Nightlife_ A Novel Part 21

"Oh, my G.o.d," Anne whispered. "It's her."

"It's who?"

Someone off camera shouted, "Sergeant!"

"I'll be around to take questions after the conference," said Catherine Hobbes. "I just wanted to speak for a moment to Tanya Starling. Tanya, we've spoken on the telephone, so you probably recognize my voice."

"You bet I do, b.i.t.c.h."

"If you're anyplace where you're able to hear me, I want to appeal to you to turn yourself in now. If you can't get to a police station, just dial nine-one-one, and officers will come to pick you up and take you there. At this moment police organizations in at least fifteen states are watching for you, and it's only a matter of time until you're found."

In the pause, Anne said, "f.u.c.k you."

"I know you're frightened," said Catherine Hobbes. "But everything I told you on the telephone still holds. I can guarantee your safety if you will come in voluntarily."

"You see?" said Anne. "She's threatening me, trying to scare me and get her face on television at the same time."

Tyler Gilman gaped at her. He had never seen her when she wasn't in control of her emotions. She seemed to be irrationally angry.

"She's hounding me. She won't leave me alone until she runs me down and gets her cops to kill me."

"She doesn't seem like that," said Tyler.

Catherine Hobbes left the podium, and the chief took her place. He said, "We believe that someone picked up Tanya Starling and gave her a ride away from the Flagstaff bus station in a private car. I urge and appeal to this person to call the police immediately. We need to know where you took her, what name she is using, and anything else that might hasten her apprehension. I caution you that her appearance is deceptive. We believe she is armed and extremely dangerous. If you are with her now, you are in peril. Get as far as possible from her right now and dial nine-one-one. You need not fear prosecution. We believe that you merely intended to help a stranger in need."

"Liar!" said Anne Forster. "He's lying."

"Him too?"

"They all are. She's just the worst, because she's decided I'm going to be the one that makes her into a success."

"It'll be okay."

"No, it won't. People think the devil is a cartoon character, all red with horns, but that's not what it is. It's a person like that, all self-righteous and sure that anything they do to you is right because you have to be punished. She keeps trying to tempt me. She says, 'Come in,' like she was asking me to come to the doctor's for a checkup. But as soon as I let them know where I am, the cops will come and n.o.body will ever see me again. They'll take me out into the desert and shoot me."

"You really think they'd do that?"

"Do you believe her instead of me? Did she come to your house because you said to, and have s.e.x with you to prove that she was a sincere person?"

"Obviously not, but-"

"But what?"

"Don't worry about her," Tyler said. "She can't do anything."

"You look at her, and I know you only see that she's pretty, and she's talking with a soft voice, so you think she must be telling the truth. She's not. Take a look. See her standing there? That's what death looks like."

The press conference vanished from the screen, and the television stayed on, but neither of them was watching or listening to it, so after a half hour, they turned it off, went into Tyler's room, and collapsed on the bed.

She awoke early the next morning and started to make her preparations for departure. She packed her suitcase, then went to Ty's closet and dresser to pack a suitcase for him too. When they spoke they practiced calling each other Anne and Jim.

Later that morning she sent him out to run errands. The first was to fill the Mazda's tank with gas. "Jimmy, when you're trying to get away from a place, you don't take a single risk that isn't necessary, and you prepare. Stopping for gas anywhere near here later with me in the car is foolish, so we won't do it. You do it alone ahead of time, when it's safe."

"Sure," he said.

"And go to the grocery store. I made a short list, and here's the money. Buy at least twelve bottles of water, some nuts-peanuts, cashews, almonds-a few candy bars, some apples, and pears."

"What's all that stuff for?"

"The drive. We don't know how long we'll be on the road. In this heat we'll need water, and the nuts have fat and protein, so they prevent you from being hungry, and they keep. And by the way, Jimmy. Don't just buy gas. Check the oil, water, tire pressure, and whatever too. We get one chance at this."

"I guess I'll get started," he said. "What time do you want to leave?"

"Tonight. Right after you finish work."

"Why then?"

"Because your going to work gives us extra time before anybody notices that anything else is wrong. Just before you leave, tell your boss you want to take tomorrow night and the next night off. Your parents have car trouble in Lake Havasu and you have to go get them and leave the other car there to be fixed."

"I don't think he's going to be okay with that."

"You say, 'Gee, I'm sorry, but I don't have any choice. If you have to fire me for it, then you do.' "

He looked at her with admiration. "That's really good."

"Either way, it keeps anybody from noticing you're gone until your parents get home, which gives us two full days. Now get going."

He went out, and she listened to his car going up the street. She selected the clothes she wanted to wear for the trip and laid them out on the bed: the black pants and the blue top, with the sweatshirt out where she could reach it if she got cold during the night drive. She took out some clothes of Tyler's too.

