Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  She spent the evening finding and searching the dumpsters outside the office buildings surrounding the three big hospitals. At four A.M. she found something that looked right: a carbon copy of a physician’s office-visit checklist. On it the doctor had checked off the exams he had performed and the tests he had ordered for a patient. The patient’s name, birthdate, and social security number were on the sheet. It was not going to help her in the way she had hoped, because the patient’s name was Charles Woodward, and his age was seventy-one. But she put the sheet in her pocket and kept working.

  At seven she went back to the park to sleep. When she woke for dinner at four, she was already breathing hard—panting, almost. She had a panicky certainty that she had been letting time go by without doing the right things, or doing them assiduously enough. She decided she was already running out of time. She had left Flagstaff on Friday, and it had taken all night and most of the next day to drive here. That made it Saturday afternoon when she had arrived in Denver, so now it was Monday. She had to get moving.

  She drove to a mailbox-rental store, paid in cash to rent a mailbox in the name Solara Estates, and took a couple of business cards so she would remember the address. After it was dark, she went to a big Kmart and bought an adjustable wrench, a screwdriver, and pliers.

  She drove to a street where there were auto repair shops, muffler shops, tire stores. One of the cars that had been left outside a mechanic’s shop caught her eye. It had a cover over it, and she looked beneath it to see that the hood had been removed and so had the engine. She stole the license plates, drove to a dark alley down the street, and used them to replace the Arizona license plates on Tyler’s car.

  She drove to the Aurora Mall, went to the ladies’ room near the food court, washed, and did her hair and makeup. She went to Nordstrom’s, bought a purse, a pair of black pants, shoes, and a top like the ones she had always worn by preference, and changed into them. As she studied herself in the mirror she judged that she had held up surprisingly well. Sleeping in the park during the day had not been something she would have chosen, but she had actually gotten more undisturbed sleep than she’d had since she’d left Chicago. The work of wandering the city and hauling trash bags around by night—or maybe the one meal a day that she had eaten—had kept her trim. She looked good, even healthy.

  When she returned to her car she opened her suitcase and put on some medium-good diamond earrings that Dennis Poole had bought her and a matching tennis bracelet. She put her Anne Forster driver’s license into the little ID wallet that came with her new black purse, then stuck a hundred dollars in with it. She locked everything else in the trunk, and kept the keys in her pocket.

  She found a singles bar near Larimer Square early in the evening. There was a line outside, and it gave her a chance to see the kinds of people who thought the bouncers and doormen should admit them. It was too early in the evening to see the staff make any difficult decisions. They turned away only a couple of young men, who seemed to have done something the night before: “Sorry, man. If the boss sees you two in there after last night, I’m going to be looking for a job.” They didn’t turn any women away, which was a good sign.

  When she reached the head of the line, she held her homemade license inside the wallet, but the bouncer barely glanced at it before he waved her in. Inside, the light was dim and the recorded music was loud. There was a D.J. in a booth high above the dance floor choosing cuts and operating the colored lights that strafed the crowd. The line at the bar was already three deep, and the five bartenders were lip-reading and pouring drinks methodically.

  She had to have a drink to hold in her hand, so she ordered a 7UP with a lime twist, which looked enough like a gin and tonic in the changing light. As soon as she was away from the bar, men started asking her to dance with them, so she did. She had an extremely clear vision of what she had to accomplish tonight, so she used the dancing, making turns to watch the way the crowds were forming and reconfiguring.

  As she danced, she could see groups of single girls sitting at the tables in the corner of the room just off the dance floor and farthest from the front door. Men lingered near that spot or walked by, surveying the selection while pretending not to, and the women made their own evaluations and decisions while pretending not to.

  When she had danced enough to be sure that the young women at the tables had become used to her, she bought another 7UP and went to the women’s area to sit on the upholstered bench that ran the length of the wall beyond the tables. She began to make overtures to the women around her. “This is a great place,” she said to one of them. The woman appeared not to be able to hear her over the noise of the music. She tried the one on her other side, a thin blonde who seemed to be there alone. “Wow. I absolutely love those shoes. Would you mind telling me where you got them?”

  “Zero Gravity.”

  “Can you tell me where that is? I’m new here. I just moved here from Florida.” She laughed. “I don’t know anything.”

  “It’s on Colfax, not far from the capitol building. It’s really a great place.”

  “Thanks so much. Do you know a good place to get a jacket? The fall stuff is out already, and I thought I might pick up a jacket now. With the altitude here and everything, I’m freezing half the time.”

  “Zero Gravity would be a good place to start for that too. Or, you know, there’s a mall in Aurora that has just about everything.” The woman’s eyes left hers and rose to focus on someone standing over them.

  “Would you like to dance?” asked the man. He was looking at Anne.

  She said to the blond woman, “Would you mind watching my purse for a minute?”

  The woman said unenthusiastically, “Okay. Sure.”

  She got up and danced with the man. He was tall, skinny, and young—so young that she wondered if he had used a false ID to get into the bar. She smiled at him, wondering if the blond woman she had chosen was right. If she had chosen wrong, the woman would be gone and so would her purse, fake driver’s license, and hundred in cash.

