Nightlife_ A Novel Part 36

At eleven Catherine went into the living room, where her father was watching the local news. He looked up. "Have you had uniformed officers circulate her picture to the mom-and-pop stores?"

Catherine said, "What am I missing?"

"She's got to buy food and toothpaste somewhere. Supermarkets are full of people standing in line staring at one another, and four or five a.s.sistant managers watching customers. Maybe instead, she shops at one of those little stores run by immigrant couples who can't tell one young American woman from another, or are afraid to cause trouble."

"I'll give it a shot. Thanks, Daddy." She kissed his cheek.

He said, "Are you going?"

"Yeah. I've had my free slice of pie, so I guess I'll be on my way."

"I drove by to check out your apartment building."

"And you hated it?"

"I don't work for Architectural Digest. Architectural Digest. I like that it has a locked door with an intercom and a lot of people around. Looks like a lot of doctors." I like that it has a locked door with an intercom and a lot of people around. Looks like a lot of doctors."

"They're all interns," she said. "The ones that are old enough to be keepers must all have houses."

"When you park in that lot behind the building, look around before you get out of your car, and then watch your back."

"I always do," she said. "Good night."

"Good night, kid."

She went out and stepped onto the porch. Her eyes took in the configuration of trees and houses that were so familiar to her they were the landscape of her dreams. She could see it was all as it had been for as long as she could remember, and there was no shadow that she had not memorized. She walked toward her car slowly, looking up and down the quiet street.

The day after Tanya had burned her house, Catherine had requested that a plain car be posted a hundred feet below here, on the curve of the road, so that an officer could get a close look at the face of anyone who drove or walked by. After a week there had been no adequate justification for keeping a car any longer. There had been no indication that Tanya had looked for Catherine's parents, but tonight something felt wrong.

She continued her walk to her car, stopped beside it, and reached into her purse, pretending to search for her keys while she watched and listened. There was no unfamiliar sound, no sign that anything was out of place. She stood there a bit longer, waiting, giving Tanya a chance to move. Nothing happened.

Catherine got into the car and started it, then turned on the lights and drove farther up the hill. She turned around in the spot where she would have hidden if she had been Tanya, just on the uphill side of the Tollivers' high hedges. Then she coasted down the road, turning the wheel slightly now and then to shine her headlights on the best hiding spots along the narrow street.

She kept encouraging her mind to feel its discomfort, trying to let it intensify so she could identify what it was. If she had seen something too subtle to interpret, it was gone: no troubling image formed in her memory. As she reached the bottom of the hill and turned left toward the bridge, she realized what it was: timing.

She had listened to the stories of her father and other old cops and had read files from hundreds of cases of serial killers. Serial killers were almost all male, and most of them seemed to be acting out some fantasy that was a mixture of violence and s.e.x. Many appeared to search for a particular kind of victim. Others seemed to be trying to reproduce exactly some scene they had concocted in their imaginations. It was not clear to Catherine what Tanya was doing when she killed someone. It seemed to Catherine that it had something to do with power. Maybe in some part of her past, Tanya had been powerless, and had been harmed or abused in some way. It seemed to Catherine that with the killings she had created a method of making herself safe.

Tanya seemed to be driven by fear. Every time she killed someone she had more to fear, so she had to kill again to feel safe. Whenever Tanya felt she might be losing control, she proved she wasn't by killing somebody. What was bothering Catherine tonight was that she had become accustomed to Tanya's rhythm, and it seemed to Catherine to be time.

She pulled her rental car into the parking lot behind the apartment building, and her father's advice came back to her. She turned the little car in a full circuit of the perimeter, letting the headlights shine on the low brush that came to the edge of the pavement. She selected a s.p.a.ce in the middle and got out of her car, her left hand holding her purse and keys, and her right hand free to reach for her sidearm.

Catherine took a last look around her before she unlocked the back entrance of the building, stepped inside, and closed it behind her, listening for the click of the lock. She walked up the hall to the staircase at the front of the building instead of riding up in the elevator. When she was inside her apartment on the third floor she locked the door and flipped the latch across it. Then she headed for the shower.

55.

