Till watched Wendy as a third person came in the door, and her eyes began to fill with tears. “Eric!”
He stepped forward, looking tired and shaken, and said, “Do I get one of those hugs, too?”
“Try and stop me.” She threw her arms around his neck and they embraced hard. “I missed you so much.” After a few seconds, she pulled back to look at him. “You look good for a condemned man.”
“Thank God you came back,” he said. “I’ve heard what you’ve had to go through to get here. Why did you ever leave in the first place?”
“I was just so scared, and I had to get away. I never imagined you could be accused of killing me.” Her eyes drifted to Jack Till. “I came back because this whole nightmare has got to end.” She hugged Eric again and then, after a few seconds, they parted.
Linda Gordon turned to Chernoff. “Do you want to tell me the purpose of all this?”
“Depositions,” Chernoff said. “You and I and Sergeant Poliakoff and Officer Fallon can go into your kitchen and take some official statements.” He turned to the newcomers. “I assume you can all swear on pain of perjury that this woman is the same Wendy Harper you knew six years ago?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “Let’s get it over with so we can catch up on things.”
“I don’t see any point in deposing anyone,” Linda Gordon said. “We’ll have irrefutable scientific evidence in a couple of weeks, and it will make witnesses irrelevant.”
Jack Till said, “You weren’t shy about taking an official statement from me when I went to see you the first time. It doesn’t matter if you won’t take a statement from them, though. Sergeant Poliakoff is the detective in charge of a murder investigation. He can interview anyone he pleases, tape-record their statements, or take his own notes.”
“You came to me and offered to give me your statement voluntarily, so I took it,” Linda Gordon said. “But this is no longer a matter for the opinions of witnesses. Either she is Wendy Harper, or she isn’t.”
Poliakoff had made a decision. “Tim, take a few pictures of everyone here.”
“What’s that for?” Linda Gordon asked.
“It will help me identify them later.”
She turned to stare at Chernoff, who seemed uncharacteristically silent. “You’re planning to call me in front of the judge, aren’t you? You’ll put me under oath and force me to say that all of these people recognized each other.”
“I don’t want to do anything theatrical.”
“Do you honestly not understand why I feel it’s best to wait until the positive scientific evidence is in?”
“I don’t.”
“All right, then. We’ll take depositions.”
Chernoff said, “Olivia? Would you like to go first?”
“Yes.” And she walked into the kitchen ahead of the others. The two lawyers swore her in and explained perjury to her. Then each of them asked her questions. “How long did you know Wendy Harper?”
“Ten years.”
“Don’t count the six when she was missing.”
“Four years, then.”
“How often did you see her?”
“Every day.”
Her husband David said, “I knew her for four years at the restaurant. Olivia was the first person hired to work at Banque, and then she persuaded Wendy to hire me.”
“
“Wendy ran the dining room and the bar. I was a bartender.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Extremely well.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She and I, um, dated once.”
Jack Till was the last one in the kitchen. Linda Gordon began, “Do you swear that the woman you brought here today is the same Wendy Harper you helped to disappear six years ago?” Then: “Did you ever reveal to anyone what you had done?”
“Not until the day I read in the paper that Eric Fuller had been charged with her murder.”
“But otherwise you didn’t reveal it to anyone?”
“No.”
“You know that there was a large life insurance policy on Miss Harper that Eric Fuller collected on?”
“I’ve heard that. You’ll have to ask him.”
“You know you’re guilty of assisting him in a life-insurance fraud?”
“No, I’m not,” Till said.
Chernoff said, “Hold it, Miss Gordon. I need to interrupt this for a moment.” He turned off the tape recorder.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I see you’re searching for a pretext to try to detain either Miss Harper or Mr. Till. The reason I stopped the tape was to save you from going on the record with something that would have terrible consequences for you. I assure you that any charges will be dropped, and you’ll spend the rest of your career fighting to keep from being fired and disbarred.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“Of course it’s a threat. My God, are you listening at all?”
“This meeting is over,” she said. “You can all leave my house now.”
“I’m happy to do that,” Chernoff said. “I’ll be petitioning the judge to dismiss the charges against Eric Fuller before the end of the afternoon. If I were you, I’d try to get in first to drop the charges before then. But you suit yourself.”
Chernoff crossed the room in ten quick paces, opened the door and stopped only long enough to say, “Eric, I’ll call you later when the charges are dismissed.” Then he was out the door.
Eric nodded, then looked at Wendy. “Do you think we could talk?”
Wendy looked at Eric, then at Till. Jack Till hid his instinctive feeling of jealousy and his more reasoned dread of loss. He said, “I don’t think Miss Gordon wants us here, and I don’t want you standing around on a street in plain sight. Wendy, you can ride with Eric, and I can follow you to the police station. Eric, do you know how to get there?”
“Unfortunately, I do,” Eric said.
Linda Gordon came out of the kitchen, and she seemed to be propelled toward the door. She hurried past them, flung the front door open, and stepped out onto the porch. Jay Chernoff’s red Saab was just pulling away from the curb as she shouted, “Mr. Chernoff!” She waved her arm frantically. “Mr. Chernoff!”
Jack Till saw her do a quick half-turn and then fall sideways on the porch before he heard the distant report of the gun. He and Poliakoff dropped to their knees on opposite sides of Linda Gordon’s fallen body. Each of them grasped an arm to drag her inside. Till kicked the door shut, and then he and Poliakoff were up and at the windows, trying to locate the shooter.
“Rifle,” Till said.
“A sound delay,” said Poliakoff. “At least half a second.”
“Six or seven hundred feet.”
“The hill at the end of the street.”
“There’s an empty lot, and I think there’s a road up above, so it could have been one of the back yards. Call it in.”
Poliakoff took a hand radio out of his pocket. “This is Sergeant Poliakoff. I am under sniper fire at 5605 Greenbelt Street, Sherman Oaks. There’s a gunshot victim here, and I need an ambulance. I think the sniper is at the south end of Greenbelt on the hillside. It’s three blocks south of Ventura, four blocks west of Coldwater. I’ll stand by.”
Till was back on the floor with Linda Gordon. “Wendy,” he said. “Get a couple of blankets and a pillow off her bed.” To Linda Gordon, he said, “You’re going to be just fine. You got clipped in the shoulder, but it went right through. We’re going to make you comfortable, and the ambulance will be here in a minute.”
