room, sipped her coffee, and stared down at the city of Portland. Each morning since she had returned from Albuquerque, she had gone to work at five-thirty so she could spend an hour or two before her shift trying to follow cold leads to Tanya. It had been a month since Tanya had made the call to this house from Albuquerque and then disappeared again, and Catherine had begun to let a new possibility enter her mind.
Not all serial killers got caught. Catherine had thought Tanya would turn up in Albuquerque, but there was no guarantee she would ever be recognized again anywhere. At some point people would say, “Maybe she died.” Or, “Maybe she’s in a prison somewhere for something else.” But she wouldn’t be, and from time to time, when the urge came on her again, she would kill someone else.
Catherine put her coffee cup in the sink and went to find the lightweight hooded raincoat she kept for unpredicted rains. She slung it over her forearm, checked her watch, and appraised herself in the mirror near the stairs. The gray suit looked good, so she ran an inventory of the gear by touch: the belt with her gold badge clipped to the right of the buckle, the handcuffs at the hip, the pistol on her belt to the right side of her spine under the tailored coat.
She went downstairs and out to the garage, got into her teal blue Acura, and conceded that she was letting her mood weaken her. She had even failed to keep herself from thinking about what day this was. The divorce had happened long enough ago so the day shouldn’t matter anymore. It was the twenty-first of August—Kevin’s birthday. He would be—what? Thirty-five—today.
Each year had made her feel it less and less, and after eight years, Kevin was no longer real. He existed only as a part of her mind now, an altered point in her brain. What would the doctors call it? A lesion. Everything in medicine was a lesion, from a mild scratch to a fatal tumor.
The part that was hard to believe now was that Kevin had been the other half of the conversation for so long. She had been with him for years and talked without any dissembling, and eventually without filtering or even reserve. When, at any time during those years, she had said something funny or profound, he was the one who had heard it, and probably the only one. For years after the divorce there had been times when she would catch herself in a forgetful impulse to describe something, and then remember that he wasn’t there anymore. There were other times when she would be talking to someone else—a friend, a colleague—and realize that the point she was making was something that she had heard Kevin say.
The birthday was not a good memory. It had been on his twenty-seventh birthday that the quiet explosion had occurred. She had taken a half day off from her job at the brokerage. At just before noon she had rushed out, bought a birthday cake, and gone to his office to surprise him. She remembered that when she had grasped the doorknob of the office on the fifth floor, she had sensed that something was different. She had felt odd, almost dizzy, and she had attributed it to the elevator ride, but it didn’t feel that way. It had felt as though she were holding on while a subtle tottering of the universe occurred, a tremor.
She opened the outer door of the office and walked into silence. The sales center wasn’t the sort of place where customers simply walked in, because the company worked on enormous construction projects. Usually somebody stayed to watch the office during lunch, but the desks were empty. It occurred to her that maybe the whole office had shut down and taken Kevin out to lunch to celebrate. It was a young, social group, and Kevin was a popular manager. She should have called ahead instead of surprising him, she thought, and then she could have gone too. He would have loved that.
The thought gave her an idea. Maybe there was a notation somewhere, a scrawl that would tell her where they had gone. Paula, the receptionist, would be the one likely to have made the reservation, so Catherine looked first at the notepad on her desk, then the Rolodex, to see if the card that was showing was a restaurant. It wasn’t.
Catherine went past the empty desks in the outer office, through the bay past deserted cubicles, to the hallway that led to the offices of the sales executives. She knocked on Kevin’s door, then opened it.
He wasn’t there. She went to his desk to see if there was anything on his calendar. There were a few scribbled lines—his morning appointments, a meeting at four. She put the cake on his desk, then sat in his chair and typed on his computer, “Happy birthday, Kev. I just stopped by for a minute to tell you I love you. See you later, Catherine.” She highlighted it, made the type twenty-eight point and red, and left it on his screen.
She was pleased with that, because it implied that she had just breezed through in a rush, and not that she had blown half a day of work for nothing. He would feel happy instead of disappointed or guilty. She stood up, stepped out of the office, and heard something down the hall. It seemed to be a muffled female voice, as though one of the salespeople had stayed and was on the telephone. There was the voice again. It was definitely a woman’s. Maybe she would know where Kevin was.
She followed the sound to a door down the hall. She put her ear to the door. She knew. There was no way to introduce doubt, no way for Catherine to save herself. Catherine had no right to open the door, but she did.
It was Diana Kessler’s office, obviously. Diana was bent forward over her desk, her skirt up over her back, and Kevin was behind her. They didn’t hear Catherine open the door. She stood there, paralyzed and speechless, for two or three seconds before she took a step back and closed the door again. Catherine remembered the cold, empty feeling in her chest, the tightness in her throat. She had simply stood there, listening to their alarmed voices, the rapid, hurried rustling, and the quick footsteps.
When Kevin flung the door open and saw her, his eyes widened with what looked like fright. He tried to cover, forcing a smile. “Honey! Are you here to surprise me? I’m so glad to—”
“I saw,” she interrupted. “I opened the door while you were with her.” She turned and began to walk back along the hall toward the outer office.
“Wait. Please. Let me talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk.”
His voice became jocular, but it was unconvincing. “Come back. I don’t know what you think you saw, but you misinterpreted it. You’re wrong.”
She stopped walking and turned to glare at him. “Kevin. You don’t seem to have heard. I saw. I am not ‘wrong.’ ”
His brows were knitted in worry and unhappiness. He put his hands on her arms, as he had a thousand times, and looked into her eyes. “Diana can tell you. It’s a misunderstanding. Let’s talk. The three of us.”
He seemed to have lost his mind. “I don’t want to talk to Diana, and Diana doesn’t want to talk to me. Now let me out of here.” She shook his hands off her arms, spun, and walked out of the office. That had been the explosion, and it had propelled her away from his presence, his life.
When she thought about it, she usually summarized the story as though she had caught him one day and never seen him again. It wasn’t that simple. There had followed months of surreal scenes with him. There were meetings with him to sign off on the property settlement, two meetings that were supposedly by chance when he was clearing out, and others she couldn’t quite bring to mind now. But she had been forced to hear his denials, then his excuses, then his anger.
During those months all of their mutual acquaintances seemed to discover the need to unburden themselves of their knowledge about some girl who had slept with him. Two had even admitted to having done it themselves. They felt that they, too, belonged to a larger category of women mistreated by Kevin. It had all ended eight years ago, and every one of those people had vanished from her life.
36
She drove through the city, toward the bureau. Portland was not huge, so if she was up early enough she never had much trouble getting across the river and into the homicide office in fifteen minutes.
She was there before six, and went to work immediately on the next phase of the search. Today she was sending copies of the photographs of Tanya Starling to Department of Motor Vehicles offices in major cities all over the country, warning them that Tanya Starling would probably soon be applying for a new driver’s license somewhere.
Catherine was nearly finished with the flyers for the motor vehicles departments when she looked up and saw Captain Farber approaching her desk. “Catherine, I need to assign you to help Tony Cerino this morning.” Cerino specialized in missing persons complaints. She could see him standing beyond Mike Farber’s shoulder in the entrance to the homicide office, so she didn’t protest. Instead she turned to Cerino. “What can I do, Tony?”