Judith lifted the package off her bed and worked at getting the heavy plastic wrapping off. She went to the kitchen and got a steak knife, then came back and made a slice along the top. The package said, "Hospital Scrubs, size S, OSHA Compliant." She held the pants up in front of the full-length mirror and looked at them critically. Were the legs going to be just a bit long? She had bought the scrubs this afternoon at a uniform store that specialized in medical clothes, and she had not wanted to spend much time shopping or ask any questions.

She had just picked up the package, paid cash for it, and gone. She took off her jeans and T-shirt and put on the scrubs, then stared in the mirror. They felt like starched pajamas, but she liked the way they looked on her. She turned halfway around to look over her shoulder, then kept turning until she was facing forward again. She was very pleased. The only essential part was that the fit be good: no nurse would have scrubs that weren't her size. Judith made a very attractive nurse.

She had chosen the maroon color because she didn't want to be too visible in the dark. Some of the men and women she had seen walking up Russell Street from the hospital wore bright white coats or pants, and when a car came around the corner they seemed to glow in the headlights. The ones who wore dark blue or maroon were almost invisible.

Judith put on the pair of walking shoes she had chosen and checked the pant length again. The pants came right to the top of the shoes and rested there with only a half inch or so of overlap. That was just right. She lifted the loose pullover top and looked at her bare stomach. That was the only place for a gun. The loose top would cover it.

She stared into the mirror. She made a serious face, as though she were a nurse hurrying down a hallway to a patient's room. Then she tried an empty face, and decided that was the right one. She wasn't going to be clapping a defibrillator on somebody's chest. She was just going to be a young woman coming off a long evening shift.

Judith used an elastic band that matched her scrubs to tie her hair in a ponytail, then put on the clear gla.s.ses she had bought in the hobby shop. They were for protecting people's eyes when they worked on crafts, but they looked just like regular gla.s.ses. She looked smart in them.

She took off her top and picked up the roll of adhesive tape she had bought. She wrapped it around her waist twice, then twice more to hold Mary Tilson's gun so it rode comfortably above the waistband without tugging on her pants. Then she put on her loose top and checked the effect. The gun was invisible.

She put on the hooded waterproof jacket she had bought when she had arrived in Portland, and decided the effect was right. It could rain in Portland at any time, and she had seen that the people she wanted to look like all wore jackets at night.

Judith examined the fabric purse with the long strap that she had carried in Denver, and tried it with her work outfit. She could fit the adhesive tape and the steak knife in it easily.

Judith looked around her small apartment to a.s.sess her preparations. She had already packed her suitcase. If she needed to run, she could. The place looked neat, nearly empty, and clean. She carefully folded her jeans and T-shirt, put them in a paper sack, and brought it with her suitcase.

She had a feeling of elation as she stepped out of her apartment and went down the back stairs to the outside. The night was clear and calm, a little like the late nights she had loved when she had been a little girl. There was a silent, private emptiness. There was nothing for a block or two that was moving, and the lights from the big busy streets to the south were blocked by apartment buildings.

She put the suitcase and the clothes in her trunk and started the car. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was eleven-fifteen, time to be moving. She let the car drift quietly down the alley behind the building, then accelerated gradually as she moved up the street.

Judith drove across the Broadway Bridge to North Interstate Avenue, then turned onto Northeast Russell. She could see the big shape of Legacy Emanuel Hospital as soon as she made the turn. She pulled over on the street near the east end of it and parked.

Judith looked at the car clock again. It was eleven forty-five. When she had followed Catherine up this street to her apartment building she had noticed that the activity picked up around midnight, which she a.s.sumed must be when the hospital shifts changed. She wanted to be ten minutes ahead of the change, so people would be leaving Catherine's building when she arrived. She got out of the car, put her keys into the pants pocket of her scrubs, and looped her purse strap over her shoulder.

She walked up to Catherine's apartment building just as a young man in green scrubs appeared in the lobby. She looked down into her purse as he hurried out of the building past her, but then she lunged ahead, caught the door before it could swing shut, and stepped inside. Her heart was pounding. She had made it past the first barrier.

