tonight, and when it’s over, that’s it. But why ruin it? What if this turned out to be the last night of your life?”
“That’s a funny way to look at it.”
She smiled up at him, and she knew she was alluring. “It’s the only way to look at it. If it was the end of your life, how would you want to have spent it—alone or with me, the way you are?”
“With you.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Then smile.”
He gave her the smile she had asked for, and took her in his arms. They moved off the balcony and into the room. It was a moment before the bathrobe dropped to the floor and they were together on the bed again. This time there was something better than the eagerness and haste of the first. She imagined them to be a pair of lovers who had become old friends, and somehow had learned to enjoy each other without all the pain and hurt feelings and failed attempts to connect that people had when they were actively in love. She moved into a cycle of pure selfish wanting and receiving and appreciating and wanting. Then she lay motionless on the bed again.
Nancy waited until Brian got up and went out to the balcony again. Then she crawled to the side of the bed and swung her legs to put her feet on the floor near her pile of clothes. She dressed silently and efficiently.
She moved closer to the balcony, and she could see past him to the city below. It was the darkest, quietest time. The lightbulbs that were ever going to be switched off were off now. The fog had slid in from the Pacific, and dimmed even the streetlamps and traffic signals.
She took her first step on the concrete surface of the balcony, then the second, each quicker. If he heard her, he expected her to come up from behind and put her arms around him, just as she had done before. He did not move. He was still leaning forward, his arms crossed and his elbows on the railing.
Nancy went low, clamped her arms tightly around his knees, her legs already straightening to lift him up over the railing. Brian’s head and upper torso had already been past the railing and leaning before she’d arrived, and he began toppling over the edge before he had any notion of what was happening. His arms started flailing now that there was nothing but air for him to grasp, and he half-twisted to try to face her, but his sudden movement only helped to propel him over. In an instant he was free of restraint, falling. As he went he said something that sounded like “Unh?” Nancy stopped herself against the railing and watched him accelerating toward the earth.
It took a long time for him to fall eight floors. She watched until he hit the concrete walkway beside the building, bounced upward a foot or two, and then lay still. She could already see that there was a splash of blood where he lay, but she had no more time to look. She snatched his wallet, then wiped a towel over the glass she had used and the doorknobs and faucet handles, and quietly closed the door behind her.
Nancy knew without having to think about it that it would be best not to be in an elevator, so she stepped into the nearest stairwell. She took the stairs all the way down to the bottom, moving as quickly as she could. The door was locked where it met the parking garage, so she had to go up one flight, come out on the lobby level, and go outside. She avoided the parking attendant, hurried around the building to the entrance to the lot, went down and found Brian’s rental car with the key under the visor. She got in, started it, and drove up the ramp onto the street.
She turned to the east and then north, and drove as far as a public parking lot on Hollywood Way near the Burbank airport. She parked the car, then walked to the airport. She waited two hours until the first flights of the morning arrived at seven, stepped out of the terminal in the middle of a group of arriving passengers, and waited her turn for a taxi.
14
Catherine Hobbes placed the two photographs together on her desk, and looked from one to the other. Then she picked up the telephone and dialed the captain’s office. “Mike, this is Hobbes. I’ve got something I think you should see.”
She released the telephone and walked down the hall to the last office. She opened the door, then walked to the big desk where Captain Mike Farber, chief of homicide, waited for her. She reached across the desk and set the driver’s license photograph of the young blond woman in front of him. “This is the Illinois DMV’s latest license picture of Tanya Starling. It was taken less than a year ago.” She set the second photograph directly below it. “This is the picture the California DMV sent us from the driver’s license issued to Rachel Sturbridge. It was taken a month ago.”
Mike Farber was a big, broad man about fifty-five years old, with bristly gray hair. He leaned down for a moment to study the photographs, then looked up at Catherine Hobbes. “Looks like you’re not looking for an innocent witness anymore. What do you want to do about her?”
“I think it’s time to get a new notice made up and sent out to other agencies,” she said.
“We’ll want to get the D.A.’s office in on this right away. I’ll handle that. We can get a warrant on the false ID at least, and possibly intent to flee. That way we can get her held wherever she turns up.”
“She has turned up, in a way,” said Catherine. “She wouldn’t tell me where she was calling from, just Southern California. The phone company says it was a pay telephone somewhere in the 818 area code. That’s the northwest part of Los Angeles. It’s where Rachel Sturbridge’s car was sold. I’d like to go down there to see if I can pick up her trail.”
He studied her for a moment, then nodded. “Hand off the cases you have and go get her, Cath.”
It took Catherine Hobbes two hours to clear her desk of the cases she had been working on by giving them to the other detectives, and to prepare to make another trip out of Portland. The first plane to Los Angeles she could get left early that evening.
On the plane she kept working her way through the telephone conversation she’d had with Tanya Starling. She had sounded very young, and maybe a little bit slow. Catherine had spent much of the time trying to persuade her that being wanted for questioning in a murder case was a serious matter, not something that she could ignore. She had worried about Tanya, because it might take a certain amount of common sense for a person like her—a potential suspect who appeared to have fled—even to get arrested safely.
But as soon as Catherine had looked at the two photographs on the two driver’s licenses, she had begun to get a different feeling about Tanya. Innocent bystanders and slow learners with nothing to hide didn’t turn up with two driver’s licenses in different names.
As the plane came closer to Los Angeles, Catherine couldn’t help remembering that Los Angeles was where Hugo Poole and Joe Pitt lived. She kept catching herself constructing scenes in which she would call Joe Pitt to let him know what was happening. He would offer to help her get around the unfamiliar city, and maybe to help her get the best cooperation from the local police. Every time she caught herself thinking about calling him, she shook her head and cut the vision short. She knew that she had only been imagining these things because she had somehow allowed herself to think about him in a romantic way. She could recognize the idea of calling him for what it was— not a rational plan of action but the foundation for a fantasy.
