Nightlife: A Novel Read online

“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 grass on either side of the driveway. She turned in her seat and craned her neck to see if she had missed him. Her eye passed 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 glass 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 assault 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 space.

  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 sex 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 brass, pushing it forward to seat the next round, and down to lock it again.

  By the time the hot brass 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 nobody 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 brass, 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 butt 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 snatched 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 bloody 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.

  Hartnell said, “Your name, please.”

  “Calvin Dunn.”

  “I’m Lieutenant Hartnell, Flagstaff Police Department. I would like to ask you a few questions about what happened tonight. I want you to know that you have the right to refuse to answer them. What you say could be used against you in court. You also have the right to have an attorney present while we talk to you. If you cannot afford an attorney, we will get you one before we proceed. Do you understand your rights?”

  Calvin Dunn never took his eyes from Hartnell as he listened to the recitation. “Yes,” said Calvin Dunn. “I think that for the moment I won’t need an attorney, thank you.”

  Hartnell did not like the exaggerated politeness. “I assume that you’re saying that because you think that you won’t be charged with anything?”

  “I can’t control what somebody might accuse me of. But I won’t be convicted of anything. That’s not a possibility.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “Because there was only one gun up on that fire escape, and the dead man brought it with him. I climbed up there carrying no weapons. While I was struggling to take his rifle away from him to prevent him from using it on me and others, it went off.”

  “Mr. Dunn, your identification says you live in Los Angeles. What are you doing in Flagstaff?”

  “I’m a licensed private investigator. I’m searching for Tanya Starling.”

  “Why were you at the Sky Inn tonight? Are you registered at the hotel?”

  “No. I was watching for Tanya Starling.”

  “Why? She hasn’t been seen at the hotel for several days.”

  “Hasn’t been seen. Right,” Calvin Dunn said. “That doesn’t mean she ha
sn’t been there, or wasn’t nearby, just out of sight, doing the seeing.”

  “All right. You know she hasn’t been seen at the hotel, but you were waiting for her to show up anyway. Why would she do that?”

  “Because of that lady right there.” His right forefinger pointed directly at Catherine’s heart. It made her want to flinch, but she controlled the impulse. “I went there at first because that was where Tanya Starling had been spotted last, but then I developed a hunch, and verified that Miss Hobbes was staying there. And that made it a good place for me to be.”

  “Explain.”

  Calvin Dunn looked directly at Catherine. His pale eyes made her uncomfortable, but she met his gaze. “You can’t just follow a killer around and hope you’ll catch up with them. You have to think about what makes them want to do it.”

  “Can you elaborate on that?”

  “Sure. There are some people who kill once because they lose their temper or they’re drunk and don’t think it through. Others do it because they get a charge out of it, like sex. Tanya Starling isn’t either kind. She solves problems that way.”

  “Solves problems? What kind of problems?”

  “Whatever comes her way. She goes along doing what she wants until somebody becomes a problem. She solves it by killing them.”

  “And how in the world did that theory lead you to sit in the parking lot of the Sky Inn tonight?”

  “The place you want to be isn’t where the last victim was. It’s where the next one is going to be.”

  “You thought that Tanya Starling was going to the hotel to harm Detective Hobbes?”

  “It seemed likely.”

  “How long would you have stayed?”

  Calvin Dunn turned to Catherine Hobbes. “How long would we have stayed?”

  The others sat in silence, and Catherine realized she had to answer. “I can’t say.”

  Calvin Dunn turned to Hartnell. “We can’t say.”

  “Why would she think killing Detective Hobbes would solve her problems?”