the maximum amount of pleasure out of him, even if she had to risk losing the use of him. As soon as they finished their drinks, she made Greg get up and dance with her. Like nearly all tall men, he was an awkward dancer, but at least his movements were only stiff and abbreviated. He was aware that his purpose was to provide a partner so she could dance, so he dutifully remained on his feet until she let him sit down and have another drink.
She drove Greg to her apartment, and then kept him for the night. She loved being out so much that she forced him to go out every night for the rest of the week. She insisted that every second time she be permitted to pay, and when she did, she paid with her Catherine Hobbes credit card.
The following Tuesday, Judith went out and bought a pile of magazines. She drove home and spent hours looking at pictures of women until she found the right one. Then she cut the page from the magazine and took it to a hair stylist’s shop. She had the stylist copy the cut and strawberry-blond color in the picture exactly. It was a three-step process and she had to endure the stylist’s lectures about the damage that frequent dyeing had done to her hair. When she came out, she drove back to her apartment and stared at herself in the mirror for a long time, holding up a hand mirror so she could see from every angle. “Catherine,” she whispered.
47
Catherine Hobbes’s insurance company helped her rent an apartment not far from the police bureau. It was on Northeast Russell Street, about two blocks east of Legacy Emmanuel Hospital. The apartment building tenants all seemed to be young nurses, interns, and medical technicians. They used the place in shifts: no matter what time of the day or night she entered, there were people in medical uniforms coming in or out.
Catherine had not yet decided what she wanted to do about her burned house. The fire insurance would pay to rebuild it, but she was not sure if that was what she really wanted. At times she would awaken in the night and feel the same panic she had felt the night when she had seen flames glowing beyond the closed blinds. At those moments it felt good to her to be living in an apartment in a big building surrounded by people, and to hear the reassuring sounds of their footsteps in the hallway at all hours.
Catherine had been a cop for seven years now. She had seen traumatized people—witnesses and victims— suffer various kinds of aftereffects, and she recognized that hers was a very mild one. But she also knew that as long as Tanya Starling entertained some fantasy of killing her, it was not a great idea to rebuild the house and live in it alone.
When she had talked to Joe Pitt on the telephone about her burned house, she had started to cry. He had said, “What’s the matter? Are you hurt or something?”
“No. I guess I’m crying about my house.”
“What about it? Wasn’t it insured?”
“Of course it was. I just miss it.”
“So you’ll rebuild it, exactly the same, except maybe fireproof and with a great alarm system.”
“It won’t be the same. And besides, I don’t even know if I want to. It wasn’t that great, objectively. I just loved it.”
“So while you’re thinking about it, I’ll come up there and rent a house for a while. You can live with me.”
That brought up even more complications. She had been holding Joe Pitt at bay. She had kept him from flying up to Portland the minute he’d learned that her house had burned. Every day he called, and every day he repeated the offers: they could rent a house or apartment together and he would protect her. She appreciated that instinct in men, that unfounded confidence that their sheer bulk and aggressiveness would prevent disasters.
Joe Pitt was the first man she’d had romantic feelings for in a long time, and she was cautious: she didn’t want to suddenly collapse and become dependent on him, and she feared that artificial intimacy might be worse for the relationship than too much distance at this stage. She said, “As soon as you finish the cases you’ve taken on and feel like coming up, I’d love to see you in Portland. If I get any time off, I’ll use it to fly to L.A. But I won’t live with you right now. And I don’t plan to go anywhere until I’ve got Tanya.”
She had stopped calling the case “the Dennis Poole murder.” It was now “Tanya Starling” when she thought of it, and she thought about it all the time. Tanya was evolving. She killed more easily, and with increasing frequency, but she seemed to be able to disappear afterward. She was going to keep killing until somebody stopped her, and stopping her was becoming more difficult.
Catherine stayed at the office late for the next two evenings, backtracking, making telephone calls to the witnesses who had met Tanya Starling in any of her guises. She called neighbors, people who had bought Tanya’s cars, clerks at hotels. She asked them everything she could think of that might help her find Tanya. She was looking for quirks, for compulsive behavior, preferences and habits that might limit the search area or give her an idea of where to look and what to look for.
She spoke with homicide detectives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Flagstaff to be sure that any new information from the crime scenes was being sent to her, and asked them for any new theories they might have, any leads they might be following. When there was spare time, she would send pictures of Tanya Starling to businesses that might find themselves dealing with Tanya Starling under some new name: banks, car rental agencies, hotels.
At night when she came back to her apartment there were telephone messages. Each night she had to spend time reassuring her parents that she was all right, that she would not be better off living with them than in a small dingy apartment with practically no furniture, and that she was eating and sleeping regularly. Always she had to fend off Joe Pitt’s offers of help, protection, and various kinds of comfort. She was becoming increasingly devoted to finding Tanya Starling, and increasingly isolated. Comfort was distraction.
On the third night after the fire, Catherine had just returned to her new apartment when an unfamiliar buzz startled her. It seemed so loud that it made her stiffen, but even as her muscles tensed she realized that the buzz was only the intercom on the wall near her door. She pressed the talk button. “Yes?”
The voice from the speaker said, “Catherine? Is that you inside this box?”
She laughed. “Joe?”
“I guess it is you in there,” he said. “If this is a bad time I can come back at a worse one.”
She pressed the other button, which released the outer door lock. “Get in here.”
Catherine waited inside her apartment for a few seconds, then flung open her door, walked to the door of the elevator, and waited there. She was angry at herself. She had said too much to Joe on the telephone, sounded weaker and needier than she was. She had made him drop everything to fly all the way to Portland to hold her hand when they both had important things to do. She had used up a call for help, wasted one of her chances to say, “I’m in trouble and I need to be with you right now.”
The elevator door opened and Joe Pitt stepped out. He was grinning, holding a briefcase in one hand and a long white box in the other. He kissed her on the cheek and handed her the box.
“Thanks. I don’t suppose these are roses?”
“I’m a bit ashamed of that, because I’m usually more original, so don’t tell any of the other girls, okay?”
“I’ll keep it to myself.” She led him to the door of her apartment and pushed it open. “I’d hate to see your legend crumble.”
“I knew you’d understand.”
She closed the door and locked the bolt, then set the box on the dining table and opened it. There were a dozen long-stemmed roses with pink and orange petals. She said, “They’re gorgeous, Joe.” She put her arms around him and gave him a deep, lingering kiss. After a moment she pulled away to look down. “Are you handcuffed to your briefcase?”
“I was being distracted by an erotic daydream and forgot.” He set the briefcase on the table, opened it, and pulled out a salt shaker and a small freshly baked loaf of bread. “Somebody had to bring bread and salt to inaugurate your new place, so I got some on the way to the airport.”
“Thank you,” said Catherine. “You think just like my grandmother.”
He turned in place and looked around at the sparse, utilitarian furniture and the bare walls. “And quite a place it is too. It’s a lot like the apartments in L.A. favored by hookers from the former Soviet bloc. They like the no-frills aesthetic. I’ve only seen them on a professional basis, of course.”
“Theirs?”
“Mine,” he said.
