He looked at her with a serious, contemplative expression. “My intentions have been on the surface since the beginning. I’m not here just to confer with an esteemed colleague. I asked you out on a date.”
“Asking for a date is kind of ambiguous,” she said.
“Maybe to you.”
“To everybody. To the world.”
“It isn’t to me, and only I can say what I meant. When somebody asks you out on a date, you can accept or not, and your acceptance means whatever you want it to mean.”
“And what does your asking mean?”
“It means that I’ve already watched and listened to you and thought about you enough to have made my decision about you. I’m not window-shopping.”
She picked up her glass of water and took a deep swallow. Then she put it down and said, “That’s what it meant when I accepted.”
He looked into her eyes for a few seconds before the smile reappeared on his face. His eyes focused on the waiter and he nodded, and the waiter approached. “Check, please?”
Hours later, Joe Pitt rolled onto his side, leaned on his elbow, and looked down at her on the pillow beside him. “What made you change your mind about me?”
“I haven’t changed my mind about you. You’re exactly the way I always thought you were.”
“You always acted as though you didn’t approve of me, but here you are.”
“Yep. Here I am. I’m lying naked in a hotel bed with a man on a first date. I guess that means I’m pathetic.”
“If you’re fishing for compliments, I can give you a few thousand new ones now. I’ve been holding back.”
“Spare me.”
“You can’t really feel bad about this.”
“No, I’m glad we’re here. I was just afraid you’d want to talk about it.”
“You don’t believe in talking about sex?”
“No, I don’t. There’s nothing anybody can say about it that isn’t embarrassing and stupid. Yes, it was as good for me as it was for you. Yes, you’re the best ever. As if you didn’t know. If I didn’t say that, you’d kill yourself, after all those years of practice.”
“I just want you to be happy—about tonight, about me, about you. No regrets.”
“There is one part I regret. It’s that the minute I let you look at the Poole crime scene, all the old boys were thinking, ‘Hmmm. She’s not bad. I wonder how long it’ll take good old Joe to get her in the sack.’ And here I am. They were right, and I hate that.”
“What old boys?”
“Jim Spengler and the homicide guys in Los Angeles, your buddy Doug Crowley in San Francisco. My own friends up here.”
“Do you think it’s possible to be too conscious about what other people might or might not be thinking?”
“No.”
“Oh. So I take it you don’t do this kind of thing often.”
“Practically never.”
“I hope that will change.”
“If you want it to, it will.”
“Really?”
“Yes. I make big decisions carefully, and with both eyes open. I wouldn’t have done this once if I didn’t think I might be interested in something more lasting.”
“Would you consider having an exclusive relationship with me?”
“That’s pretty quick,” she said.
“I make big decisions with both eyes open too. Will you?”
“Only if you’re willing to do it sincerely,” said Catherine. “If it isn’t working out, we’ll see it right away.”
“Then what?”
“Catch and release.”
“Sounds humane.”
“Practical too. Neither of us has to bury a corpse.”
“Deal,” he said. “As of some hours ago—I don’t have my watch on—you and I have been seeing each other exclusively, with serious intent.” He lay there for a time, staring at the ceiling. “You’ve always insisted on being professional, so we don’t really know anything about each other. We’ll have to start talking about personal things from the start. How many children were you thinking of?”
She pushed him over quickly, rolled onto his chest, and kissed him. “Oh, boy. I’ve got to take you to meet my parents before you come to your senses and get away.”
38
It was shocking. Judith Nathan could hardly believe what she saw in front of her on the television screen. She stood up and stepped closer to the cabinet where the hotel had secured the television set and squinted to be sure that it wasn’t just someone who looked similar. No, it was Catherine Hobbes, absolutely. She was getting out of an unmarked police car with a tall male cop. Now she came around the front of the car and they both pulled another man out of the back seat. He was a shorter man wearing a short-sleeved pullover shirt that looked tight. He seemed to be a bodybuilder.
The picture cut to Hobbes and the other cop, standing outside a police station, and it must have been later. Hobbes was saying, “During our visit Mr. Olson became agitated and tried to run. We searched the house and found Mrs. Olson bound and locked in the trunk of Mr. Olson’s car. The hospital says she’s in stable condition and will recover from her injuries.” She listened to a reporter’s virtually inaudible question, then touched a spot on her forehead where there seemed to be a bruise and a scratch. “This? Yes.” She smiled. “It was a lucky punch.” She turned away from the reporters and went inside.
“Bitch,” said Judith Nathan. “You horrible bitch.” Catherine Hobbes was becoming a celebrity, practically. She was placing herself in front of the television cameras all the time now. Was anybody supposed to believe that it had been just little Catherine Hobbes fighting with that man? What had that big male cop been doing while that was going on? The man they had in handcuffs didn’t even look like a bad person, just some ordinary man the cops had scooped up to use as a fall guy. He would be destroyed to give Catherine Hobbes one more moment of glory. Disgusting.
Everything had turned into a disaster. She had not been given time to start living. Every time she began to get settled, Catherine Hobbes would start in again, telling lies about her, circulating her picture everywhere she tried to live. Every time she went anywhere, Catherine Hobbes seemed to show up a day later. Maybe Judith should have taken Catherine Hobbes more seriously. She had thought that coming back to Portland was a clever idea, because it was the last place anyone would expect to see her. But the price was that she had to live in the same city as Catherine Hobbes.
That night she lay in bed, unable to sleep. Staying free could not be that hard. There seemed to be lots of people who had done things but never got found. It all seemed to depend on who was looking. The main one who was looking for her, the one who kept traveling around and convincing everyone that they had to drop everything and search for small, solitary Tanya Starling, was Catherine Hobbes.
The video clip of Catherine Hobbes on television kept repeating in her memory. It was like one of those dreams she sometimes had that reminded her there was something important that she had forgotten. There was something she was supposed to do that she had not done.
In the morning Judith Nathan left her hotel room, bought a newspaper in the lobby, and went out to begin searching for an apartment. She found one early, and gave Solara Estates in Denver as her last address. Because she had just arrived in town and had no local bank account yet, the landlady didn’t mind taking her rent and deposit in cash.
Judith Nathan drove Tyler’s Mazda to see a garage that was for rent about a mile from her new apartment
