“During the twenty years I was the D.A.’s investigator, I never had an easy one,” he said. “Not once. Now that there’s money involved, it seems to happen a lot. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Not to me. What did you want to tell me?”
“That Hugo Poole has hired Calvin Dunn.”
“Who’s Calvin Dunn?”
“He’s sort of a well-known figure in this part of the world. If you don’t know anything about him, you should have Jim Spengler run his record for you. Dunn does investigations. I don’t know if he’s still got a license or not, but it doesn’t matter.”
She shrugged. “So Hugo replaced you. I wouldn’t work with you, and I won’t work with him, either.”
He shook his head. “Calvin Dunn doesn’t want to work with you.”
“What do you mean?”
“He works for people who would never go to the police for any reason. If a criminal has a relative kidnapped or a shipment hijacked, he wants to find out who did it. Calvin Dunn will find out. He’s not one of us. He’s one of them. He goes down the rabbit hole, and when he comes back he’s got blood on his teeth, and there’s no rabbit problem anymore.”
“When did Hugo hire him?”
“Today, I think. It could have been yesterday.”
She stared at the wall for a moment. “Why did you decide to tell me this?”
“Because Calvin Dunn is dangerous. He isn’t going to be out collecting evidence or something. He’s not interested in seeing the girl go to trial. Even if you see him go through two sets of metal detectors, you should assume that he’s armed and doesn’t mind if you’re the one he needs to hurt to get to her.”
“Thanks. I appreciate the warning. I probably won’t be the one to run into him, though.”
“Why not?”
“I’ve got to leave for Portland in the morning. My captain let me stay this long only because we thought the California police might stop her on the road. But there are other cases in Portland, so he wants me back.”
Joe Pitt shrugged. “I suppose he’s right. She could turn up anywhere at this point, and L.A. probably isn’t the most likely place now that she’s been here.” He brightened. “You know, since you’re just going to spend tomorrow in airports, you could come downstairs and have a drink with me.”
“I don’t drink.”
“Then come and have a soda with me.”
She gazed at him for a moment, wavering. She detected in herself a kind of affection toward him, maybe just because she had worked with him and then expected not to see him again. She had been feeling very alone, and maybe even depressed tonight. “All right. Just for a little while. Then I have to get to sleep.” She took her purse, went to the door, and opened it for him.
As she walked beside him to the elevator, she sensed an odd feeling of familiarity, and then realized it was walking beside a man in a hotel corridor. It reminded her of being with Kevin.
She dismissed it, irritated at her own stupidity. Joe Pitt was very different from Kevin. The two had absolutely no shared qualities except that they were both about the same height and weight. That had been all that was necessary, she supposed. The voice came from about the same distance above her ear, the sound of his shoes on the hotel carpet was the same, and so it had set off the feeling of loss again.
It was ridiculous, because it wasn’t Kevin that she missed. She missed having another presence, the other person who was seeing things at the same time and reacting, so that her thoughts were not just voices inside her own skull.
She had been surrounded by male colleagues most of the time since the academy, but she had never allowed her relationships with them to become close, let alone romantic. She had exerted her will to ignore any inconvenient feelings. It was like forcing herself to tune out a particular sound so she wouldn’t hear it, and listen instead to the other sounds that competed with it. Any approaches from other cops that she could not ignore she had brushed aside with humor. But now and then she would be surprised by a feeling, a memory, a sound.
She analyzed her vulnerability. Joe Pitt was very male and he was smart, and the fact that he seemed to like her had surprised her, so that forbidden part of her mind had been switched on when she had not been guarding it. All she had to do now was switch it off again.
“I’m only going to stay for ten or fifteen minutes. I’ve still got packing to do, and when I get home I’ll have to try to catch up with what’s been piling up on my desk.”
He pressed the elevator button and the elevator took them downstairs to the lobby. She was surprised when he stopped at the bar, ordered two colas, and carried them to a small table for two. She took hers and said, “I thought you were a drinker.”
He shook his head. “Been known to, but tonight I’m driving.”
So maybe he wasn’t a problem drinker. She found that she was losing one of the barriers that had kept her distant from him. She had to build others, distract herself, keep everything impersonal. “What do you think of the fact that she’s killed a woman this time? They were always men before.”
“Don’t you ever think about anything besides the case you’re on?”
“I’m still learning. You’ve seen more killing sprees than I have. I’ve seen solitary men, or pairs of men doing strings of killings. I’ve seen one where there was a man taking his girlfriend along for the ride. Have you ever worked a case where a woman traveled around alone killing people?”
“Is learning the only interest you have in men, or is it just me?”
“I don’t think I know what you mean.”
“You’re interviewing me. I feel as though there’s a tape recorder in your purse. Why not let yourself relax? Your subconscious will still be working on the case, I promise.”
“I’m just making conversation,” she said. “The case is what you and I have in common.”
“We have lots of things in common. We just don’t know each other well enough to know what they are. We need to tell our life stories.”
“No, we don’t.”
“I’ll start. I was raised in Grand Island, Nebraska. I dropped out of college, spent four years in the air force, and then became a state trooper. Then I was a police officer in Los Angeles, and finally became a district attorney’s investigator. I retired from that a couple of years ago, and now I’m a private investigator.”
“Okay,” she said. “I was raised in Portland a few blocks from where I live now. I graduated from college, got married instead of going to law school, dropped out of the marriage, and then went to the police academy. I’m still in the first law enforcement job I ever had.”
“See? Our lives are exactly alike.”
She laughed. “Uncanny resemblance.”
“If I fly up to Portland tomorrow, will you have dinner with me?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t date people from work.”
“Wait a minute. You’ve made it very clear that you and I are not working together, and that we aren’t going to be working together. We don’t live in the same city, or even the same state. There’s no way I can be considered to be ‘from work.’ ”
“I guess that’s probably true,” she said. “But people up there know who you are. They know we were on the same case, traveling and sharing information. If you turn up when I do and take me out, it will put me in an uncomfortable position.”
“Why?”
“People will think that we’re sleeping together.”
“Do you always behave like this—all these rules?”
“Yes.”
“Then they won’t think that.”
She laughed again and shook her head. “I’ll go out with you. I
“Starving.”
“Then let’s go across the lobby to the coffee shop and see if we can get a booth.”
