Nightlife: A Novel Read online

  Judith walked across the street slowly, careful not to disturb the perfect quiet. She climbed the steps beside Catherine’s house and walked around to the back door. She looked in the window at the kitchen. It was pretty. The color of the walls seemed to be a pale yellow, but it was difficult to tell the exact shade in the darkness. She could see that here, as in most houses, there were no smoke detectors in the kitchen, where cooking would continually set them off. Judith took off her pack, pulled out a can, opened the spout, and poured charcoal starter on the door and the wooden footing below it.

  Judith poured the rest of the can of charcoal starter on the clapboards of the house, letting extra pools of it soak into the sills of all the windows. She put the empty can back in the backpack, opened another, and kept going along the side of the house, searching for the things she had noticed in previous visits. When she reached the narrow door set into the wall outside the house, she slowly and cautiously opened it to verify that it covered a gas water heater. She took the adjustable wrench out of her backpack, unhooked the gas line from the heater, and closed the door. Then she poured some charcoal starter on the door and the walls beside and below it.

  She tried to keep a steady stream of charcoal starter going as she walked beside the house, soaking the lowest few rows of clapboards. Whenever a can was empty she put it back into the pack and opened another. She took her time, trying to be thorough. There was a front entrance at street level that she knew opened into a narrow hallway with a side entrance to the garage. From there an interior staircase climbed to the living areas on the upper floor. She had glimpsed it the night when she had watched Catherine pull her car into the garage and open the door to go upstairs. Judith poured a whole can of charcoal starter on and around the front entrance and another on the garage door.

  Judith still had a couple of cans left, so she used them on the wooden clapboards along the side of the house as she made her way again along the steps up the hill to the back door. Then Judith put on her pack. It felt incredibly light now. She took out her matches, and listened once more to the world. She could hear nothing, not even a distant swish of traffic from the city below.

  Judith wanted to do this in a particular way. She wanted the fires in the back of the house to burn unnoticed for a time. She would light them first, beginning with the one that would block the back door and eat its way into the kitchen, where there were no smoke detectors. After a time the fire would spread to the petroleum-soaked wood on the sides and front of the house, blocking the other exits. They were the lowest parts of the house and they faced the river, where the wind was coming from tonight. Once the back of the house was engulfed, the fire in front would run right up the stairs to meet it.

  She struck a match, listening to the scrape and then the hiss as the match head flared. She dropped it into the pool of charcoal lighter that had dripped to the foot of the back door. The wet fluid lit and the flames began to flicker up the surface of the wooden door. She moved a few paces and lit the next match, which she held against the lowest clapboard where it met the concrete footing below.

  The saturated boards began to flare up, and the flames moved along the back of the house more quickly than she was walking: Judith had overdone it. The flames were running along ahead of her now. She stopped, turned, and hurried along the back of the house the way she had come. She had no time to go the long way, because the little house was already ablaze. The flames were blistering and peeling the layers of old paint to get to the dry wood beneath, then blackening it and beginning to devour it.

  Judith trotted down the steps beside the house toward the street. She could feel the breeze making the short hairs along her hairline move, and she knew she had to escape. The fire was moving too quickly. Judith reached the bottom of the steps. She had to block the front exits, or it would all go wrong, so she struck another match and dropped it in front of the garage door. She watched flames unfurl from it, rolling up the surface of the garage door.

  Judith whirled and started down the street. The flames were bright and yellow now, and her shadow stretched ahead of her on the empty asphalt of the street. She began to trot. She needed to get away from the neighborhood before the fire trucks and police cars came up that road. She had trotted only a few paces before she realized that the faster she went the better she felt, so she broke into a run, pumping her arms and pushing off with the balls of her feet.

  The sidewalk was too treacherous, a series of tilted blocks and cracks to catch her feet, so she moved to the middle of the street. She sprinted, dashing for the first curve that would get her out of the light of the fire. She made it around the first corner and the light was dimmer. She ran hard for a few seconds, but then the light seemed to get brighter again.

  Judith turned to look behind her. It was a set of headlights brightening the trunks of trees. She could hear the car coming fast. The car stopped a few feet from her and the driver was out, crouching behind his open door. He had a gun in his hand. “Hold it.”

  She said, “What? What do you want?”

  The man said, “You. I’ve been waiting for you, honey. I’ve been watching, and waiting, and here you are.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Calvin Dunn,” he said. “Put the knapsack down and step away from it.”

  Calvin Dunn. That was the name in the newspapers, the man who had killed Tyler. She knew that she had no choice except to do what he said. She set the backpack down on the street and took a few steps away from it, stepping to the side to get the light of the burning house behind her, trying to see Calvin Dunn’s eyes.

  They were focused on her. He said, “All right. Stop there.” She could see the fire’s reflection in his eyes, the glow flickering on the retina. Calvin Dunn took two steps from the car. His eyes moved to the backpack.

