She said, “The manager says Nancy Mills didn’t have a car.”
Spengler said, “That’s right. Ron, get a description of Mary Tilson’s car, check the parking spaces downstairs and see if her car is gone. If it is, run her name and get the license and description on the air. Dave, get on the radio and let them know what we’ve got here.”
He saw the forensic team move to the doorway and peer inside before stepping in. “Toni, you want us to call for reinforcements?”
“Thanks, Jim, but I’ll call them myself as soon as I’ve taken a look.”
“Fine.” He turned back to the other police officers. “Al, see if anything is missing in the apartment, especially credit cards or ATM cards. If they are, get started on finding out if they’ve been used yet.”
The detectives moved off, and Catherine went down the hall to Mr. Norris. She said, “I’d like to take a look at Nancy Mills’s rental agreement.”
They entered Mr. Norris’s apartment, and he produced a file from a desk drawer. Inside were five-page lease agreements for all of the tenants. Catherine leafed through them carefully until she found the one that said Nancy Mills. Norris said, “You can take that one if you want. I’ve got a Xerox copy in the file, and the rental company has a duplicate original.”
“Thank you,” she said. “Do you have a spare file folder or an envelope?”
“Sure.” He handed her a manila envelope.
“Thanks very much,” she said. She slipped the agreement inside, and walked out of the room. She went down the hall and found Toni in the kitchen of apartment 4.
She said, “Toni, this is the rental agreement for Nancy Mills. I’d appreciate it if you could take it to the lab and examine it for latent prints.”
Toni took it. “Sure thing. I’ll try dipping it in ninhydrin to bring up the amino acids, and give you a call.” She put it into a cardboard carton with her growing collection of plastic evidence bags.
Catherine turned to Spengler, who was staring down at the body of Mary Tilson. He said, “I guess this just about finishes the idea that the girl is the one doing this stuff. I can’t see her cutting a woman like that and leaving her to bleed out on the floor.”
Catherine walked out of the room, down the hall, and outside, where she leaned against the car and took a few breaths of air. Her mind had been fully occupied since the moment she had arrived, but now it was still racing, and there was little for her to do until either the crime-scene technicians or the officers searching for the girl gave her something new to interpret.
Her mind kept returning to Joe Pitt. She was tempted to call him and tell him what she thought of him for interfering with the relations between her and the Los Angeles police. But this was his town, where he had been the D.A.’s investigator. She had no right to tell him what to say to the L.A. police, and any homicide detective here would know him personally. He had seen the photograph in the paper and recognized Tanya, and he’d had to report it. But why had he called the L.A. homicide people, and not her? She could think of two answers, without even asking him: the newspaper had said to call Spengler, so he had. And she had essentially told him not to bother her again, and so he hadn’t.
17
As the girl drove along Interstate 15, the brightly lighted hotels appeared against the sky in the distance, and minutes later the town rose up around her. She was afraid to stop, but she was too tired not to. She had been up since sunrise, spent the day on her feet, and then been forced to defend herself from Mary’s ugly demands and clean up afterward. The hours of driving since then had drained the last of her nervous energy.
She saw the exit for the Mandalay Bay hotel, and then she was on it, and then in the thick traffic on the strip. The first place where she was able to make a right turn was the entrance to the MGM Grand, so she gave her car to the parking attendant there and watched him drive it into the parking structure.
She wanted to check into a hotel and sleep, but she didn’t dare. If the police were searching for her, one of the things they would do right away was get in touch with the Las Vegas hotels. She was hungry, so she went inside to the long promenade where the restaurants were and looked into a few. The customers had all moved into the drinking phase of the evening, so she kept going.
She found a coffee shop farther on the promenade, bought a piece of lemon cake she saw in the glass case, and ate it. She rested her eyes and cradled her head in her arms for a moment. When she awoke, there was a tall man in a dark blue suit standing over her. As he leaned closer, she could hear low-volume radio chatter coming from his coat pocket. He said, “Miss? Are you all right?”
“Huh? Oh my gosh,” she said. “I must have dozed off.”
His sympathetic concern vanished. This was not a medical emergency. “You can’t sleep here.” It was as though he had already heard and penetrated the lie she had not told yet.
She stood, took her purse, and strode off. She had the feeling that he was behind her, talking into the radio about her. She never decreased her speed until she was out of the building.
For the next few hours she was one of the thousands of people walking from casino to casino. She had stopped in Las Vegas to rest, but there seemed to be no way for her to do it. When she was too tired to keep walking she would sit at a table in a bar and order a soft drink. She caught another catnap at six A.M. on the couch in a ladies’ room in Caesars, but the attendant politely woke her as soon as she had entered deep sleep. Later in the morning she ate brunch at the Aladdin. When big groups of people began to check out of the hotels at ten- thirty, she joined the line at the entrance to the MGM and had the valet retrieve her car.
She drove out the Boulder Highway toward Henderson, and stopped at a shopping mall. She left her car inside the parking structure, where it would be less visible, and walked to the mall’s cinema complex. She bought a ticket to the first movie that was showing. It was an awful film about two evil children, and there were few other people in the theater to watch it, so she found a seat in the middle of a row and fell asleep. She spent the whole afternoon and evening in the complex, going from one small theater to the next, each time sleeping for an hour or two and waking when the lights came up and people shuffled out.
When she felt that she was able to drive again, she ate dinner in a Denny’s in Henderson. It was eleven-thirty when she drove into the desert to the east. She had wasted a whole day in Las Vegas, and she was nearly as tired as she had been when she had arrived.
Her troubles were building up. She had done a rash, unconsidered thing, but it had not really been her fault. She had not set out to kill Mary Tilson. She just had not been able to think of a way to avoid it. Mary Tilson wouldn’t shut up, and she wouldn’t leave her alone, and she couldn’t be dissuaded from calling the police.
She was just a regular person who had always wanted what everybody else wanted—to be happy. She had been smart in school and had been accepted to the University of Illinois. She remembered that the letter had arrived in April, and she had taped it to the wall of her bedroom so she could look at it every morning when she woke up, and every night when she went to bed. The habit had lasted until June. It was a Sunday when everything had changed.
She remembered waking up and seeing the letter that morning: “Dear Charlene Buckner: It is my pleasure to inform you . . .” She had used a single small piece of tape on the top so she could take it down in September and bring it with her in case she needed to prove that she had been accepted.
As she always did, she lay in her bed, looked at the tone of the light, and touched the wall beside her bed to see if it was warm or cool, because that side was the outer wall of the house. She could feel that it was warm. In those few seconds she sensed that something was wrong. The house was more than quiet. It was a vacuum, because something big had moved on, and nothing had yet filled the space. She knew what it was.
She got up and stepped to the door of her mother’s bedroom. The drawers of the dresser were still open, a little askew and out of their tracks because her mother had been in a hurry to empty them.
Charlene walked through the little house, moving from room to room and looking. She was not exactly searching for her mother, just looking at her world to see what it looked like without her. There was a note on the kitchen table, a glass placed on it to hold it down, as though a wind might blow through and take it. Charlene picked up the glass and smelled the strong, turpentine scent of whiskey, so she set it in the sink with the other dirty dishes.
She picked up the note. “Dear Char, I had an unexpected opportunity, and I had to take it. If you need to
