Nightlife: A Novel Page 22

  “But she wouldn’t get anything from killing me.”

  “It’s hard to say what she got from killing those other people either. Some killers get a thrill out of it, and some are just pissed off.” He shrugged. “I’m a little surprised that the police haven’t considered the same thing. They’re acting as though they think she’s already a thousand miles from here.”

  “You don’t think she is?”

  “I don’t know, and neither do they.”

  “Are you planning to stay here until my shift ends?”

  “If you don’t mind.”

  “Not at all,” said the young man. “Make yourself comfortable.” He held out his hand. “My name is Donald Holman.”

  Calvin Dunn shook his hand. “I know that. Calvin Dunn.”

  “You know, the light up here in the lobby is better for reading. Hardly anybody sits by the fireplace in the summer.”

  “I noticed that. But it’s the only place where someone outside can’t see me through the windows.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Well, if you need anything while I’m on duty, just let me know.”

  “You know, there is just one thing. Do you, by any chance, have a woman staying here named Catherine Hobbes?”

  Donald looked troubled. “I’m really not supposed to talk about any of the people staying here.”

  “I didn’t ask for her room number or anything. I could go over to the house phone over there and ask the operator to connect me with her room.”

  “I know,” said Donald. “It’s a silly rule. She is staying here. She flew in from Portland to interview me a few hours after I reported Tanya. After that Detective Hobbes checked in, and one of the local cops told me she wanted to be in this hotel because she likes to see everything that Tanya Starling sees.”

  “Maybe that works for her. What it does for me is put you both in one place, and that makes this the place to be.”

  Donald frowned. “You think she’s in danger too?”

  Calvin Dunn shrugged. “She’s a detective hunting for a serial killer, she’s in a strange town where the serial killer is—or was—and the killer knows her name. The thing that keeps cops alive isn’t that they’re especially smart, which most of them aren’t, or tough, which a few of them are. It’s that they come in bunches, an inexhaustible supply, like ants. But she’s here alone.”

  “I guess you’re right. She’s probably as much of a target as I am.”

  Calvin Dunn was leaning on his elbows at the counter with his arms folded. He straightened, and his right hand opened his coat to reach into his inner pocket. Donald saw the knurled handgrips of the big pistol in its shoulder holster, but the coat closed again and Calvin Dunn held a thin stack of hundred-dollar bills. “Tonight I expect to be in sight of you until your shift ends, but maybe I won’t be tomorrow. This is five hundred, and here’s my card. I would like you to call my cell phone number any time Detective Hobbes goes out or has a visitor. If you happen to overhear anything, I can promise you a lot more.”

  “Gee, I don’t know . . .”

  “Please take it. She’s a dear friend of mine, and she’s just too proud and stubborn to let me protect her.” Then he had Donald’s wrist in a grip that wasn’t hard, but it was so strong that Donald was afraid to let any of his muscles contract for fear the grip would tighten and break his wrist. Dunn put the money into his hand, then released him.

  “I shouldn’t be taking this money, or spying on a policewoman.”

  “It’s for her own good, and yours. This way I can keep an eye on both of you at once.”

  “But I don’t feel right about taking the money.”

  “I’m going outside to look around the parking lot now,” said Calvin Dunn. “And don’t worry about my money. The only reason to have money is to help your friends.”

  28

  It was Thursday morning, and Nicole sat at Tyler Gilman’s computer in his bedroom. The scanner he had beside his printer had given her an idea. She scanned the pattern from the back of an honor roll certificate that had been posted on Ty’s wall onto a blank sheet of paper. She did it on four sheets, then turned over the paper and did it on the reverse side. “Ty,” she called. “Help me think of a new name.”

  He lay on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “How about Tara?”

  “Too unusual.”

  “You are unusual.”

  “No. I want something that sounds like everybody else’s name. I want to fade, Ty. I want to be invisible for, like, two years, and have a life.”

  “Victoria? Veronica? Melissa?”

  “Too long. Maybe I’ll be an Anne. Let me see. Foster, no, Forster. Anne Forster.”

  “That’s good,” said Ty. “That’s really good.”

  She reached into her purse, took out the disk she carried, and put it into the computer. She opened the file containing the blank birth certificate. She selected the type font that fit the rest of the document and filled in the blanks to make Anne Forster a woman born twenty-two years ago, on the nineteenth of July. She put one of her sheets of paper with the filigree patterns on it into the printer and printed the certificate. Ty reached for it, but she said, “Don’t touch it. The ink will smudge.”

  He stopped himself, and held his head at an angle to see the certificate in the tray. “It’s just like the real thing. What should my name be?”

  “Your name?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “It should sound real too. How about Joshua? Josh Forster.”

  “Uh . . . not quite right.” She managed to conceal her surprise, but her mind was not moving quickly enough. “Who are you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why do you and I have the same last name? What are you trying to be?”

  “Your husband.”

  She smiled indulgently, but she shook her head. “That’s so sweet. But Ty, you’re twelve years younger than I am. That difference is three-quarters of your life. Nobody would believe we were married. More likely, they’d think I was one of those teachers who run off with one of their students. They’d call the police.”

