"The right. Oh, look. There's a nice little park up there. Can we stop for a minute?"

"I guess so," he said doubtfully. "Sure." Thayer drove off the road and stopped on the shoulder beside a grove of trees with picnic tables in it.

Nancy got out of the car with her purse over her shoulder. "I've been looking for a good place to have a small party. I wonder if I could do it as a picnic, right here."

Thayer didn't seem to know what to do. He got out of the car slowly, and scrutinized the ground before he took each step, as though he were afraid of getting his shoes dirty.

"Come on," she said. "Let's get a better look." She took his hand playfully and began to walk among the trees.

Thayer looked a bit doubtful, but he began to stroll with her in the deserted grove, past picnic tables and trash cans. Nancy let go of his hand and moved off a few feet to disapprovingly rock a picnic table that was set on uneven ground. He strolled on, and got a few steps ahead of her.

She looked at her watch. It was nearly ten-thirty. It wasn't surprising that people weren't here in the morning, but someone could arrive before long to set up a picnic lunch. She looked back at the road. There were no cars going past, and she couldn't hear any coming. There was n.o.body nearby yet. It would have to be now. She let him get a few more steps ahead of her as she reached deep in her purse.

He suddenly stopped and turned to look back at her. He said, "What are you looking for?"

She smiled brightly at him. "My camera. I want to take a couple of pictures so I can compare it to some other places."

He turned away and walked on.

Nancy Mills gripped the pistol and lifted it out, then held it tight against her thigh as she walked to catch up with him. She took one last look over her shoulder and listened for the sound of a car on the road. Then she raised the gun and fired through the back of Bill Thayer's skull.

His head bobbed forward in a sudden nod and his body followed it, toppling straight onto the ground. She squatted beside him to take his wallet out of his back pocket, then pushed him over on his back so she could reach his car keys in front.

She stood and walked calmly to the car, started it, and drove back the way she and Thayer had come, north on Topanga Canyon. She parked his car in the mall parking lot, wiped the steering wheel and door handles clean with one of the alcohol-soaked antibacterial wipes she carried in her purse, then picked up the bag containing her bath salts and walked away.

Nancy thought about the morning's events as she headed back toward her apartment. She had not wanted to harm Bill Thayer, but he had made it impossible not to. He'd had no right to keep pestering her. What could he possibly have been thinking?

Of course, she knew what he had been thinking. When he had seen the woman he thought of as Tanya Starling, it had probably made him feel excited. He already knew her slightly. She was a small business owner, and he was the manager of her bank. Not only could she be sure he was respectable, but he was powerful. He could raise her credit limit and get her loans approved. He could also get in her way, make things difficult for her. He was a shy, quiet man who had made so little impression on her the first time she'd met him that she had not recognized his face when it was three feet from hers this morning. But he had exercised his power over her, following her from the store, making her talk to him, keeping her from leaving, then making her agree to go somewhere with him. She'd had to get rid of him.

When Nancy reached home, she put on a pair of the rubber gloves she wore to do the dishes and sat at her kitchen table. She took Bill Thayer's wallet from her purse and examined it. The credit cards were too risky to keep, but he had also been carrying almost a thousand dollars in cash when she had killed him.

A lot of people carried extra cash when they were traveling, but this was better than she had expected. Nancy took the money, wrapped the wallet in a paper towel to disguise its shape, and put it in an opaque trash bag.

Somewhere in the back of her mind was a feeling, almost a physical sensation that had not yet developed into a coherent thought-something pleasant, even t.i.tillating.

Her need to end the fear had been like an ache. When she had at last been able to pull out the pistol and blow a round through Thayer's head, there had been a feeling of release. When she had left his rental car in the plaza parking lot and walked off with her Bloomingdale's bag, she had felt herself smiling.

Nancy had not allowed herself to acknowledge it yet, but she had been missing the excitement that she took from men. She had missed the antic.i.p.ation of watching and waiting for the right one, and then the care and calculation of drawing him to her. She had missed the thrill of the next phase, the charged, anxious period of flirtation and speculation, and then the longer game of divulging and concealing, withholding and succ.u.mbing. She had especially missed the sweet, warm, lazy time after that, when she was secure in the man's love, soaking in the attention and the luxury.

Now she was beginning to notice the puzzling fact that she liked the bad parts too. When Dennis had begun to disappoint her, the resentment and anger had made her feel powerful and dangerous and clean-not like a victim, but like a judge and avenger. The building anger had made her feel energetic and purposeful. The single shot had been the best possible climax to the relationship.

