me, kill the Turners, and keep the money for themselves. Got it?”
“Yes. I’ll try to reach them.”
“Carl, this isn’t a time when you give it a try and see what you can do. You have to succeed. I’m trusting you with my life here.”
“Okay, Scotty, okay. I didn’t mean it like that. You know I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Thanks, Carl. I’ve got to go now.” He hung up and looked inside again. He was ashamed that he had panicked and tried to hire Dale to kill the Turners. Carl would use money to succeed with the Turners. Nobody wanted a half-second of revenge more than they wanted a million dollars. Once Carl paid them off, then he would be safer than he had been at any time in the last six years.
But there was one more problem that was nagging at him: the terrible mistake he’d made upstairs. He couldn’t have Jill Klein as an enemy. She was his boss’s wife, even if his boss slept with somebody else now and then. She could sour Scott’s reputation with the board of directors of Aggregate, who were virtually all presidents of other big companies. She could squash somebody like Scott Schelling in a week.
He slipped indoors and began to search for her. He moved through the crowd, looking in every direction until he spotted her. She was at the far end of the big living room, standing with another lady and laughing at something the woman had said, her head back and her too-perfect teeth on display. Her eyes were always rolling to see how people around her were looking at her, but when she saw Scott Schelling, her laugh lost its energy and died.
He stood patiently a few feet off until she had to notice him or risk causing a scene. She nodded and stepped away, and he moved to intercept her. “Hello, Mrs. Klein.” He held out his hand to her. “I don’t know if you remember, but I’m Scott Schelling, Crosswinds Records. We met at the party a few months ago when Aggregate bought us up.”
She stared at him with narrowed eyes. “Schelling? Yes, I believe I do remember. Nice to see you.” She took a step to his right, to move past him.
“I sent you a small present, and I wondered if you had opened it.”
Her eyes moved from side to side to be sure nobody was listening. She whispered, “What are you trying to do?”
“I’m trying to start over. I want to apologize for answering my telephone. It’s a line I use only for emergencies. My mother has been hospitalized for over a week with a stroke, and the hospital wouldn’t connect me with her room earlier. My secretary was calling to tell me she got through and my mother’s doing better.”
“Oh,” she said. “I’m very sorry she’s been ill.”
“Thank you, Mrs. Klein.”
“Jill. Please call me Jill.”
“Jill, then. I wondered if you would be willing to show me where you’ve hung the map.”
She looked around with the alertness of a deer. “There’s not enough time now. I told the caterers to call everyone in to dinner in five minutes. Where are you staying?”
“The Eldorado. Room 362.”
“Expect me at one.” She turned and disappeared into the crowd, then reemerged on the other side of the room near her husband and Martha Rodall.
Schelling used up a few minutes trying to have conversations with the wives of two executives in the Legal Division. They were well trained in talking to men, but they seemed to be under the impression that all men wanted to talk about golf.
When dinner was announced, he filed into the dining room with the others and took his seat near the foot of the table among the executives from other minor subsidiaries of the parent company. It was like being one of the youngest children in a big, complicated family.
But tonight he didn’t mind. He had just saved himself from destruction. Maybe he had even found the secret back stairway to the next level of success.
39
AFTER DARK, Jack Till walked along the sidewalk away from the hill and headed back toward Linda Gordon’s house. He had watched the men and women beyond the yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, searching for the brass casing from the rifle or any impression left on the dirt by the shooter’s shoes, but Till had been forced to keep his distance. The police would stay at the scene for a while trying to get everything that there was, but he had known for hours that there was nothing left to find.
He walked back to the house. There were two cops still working the front yard, looking for the bullet that had passed through Linda Gordon’s shoulder. They had a faint hope that it had gone into a tree trunk or a fence or the next house. He could see that others were finishing their door-to-door interviews in the neighborhood with the usual hopeless questions: “Did you happen to see?” “Did you happen to hear?” “Will you please call us right away if you hear of someone else who did?”
He went in the door and saw that Max Poliakoff was back inside, using the small kitchen table as his headquarters while the other cops searched. Till said, “Max, can I talk to you for a minute?”
“Sure.”
“Have you found out anything about Kit Stoddard yet?”
“Hell, Jack. One crisis at a time. You gave me the name yesterday, and I’ve got a man on it. There was such a person, but the name probably was an alias, as you thought. She’s not on any list that he’s checked yet. Nobody he’s talked to knows where she went.”
“What about Scott?”
“Well, yeah, that’s the important one, isn’t it? He’s even harder to find because we don’t know where to begin. Apparently nobody knew anything about him even at the time when he was dating Kit Stoddard, including his last name—if Scott was his first name. He could have been from out of town—out of the country, even. He was seeing Kit, but none of her friends met him.”
“I have a feeling,” said Till.
“What’s your feeling?”
“Ever since I went to talk to Linda Gordon a couple of months ago, I’ve thought there was something odd about her. She seemed to have an abnormal interest in how this case came out. She didn’t want to hear that the victim was alive, she wanted Eric Fuller to go to trial. Did she strike you the same way?”
Poliakoff looked down at the table for a moment. “Yeah, actually, she did. I asked around, talked to some people in the department, and then a couple of contacts I have in the DA’s office. The word is that she’s always a competitor. But she really likes these cases where some guy victimizes a woman. It seems to inspire her, to make her feel like she’s fighting for something. It makes her tough to beat in front of a jury. So the head deputy DA assigns a lot of them to her.”
“You’re telling me that what we saw here today was normal?”
Poliakoff shrugged. “What’s normal?”
“If you hadn’t thought she was behaving strangely, then you wouldn’t have asked around about her.”
“All right. That’s true. But I can believe she just got carried away. Everybody here must have seemed like they were on the other side, trying to push her into rushing her decision. Maybe she felt cornered.”
“There were four witnesses who had known Wendy Harper six years ago, and a police forensics technician who as good as told her that the picture he took of Wendy today matched her old driver’s license. But she wanted to try to keep Wendy in town and vulnerable. You heard her trying to dream up charges to file to keep her here.”
Poliakoff held up his hands. “What do you want from me, Jack? She’s the prosecutor in the case.”
“She just got shot.”
“She got shot because all that blond hair made her look from a distance like Wendy Harper, and no other reason.”
“She’s an attempted murder victim, and it happened right here. This house is a crime scene. It’s got her blood splattered on the front of it.”
“You’re telling me to search her house? What’s the probable cause?”
“You don’t need a warrant. You were already inside when the crime was committed, and the scene belongs