Now that she was used to Tyler's computer and scanner and could make birth certificates and driver's licenses, she made sets in the names Barbara Harvey, Robin Hayes, Mich.e.l.le Taylor, Laura Kelly, and Judith Nathan. She spent hours diligently performing the kind of cleaning that she had done before in the other places where she had lived. She managed to finish wiping down the surfaces in the master bedroom and bathroom, the den, and the living room before Tyler returned with the supplies.

She cooked a steak and baked potato for Tyler's lunch, and served it on plates from the best set she could find in the cupboards, with crystal stemware for his milk. "This is the way you deserve to be cared for, Jimmy. I want you to know what it's going to be like when we get settled somewhere."

Before noon he left to go to work. She made such a big event of his departure that she was afraid for a moment that she had done too much and he would refuse to leave her for his final night of work. While he was gone she cleaned the rest of the house of all traces of her presence, did the rest of the packing, showered and washed her hair, then searched the shower stall for any hairs of hers that might have fallen. She knew that her hair was exactly the color of Tyler's mother's, but she did it anyway.

She dressed and then prepared herself, sitting alone in the house that had now fallen into darkness. When Tyler came in the kitchen door he had to walk through the house, looking for her. He found her in his bedroom, sitting on the bed, looking grave. Beside her on the bed lay his rifle and two boxes of .30-06 ammunition.

"What is it, Anne? What's wrong?"

"You know," she said. "You saw last night."

"What do you mean?"

"All day I kept telling myself what I always do-that next time it will be better, next time things will be different. But it won't. There's really only one thing we can do."

"What do you mean?"

"We've got to get rid of her."

31.

Catherine Hobbes had been in the Flagstaff police headquarters for eighteen hours, and she was tired. She had helped to work the leads that developed every time Tanya made a move-the abandoned car, the witnesses at the hotel and in the stores between the hotel and the bus station. As the time of the press conference had approached, she had been gripped by nervous energy that had lasted until she finished speaking in front of the cameras and then left her feeling drained and anxious. Finally she had spent hours sorting through the dozens of calls from tipsters, all the time waiting for a call from Tanya, hoping that something she had said would persuade her to pick up the phone.

There was no way of knowing whether Tanya was hiding in a place where there was no television, or had managed to escape beyond the range of the television broadcast, or had heard Catherine's plea and ignored her.

Everything Tanya Starling did made Catherine Hobbes uncomfortable. Serial killers usually had patterns and compulsions that made them perform a series of killings in the same way, often with elaborate planning and victims who were similar. Tanya didn't seem to do anything the same way twice in succession. Maybe she killed people out of fear.

It was confusing, because she didn't act as though she was afraid. She didn't hide from potential victims; she seemed to seek them out. She went to resorts and hotels and restaurants to find them. Tanya appeared to form relationships with strangers effortlessly. She cultivated them, made them trust her. She convinced them that she was smart and attractive and personable, and they didn't seem to notice that she was missing something. She was like a machine that didn't have some crucial part. The motor whirred and the wheels turned, but it didn't work right.

Hobbes had wanted to try to talk to her one more time. Tanya seemed to be susceptible to self-interest, and that implied that if she were approached in exactly the right way, she might be persuaded to come in quietly. Hobbes had now made two attempts, and both had failed.

Around eleven-thirty, after the press conference had been repeated on the eleven o'clock news, the telephone calls had increased for a while, then gradually stopped, and the police officers in the station had begun to look at her with curiosity, obviously wondering when she was going to give up.

She stood up, stretched, stepped out of the station, and got into her rental car. She drove along Route 66, then turned down South Milton Street toward the hotel. It was going to be another night when she arrived at the hotel long after the kitchen had closed, and it was too late for dinner.

She supposed that it wasn't so bad. There was something awkward and depressing about sitting in a restaurant alone late at night. People at that hour in restaurants were in groups or couples, and they always seemed to her to be looking at her strangely. Men were either considering offering her their company or forming theories as to why she was alone. Women seemed to think either that she was to be pitied or was up to something, possibly attracting the attention of their husbands.

She knew it was the aloneness that made her think about Joe Pitt again. He had begun to make more frequent appearances in her consciousness over the past few days. She was still not sure whether their relationship was going anywhere, but she missed him. He had called her in Portland the day after their impromptu dinner, and they had stayed on the phone for half an hour, talking like teenagers. But when she had received the news that Tanya had been sighted in Flagstaff, she had left Portland without letting him know. She wasn't used to calling men, but maybe she should.