She had liked the killing. The breakup with David Larson had shown her that perfectly. When David had betrayed her, she had enjoyed the process of getting angry and rejecting him and punishing him. Seeing his devastation had given her the chance to know how beautiful and desirable she could be. But it wasn't enough. What was missing was that she had not gotten to kill him.

She took the bag with the wallet out with her garbage late that night and stuck it in the bottom of the dumpster behind an apartment building three blocks from hers. Her gun stayed in her purse. It would be foolish to get rid of her gun just when she had started to enjoy it.

11.

h.e.l.lo? Mrs. Halloran?"

Eve Halloran wasn't quite sure, but the young female voice made her think it just might be. "Yes?"

"This is Tanya Starling calling. I'm very sorry to bother you, but I wondered whether anyone had tried to get in touch with me since I left, or asked about me. There might have been a man named David?"

"No, dear," said Mrs. Halloran. She spoke with barely suppressed excitement. "I haven't heard from anyone like that. But a couple of days ago I did have a visit from a pair of police officers." She stopped, waiting for a reaction.

"Police? Why? What did they want?"

Eve Halloran relished the suspense, loved holding back and tantalizing, but she could hardly withhold this information. It was too dramatic, too delicious. "There were two of them, a man and a woman. They came all the way from Portland, Oregon. They said-I don't know how to break this to you-that a friend of yours has been the victim of a crime. It sounded as though he's been murdered."

"Who?"

"I think they said Dennis Poole."

"Oh, my G.o.d. Dennis Poole?"

"That's right." Now Eve was feeling better. That last exclamation had carried the sort of emotion that she had been hoping for. What could that man Dennis Poole have been except Tanya's lover? "I'm very, very sorry, honey. I hated to tell you this way, but there just wasn't any other way."

"I can't believe it. How could he have been murdered? He was such a sweet man. He had no enemies. Was it some kind of robbery?" There were tears in her voice. Eve Halloran could hear the tension in the throat, the higher voice.

"They didn't say, but I don't think that was it," said Eve Halloran. She allowed herself to give in to an ungenerous impulse. "That was what they wanted to talk with you about." She felt a tiny bit of guilt about holding back the next part of what they'd said, but she was still too curious. "They seemed to think you might know something about what happened. They said you had left town just about the time when he was killed."

"You mean they think I had something to do with Dennis's death?"

There. That was said just as Eve Halloran had imagined it. She didn't mind that she had to say the next part now. "Oh, no, dear. They said you were not a suspect. They definitely said that. I didn't mean to imply anything of the kind. Stupid me. I should have said that right away, first thing."

"I'm just overwhelmed. It never seems as though something like this can happen to anybody you know."

Eve Halloran said eagerly, "Were you very close?"

"I just can't believe it."

That answer was unsatisfactory. In fact, it had been an evasion. "Was he your boyfriend?"

"No."

Mrs. Halloran waited, but there was no more to the sentence. "Well, it's very sad. I'm sorry." Eve Halloran was growing tired of this conversation. She had built an expectation of a flood of intimate details, but she had been repeatedly disappointed.

Tanya said, "Did the police say how I was supposed to get in touch with them? Did they leave a number or anything?"

"I'll see if I can find it." Her voice was glum. This had been a disappointing conversation, and the fact that there was no further excuse to prolong it made her feel even more frustrated. She had taped the card to the wall right above the phone, but she stood leaning against the kitchen sink with her arms folded for thirty seconds. Let Tanya wait. She had become awfully demanding for a former tenant, calling up at night and expecting Eve to be her message board. After a time she sauntered back to the telephone. "Tanya? Still there?"

"Yes."

"Have a pencil?"

"Yes."

"The name is Detective Sergeant Catherine Hobbes. She's on the homicide squad." She added that part with a tinge of malice. She read off the various telephone numbers and the address of the police station, slowly and distinctly, to prolong the time of feeling important while Tanya silently copied down every word, probably with her hands shaking. When she had read everything on the card she said, "Got all that?"

"Yes, thanks. I'll give her a call."

Eve said, "Have you thought about hiring a lawyer?"

"No. I just heard about this."

"Well, from what I hear, the time to think about lawyers isn't after you've talked to the police, it's before." She was spiteful now.

"I'll think about it."

"You do that."

"Thanks, Mrs. Halloran."

"You're welcome." She was about to add a little jab about how she was going to tell the police that she had talked to her, but she realized that the line was dead.

Nancy Mills stood beside the row of telephones in Topanga Plaza, gazing at the food court. She looked down at the little spiral notebook she had bought at the stationery store to prepare for this call, and reread the phone numbers of the cop who was after her. The name disturbed her: she had never expected that it would be a woman.

12.