But now Judith was in the lighted lobby, where people outside could see her, and anyone who came downstairs to leave would have to walk right past her. She stepped quickly to the row of mailboxes and read the Dymo labels stuck above them. There was one that said HOBBES. HOBBES. It was apartment 3F. It was apartment 3F.

Judith opened the door to the stairwell and began to climb to the third floor. At least while she climbed, while she was in the deserted stairwell, n.o.body was looking at her. But when she reached the third-floor landing, she became tense again. She opened the door to the third-floor hallway a crack and listened. There were no voices, no footsteps, no sounds that indicated that anyone was awake. Judith moved cautiously into the hallway. She had never been in this building before, and so she had to think as she walked. She stepped along the hallway scanning, searching for any opportunity that would permit her to do what she wanted, and listening for someone who might stop her. As she came to 3D, she paused and listened for the sounds of people awake, then stopped at 3E and did the same, but there was nothing. She went on more slowly and quietly until she came to 3F.

When she had followed Catherine home last night, she had seen a whole row of windows light up. Catherine's apartment had to be big-at least three rooms along the side of the building, probably with the bedroom in the back, away from the noise of the street. But Judith couldn't know for sure. Catherine might be standing right on the other side of that door. Judith's hand went to her belly, and she felt the hard, rea.s.suring shape of the gun under her shirt. She leaned close and pressed her ear to the door. Catherine's apartment was just as quiet as the others.

She prepared herself, then carefully touched the door handle at apartment 3F and tried to turn it, just in case Catherine had forgotten to lock it. The handle didn't budge. She looked closely at the lock on the door. She didn't need to try to slide a credit card between the door and the latch, or try to pry it open with the steak knife. She could see that the hardware was the heavy and expensive kind that was fitted tightly and would be sunk too deep into the receptacle to be opened.

She resumed her walk along the hallway. There was an unmarked door, so she tried it. The door opened. Inside were a set of circuit breakers and a supply of cleansers, carpet cleaners, mops, and rags. She stood with the door open and thought. She could pop the circuit breakers. People would come out of their apartments, and one of them would check the panel and flip the breakers back. But that wouldn't work unless the one who did it was Catherine. If she was asleep, she would never know it had happened. What would rouse her? Pulling a fire alarm would do it, but that would bring firemen and cops. She closed the door to the little room and moved on.

The only barrier that kept Judith away from Catherine was a single wooden apartment door. She had to think of a way to get past that door. Was there a way around it? Was there a way onto the roof? Maybe she could find a rope or make one, tie it to something solid-the central-air-conditioning unit, a pipe-and then lower herself down outside Catherine's window. She could look in and see her lying in her bed asleep. She could stay pressed against the window like a night creature. And then, when she was ready, she could fire through the gla.s.s. No. That was far too athletic for Judith-crazy.

She kept going, looking closely at everything she saw. The windows at the ends of the hallways opened, but that didn't seem to her to do any good. She studied the ceilings. They were made of plasterboard. If she'd had a ladder, she could go to the ceiling outside of Catherine's apartment, cut a hole in the plasterboard with her knife, climb up, and carve a hole into the ceiling on Catherine's side so she could climb down. It was crazier than the first idea: far too loud, and too likely to get her caught.

The doors were beginning to look less substantial. After all, they were made of wood. Maybe, in an hour or two, she could carve a hole through one of them with the knife, reach through it, and turn the handle.

If she had to, she could simply stay here-maybe in the third-floor storage closet across from Catherine's apartment-until dawn. She could wait and watch until Catherine came out. She recognized that as the first sensible strategy that had occurred to her. She had done the hard part, gotten in past the outer doors without being noticed. If she just stayed in the building, her chance would come. She decided to finish her tour of the building before she gave up and hid in the closet.

She reached the stairwell again, went back down to the lobby, and looked at the triple row of mailboxes. If the Dymo labels told her where people lived, then maybe an empty one would tell her which apartments were vacant. If she could find one, maybe she could break into it and wait in safety.

"Is something wrong?" It was a male voice from behind her.

She turned, her body instantly tense and ready to fight. He was in his fifties or sixties and he wore a uniform, but it wasn't medical like hers. He was balding and chubby. He looked like a janitor. She said, "I forgot my keys."

