“I was still back on the part about single-woman etiquette. You said you’ve been single for a long time, as though you weren’t always. Have you ever been married?”
She frowned. She had been careless, because she hadn’t been thinking about herself, or about him: she had been thinking about the sequence of events at the crime scene. “Yeah,” she said. “I was.” She avoided his eyes. Could he possibly not know that bringing up a woman’s failed marriage would cause her pain?
“When were you married?”
“None of your business.” She still didn’t look at him.
“Come on. What am I going to do, gossip? Nobody knows you down here, and all I asked was when. That’s a public record. I could look it up.”
She turned to him, feigning boredom with the topic. “A long time ago. We were young, just out of college. It was a classic starter marriage. After a couple of years we both started to realize that we’d made a mistake.”
“What was your reason?”
All right, she thought. Evasion would just prolong the badgering. “He had a problem with the ‘forsaking all others’ part.”
“So you got a divorce. And that’s how you got to be an expert on women living alone.”
“Correct. Divorce is a costly way to find out how to choreograph murders of single women, but it works.”
“Okay,” he said. “For the moment, we don’t have any sign it was a man. But my gut is telling me there is one.” He looked over the lab reports.
From across the room Al Ramirez, one of the officers who had been at the apartment building, called out, “Detective Hobbes? There’s a call for you from your department. Captain Farber.”
She stood. “That’s my boss. Where can I take it?”
“That phone on the desk in the corner. I transferred it.”
“Thanks.” She stepped over and picked it up. “Mike?”
She noticed that Jim Spengler had found something to do that kept him nearby, in earshot. The captain said, “Hi, Cath. What’s up?”
“Tanya Starling was here in Los Angeles, using the name Nancy Mills. She seems to have pushed a man off an eighth-floor balcony at the Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills the night before last.”
“How do you know it was her?”
“She got herself on another hotel security camera.”
“Pushing him?”
“No. Picking him up in a bar earlier that night. The LAPD released a picture of her with him. She seems to have seen it and panicked. She packed up, cleaned her apartment, killed the woman in the apartment across the hall from hers, and went off in the victim’s car.”
“You really think she’s doing all of this herself?”
“You sound just like Jim Spengler, the homicide detective in charge of the case.” She looked at Spengler, who shrugged. “Who also sounds like Joe Pitt, and everybody else. I can place her in Dennis Poole’s hotel room in Aspen with a picture and witnesses, and her hair places her in his house. I have pictures that can put her in a room in the Hilton hotel with the second victim, Brian Corey, and a fingerprint that places her in the apartment where Mary Tilson was murdered. What I can’t do is find a single bit of evidence that there was an unknown man with her, or after her.”
“I’ve seen a few pros who could come looking for her, kill witnesses, and take the evidence with them. I’m just saying, don’t rule out the man just yet. I assume the LAPD has the car’s description and plates out to every department.”
“Yes. I think we’re about twelve hours behind her. I think she’ll get as far as she can in a day or two, and then dump it.”
“So what do the L.A. cops need you for?”
“I suppose they don’t. I’d like to stay at least another day in case the car is found and she’s still in it.”
“All right. You’ve got a day. And I know how I want you to spend it. We still don’t know for sure that Dennis Poole’s murder wasn’t some kind of reprisal against his cousin Hugo—whether the girl did it, or someone helped her, or someone came for Dennis and she became an inconvenient witness.”
“How can I eliminate a reprisal against Hugo Poole?”
“Find out if Hugo Poole is fighting back.”
Catherine Hobbes parked her rental car on Sheldrake Avenue and dialed the number of the homicide office on her cell phone.
“Spengler.”
“It’s me. I’m on Sheldrake and I can see the theater.”
“I hear you.”
“All right. Here goes.” She put the cell phone into the compartment on the side of her purse without ending the call, got out of the car, and walked toward the old movie theater. Long experience made her dislike being on foot and alone in this kind of neighborhood: there was nobody else walking, and there seemed to be no place to take a defensive position, only big brick office buildings with bars across their doorways. She considered the possibility that Hugo Poole cast such a big shadow that it kept minor predators away from his door.
When she reached the front of the theater, a tall, muscular man about thirty-five years old was waiting on the other side of the glass with a set of keys. He unlocked the door and held it open for her, then scanned up and down the street before he closed and locked it again.
“I’m Sergeant Hobbes, Portland Police.”
“I know.”
“And you are—?”
“We’re not in Portland.”
The man turned, and she followed him into a big, ornate old lobby with an empty glass candy counter and faded art deco murals on the walls. He climbed a carpeted staircase to the upper hallway. On both ends of the hallway were loges, but in the middle there was a wall of dark polished hardwood. It took her a moment to see that there were two doors cut into the wood. One had worn gold letters that said PROJECTION, and the other was unmarked. The man knocked on that one, and a muffled voice said, “Come in.”
The man held the door open for Catherine Hobbes. “Thanks, Otto,” said the voice inside, and Catherine entered.
Hugo Poole stood behind a big old desk that must have been part of the theater’s original furnishings. He came around it, smiling. “Hello, Catherine. Or is it Cathy?”
“It’s Sergeant.”
“Oh. Should I be asking to see a warrant?”
“I’m just here to chat. When I called, I figured you would have Joe Pitt with you. Is he on his way?”
“No. I paid him off, and he went back to gambling full time.” Hugo Poole looked at her suspiciously, and for a moment she wondered if he had sensed that her question had a personal interest behind it. But he said, “I don’t know if you’re wearing a wire or not. I often have Otto frisk visitors who might mean us harm. With you that policy seemed fraught with difficulties.”
“Yes,” she said. “Fraught.”
“So I’ll have to assume you are wired.”
“Suit yourself.”
“Are you here to tell me you’ve finally caught Tanya Starling?”
“No, I’m here because a disturbing suggestion keeps coming up as we search for her.”
“What’s that?”
“She seems to be doing things that some of my colleagues believe she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do—at least alone. They think that your cousin Dennis was killed by some man who was trying to hurt you, and she was either a witness or an accomplice.”
Hugo Poole stared at her unhappily, but said nothing.
She said, “Two days ago, another man she had been with in a hotel fell off an eighth-floor balcony. There are pictures of her on the hotel security tapes, just as there were with your cousin Dennis. The day after that, the
