the stage, a simple reflex of the brain because it needed to know where so much sound was coming from. She noted that it was a girl band, and returned her eyes to the crowd.
The patrons were of the right age and the right style for Tanya. There were at least two hundred people of both sexes in the big room, their faces sometimes illuminated by the glow of the spotlights on the stage, sometimes held in the dark for long periods. As she scanned the faces—smiling, laughing, trying to talk to each other over the music—she felt a shiver of fear for them. They looked like Tanya, clean-faced and alert, between twenty-one and thirty, all with good haircuts and dressed as though they were employed in some white-collar job. Tanya could slip in among them and be so like them that she would be unmemorable and invisible, until one of them was dead. It could happen any night that Tanya felt the urge. It could be happening now.
Catherine began to make her way through the crowd, squeezing into the border between the dance floor and the outer ring of patrons lined up for a turn at the bar. She would move sideways a few feet, then extend a hand between two people and let the arm and shoulder follow, repeating, “Excuse me. Pardon. Excuse me” as she went, her voice just part of the mixture of voices to be heard trying to climb over the music but barely over it, so that she needed to be within a foot of the next person before he knew anyone was talking. Catherine slowly made it closer to the destination she had set for herself, the ladies’ room.
She had known that in a crowd this size there would be a line of women waiting to use the ladies’ room. No matter what else was true of Tanya, if she was here, she would have to wait in that line sometime. Catherine came within sight and began to move laterally in the crowd, studying the faces of the women in the line. Tanya was not among them.
Catherine devoted a few minutes to studying the layout of the Mine more closely. There were two fire exits at this end of the building, and probably another behind the stage. If there was a sighting of Tanya here, Catherine would have to remember to have those exits watched. She turned and began to inch her way through the mass of moving bodies toward the door. She was blocked suddenly as a tall man stepped into her path. “Excuse me,” she said.
“Dance with me.” He was handsome, but he knew it.
“No, thanks. Got to go.”
“Come on,” he said. His confidence grew until he became repulsive. “You know you want to.”
To his right Catherine saw something that didn’t fit, the flash of a face and then a sudden movement that went against the beat of the music. She saw a couple moving off in the crowd ahead of her. “Excuse me,” she said as she tried to go around him.
He held her arm. “Please. I’m in love with you. The marriage is on.”
She looked at his arm clutching hers, then up into his eyes. “Want a really nasty surprise?”
He let go, held up both hands, and stepped backward. She used the space that he opened between them to slip past him and make six feet of progress before the next obstacle formed.
“Excuse me,” she said to a group of young women who had just come in. The nearest of the women turned to look at her, just an aura of blond hair to frame an expression that was utterly empty.
Catherine said, “You won’t be able to get in unless you let people out.”
The woman reluctantly stepped aside six inches. Catherine brushed by her and the next two, and was out the door. She squinted into the rain, then down the street the other way, but she could not see the couple. She had lost them.
She tried to analyze the impression she’d had. It wasn’t that the woman looked like Tanya—she had not been able to tell what she looked like in the dim light. It had just been the impression of furtiveness that had made her want to get a closer look.
She began to walk again, this time heading for Metro. She had noticed something, and it had not quite reached her consciousness until a moment ago. Every place where the Catherine Hobbes credit card had been used had one thing in common. They were all very dim. She hoped that when the officers had gone around this afternoon they had asked the owners of the businesses to post the circulars where people could see them.
51
Judith was sitting at her favorite table in Underground. This was the bar where she had met Greg, and the table was the one where they had sat and talked for so long on that first night. She was drinking her second martini of the evening, and it was probably going to be the last. This night was precious, and she didn’t want to get sleepy. It felt to Judith as though she had finally managed to hold together all of the elements of the life she had always thought about when she was a child.
She had not realized when she was eight or ten that what she was imagining was only a single evening that was repeated endlessly. She had determined that she would grow up, get away from her mother, and stop having to be Charlene Buckner. She had known exactly who she would be: a woman who wore beautiful clothes and held drinks in a manicured hand adorned with jewels that sparkled. She would dance with a tall, strong man who adored her.
Now she was a success. Charlene had grown up, and right now she was Judith and she’d had that special evening a hundred times. She leaned close to Greg and said, “I’ve wanted to go to the ladies’ room since we were in the Mine, but I didn’t want to wait in that line. I’m going now.” Since she was that close to him, she kissed his cheek before she stood.
Greg smiled at her and shrugged. “I’ll be here.”
Judith walked to the back of the room near the bar, where there was a corridor. She passed the pay phone, then the door of the men’s room, and then approached the ladies’ room at the end. There was only one woman waiting ahead of her, so she waited too. She stood away from the wall, and pretended to look at the things that were written on it, glancing now and then in the direction of the telephone so she didn’t have to make eye contact with the other woman.
She heard the door open and close, saw the girl who had been in the ladies’ room move past, and heard the one ahead of her go inside. It was a relief to be alone. Judith waited, leaning against the wall. She hated being trapped anywhere with people who might have nothing to look at but her face. It had been about three weeks since the local television stations had shown the pictures of her old driver’s licenses. People usually forgot everything quickly, but if just one person recognized her, Judith would be finished.
The door opened again, the woman edged past her, and Judith went inside. The room was small, like a half bathroom in a house, but it was clean and private. The walls were covered with copies of old movie posters, menus from forgotten restaurants, and travel ads, all pasted there like wallpaper. She flushed the toilet, went to the sink, and stopped.
Just to the left of the mirror, what she had thought was just another old poster wasn’t. The pictures on it were the familiar ones of Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge. But now there was a third one. Her face on the California license had been given a new hairstyle by computer.
Judith stared at herself in the mirror, then at the photograph. It had been doctored. The picture had hair like Judith’s—hair like Catherine Hobbes’s.
A dozen thoughts competed for her attention. Had those two women a moment ago seen the picture and recognized Judith? They had been in here, and they must have looked at the mirror. Could they have missed the pictures? What did the poster say? She read the print under her face. “Wanted for questioning . . .” That didn’t sound like such a big deal. “Homicide, arson, auto theft . . .” That was worse. Maybe the women hadn’t read that far. “Armed and dangerous.” Could anyone not see those words? Could they have seen this and not connected the pictures with Judith?
She tried to calm herself. Maybe she had been lucky. Her pictures had been all over the western half of the country, on and off, and almost nobody ever recognized her. She had not talked to either of those women, had not even made eye contact. A bathroom line was one of the places where people hardly looked at one another. Nobody wanted to get caught staring and then have to stand around with the person for five or ten minutes. And Judith had been careful.
She pulled the wanted poster off the wall, prepared to throw it into the wastebasket, but changed her mind. Whoever had put it up could be the one to empty the basket, and they might just stick it back up. She quickly folded it three times and put it in her purse. No, that was the wrong place. It was covering the handle of her gun, just when she might need to reach for it. She pulled the folded poster out again, put it into the side compartment of her