  Judith’s right hand slipped into the pocket of her raincoat and grasped the pistol. She sensed from a slight change in his posture that Calvin Dunn’s brain had registered his mistake. She saw the eyes flick back to her and his body begin to tense, trying to raise his gun.

  She fired through her pocket. The round hit his chest, but he didn’t go down, so she leapt to the side. He fired at her, but she reached the barrier of a parked car. She heard Dunn running too, so she popped up and fired. This time when she hit him, he slowed as though the loss of blood was weakening him, so she fired twice more. He toppled to the pavement, and she stepped closer to fire into the back of his head.

  The return of the silence seemed to waken her, and she began to run again. She took a half dozen steps down the center of the street, her gun still in her hand, before she remembered the backpack. She couldn’t leave it lying on the pavement beside Dunn’s body. She turned and ran back, snatched up her pack, and dashed down the street carrying it. She saw the end of the street bathed in light from the streetlamps, and she pushed the gun back into her pocket and ran toward the light. When she reached the bottom of the hill she tried to slow down, but her legs refused to obey her. She ran until she was around the corner and at her car. She fumbled with the keys for a second or two, but got it started and drove.

  Catherine was in the midst of a dream she’d had many times. In it she had bought a huge, rambling house full of long turning hallways, attics, and secret rooms. She knew there was something in it that she had forgotten to take care of, something that was getting worse every second. She heard a shot, then another. Her brain worked to fit the sounds into the dream. Then there were three in a row, and she wasn’t in that dream house anymore. She was in her bed. For a moment she felt the relief that awakening brought, the reassurance that the impressions had not been real. But something was still wrong.

  She opened her eyes, and she could see there was light beyond the blinds in her room. She glanced at the clock, but it was only three-ten. Catherine sat up. The light in the cracks between the blinds was flickering and moving as though— She was up on her feet, and the air was thick and hot. She went down to the floor and began to crawl
. As she did, the smoke detector overhead began to shriek at her, and she had to fight panic.

  The lights were flickering beyond all of the windows. She had to get to the front of the house, where there were more exits. She crawled to the closet and pulled an armload of clothes off the hangers. There were a pair of pants—the silky black ones that were from her best suit—and a navy peacoat that she sometimes wore in cold weather. She put them on and crawled to the bedroom door. She reached up cautiously and touched the doorknob. It felt warm, as though it was beginning to heat up, but she could still grasp it. She turned it gingerly and opened the door.

  She could see the sky through the greenhouse windows across the room at the front of the house, but there were flames moving along the walls on both sides of the room. The only windows still free of flames were the greenhouse windows, and they didn’t open. Catherine rose to a crouch and rushed to the dining room table. She lifted one of the chairs and swung it hard into the greenhouse window. There was a crash and a spray of glass, and she pushed the chair the rest of the way out.

  She wrapped the tablecloth around her right hand and forearm, used it to clear the glass shards from the bottom of the window, draped it over the sill to protect her while she put her feet out, then slid her body out after them and held herself there. She extended her arms, looked down, then dropped.

  44

  Judith Nathan’s alarm clock gave an insistent buzz. She reached across the pillow to turn it off, and sat up in bed. She had been asleep for barely two hours, but she had wanted to be awake at six. She walked out into her living room, turned on the television set, sat in front of it, and waited.

  The local morning news began with a lot of oppressively energetic music, quick cuts of cars on highways, shots of office buildings downtown, and idealized stills of the couple who read the news.

  The man said, “Good morning. Our top story this hour is an arson fire in the Adair Hill district that’s linked to a murder.” Judith stood up, the excitement building. Had she caught Catherine Hobbes in the fire? “Our Dave Turner was live on the scene with police lieutenant Joyce Billings this morning.”

  The image changed to a shot of a woman in her fifties wearing an uncomfortable-looking blue police uniform who frowned at a hand that thrust a microphone into her face. She said, “The fire at the house is now out. The firefighters say that the house will be a total loss, but they were able to contain the fire and limit it to the one building. Fire department investigators have already declared it an arson fire. There is conclusive evidence that accelerants were used.”

  The voice of the man holding the microphone said, “Is it true that this was a police officer’s house?”

  “Yes, it was. This happens to be an officer who has been involved in a number of high-profile cases during the past few months. We don’t know whether this has to do with one of those cases or not.”

  “What can you tell us about the shooting?”

  “At approximately three A.M. there were calls to report both the fire and, about a block from here, gunshots. The fire trucks arrived first, to find the street blocked by what appeared at first to be a disabled car. Firefighters got down to push the car out of the street and found a Caucasian male about forty years old lying nearby. A gun was found beside him. We believe that he was killed during a shoot-out with an unknown assailant. We won’t release his name until after his family has been notified.”

  “Was he a suspect?”

  “No,” said the lieutenant. “He was not a suspect in the investigation.” She turned away, and the camera panned quickly from the microphone up the arm to the face of the young male reporter who had been asking the questions. Behind him Judith could see Calvin Dunn’s car, which was now pushed to the curb. There were cops milling around measuring things with long tape measures and talking. Among them was a shorter, possibly female figure in black clothes.