  When the song was over, the young man said, “Want to dance again?”

  “I shouldn’t. I left my purse with that girl.”

  She went back and found the blonde still there. She said to her, “Thanks for watching my purse.”

  She worked to shape the evening and make it conform to her vision. She talked with the woman and made observations, tried to make her laugh. They moved to a table when its occupants left. They became more and more comfortable with each other, and their smiles and laughter attracted another man. The blonde got up to dance with him, and she said, “Your turn to watch my purse, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  She waited until the girl had disappeared into the surging crowd of dancers, took out her little notebook and pen, and reached into the purse. She kept the purse beneath the table, her head up and her eyes on the dancers, so even if the lights had suddenly come on it would have been difficult to say she had been searching the purse. She looked down only when her fingers had identified something.

  The driver’s license gave the blonde’s name as Laura Murray, her address as 5619 LaRoche Avenue in Alameda, and her date of birth as August 19, 1983. She copied quickly, then found the health insurance card, which gave an identification number that started with XDX and ended in a social security number. She looked into the wallet to see the issuers of the credit cards. Then she closed the purse and put away the notebook and pen. The whole process had taken barely sixty seconds.

  The young woman came back after ten minutes to find her slightly bored and tired. They talked for a few minutes longer, and both went to the ladies’ room. As soon as they returned, the young man who had danced with the blonde before asked her to dance again. At that moment, Anne caught the blonde’s eye, pointed at her watch, and waved. The blonde smiled and waved back.

  She stepped outside into the cool night air and breezed past the doormen, feeling eager. It was going to work. She knew it was going to wor
k. She walked back to her parked car, retrieved her real purse with the gun and money in it, and drove to a 7-Eleven store that had a pay telephone on the wall outside. She searched the directory for an all-night copy service that rented computers, then drove there.

  When she reached the copy center, she was pleased. This seemed to be a business that served people from the university. The customers were all her age or younger, and there were at least two dozen of them, even though it was after midnight. There were a dozen using the self-service copying machines, paper cutters, and laminating machines. There were another dozen people using the computers. She claimed one and went to work.

  She went to bank Web sites and found one that would allow her to apply for a Visa card online. She brought up the application and checked her notes to be sure it wasn’t one of the banks that had already given Laura Murray credit. She entered Laura’s name, address, birth date, social security number, and driver’s license number. She said Laura was an executive trainee, effective a month ago in case the credit check revealed some other job, and that she made approximately fifty-one thousand dollars a year. Then came the question “Have you moved within the past two years?” She said yes, typed in “Solara Estates,” the mailbox number, and the street address of the mailbox-rental store. She put the effective date as today, and clicked that address as the current one.

  She had noticed that the application form she had filled out had asked, “Would you like to apply for a second card for another person on this account?” It gave her an idea. She applied for two cards in the name of Charles Woodward, the elderly man whose medical record she had stolen. After filling in his name, social security number, and birthday, she said he was retired. His annual income was eighty-seven thousand dollars. Yes, he did want a second card on his account. It was for one of the names she had made up for herself, Judith Nathan. She said her full name was Judith Woodward Nathan, and that they both lived at Solara Estates.

  She checked to see that the copy center was still safe, then used the scanned images of her Illinois, California, and Arizona driver’s licenses to make the paper fronts of licenses for Judith Nathan and Laura Murray, and signed off. She used a copier to copy the backs of her licenses, used a laminating machine to join them to the front sides, and a precision paper cutter to trim them to size. They still were not good enough to fool a policeman in their home states, but if she put one of them into the plastic holder in her wallet, it looked real.

  When morning came, she bought a Denver Post and searched for furnished apartments. The place she found was an old motel that had become less and less desirable to travelers and was living an afterlife offering rooms by the week at cut-rate prices. After a few days of sleeping during daylight in a park, she was not critical of the place’s faults. She was delighted to have a shower and a door with a lock on it, and there was even a television set.

  She drove to a hardware store and bought four sliding bolts. Late on the first night she installed two of her sliding bolts at the top and bottom of the door, and one bolt on each of the two windows. When she had done that, she slept with Mary Tilson’s gun under the spare pillow beside her head.

  She slept ten hours a day, exercised, took long showers, gave herself facials, treated her skin with moisturizer, and did her nails. She watched television, thought, and planned. She went out only to buy food and newspapers and check her Solara Estates mailbox.

  On the tenth day, she found her first credit card, in the name Laura Murray, in her mailbox, and on the thirteenth, the one for Judith Nathan. By the twenty-first day, she was ready to drive again. Judith Nathan packed her suitcase and began the long drive toward Portland, Oregon.

  35

  It was five-thirty in the morning. Catherine Hobbes stood at the big window of her dining room, sipped her coffee, and stared down at the city of Portland. Each morning since she had returned from Albuquerque, she had gone to work at five-thirty so she could spend an hour or two before her shift trying to follow cold leads to Tanya. It had been a month since Tanya had made the call to this house from Albuquerque and then disappeared again, and Catherine had begun to let a new possibility enter her mind.