"Your apartment key?"

He didn't seem threatening now, but she knew it was an illusion. She couldn't make a mistake. "Yes. I thought it was in my purse, but here I am, and it's not there. I'm hoping I didn't lose it permanently."

"How did you get into the building at all?"

"As I was coming up the steps somebody else was going out. He held the door for me. I didn't know I didn't have my key until I got up there."

"Do you have your ID?"

"Sure." She was making a plan. It was just a series of pictures in her mind, a flash of images. She would fire, and step around him to go out the front door. She would dash back along Northeast Russell Street to the hospital. If she was being observed, she would go into the building as though she were late for the midnight shift, then come out of the hospital at the parking lot entrance with whatever stragglers were left, make her way to her car, and be gone.

She opened her wallet and held it up so he could see the Catherine Hobbes driver's license and the credit card. She pointed at the mailboxes. "See? That's me-Catherine Hobbes." She let her hand linger near the pistol she had taped to her body.

The man held out his hand. "I'm Dewey. I do the handyman work for these apartments and three others that the company owns."

"Pleased to meet you," said Judith. She managed a sad smile as she shook his hand. "We'll probably see each other a lot while I'm sleeping in the hall."

"Don't worry," said Dewey. "I've got a grand master key for the building. I can let you in."

"You can?" Her eyes widened, and her smile became real and grew. "Oh, that's wonderful. You don't know how awful I felt. Thanks so much."

"Don't mention it. What's the apartment again?"

"Three-F. But there are six or seven interns on my floor, and at least half of them will be trying to sleep off a forty-eight-hour shift. Do you think we'd be quieter if we took the stairs?"

"It's okay," he said. "I've had all kinds of calls to come here in the middle of the night, and the elevator never wakes anybody up. When it's a plumbing thing on an upper floor you've got to get up there quick, or it's going to start coming through the ceilings. You a nurse?"

"Hmm?"

"A nurse. Are you a nurse?"

She tried to think of something he would know nothing about. "Yep. A surgical nurse." She was fairly sure that anybody who'd had surgery would have been unconscious.

"You mean like when the surgeon says 'Forceps,' you're the one who says 'Forceps' and hands them to him?"

"That's me. Only sometimes I hand him the monkey wrench or the pruning shears for fun."

Dewey chuckled. He looked at the numbers lighting up above the elevator door: 2, then 3.

She had to get whatever talk there was going to be out of the way before the elevator door opened, and she needed to head off trouble. She reached into the pocket on the side of her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. "I'd like to give you something for helping me out."

He said, "It's nothing."

"Please," she said. "I insist." She had to hold him off this way or he would expect to come in, have a soft drink, and be sure her faucets weren't leaking. She had to keep this under control and foreclose all chances of a mistake.

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. She tiptoed to the door of apartment 3F, almost pantomiming the act of being quiet.

Dewey slipped his key ring off his belt and tried a key, but the lock on Catherine's door wouldn't accept it. As Judith waited, the noise of the keys on the ring seemed to her to be terribly loud. What if Catherine heard that jingling right outside her door? Even if he got the door open Judith might step inside and see Catherine standing there with a gun in her hand. Dewey held up his key ring again, picked another that looked like the first, and tried it. He pushed the door open, but Judith stepped forward and held it open only an inch. She leaned close, whispered, "Thanks," then slipped inside and closed the door.

It was dark. There seemed to be no sounds of movement in the apartment. Judith stood absolutely still, listening. She heard Dewey's heavy feet move off. After a few more seconds she heard the elevator doors open, then heard them slide shut. The last barrier was gone. She was in.

56.

Judith felt relief, but it was only tentative. She was not yet sure that Catherine had not heard her enter. She listened and waited for a long time, and then began to orient herself in the darkness. This was a big open s.p.a.ce, and ahead of her was the large window she had seen at the front of the building. She was standing in the tiled entry where Catherine had left a pair of shoes that must have been wet from yesterday's rain.

Judith stepped over them and onto the soft carpet, across the room to the window. She took her time, not rushing to the bedroom. It was only twelve-fifteen. There were probably day-shift people in the building who had not even gone to bed, and some of the night-shift people might leave late for the hospital.