  She saw his eyes begin to cloud, and he lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She had said too much, and she had to fix things instantly or she was in trouble. “How about my brother? You could easily be my brother. That way, if we traveled together, people wouldn’t think anything of it.”

  “I don’t want to be your brother.”

  “Ty, please. Don’t insist on taking extra risks. Our lives could depend on this. We can’t be lazy-minded and draw attention to ourselves.”

  “I don’t even look like your brother.”

  She thought about what she had seen of his parents’ room. “Does your mother dye her hair to get rid of the gray?”

  “Yeah.”

  She got up and went into the master bathroom off Ty’s parents’ bedroom. When Ty caught up with her she was opening cabinets and drawers. She knelt at an open cabinet under the sink, and took out a hair dye box with a picture of a beautiful woman on the front. She stood and pulled Ty to the mirror, then held the box up beside his hair. “Look. Her hair color is exactly the same as yours.”

  “You’re going to dye your hair the color of mine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Our eyes are different.”

  “My eyes are a paler blue than yours,” she said, “but I have blue contacts. And brown and green. But I’ll wear the blue. We’ll look amazing.”

  He said nothing, just stared unhappily into the mirror at her. She looked at him from the corner of her eye. “Brothers and sisters can stay in the same hotel room at night. They do it all the time to save money.”

  He smiled.

  “Come on. Help me.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. Ty, we’ve only got about three days left before your parents show up. Anything we need to do to prepare has to be done well before then. And some little thing might be what saves us.” She tore open the top of the box.

  “What if she notices it’
s missing?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “She probably won’t notice, at least right away. She’s got three boxes. I do know that if she can’t find a box of hair dye, what she does about it isn’t going to be calling the police. That’s all I care about.” She started to take small bottles and plastic gloves out of the box and set them on the sink.

  “This looks really messy.”

  “It is.”

  “Then let’s do it in my bathroom.”

  “But that’s smaller and darker.”

  “If they come back and we’re gone, you don’t want them to figure out what happened right away. If there’s a stain on the counter or something, they’ll know the exact color you dyed your hair.”

  She stared at him. He kept surprising her. She followed him into his bathroom and set up her kit on his sink. She pulled her top off over her head, and heard the intake of breath from Ty. “Don’t,” she said. “Not now. I just can’t take a chance that I’ll stain my clothes. I don’t have any except these.”

  He said, “I . . . I’m sorry. I should have thought about that. I have, like, three hours before I have to go to work. I can go out and buy you some now. I’ll bring them when I get back from work.”

  “Where were you thinking of going?”

  “I don’t know. The mall?”

  “Go someplace big, where nobody pays any attention to you and you put stuff in a shopping cart. Is there a Wal-Mart or a Target or something?”

  “Yeah. Both.”

  “Then I’ll give you a list of what I need, with my sizes. Buy some stuff for yourself, too, and mix it all together, like it’s for your family. Okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She stepped into his room, took a blank sheet of paper from the printer, and wrote out her list. She picked up her purse and took out some money. “This is six hundred dollars. If you spend all of it in one place, they’ll notice you.” She handed him the list, and watched him read it. “Can you handle all of that?”

  He shrugged uncomfortably. “I can do it. I’ve bought things for my mom.”

  “Just do your best, Ty. Be careful.” She leaned close and kissed him slowly, passionately, then held him at arm’s length. “The thing I care about most is that you keep yourself safe. If anything in or around the store doesn’t seem right, then avoid the place. Don’t go in.”

  “Okay,” he said.

  “Then go. Get the exact sizes I said. Try to stick with dark colors and earth tones. Don’t worry about the lengths of the pants. I’ll shorten them if they’re too long. And try to find me a small, cheap suitcase with wheels, about the size to hold the clothes.”

  She kissed him again, and he looked a bit dazed. He didn’t want to go. His arms lingered around her, until she grasped his wrists and removed them. She spun him around and pushed him toward the door. “Get going!” She snatched a pillow from the bed and hurled it in his direction. He sidestepped it easily and was out the door.

  She listened to his footsteps going out, then the sound of the car. She went into the bathroom, took off the rest of her clothes, and opened the bottles. The strong, acrid odor of the chemicals filled the room. Some people hated that smell, but for her it brought back very early memories. The first time she had smelled that smell she had been five. Charlene and her mother had arrived in the downtown hotel the night before the Tiny Miss Milwaukee pageant, and she and her mother had gone down to the ballroom to watch the other contestants being brought in by their mothers for registration. As they watched the other little girls, her mother had looked increasingly worried. Finally she had locked Charlene in their room, gone to a drugstore down the street, and come back with two hair-dyeing kits. The next morning at the opening of the pageant, Charlene and Sharon Buckner had appeared with the same fresh golden hair and the same carefully applied makeup. They had looked almost alike, the pretty daughter like a miniature of the pretty mother.

  As she worked, she reflected that it was a relief that Ty was gone. The dyeing wasn’t difficult to do, but it did require that she pay attention to the time, and he was always trying to distract her.

