“Just like that. She left. You never saw her again, or heard from her.”
“No. That was one of the things I warned her about. If you have contact with people you used to know, you’ll get caught. She had not told anyone she was going to hire me, but if someone had already been watching her, then he might know. We were definitely not followed to Solvang. But later on, a potential killer might monitor my mail or my phone and wait for her to write or call.”
Linda Gordon was finding his clear, unemotional delivery maddening. “Let me ask you something. What evidence can you give me that any of this ever happened, or that you ever met her?”
“I tried to be sure there wasn’t any. Keeping evidence could have endangered her. I wouldn’t be telling you any of this now if you hadn’t charged someone with killing her.”
“Did Eric Fuller know she simply went away voluntarily?”
“No. She wanted him to believe she was dead, and go on with his life. She felt there was nothing to be gained by telling him anything. She believed that if he knew, he would try to find her and possibly get them both killed.”
“I thought she was in love with him. That’s the story we’ve been told. I’m sure that’s going to figure in his defense. You expect me to believe she would leave him like that?”
Jack Till looked at her, beginning to lose his optimism. She wasn’t really listening to what he said. She was formulating arguments against it. “They were a couple when they came to Los Angeles. They had gone to college together and had been close friends. At different times, that friendship took a lot of different forms. They were roommates, and they were engaged to be married, and they started a business together. When the romantic relationship went away, nothing else changed. They were still closer to each other than they were to anyone else, and they trusted each other. They stayed partners and the restaurant did well.”
“Well enough so he killed her to get her half of it?”
“What I came to tell you is that he didn’t kill her, and neither did anyone else. I sent her away.”
“Maybe you did. That was one day, one moment in time. You admit you have no way of knowing what happened to her after that day six years ago. Isn’t that right?”
“It’s right. I haven’t seen her. I haven’t tried to see her. I taught her how to keep from being seen, and then sent her off to do it.”
“And you think a week of lessons from you was that effective? That she just heard your advice, and then she could stay hidden forever?”
“It’s not as simple as that. Nobody was looking for her until she had been gone for at least a month. She told Fuller she was going on a trip to recuperate from the beating, and nobody else cared where she was. When she didn’t come back, he tried to find her by calling mutual friends, who hadn’t heard from her. By the time the cops were involved, there was no place for them to start looking.”
“And you planned that, too?”
“Yes. I did. I taught her what I knew, and that was enough to get her started. But now she’s been at it for six years, and probably knows more than I do. She’s a very bright woman.”
Linda Gordon pushed off from the wall and stepped closer to her desk. Till could see her eyes lower for a second, and he knew she was looking to check that enough tape was left in her recorder without reminding him that it was running. She leaned on the desk. “You know, you’ll be in serious trouble for telling me all this.”
“I know.”
“You’ve admitted that you’re a party to insurance fraud, that you helped a person get false identification, and I don’t know what else. You used to be a cop. You know there will be quite a list.”
“I had a choice. I could go to bed every night for the next thirty years knowing that Eric Fuller was going to spend another night in prison, or I could go to bed knowing I was the one who prevented that.”
“You could go to jail.”
“The choices aren’t always good.”
“Very stoical. Let me show you something.” She walked around her desk to the chair with the stack of files, moved a few to the desk, found the one she wanted, and opened it. There were ten-by-twelve-inch color photographs. She selected one and handed it to Jack Till.
There was a white cloth torn like a rag and covered with dark stains. It was stretched out on a lab table. He could see the ruler on the table in the corner of the shot to give it scale. “What is it?”
“It’s her blouse, with her blood on it.” She handed Till another photograph.
“And what’s this one?” he asked.
“It’s a bat like the one you were talking about, also with her blood on it.” She glared at him. “Interesting, don’t you think?”
“Where did you get this stuff?”
“It was found at Eric Fuller’s house.”
“Where—the front porch?”
“No,” she said. “Buried in the back yard in a rusty metal box. There was a gas pipe leaking, and the gas company dug it up while they were looking for the leak.”
“Just as good.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s planted. That rag may have been a blouse once, and it may even have been the blouse Wendy Harper was wearing when she was attacked. I assume you have a lab report that the blood is a match for hers.”
“She had herself genetically tested for a breast-cancer gene a couple of years before she was murdered. There isn’t any doubt that this sample belongs to her, and that means she’s dead. I’ve got a significant amount of her blood on a piece of her clothing, and murder weapons.”
“Weapons? Plural?”
“There was also a knife that once belonged to a set in Eric Fuller’s kitchen. We have proof that Eric Fuller bought the set eight years ago. I’m sure by the time we go to trial, we’ll get something similar on the bat.”
“The evidence is faked.”
Linda Gordon said, “I don’t know if you’re telling the truth about what you did or not. If you’re telling the truth and you tried to help her save herself, I’m truly sorry for you. But it certainly looks to me as though sometime around the period when she disappeared, Eric Fuller caught up with her. She hasn’t been seen for six years. How can I look at that blouse and that bat with her blood on them, and do nothing?”
6
JACK TILL LEFT Linda Gordon’s office and walked to his car, thinking about all the reasons Linda Gordon had not to believe him. He had no way of explaining to a young, ambitious prosecutor why an old homicide cop would make the decisions he had made: why he would help Wendy Harper disappear, and why he would go to the DA’s office six years later and admit it. Linda Gordon just hadn’t lived long enough yet.
He sat in his car, took out his cell phone, and punched in the phone number of his old office in Parker Center. “I’d like to speak to Sergeant Poliakoff, please. This is Jack Till.”
In a moment, Poliakoff’s voice said, “Jack?”
“Yeah.”
“How’s it going?”
“I can tell from your voice that you heard already. Did Linda Gordon just call you?”
“Yeah. She wanted to know if you were a good guy or a bad guy. Have you decided yet?” Till could picture him sitting behind the old dented steel desk he had inherited when Till had retired. He was three inches taller than Till, so he had to adjust his chair low and sit in a crouch to fit his knees under the desk.
“After you told her I was the best of the best, did it sound as though she would consider dropping the charges?”
“I’m sorry, Jack. The way I read it, there’s zero chance unless Wendy Harper walks into her office. She doesn’t think you’re lying, so your record isn’t the issue. She just thinks you’re wrong about what happened after you weren’t around.”
“I had to ask.”
“I know. At the moment, I agree with her, but one of us is going to be surprised, and it could just as easily be
