off for hours, but now she had to control herself. She closed her suitcase and latched it, then looked around. The bedroom seemed comfortable and reassuring. The big king bed with its high walnut headboard and antique quilt looked so safe and secure. It was terribly hard to leave this room.
When she had run away from Los Angeles, she had looked for a chance to invent a new and better self. She worked on being Ann Delatorre for a time, and then realized that she needed another layer of distance from the past. She conceived the idea of giving Louanda Rowan the identity she had invented, and the business she had built and the house she had bought. It was a chance to repay Louanda for her friendship and help. It was also a way of keeping tough, fearless little Louanda between her and her troubles. She had to acknowledge that now and accept it. She had befriended a woman who was poor and desperate, used her as a surrogate—a double—and put her in terrible danger. She had never intended the danger to be real, but that was how it had worked out. Now, as the minutes went by, it was becoming surer and surer that Louanda was dead, and that she had died trying to protect Ann Donnelly.
Trying. That was a word that raised other problems. If Louanda had been hurt or running, she could have called this house and told Ann Donnelly what to do to help her. But if she had been caught in Henderson and had not been able to keep Ann Donnelly’s name and address from her captors, then waiting for her call was wasting the only time left to escape.
Ann walked slowly through the house again. As she walked, she absentmindedly corrected things that had been left out of place. She straightened the oriental rug in the living room, then used her foot to push the strands of fringe at the ends into place. She gathered a pile of magazines into a stack on the coffee table, picked up a plastic dump truck with a Barbie doll in it, carried it into the playroom, and set it on a shelf. She looked at her watch. It was after eleven. She had given Louanda all the time she could spare. She went back into the hallway, picked up her suitcase, and walked toward the back door.
It was as though she had awakened suddenly. Once she had begun to move, the insanity of waiting here for her executioner to arrive began to seem obvious. She stepped outside, looked up and down the street for signs of unusual activity, then locked the door behind her, went into the garage by the side door, and put the small suitcase into the trunk of her beige Nissan Maxima. She started the car, backed out of the driveway, and noticed again the flat of strawberries that she had bought three days ago, before the call from Louanda, but never planted. She pressed the remote control to close the garage door.
She drove up the street, made a few turns randomly in case somebody had arrived in time to follow her, and then turned onto a pretty street with big trees shading her car. She parked, then dialed her cell telephone and waited.
Dennis’s voice came on, but she recognized the recording instantly. “This is Dennis Donnelly. I’m not available at the moment, but please leave a message, and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Den, this is Ann. I’m sorry, but the thing I told you might happen someday has happened. I left the kids— you know where I left them, so I won’t say it on the phone. I told them I had to go away for a long time on business, so that’s our story. Don’t try to add details. We’ll just contradict each other. Don’t even think about bringing them back to the house. That goes for you, too. Tell your partners as soon as you get this message that something has come up and you’ve got to take a trip. Pick the kids up and go from there. I’m sure you remember that the kit I put together for this is in the trunk of your car. I love you.” She turned off the telephone and put it back into her purse. She was crying so hard that it took her a minute before she could wipe away enough tears to look behind her and be sure she hadn’t been followed.
18
JACK TILL got off the plane in San Francisco and made his way to the car-rental counters. While he waited for the keys to a car, he kept turning his head and scanning the changing, moving crowds of people behind him, looking for some constant, some person who stayed in sight.
His search for Wendy Harper was different now that Ann Delatorre was dead. Till had not been able to stay in Henderson to wait for the crime lab and the autopsy, but he had seen enough bodies to know that she’d been beaten before she had died. Probably her assailant had been trying to get information. It had ended with a shot to the side of the head near the back from less than a foot away—close enough to singe her hair a little. He hoped it had been a shot taken out of anger and frustration at a failure to make her talk.
The angle of the shot to her head hinted at more bad news: Judging from the marks on the wall in the hallway where the blood was, and the marks on the right side of her forehead, he believed that the person who had beaten her had used his right hand to hit her head against the wall. A shot to the left side of the head at the back meant a person holding a gun in his left hand. To Till, the difference raised the possibility that there had been two people involved in the killing.
Till had to go to the baggage-check office to pick up his gun in its locked carrying case before he went to his rental car. A day ago he would probably not have opened the case, but now everything had changed. Now that Ann Delatorre had been killed, he knew that the danger wasn’t theoretical or distant. He drove his car out of the airport onto the 101 freeway, then took the next exit and pulled into the first big open-air parking lot near a Costco store. He unlocked the case, loaded the gun, put it into its holster, and clipped it to his belt.
He drove into San Francisco with the last of the morning traffic. He had called Max Poliakoff from Las Vegas to convert Wendy Harper’s telephone number into an address in San Rafael. He had been hoping to get to the house before Wendy Harper went off to work or whatever she did, but it was already past eleven, so he had probably missed her.
Till headed northward into the city and through its center, across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael. After Max Poliakoff had given him the address, he had used a computer at the hotel in Las Vegas to go onto a real-estate site where he had found the name of the legal owner and a description of the house. The house had been bought four years ago. It had four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a pool, and was 4,500 square feet on a half acre of land.
Wendy Harper’s luck seemed to have improved. She had apparently started badly in Las Vegas, floundering, living in a cheap apartment building among people who were essentially transients and fugitives. She had made a very lucky meeting in the woman she renamed Ann Delatorre, but a big part of her luck was that she didn’t meet anyone who would hurt her or make an effort to find out what betraying her might be worth.
Till drove along the streets of San Rafael, watching the signs for the right one. The listing had said the house belonged to Dennis Donnelly. That was a ploy that Till admired. Wendy Harper must have converted herself to Ann Donnelly, put a bid on the house, and invented a husband who was too busy to come to the escrow office to sign the papers, so she had to take them to him and get them notarized. Or maybe she had simply bought the house in one name and transferred ownership to the other to make her nonexistent husband the owner.
Jack Till found the street and coasted past the house, looking in his practiced way at every aspect of it without letting his foot touch the brake, and then studying the mental image of it he had filed away. It was long and low, with a lot of expensive wooden detail work along the eaves and windows and the front door. The big pieces of natural wood gave the place a look that was somewhere between Craftsman and Japanese. It was the sort of architecture that had characterized the house she had owned with Eric Fuller and the enclosed area at the back of their restaurant, where the tables began inside the dining room and spilled out through an open glass wall onto the stone patio with groves of dwarf evergreens. That had been in Los Angeles, where bad weather was mostly theoretical, and the sun shone three hundred and fifty days a year. He supposed that up here in the Bay Area, things like rain and cold wind weren’t unusual, and the doors would be more substantial.
He had also spotted two signs on the lawn and one on the gate that said “NATIONAL PACIFIC SECURITY— ARMED RESPONSE.” He stopped the car around the corner and called 4-1-1.
“What city, please?”
“San Rafael.”
“Go ahead.”
“Do you have a number for National Pacific Security?”
There was a pause. “There’s no number for San Rafael. No listing for Marin. Nothing for San Francisco. Nothing for Oakland. You could try San Jose.”
“Thank you very much.” Till disconnected. If there was a security company that responded when its alarms
