woman who lived across the hall from her was stabbed to death with a butcher knife. LAPD is saying that it seems as though a dangerous, angry man is looking for her, and killing anyone who tries to protect her.”
“I’ve heard that theory.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Not much.” He stared into her eyes. “But I don’t know much about these things.”
“No?”
“No. You’re the cop. I’m just a small businessman. But it seems to me that all of these theories are based on the idea that women don’t kill people.”
“True.”
“It seems to me your colleagues aren’t willing to see anything that isn’t statistically likely, because they’re afraid of looking stupid.”
“You could be right. But it’s hard to prove that somebody isn’t after her. And the only person anybody can think of who has a motive to hunt for her, and might have found it necessary to kill anyone near her, is you.”
“I haven’t been out of town since I was in Portland with you.”
“The last two were in Los Angeles. The hotel was right up there on Wilshire.”
“I haven’t been in any hotels lately. You said there are pictures of her on the security tapes. Did you see any pictures of me?”
“No. But I didn’t see any pictures of anyone else, either.”
“Then she did it herself.”
Catherine hesitated. “I’ll be honest with you, Hugo, but I need you to be honest with me too. I think she’s the only one. But if there’s anything going on down here that would have made someone kill your cousin, I need to know about it. Now.”
Hugo Poole shook his head and held out his hands. “I don’t have any active enemies that I know about. I haven’t heard a word from anybody taking credit for Dennis and threatening me. And I didn’t kill any of these people or pay anybody to do it.”
“I noticed that you didn’t say that you’ve never killed anyone.”
“And I noticed that the cops haven’t been able to find one young girl in all this time, even though she’s been leaving bodies all over the place.”
“She’ll be found. Be sure of that.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you?”
She looked at him closely. “No. I just had to check and see if you knew anything I didn’t.”
He walked to the door and held it open for her. “Then you’d better be going. The traffic gets bad in this part of town right about this time of the afternoon.”
“Well, thanks for your time, Hugo. Take care.”
She walked past him into the carpeted upper level of the theater and let Otto conduct her to the front door. When Hobbes was outside and walking toward her car, she took her cell phone out of her purse and pretended to dial it. Then she said in a voice too low to be audible beyond a few feet, “Did you get all that?”
Jim Spengler’s voice said, “Sure. I haven’t heard the recording, of course, but it should be fine.”
“Thanks for doing it,” she said. “Not that it got us anything.”
“Do you think he was lying?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t see any sign that he was lying, and I’m good at spotting it. I think he was actually glad to see me at first, because he thought I’d come to tell him we had Tanya Starling.” She reached her car. “Well, I’m at my car. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”
“Wait,” said Spengler. “I’ve got news.”
“What is it?”
“Remember that I was checking other homicides that happened since she came to town? Well, after you left, the detective who was working on another case came to talk to me. He was investigating the murder of a young man a couple of weeks ago. The victim was a bank branch manager from San Francisco named William Thayer. He was here to visit his family. He was found shot in the head in a picnic area in the hills above Malibu. His car was found in the parking lot of the Topanga Plaza, about a mile from the apartment building where Nancy Mills lived. It seems the dead guy was the manager of the bank branch where Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge had a joint account.”
“Shit.”
“What?”
“Nothing. I’ll be there soon.”
Inside the lobby of the Empire Theater, Otto locked the front door again. He watched Detective Hobbes get into her car and drive away, then turned to see Hugo Poole standing behind him, watching too. Hugo asked, “Did she say anything to you on her way out?”
“No. Anything I need to know?”
Hugo Poole nodded. “Yeah. All this time has gone by, and they’re no closer to finding the woman who killed my cousin than they were two months ago.”
“They’re not?”
“No. She was back here to see if I did it. She’s starting over.”
“Is there something you want done to speed this up?”
“See if you can reach Calvin Dunn. Tell him I want him.”
21
It was three-thirty A.M. and Nancy Mills seemed to be getting used up. She had been driving for hours and she was on the outskirts of Flagstaff, Arizona. At night like this, the city looked like an outpost on another planet. She found a street on the southwest side of the city where there were a few run-down apartments, parked Mary Tilson’s car by the curb in front of an empty lot, and opened the trunk. She needed to cut down on what she was carrying.
She put her money and the drabbest, plainest clothes she had into one suitcase. She put the Colt Python pistol that had been Carl’s into the zippered pocket on the outside of her suitcase, checked to be sure the smaller pistol she had taken from Mary Tilson’s bedroom was loaded, and slipped it into her purse. She closed the trunk, then drove until she came to a shopping center, and cruised along the back of a row of stores until she found a dumpster. She placed the unwanted second suitcase into it, and drove off again.
She was lost in a way that felt hopeless, because there wasn’t any place she was looking for, or any reason to believe that anywhere she stopped was going to be safe. She knew that she had to find a way to get some sleep. When she turned onto the next street, she saw that there were cars parked all along the curb, below some apartment buildings. She let the car coast to a stop and looked around her. Maybe if her car was parked with so many others, she could sleep in the back seat and nobody would notice her until morning.
But she couldn’t let herself be here in the morning. The sun would come up, the new day would already be under way, and she would be caught in the light in the open.
She had to think hard, but she was so tired that getting her brain to do more than keep the car on the road was too much effort. She drove on for another mile of flat pavement, each side lined by one-story bungalows on plots of land that had ornamental stones or desert brush instead of grass.
She realized that it was the car that was making her vulnerable. The police would be searching for it, and without it she would look just like anyone else—just an anonymous girl. That gave her an idea, and she drove on, following the signs toward the airport. She parked the car in the long-term lot, wiped off the steering wheel, door handles, and trunk lid, took her suitcase, and caught the shuttle bus to the terminal.
She went inside the baggage area to the row of courtesy telephones for local hotels, picked the ones near the airport, and began trying to find a vacancy. When she found a room at one called the Sky Inn, the man at the desk asked for her name. She hesitated. The police were looking for Rachel Sturbridge and Tanya Starling, and probably Nancy Mills by now, so she said, “Nicole Davis.” It was one of the names she had used in college when she had gone out alone. She stepped outside and into the first taxi at the curb.
When she arrived at the Sky Inn, she saw that the clerk who had talked to her was in his twenties but had
