and having power was a new feeling for Tyler. He had to guard it. He pretended that he had not noticed the television. He moved off, mopping the floor near the front window, where he could not see the television screen, and thought about the pretty young woman and what he should do with her.
At three o’clock, Tyler took the mop and bucket he was using into the back of the kitchen, leaned the mop handle against the wall, and continued out the back door. He got into his car and drove it toward the bus station.
Nicole Davis had stopped for a quiet lunch in a small Mexican restaurant a block away from the bus station, and looked at her bus schedule. There was a bus leaving for Santa Fe, New Mexico, tomorrow at ten in the morning, so she had returned to the station and bought a ticket. She would get another night’s sleep, then take the bus to Santa Fe.
She knew she was probably too early to get into her new room, but she seemed to have accomplished what she could for the moment, so she began to make her way back. She headed in the right direction, but after a time she did not see any buildings she remembered. She had somehow gone past the street where she should have turned. At each intersection she stared up the street and down, until she recognized the sign above a store on the corner two blocks to her left.
She considered correcting her course, but the street she was on had a long row of two-story buildings that threw shade across the sidewalk, and the shops had window displays of jewelry with turquoise and coral set in silver, weavings that might be Indian, and pretty clothes.
As she walked she could see that she was going to approach the hotel from the back, and that seemed fine to her. But as she came closer, she saw something else. There were four cars parked near the loading dock, all of them big American-made sedans that had short antennas sticking up on their trunks, identical but in assorted colors: navy blue, white, black. There were two men inside one of them. One seemed to be talking on a radio, and the other had his head bent down as though he was writing something.
Nicole stopped and retreated a few steps, until she was out of sight of the cars. She wanted to run, but she had to control herself, and fight the panic. She told herself there was no good reason to assume they were here for her. She walked back the way she had come for two blocks, then turned, making a wide circle around the building, trying to see more of it without being seen.
From the front, the hotel looked exactly the same. There were no police cars, no big men standing around. When she came to the parking lot side, she picked out the window of the room where she had spent last night. It was on the second floor, three windows from the elevator shaft. The curtain was open, and she saw a man walk past the window and disappear.
She walked quickly back toward the bus station. As she walked, she took out her bus schedule and scanned it. There was a bus leaving for Phoenix in thirty minutes. When she arrived, she bought a ticket for that bus, then sat in the dismal waiting room to stay out of the sun. But after a few minutes she began to be aware that somebody was staring at her.
A teenaged boy must have come in the side entrance while she was buying her ticket, and now he stood near the wall watching her. He was tall and thin with sandy blond hair, and when she looked at him, his blue eyes would turn away, toward other people in the station, then look out the windows at the street, and then return to her again, staying on her unblinking until the next time she caught him at it.
She went outside and waited near the pay phone until she saw her bus arrive and discharge the passengers from its last leg. When their luggage had been unloaded and the driver was standing by the door taking tickets from the line of new passengers, Nicole stepped to the telephone and dialed the front desk of the hotel. She heard the young girl answer, “Sky Inn. May I help you?”
Nicole Davis said, “This is police dispatch. Are any of the officers who are waiting for the female suspect close to you now?”
The girl said, “Yes. Would you like to speak with one of them?”
Nicole Davis said, “Cancel that. We’ve just reached the one we wanted by radio. Thank you.” She hung up and walked toward the line of passengers waiting to board the bus.
Suddenly the teenaged boy who had been staring at her came out of the side door of the bus station, stopped a few feet ahead of her, and said, “Come with me. Hurry.” His expression was anxious and scared, and even though he was as tall as a man it made him look young, like a boy.
She said, “What?”
“I know you,” he said with quiet urgency. “I saw you on TV. I can get you out of here. I’ve got a car.”
She looked at him for a moment, then at the bus. She put her ticket into her purse and walked toward him. She followed him from the station at a distance of about ten feet all the way down the block. He went to a small, dark blue Mazda with dark tinted windows that was parked beside the curb. He opened the door for her and she got in.
When he sat down behind the wheel, she was staring at him. “How old are you?”
His blue eyes clouded, and his soft, unlined face seemed to flatten with disappointment. “I’m sixteen. Now you don’t want my help, right?”
“Yes. I want your help. Please.”
He glanced into his mirrors, then cautiously pulled away from the curb. The sound of sirens reached their ears. He looked at her furtively as he drove down the street away from the bus station. “The cops are coming from the other direction, where their station is.”
“And where are we going?”
“My place.”
22
It was Catherine Hobbes’s last night in Los Angeles. Mary Tilson’s car had not turned up, and Catherine had a reservation for a morning flight to Portland. She sat at the desk in her hotel room making an inventory of the duplicate case files from the murders of Brian Corey, William Thayer, and Mary Tilson before packing them. As she leafed through the collections of photographs, lab reports, interview notes, and drawings, she began to feel a sensation of dread. All of this had happened in a period of just a few weeks since Tanya had arrived in Los Angeles.
Catherine had seen videotapes of Tanya and spoken to her on the telephone. Tanya had seemed very young and harmless, maybe even a little empty-headed, someone Catherine had needed to explain things to. But what had been behind Tanya’s pretty face and her soft, feminine voice had been this—the capacity and intention to cause the horrors in these files.
A knock on the door of her hotel room startled her. She left the files on the desk, flopped on the bed to reach into her purse, came up with her service pistol, then stepped to the door and looked through the small fish-eye lens into the hallway.
She held the gun behind her right thigh and opened the door. Joe Pitt stood in the doorway wearing a sport coat and a shirt that seemed better than the ones she had seen him in before. “You?” she said. “I thought I’d already given you the brush-off.”
“You did,” he said. “I’ve never been so thoroughly dismissed in my life.”
“I just wanted to get that straight. So what are you doing here?”
“I’m not making any money on this visit, but it’s business related. I’d have to say it’s not going to make you happy.”
“As long as it doesn’t involve my making you happy, you can come in.” She stepped away from the door, and he could see she had been holding her gun in her right hand. She slipped it back into her purse.
He advanced past her into the area near the window, where there was an armchair. “Kill any bellhops?”
“Not when they were on duty.” She closed her files and piled them on the desk, then sat down on the bed. “Go ahead. Make me miserable.”
“I heard something tonight that you need to know.”
“Hugo Poole sent you to tell me he didn’t kill anybody. I already knew that.”
“I don’t work for Hugo anymore. He paid my fee and we parted company.”
“That was a great job. You didn’t even have to show up.”
