entrance, stepped into the evening air and studied the map while the parking attendant went off to bring him his car. It took him only a few seconds to plot the route to Ann Delatorre’s address, but he kept his head tilted toward the map for a minute while he scanned the area around him through his dark glasses. From the lot entrance he could see the windows of the San Remo Hotel, cars and pedestrians walking along Tropicana Boulevard, and if he looked to the right, he could see the permanent traffic jam on the Strip. He could see a thousand people right now, but there was no way to spot anyone who might be watching him.
He accepted his rental car, drove out Tropicana to Rainbow Boulevard, turned right on Charleston Boulevard to Jones Boulevard, and then north to Cheyenne Avenue, keeping watch on the cars behind him. He pulled into a grocery store parking lot, studied the cars that went by for a few minutes, then went inside the store to buy bottled water and snacks for the trip back to Los Angeles. Then he stood for a moment inside the doorway to see whether any of the cars he had seen on the road behind him had appeared in the supermarket lot or any of the other parking lots within sight, but none of them had.
Till got into his car again and drove aimlessly for a time, watching for followers and waiting for night to come. It came in a way that he had forgotten, a sky of blue and pink deepening into purple as the huge banks of moving, sparkling lights joined the billboard-sized television screens with shimmering videos of beautiful women, tables covered with food, and flutes of bubbling champagne to fight back the dark.
Jack Till drove past Cheyenne Avenue, then came back and parked. He got out and walked into a large condominium complex and then came out the other side, went around the block and returned to the car. Till was of the opinion that the way to keep from being followed was not merely to watch for followers, but to provide them with a plausible false destination and lead them there.
When he was positive that nobody could have followed him, he drove through the city to Boulder Highway, and drove south away from the tall hotels into the flat suburban landscape to the south, and then into Henderson, where Ann Delatorre lived. As he drove, he kept having the same thought over and over: Ann Delatorre might not be Wendy Harper. He had chosen her out of all of the women who had flown out of Santa Barbara on August 30 six years ago, but that didn’t mean he was right. It would not be the first time when he had made a logical guess based on the soundest evidence and been utterly wrong.
The address was a house on a clean, quiet, broad, well-ordered street, one of a long row of similar one-story houses. Each house sat on a small patch of well-tended green lawn, and had a two-car garage to one side of it. After passing a few houses, he detected that there were three styles—Mediterranean, Southwest, Colonial— alternating so that no house was beside one just like it.
He found the house, drove past it slowly and studied the pattern of lights in the windows. The suburban street seemed an unlikely habitat for the Wendy Harper he had met, and that made him uneasy in a new way. It had been six years since Wendy had seen him. She might not even recognize him. He continued along the street for a distance before he turned around. If she was still nervous, still taking a precautionary look at every car that went by, then he should try to keep from alarming her. He could have made a telephone call to warn her that he was coming, but there was no way of knowing whether someone was monitoring her line or even his cell phone. He brought his rental car to a stop at the curb near her house, walked to her front door, and rang the bell. He heard footsteps.
He stood straight on the front steps, keeping his face up so the light would catch it and she would have a chance to recognize him. The door opened an inch, then clicked. There was a deadbolt in the floor with a second receptacle for the steel bar, and she had engaged it. He stared at the two inches of open doorway, and saw that the face staring back at him was black.
“Can I help you?” The woman’s question was a challenge, a carefully polite message that she was not glad to see a stranger on the doorstep.
“Yes,” he said. “My name is Jack Till, and I came to see Ann Delatorre. Is this the right house?”
There was a second of hesitation that told him it was.
“What can I do for you?” He could see her better now, as she moved her head from side to side in front of the open slice of doorway to see whether there was anyone with him. She was in her late twenties or early thirties, with a pretty face and large brown eyes.
“I’m a private investigator who helped her once, a few years ago. I know that she’ll want to see me.”
“I
“Oh. I’m terribly sorry to have bothered you like this. I was looking for someone else.” He turned as though to leave, then stopped. “Oh, one more thing. Do you know any other Delatorres in the area? Delatorre is her married name. Her original name was Harper.”
“I’m the only one I know about. Good night.” She closed the door, and he heard the bolt click, and then a second one.
Till walked away from the door, turned at the corner of the house and made his way quickly along the side of it. When he reached the first window, he looked in. It was a dining room, but he could look through it to see the front door, where the woman stood, staring out the peephole in the door. She pulled away from it and Jack Till ducked down and bent low to sneak along the side of the house. He stopped at the next window and cautiously looked in. It was a kitchen.
She was at the counter across the room, reaching for a telephone. He knew that she might be calling the police to tell them he was lurking around, but he had to stay. She pushed eleven digits: long distance. He felt in his pocket and found the small microphone he had been hoping to plant inside the house. He looked for an opening on the outer wall of the house, and found a rounded metal awning that jutted a few inches from the wall, about six inches wide, with a metal flap. He could tell from the position high up and at the windowless portion of the kitchen that it must be the opening for the ventilation hood over the stove. He looked around for a way up, and saw three wheeled plastic garbage bins. He moved the heaviest one under the vent opening, stood on it, attached the thin power cord from the receiver to clip on the tiny microphone, and lowered it into the ventilator duct in the kitchen.
The duct seemed to amplify the sounds. He could hear the woman walking around, her footsteps sharp and heavy, as she listened to someone on the other end of the call. Then she said, “What he said was, ‘My name is Jack Till. I’m here to see Ann Delatorre. Is this the right house?’” She listened. “No, he didn’t say that right away. It was later, when he was about to leave. He asked me if I knew anyone else named Delatorre around here. He said it was your married name—that your maiden name was Harper.”
Jack Till lifted his wrist close to his face. The call had been placed at 8:07. It was July 20.
The woman said, “He’s sort of tall. Maybe six feet one or two. He’s in good shape. I don’t know. Yeah, he could be forty, I suppose. He said he helped you six years ago. Did he? I mean if he’s for real. Is he telling the truth?” Jack Till could hear frustration in the woman’s voice. As soon as she hung up, staying here was going to get very risky. He pulled the vent open and held it while he gently pulled up his microphone and pocketed it. He quietly climbed down from the garbage bin and rolled it back to the other side of the driveway, then hurried to his car and drove toward his hotel.
On the drive back into Las Vegas, Till had a few minutes to think. Watching the door of the house open and seeing the wrong woman inside had brought disappointment. Only a moment later had come the shock, the recognition that his disappointment was so painful because it was personal, not professional. He had been allowing himself to think about Wendy Harper again, to picture her and remember her voice, but he had not realized how much emotion he had invested in the prospect of seeing her again. In his mind, she had always been the woman he had met in the wrong way at the wrong time, the wasted chance.
Maybe the shock had been a corrective. He needed to see what was happening, not what he wished would happen. He went to his room and looked at the skip-tracer’s printout for Ann Delatorre and found the account number and company she used for telephone service. He called the company’s billing department and said, “I’m calling because I’d like to cancel our long-distance service. We’re going to be moving to another city. We don’t have a new address yet. We’ll be in hotels at first, so I don’t have a place to transfer the number to. But I’d like to get a final bill as soon as possible so I can take care of it before I leave. How soon do you suppose you could do that? Wow, that’s wonderful. Thanks.”
Till drove out to Henderson again the next morning. He spotted the letter carrier on her route, and then drove past her a couple of times to check her progress until he saw her delivering mail on the block where Ann Delatorre lived. He checked his watch: one-fifteen. He spent most of the day and evening watching the house to see if Wendy Harper had come, but there was no sign of a visitor. The next two mornings, Till drove by again, but there was still