  Not all serial killers got caught. Catherine had thought Tanya would turn up in Albuquerque, but there was no guarantee she would ever be recognized again anywhere. At some point people would say, “Maybe she died.” Or, “Maybe she’s in a prison somewhere for something else.” But she wouldn’t be, and from time to time, when the urge came on her again, she would kill someone else.

  Catherine put her coffee cup in the sink and went to find the lightweight hooded raincoat she kept for unpredicted rains. She slung it over her forearm, checked her watch, and appraised herself in the mirror near the stairs. The gray suit looked good, so she ran an inventory of the gear by touch: the belt with her gold badge clipped to the right of the buckle, the handcuffs at the hip, the pistol on her belt to the right side of her spine under the tailored coat.

  She went downstairs and out to the garage, got into her teal blue Acura, and conceded that she was letting her mood weaken her. She had even failed to keep herself from thinking about what day this was. The divorce had happened long enough ago so the day shouldn’t matter anymore. It was the twenty-first of August—Kevin’s birthday. He would be—what? Thirty-five—today.

  Each year had made her feel it less and less, and after eight years, Kevin was no longer real. He existed only as a part of her mind now, an altered point in her brain. What would the doctors call it? A lesion. Everything in medicine was a lesion, from a mild scratch to a fatal tumor.

  The part that was hard to believe now was that Kevin had been the other half of the conversation for so long. She had been with him for years and talked without any dissembling, and eventually without filtering or even reserve. When, at any time during those years, she had said something funny or profound, he was the one who had heard it, and probably the only one. For years after the divorce there had been times when she would catch herself in a forgetful impulse to describe something, and then remember that he wasn’t there anymore. There were other times when she would be talking to someone else—a friend, a colleague—and realize that the point she was making was something that she had heard Kevin say.

  The birthday was not a good memory. It had been on his twenty-seventh birthday that the quiet explosion had occurred. She had taken a half day off from her job at the brokerage. At just before noon she had rushed out, bought a birthday cake, and gone to his office to surprise him. She remembered that when she had grasped the doorknob of the office on the fifth floor, she had sensed that something was different. She had felt odd, almost dizzy, and she had attributed it to the elevator ride, but it didn’t feel that way. It had felt as though she were holding on while a subtle tottering of the universe occurred, a tremor.

  She opened the outer door of the office and walked into silence. The sales center wasn’t the sort of place where customers simply walked in, because the company worked on enormous construction projects. Usually somebody stayed to watch the office during lunch, but the desks were empty. It occurred to her that maybe the whole office had shut down and taken Kevin out to lunch to celebrate. It was a young, social group, and Kevin was a popular manager. She should have called ahead instead of surprising him, she thought, and then she could have gone too. He would have loved that.

  The thought gave her an idea. Maybe there was a notation somewhere, a scrawl that would tell her where they had gone. Paula, the receptionist, would be the one likely to have made the reservation, so Catherine looked first at the notepad on her desk, then the Rolodex, to see if the card that was showing was a restaurant. It wasn’t.

  Catherine went past the empty desks in the outer office, through the bay past deserted cubicles, to the hallway that led to the offices of the sales executives. She knocked on Kevin’s door, then opened it.

  He wasn’t there. She went to his desk to see if there was anything on his calendar. There were a few scribbled lines—his mor
ning appointments, a meeting at four. She put the cake on his desk, then sat in his chair and typed on his computer, “Happy birthday, Kev. I just stopped by for a minute to tell you I love you. See you later, Catherine.” She highlighted it, made the type twenty-eight point and red, and left it on his screen.

  She was pleased with that, because it implied that she had just breezed through in a rush, and not that she had blown half a day of work for nothing. He would feel happy instead of disappointed or guilty. She stood up, stepped out of the office, and heard something down the hall. It seemed to be a muffled female voice, as though one of the salespeople had stayed and was on the telephone. There was the voice again. It was definitely a woman’s. Maybe she would know where Kevin was.

  She followed the sound to a door down the hall. She put her ear to the door. She knew. There was no way to introduce doubt, no way for Catherine to save herself. Catherine had no right to open the door, but she did.

  It was Diana Kessler’s office, obviously. Diana was bent forward over her desk, her skirt up over her back, and Kevin was behind her. They didn’t hear Catherine open the door. She stood there, paralyzed and speechless, for two or three seconds before she took a step back and closed the door again. Catherine remembered the cold, empty feeling in her chest, the tightness in her throat. She had simply stood there, listening to their alarmed voices, the rapid, hurried rustling, and the quick footsteps.

  When Kevin flung the door open and saw her, his eyes widened with what looked like fright. He tried to cover, forcing a smile. “Honey! Are you here to surprise me? I’m so glad to—”

  “I saw,” she interrupted. “I opened the door while you were with her.” She turned and began to walk back along the hall toward the outer office.

  “Wait. Please. Let me talk to you.”

  “I don’t want to talk.”