Catherine Hobbes sat in the homicide office. She had finished a long list of telephone calls that had not made her happy. Tanya Starling was turning out to be difficult to find. There was nothing helpful in her past-no way to find her family or her history. The apartment she had occupied in Chicago seemed to be an insuperable barrier: nothing was visible on the far side of it. A man named Carl Nelson had rented the apartment in his own name nine years ago. Tanya Starling had not been mentioned in the lease. At some point during those years she had moved in, and at some point Nelson had moved out, leaving the place to her. His accountants had continued to pay the rent until April, when she had moved out.

But it was as though she had come into existence in that apartment. Running a criminal records check on her name yielded nothing at all. She'd had an Illinois driver's license, and it had given the apartment as her address. None of the Starlings that Catherine Hobbes had found listed in Illinois had ever heard of Tanya.

Hobbes looked up and saw Joe Pitt appear in the doorway. She stood up and said, "Come on, Joe. I'll buy you a cup of coffee."

"Really?" he said.

"Really."

"I'm flattered."

She brushed past him and walked to the break room, then put a dollar in the machine and watched the paper cup rattle into place, and the stream of hot black liquid fill it. She handed it to him, then bought one for herself. She went across the hall to the conference room, looked inside, then held the door open. "Let's talk."

He went in after her. "You have something new?"

She sat on the table, sipped her coffee. "Yes. I wanted to tell you alone. It's been mostly a positive experience having you come up here to cooperate in the investigation. You've been very helpful, and I've tried to learn what I could from your experience."

"But?"

"But. It's time to cut you loose."

"It is?"

"Yes. You've helped me to clarify a whole part of this case in my mind, and saved me quite a bit of time. I'm now convinced that this didn't have anything to do with Hugo Poole. At the same time, having a person acting as Hugo Poole's representative in this investigation isn't going to help us when we have to go into court for a conviction. So you've got to go."

"I understand."

"You don't sound surprised."

"I'm not. Does Mike know about this yet?"

"Mike Farber? My captain?"

"Yes."

"I told him this morning that this was what I was going to do."

"And he agreed?"

"He agreed that it was my case, and that I had the right to make the decision. I made it, not Mike Farber."

"Then I guess I'll try to stop and say good-bye to him before I leave. I wish you the best of luck on the case, and after watching you work, I have confidence that you'll handle it." He held out his hand and she shook it. He smiled. "See you," he said, and he walked out the door and closed it.

Catherine remained perched on the table for a full minute, sipping her coffee and thinking. She knew that this decision had been inevitable and right, and she was relieved that it had gone so smoothly. She was also just a bit regretful, and she wasn't sure why.

She had to admit that was not exactly true. During the investigation she had begun to forget the imposition that Joe Pitt represented, and become used to having someone she could talk to about the case-not just some other cop who had a dozen cases of his own to think about, or a superior who had administrative details clogging his mind. When she had talked to Pitt she could talk in shorthand, and he knew exactly what she meant. She could test her ideas on him, and expect him to have ideas of his own.

Catherine tried to a.n.a.lyze her feelings. When Mike Farber had first called her in to tell her he had a.s.signed her to work on a murder with Joe Pitt, she had felt insulted. If her captain thought she was so incompetent and inexperienced that she needed help from some out-of-town retiree, then she should get out of homicide. A moment later, when she had heard what a hotshot Joe Pitt was, she had wondered how it could be anything but an insult to her s.e.x. Would Mike Farber have expected one of the men to serve as tour guide to a visiting potentate? No, it had to be the woman, the pretty face to please the visitor, and because the visitor was so great, all the hostess really needed to be was pretty. Joe Pitt would solve the case.

She had tested Joe Pitt-maybe tormented him a bit-and found that he wasn't so bad. She had come to feel comfortable with him. Why was she putting it like that? She had liked him, felt attracted to him. Maybe that was the worst thing about him. She couldn't afford to have him around any longer.

She jumped down, took her coffee to the break room, and poured it down the sink, then walked back to her desk in the homicide office.

Catherine's telephone rang. Maybe this was it. Maybe this was Tanya Starling. "Homicide. Hobbes."

"Hey, Hobbes. This is Doug Crowley in San Francisco. Has Tanya Starling called in yet?"

"Not yet." Hobbes had been near her desk almost the whole shift. "Mrs. Halloran said that Tanya promised she would call, but she doesn't seem to be in a hurry to do it."

"Well, I have something else that might be useful. The DMV has a hit on the roommate, Rachel Sturbridge."

"What is it?" asked Hobbes. She sat at the edge of her chair and pulled her yellow pad toward her.

"It's her car. She's sold her car."

"Her too? They both sold their cars? When and where did she sell it?"