  “This is Dave Turner, live for KALP News . . .” Judith kept her eyes on the figure in black. It was definitely a woman, but maybe only a curious neighbor. “. . . coming to you from the scene of a very mysterious fire.” He gave his serious look, and the woman behind him turned to say something to someone. It was Catherine Hobbes.

  “Shit!” said Judith Nathan. “How did you get out of there, you bitch?” Catherine Hobbes disappeared and the scene changed to the studio, where the news couple sat behind their desk. It didn’t matter. Judith knew how Catherine Hobbes had survived. She had been afraid of it since the moment it had happened. It had been the shots. It had been that stupid Calvin Dunn.

  He must have been sitting in his car somewhere above Catherine’s house, waiting. She had walked past the house on several evenings before, but he had not been there. He must have known that Judith would come for Catherine late at night, when she was in her deepest sleep. Of course Judith would do it then. Catherine Hobbes was an armed cop, and she spent all of her days surrounded by other armed cops.

  He probably had not seen Judith arrive. She had not seen his car, so probably it had been parked beyond the curve, where Catherine wouldn’t see it either. But he had seen the fire. He had driven down the hill and seen Judith come away from the house in a hurry, and he had seen her running. The only thing all night that he had not seen in time was where Judith had carried her gun. He had thought she had it in her backpack.

  Judith switched channels, going to each of the local stations to hear their versions of the same story. Some of them showed the same police spokeswoman from slightly different angles, and some had video clips of the burning house and the firemen.

  At least Judith had shown Catherine what it felt like to be hunted. She had wanted her to know what it was like to be alone and afraid, to have to run for her life. She supposed that she had accomplished that much. It was a good start.

  45

  Catherine Hobbes hurried into the department store with the envelope full of cash. All of her identification, her checkbook, and her credit cards had been incinerated with her purse when the house had burned. The money she had now was from the bureau’s cash fund for emergencies. It had taken the captain’s written approval to get the loan.

  She was still wearing her black silk pants and peacoat. Abby Stern, one of the other female detectives, always kept a spare blouse in the office, and she had let Catherine borrow it.

  Catherine could have gone to her parents, both for the money and the temporary clothes. But she had been busy with the firefighters and the police investigators, and had barely had time to call her parents at seven to tell them about the fire before they saw it on television. She supposed it had been more a question of efficiency than actual time. She knew that her mother would insist on having her stay with them, and she knew that she didn’t want to. There would be an argument, and her father would eventually reassert his ancient authority to make her stop arguing with her mother. That was something that could happen only if she did exactly as her mother said. The only way to avoid it was to rent an apartment somewhere before she allowed the discussion to begin.

  She held a patrolman’s radio in her hand as she shopped, because her cell phone had burned with everything else, and she needed to stay in touch with the bureau while the hunt for Tanya was on.

  Catherine picked out some underwear and three outfits that she could wear to work. The requirements were that there be a coat that was slightly oversized so it would hide the gun she sometimes wore under it, and that the pants would allow her to run or fight if she had to. Beyond that, the outfit had to be fashionable enough so that she would not stand out in a crowd. The last purchase was the two pairs of shoes. They took longer than the suits, but she was finished quickly.

  As she hurried toward the door of the department store, she decided the shopping trip hadn’t been bad. When she had bought her first uniform in the academy, it had come as a shock to her that the uniforms were still all cut for men, and that the regulation shoes came only in men’s sizes. When she had put on her first bulletproof vest she had learned that the
y weren’t for women either, and wearing one loose was not a good idea.

  She supposed she was still feeling a bit traumatized. Last night she had been absolutely terrified, and being afraid was never a good experience for her. It weakened her and reminded her that she wasn’t what she wanted to be. Being burned out of her house was also a great deal of work, and it all came at a time when she needed to be doing her job. Tanya had been in Portland last night, trying to kill her. This was Catherine’s chance to get her.

  As she reached her unmarked car, she realized that the loss of her house had been a good mental exercise for her. She had suddenly been deprived of all the papers that the average person collected over a lifetime, and it had reminded her of how important they were. She had been unable to get money from her own bank account, unable to buy anything to wear, unable to rent a room to sleep in. Technically, she had driven over to the mall illegally, because she was not carrying a driver’s license.

  Tanya Starling had been traveling the country for months under a half dozen different names. She had been buying and selling cars, opening and closing bank accounts, signing leases, and she had done all of it without raising much suspicion. Catherine had known since she had become a police officer that the average person didn’t really take a close look at anyone else’s identification. They just glanced at the photograph, at most read the name, and accepted it, as long as nothing else made them suspicious. Tanya seemed to be getting better and better at making people trust her. She seemed to be immune to the nervousness that made people sense that something was wrong.

  She was learning quickly, and that was frightening. Learning was one of the things some of the worst serial killers did. They got more efficient and expert at committing their crimes—did the things that mattered, and stopped doing the things that were useless and could get them caught—and the chances of catching them declined. As that happened, they seemed to lose restraint.