  She finished, and she could tell even while it was still wet that she had done a very good job. She went to her purse, found the little plastic case with her colored contacts in it, selected the blue ones, and put them in. She stood in front of the mirror. “I’m a Gilman.”

  29

  Catherine Hobbes waited until Officer Gutierrez had pulled into the long-term parking lot at the airport and come to a complete stop. “This is probably about as close as we ought to get,” he said.

  They both got out of the patrol car and Catherine walked toward Mary Tilson’s small gray Honda. She could see uniformed officers outside the perimeter of yellow tape that had been set up around the car. They were stringing more tape to force cars coming into the lot to go up another aisle, one that led away from the technicians who were working around the Honda.

  Catherine reached the tape, and a police officer in a pair of suit pants and a white shirt with a lieutenant’s badge clipped on the pocket stepped up to meet her.

  When he talked she could see him making decisions. Even though he must have seen her get out of Gutierrez’s patrol car, he had to verify that she was Hobbes. “Hello. Are you Sergeant Hobbes?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  Next he had to tell her that he was in charge. “I’m Lieutenant Hartnell.”

  She held out her hand so he could shake it. “Pleased to meet you.”

  She saw him decide that he wanted to have her think he was informal and spontaneous, not the sort of man who made decisions every time he spoke, so he said, “Steve Hartnell” as he shook her hand.

  “My name is Catherine.” She had her small notebook in her hand, and she compared the California license number on the plate of the Honda with the number in her notebook, then put the notebook away.

  Hartnell said, “We’ve got it roped off so we can screen the area around the car for footprints, dropped items, and so on. The flatbed will be here in a few minutes to bring it in so we can have the trace evidence people give it a closer look.”

  “Do you know the time when it was left here?”

  “The ticket is on the floor on the passenger side, as though she tossed it there after she took it and the automatic stile went up. It says three forty-eight A.M., two nights ago. In a way, it’s a relief. It means she went to the terminal and took a taxi right to the Sky Inn. She didn’t have time to stop off and kill a family of six.”

  Catherine ignored the last sentence because she was thinking about Tanya. “She must have been exhausted.”

  Hartnell looked at her as though he wondered about her sanity.

  Catherine saw his expression. “She killed a woman in Los Angeles early in the evening, cleaned her whole apartment, packed up, and drove off in the victim’s car. She must have stopped somewhere for a day and traveled after dark, but it took her until three A.M. on the second night to get here. I think she must have been worn out.”

  “I’m not exactly moved to sympathy,” said Hartnell.

  “I’m just ruling a few things out in my own mind,” Catherine said. “I don’t think she had somebody here that she was trying to reach—somebody who would take her in or help her get away. At four A.M. the person would almost certainly have been home, and she would have gone there. Instead, she ditched the car here and went to the Sky Inn. I think she probably stopped here because she was falling asleep at the wheel.”

  “But somebody picked her up within a minute after she called the hotel from the bus station the next day,” said Hartnell. “She could have made an arrangement for that during the daytime. Maybe the accomplice worked nights or wasn’t home until then.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Catherine. “She seems to be an expert at getting people to help her, to take an interest in her. Usually it’s a man, but it doesn’t have to be. I think that’s what got Mary Tilson killed. She befriended the young woman who lived across the hall in her
apartment building. She had invited her into her kitchen and started to get her something to eat or drink when she got stabbed.”

  “Do you have any way to use that?” asked Hartnell.

  “I think we’ve got to concentrate on the person who picked Tanya up. If he drove her someplace, we need to know where he let her off. If he’s still with her, we need to persuade him to turn her in.”

  Hartnell seemed to be making one of his decisions. He said carefully, “I’ll talk to the chief about having a press conference.”

  “Great,” said Catherine. “I also think we ought to check with your missing persons section to find out if there’s anybody with a car who hasn’t been seen in the past two days.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “See you later.” As he walked to his unmarked car, Catherine knew that she had gone too far, trying to tell a lieutenant in another state how he ought to organize his investigation. She had alienated him. She watched him start his car and drive out of the parking lot.

  She turned to look at the car again, and thought about Tanya. She had been stuck in Los Angeles, on the verge of being discovered because of the photograph on the front page of the Daily News. She must have reacted desperately to get herself out—gone across the hall and stabbed her sixty-year-old neighbor to death just to steal her car. She had driven the car just about as long as she could without getting spotted: she had probably known that she had to get rid of it before daylight. When she had run out of time, she had ditched the car here. She had picked a place where she could leave it with a collection of other cars, and not have anyone wonder about it for a few days. She had been trying to buy time. She was pressed. She was running hard, and she was feeling vulnerable and scared.

  Officer Gutierrez appeared at Catherine’s shoulder. “Looks as though she didn’t leave any footprints or anything. The tow truck is here.”

  “We may as well go,” Catherine said. “Can you drop me at the station?”

  “Sure.”

  Gutierrez drove her to the station and let her out at the front entrance. “What are you going to do now?” he asked.