Catherine gave a silent huff of air as she drove, a laugh at herself and her firm rules and requirements. She had a big foolish crush on him. As soon as she reached her hotel room, she would be forward and give him a call. He would undoubtedly be out at this hour, doing everything that she didn't like to imagine him doing. He might not be, though. If he answered, she would ask him for an opinion of what she had been thinking about Tanya's motives. Having something sensible to talk about would help preserve a little bit of her dignity. She saw the hotel's sign and turned into the entrance to the parking lot.

A blow like a hammer strike hit the car, the force of it making the frame shiver slightly; she could feel it in her back and feet. Catherine was so startled that her hands jerked the wheel sharply, and the car wobbled as she corrected it. Then she hit the gas pedal.

It had to have been a rock. Somebody had thrown a rock at her car, and all she had to do was get out of range and see who it was. She stared into her rearview mirror, but could not see either the rock or the thrower. He was undoubtedly some jerk who had decided to scare some defenseless young woman from out of town who was staying at the hotel.

She decided to do what she would have done if this had happened in Portland. She kept the car going about a hundred feet to get out of effective range, hit the brake, and spun around in the parking lot to swing her car's front end toward the rock thrower, then hit her high-beam lights.

Her car swayed a bit from the spin and settled, a smell of burned rubber from her tires pervading the air. She saw no human shape, and there was no hiding place, only neatly trimmed gra.s.s on either side of the driveway. She turned in her seat and craned her neck to see if she had missed him. Her eye pa.s.sed across the metal strut just ahead of the rear window. There was a clean, round bullet hole just above it at the edge of the roof.

Catherine saw the side window behind her explode into the interior, bits of gla.s.s like little cubes of light spattering the back seat, stinging her right cheek and temple with a pain that seemed to intensify into a burn during the first second. The window on the opposite side of the car was gone, blown outward by the bullet, so she knew the approximate direction of fire.

She guessed that it was probably a hunting rifle, because the time between shots was too long for a semiautomatic a.s.sault rifle. It felt to her like the time it took to cycle a bolt, and it was due again . . . now.

Bam! The next shot punched through the door behind her. She swung the car to the right and accelerated again, slouching to bring her head and body down as low as she could and still see out the windshield to drive.

She knew that the shooter was lining up the next shot at the back window of her car as she drove away from him. That made her almost as easy to hit as she would have been standing still, so just as she felt it was time for another shot, she jerked the wheel abruptly to the left.

She heard the distant report of the rifle-a miss-and swung the car to the right, up an aisle between two rows of parked cars. She turned at the end of the aisle and put two more rows of cars between her and the shooter, then pulled into an empty s.p.a.ce.

She killed the engine, switched off the dome lights, opened her door, and slid out to the pavement. Catherine held her sidearm with her right hand and dialed her cell phone with her left. After a half ring, the operator answered, "Emergency."

"This is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes of the Portland Police. I'm under fire from a person with a rifle in the parking lot of the Sky Inn on South Milton Street in Flagstaff. The sniper is on the west side of the hotel, firing from a distance."

There was another loud bang as a shot punched into her car's trunk, and then the report of the rifle. She said, "I would say from the sound that he's about two hundred yards west of the hotel. He's probably up high."

"We're dispatching units to your location now. Have you been hit?"

"No. I'm staying low in the parking lot, and I'm about to move to a spot where I don't think he'll be able to see me. Remind the officers not to overlook the possibility that the shooter might be a woman." She closed her cell phone and put it into her pocket, then dashed across the open aisle. There was the sound of a bullet burying itself in the asphalt behind her, and then the report as she reached a tall truck in the next row of vehicles. She ran around to the front of it, where the height of the cab would hide her from sight.

Calvin Dunn's black car accelerated out of the delivery entrance of the parking lot on the other side of the hotel, sped two blocks up South Milton, and pulled to the curb. In a heartbeat Calvin Dunn was out and running. He ducked between two buildings and trotted up the alley behind the row of stores. He wasn't sure exactly where the shooter was, because the shots had come from a distance and the reports had echoed among the buildings, but he had seen Catherine Hobbes's car, and he could make an educated guess. He just had to make it to the right spot without tripping over the sniper.

As he trotted, he kept his body in the deepest shadows close to the back walls of the buildings, where the light from cars and streetlamps could not reach him. When Calvin Dunn approached the end of a large store with a loading dock, he judged that he must be near the shooter. The buildings along here were the right height, and the ones on the next block didn't have a clear line of sight to the hotel. He slowed to a walk and began to hunt with his ears.

He kept moving steadily in the shadows toward the area where he knew the shooter would be, keeping his head up and his eyes scanning for human silhouettes or movements. He knew that this time he might be looking for the much smaller, slimmer shape of a girl. Beyond that, the size and s.e.x didn't matter. A person with a gun was mostly gun.