She stood at the window and looked down at the street. She could see a white van down there that must belong to Dewey. It had steel screens in the back windows, probably to keep thieves from breaking in and taking Dewey's tools while he was inside some apartment building fixing a hot-water heater or something.

Judith knew that when this was over, Dewey's description of her would not be of much use to the police. It would make them lose a day finding all the female tenants Dewey didn't know and letting him see them, then showing him the identification photographs of the female employees of the hospital, and then probably interviewing the clerks at the stores where a person could buy hospital scrubs. It would all be a waste of time.

She wanted to wait until Dewey had left the building. She didn't see any need to harm him, and she knew that she would have to if he returned. She watched for several minutes, and then several more. Cars went by. The neighborhood had reached the hour of night when there were no pedestrians out, everyone's dog had been walked, and the hospital's visiting hours were long over.

Dewey's foreshortened, wide body appeared below the front window, coming down the front steps in a little dance. She watched him reach the bottom, walk down the sidewalk, step off the curb, and cross the street to his van. When he got inside she saw the van shake a little as though he were walking around in it, but then the taillights came on. The van slid forward, away from the curb, moved up the street, and disappeared. Dewey was gone.

She stared down at the street for another minute. Dewey did not return, and no one came to take his place. She looked at her watch. It was still well before one. She turned away from the window and studied the darker parts of the apartment.

It was spa.r.s.ely furnished, just like the one Judith had rented on the west side, across the river. Catherine had not even added any pictures. She was treating her apartment like a hotel room, just a place where she came to sleep. Catherine was undoubtedly planning to rebuild her house very soon, and she would save her decorating ideas for that. Judith hated the thought of it-an insurance company paying to build Catherine a better, newer place. Judith had risked her life for that.

She walked slowly from the window across the room to a narrow hall. Her eyes were now accustomed to the dark. Every shape, every line was clear to her, but it had been cleaned of its color. Time had changed for her too: if she took a single step and did not take another for fifteen seconds, it made no difference. There was no need to risk making a succession of rapid sounds that did not fit with the slow current of the night. Soon enough she was standing in the doorway of Catherine's bedroom.

She could see Catherine curled up in the middle of a queen bed. She was smaller than Judith had thought from the television shots. Or maybe it had been the telephone conversations. She had always sounded big, authoritative, like a strict teacher. But Catherine was one of those people who looked like children when they were asleep, the closed eyes pressing the eyelashes against the cheeks, making them look longer, the skin on the forehead and around the eyes smooth and relaxed, the body curled on its side with the covers pulled to the chin.

Judith spotted Catherine's purse on the dresser. She drifted silently to it and reached inside. Her hands felt Catherine's wallet, a small leather case that seemed to be filled with business cards, a thin leather identification folder. She would go through all of that later. She didn't want to let her eyes stray from Catherine.

From this angle, she could tell that Catherine had left some things under the bed on the side where she slept, away from the door. She could see a long, black four-battery flashlight, a pair of slippers, and Catherine's gun, stuck in a tight little holster that barely covered the trigger guard and two inches of the barrel.

Judith drifted quietly to the bed, bent her knees, and picked up the gun and flashlight, then rose and stepped backward two paces. The pistol was a semiautomatic, and Judith had to get to know it by touch. There was a safety catch, so she clicked it off, then raised the pistol to aim at Catherine's head. "Catherine," she whispered.

She watched Catherine's face as the whisper reached her brain. Her body flinched involuntarily, her eyes snapped open, and her head gave a quick side-to-side motion that was like a shudder while she found the shadow near her bed. She started to sit up.

Judith turned on the powerful flashlight to blind her. "Sit still, Catherine," she said. "Don't move."

Catherine said, "h.e.l.lo, Tanya." Her voice was a bit raspy from sleep, but she was making an effort to keep it artificially calm.

Judith knew Catherine was afraid. She could see Catherine's heart beating, making the thin pajama top quiver-see it. "I'm not Tanya. I haven't been Tanya for a long time." it. "I'm not Tanya. I haven't been Tanya for a long time."