There: he had seen a change in the borders of a shadow high on the fire escape of a four-story building directly ahead. What had looked like a part of the black iron railing moved, and the bigger shadow behind it shifted. There was the sharp bang of the rifle's report, and in the muzzle flash a man with a rifle appeared and disappeared again.

Calvin Dunn advanced another twelve feet closer while the man was staring through the scope to see if he had hit his target, and another ten while he was flipping the bolt up and pulling it back to eject the spent bra.s.s, pushing it forward to seat the next round, and down to lock it again.

By the time the hot bra.s.s casing flew from the rifle and went spinning down to the pavement thirty feet below, Calvin Dunn was close enough to have reached out and caught it. He stared upward to find the ladder suspended below the fire escape. It was on a weighted cable that made it rise above the reach of a burglar when n.o.body was on it, but Calvin Dunn could see how the shooter had gotten up.

Dunn took off his sport coat, wrapped his gun in it, and set the bundle in a doorway. Then he climbed to the top of a dumpster, took the bar that was meant to slide across the lid of the dumpster to lock it, stuck it between the bottom two rungs of the ladder, waited for the next shot, and pulled it down. He began to climb carefully and silently toward the man.

Calvin Dunn could see him on the third-floor landing of the fire escape, staring through his telescopic sight at the distant hotel parking lot. As Dunn climbed, the man fired again. Dunn knew from experience that the noise of the rifle would cause a ringing that would deafen the shooter for a second or two while he was fighting the barrel down after the kick, and then he would make noise working the bolt. Dunn used the time to climb closer.

The shooter prepared himself again, holding one of the vertical supports of the railing with his left hand to form a solid rest for the rifle's foregrip. Calvin Dunn was almost there. He climbed slowly and steadily, watched the man take careful aim. He heard him blow the air out of his lungs, then squeeze off a round. The shooter cycled the bolt and ejected the bra.s.s, but Dunn could tell from the sound that the gun must be out of ammunition. The shooter fiddled with the magazine release, removed it from the underside of the rifle, reached into his jacket for more ammunition, and heard Calvin Dunn's feet on the steel steps of the fire escape.

The shooter was seated with his legs in front of him and his knees bent, so getting up in time was impossible. He pushed a couple of rounds into the magazine and clicked it into place, then twisted his torso to bring the long gun around, but Calvin Dunn was already there. Dunn gave a quick tug on the barrel to stimulate the man's reflex to yank it back toward himself, and then pushed it up violently so the b.u.t.t plate pounded into the man's face.

The voice that grunted "Uh!" sounded young. It was a kid, and his left hand went to his injured face. Dunn s.n.a.t.c.hed the rifle out of the boy's right hand, swung it around, and worked the bolt to bring the first round into the chamber.

Dunn stood with his back against the wall of the building as he stared down at the young face, now streaked with blood from the nose and mouth. "Listen carefully. I'm going to give you one opportunity to tell me exactly where Tanya Starling is at this moment. Do not waste your one chance."

The reply was surprising, even to Calvin Dunn. The boy opened his b.l.o.o.d.y mouth, revealing that a couple of front teeth were gone. He took a deep breath, and let out a bellow. "Tanya!" The yell was a louder sound than he would have thought the boy could make, a howl like an animal. "I'm caught! Get away!"

Dunn pulled the trigger, the rifle kicked, and the bullet tore through the boy's chest. Dunn leaned over the boy and noted the location of the hole. He was dead.

Dunn left the rifle on the fire escape beside the body and climbed down the fire escape stairs until he came to the ladder. He stopped there to wait for the police car he could see at the entrance of the alley to drive all the way to the end.

32.

Catherine Hobbes sat on an uncomfortable wooden chair at the side of the interrogation room while Lieutenant Hartnell sat down at the table to question Calvin Dunn. As she looked at Calvin Dunn, she understood why Joe Pitt had warned her. The face below his graying hair was smooth and almost unlined, devoid of emotion. The pale eyes revealed no concern, or even much indication of an interior life. They were merely watchful.

As soon as she had heard the name of the man who had killed the sniper, she had asked to be in the room while he was interrogated. Lieutenant Hartnell had said, "You're welcome to watch the video monitor, or even have a copy of the tape afterward." But she had said, "I want him to see me." Then she had told Hartnell what Joe Pitt had told her about Calvin Dunn.

While Hartnell prepared to begin, Catherine watched Calvin Dunn. He took note of each of the people in the room and looked up at the video camera suspended from the ceiling, but nothing he saw surprised him. He turned his attention to Hartnell, and Catherine could see that it made Hartnell uncomfortable.