Chasing Venus

by Diana Dempsey

  Once in the garage, he pointed his truck toward his reserved space. “You stay in the truck,” he said. He kept facing straight ahead, as if he weren’t addressing the bloody female fugitive crouching in his footwell.

  Because that’s what she was now, if this tale she was telling was true. Annie Rowell was a fugitive, the very ilk of person he lived his life to apprehend. And no doubt if her name wasn’t on some Most Wanted lists already, it would be by noon.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” she said.

  “What do you want from me?”

  She didn’t have a ready answer for that one. He nosed his truck into his space and cut the engine, noting that by now Sheila was inside the garage as well and maneuvering into her spot against the opposite wall.

  Annie’s voice, very low, rose to his ears. “Didn’t you tell me the other day that you believe I’m innocent of these murders?”

  “That was before you accosted me at dawn smeared with the blood of the latest victim.”

  She was silent. He pulled the key from the ignition, keenly aware that Sheila had exited her car and was heading in his direction. He glanced at Annie. Her eyes seemed even more huge than usual. And more pleading than he’d ever seen them. Something in him tightened but he forced himself to ignore it.

  “Don’t give me that wounded look shit,” he told her. “And stay in the goddamn truck until I come back. I have no idea when that’ll be,” and he got out just as Sheila arrived at his rear bumper. He leaned back against the truck’s chassis and motioned for her to walk past, as if he were politely ceding the right of way and not blocking her view of the interior of his vehicle.

  She gave him an injured look. “You might have driven faster and let me in behind you.”

  “Good morning to you, too.” He fell into step beside her, his relief building with every yard they moved closer to the elevator bank. “You’re in early.”

  “We’ve got to get the Geppardo piece in the can, remember?”

  He’d forgotten all about it. That meant it’d be hours before he could get back to the truck.

  Although, come to think of it, he had no need for speed. He had no idea what the hell he was going to do.

  Sheila pushed the UP button. “Are you having trouble with the truck or something?”

  “Oh,” he waved his hand dismissively, “the clutch has been a little funky lately. I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

  “I could have Rajiv look at it.” The elevator doors opened and they stepped inside. Her demeanor changed, took on its usual helpfulness. “He’s coming down from Ventura today. I could ask him to stop by here.”

  Her brother Rajiv, the mechanic. Who was good at what he did but couldn’t solve Reid’s current problem unless he could make female fugitives disappear as efficiently as he did inexplicable knocking noises in the radiator.

  “Nah, thanks anyway, but I’m sure it’ll be fine.” The elevator doors opened on to the first-floor lobby. At this hour the reception desk was unattended and the sign-in book lay open to a fresh unmarked page. Its blankness surprised Reid. Somehow, at just quarter past seven in the morning, he already felt like he’d had a long day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Annie couldn’t stop trembling. She thought probably she’d been trembling all night, from the moment she’d found Michael’s body. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t escape the image. It was seared into her memory bank. She knew it would stay with her forever.

  She crammed herself deeper into the footwell of Reid’s truck, as if she were a wolf seeking the safety of a den. The night had been hell on wheels, literally. Back at Michael’s house she’d pulled Reid’s business card from her wallet, where thank God she’d stowed it days before, then forced herself to drive at precisely the speed limit north to Los Angeles. She knew the city, since she and Philip had lived there for part of their marriage, but still, in her panicked state, had to zig and zag her way to the Crimewatch address. She’d found the building around four in the morning, parked on a side street blocks away, and then—like one of her characters who’d been on the run—performed some creative artwork on the rental car license plates with a black magic marker she’d had the presence of mind to lift from Michael’s kitchen. 2CPN316 became 2ORN846. No one who looked closely would be fooled but maybe the car would remain undetected just that much longer.

  In those last darkest hours before dawn, she’d scampered back to the Crimewatch building and hunkered down in a protected spot between a bush and a fence that allowed her an unobstructed view of the garage entry. Then she simply waited for Reid to appear. She couldn’t be sure that he would. Maybe he was traveling; clearly he did that a lot. Maybe he was off; she didn’t know what his schedule was. And if he didn’t show, she didn’t know what she would do.

  But he did show. And he didn’t turn her in.

  Not then, anyway.

  Her ears pricked. For what seemed like the millionth time, she heard a vehicle whoosh down into the garage then make a sharp turn, its tires squealing on the concrete. She’d concluded that Crimewatch employees drove fast. They liked their music or talk radio blaring and they talked very loudly into their cell phones. And unfortunately every single one of them tromped right past Reid’s truck, thanks to the fact that his number-one employee status afforded him the prime parking spot nearest the elevator bank.

  The engine on the latest vehicle cut off. Seconds later she heard a door slam and heels hit the concrete. The footfalls neared and Annie identified this as a woman, striding fast. Annie kept her gaze averted as the woman passed, believing that humans could feel eyes on them and instinctively sought the source of the stare. It was a high-risk game she was playing, she knew. If anyone spied her, they’d race upstairs to tell Reid he had a female vagrant in his vehicle. Or worse, they’d recognize her as a fugitive and stand there using their infernal cell phone to call the cops. For all she knew, she’d been on the news that morning, her face splashed on the screen with a Serial Killer on the Lam! Call 911! directive to the public. And who would be more attuned to such a bulletin than a Crimewatch employee?

  Or maybe Reid himself had already called his cop friends. Maybe he’d called Simpson. Maybe the building already was surrounded, so if she tried to make a break for it, they’d catch her. Maybe they had guns trained on the only egress from the garage. Maybe it was taking so long because Reid wanted to be sure to capture her “takedown,” as Crimewatch liked to call it, on tape. No doubt she’d lead the next broadcast. She’d make Reid Gardner even more of a crime-fighting star than he already was.

  Maybe she’d been a fool to come to Reid but what other realistic choice did she have? She couldn’t simply return home; she’d be arrested. She couldn’t go to her parents for the same reason. And with Michael gone, she had no friends who’d have any clue how to deal with such a situation. Nor did she believe she could go it alone. She knew she lacked the street smarts to evade a major manhunt.

  She’d never felt so vulnerable. When her marriage ended, she vowed that never again would she allow herself to become dependent. And yet here she was, desperately in need of help from a man she barely knew. Her future rode on the beliefs he had about her, the decisions he made about what he wanted to do.

  Right or wrong, she’d made her call. And something in her believed that she had been right to come to Reid. He’d been angry, yes, but who could blame him? She’d shocked the hell out of him with her blood-stained reappearance and revelation that Michael had been murdered, nearly in her presence. True, Reid might have let her hide in his vehicle because he intended to turn her in. But she had to hope that wasn’t the case. She had to hope he still allowed for the possibility that she was innocent. Innocent until proven guilty. He seemed the sort of man who would honor that principle.

  Funny that now she thought of him as principled. He had undergone that transformation in her mind. It was partly that she couldn’t really fault his behavior and partly that Michael had vouched for him, insofar as he could.


  The tragedy from his past also cast his pursuit of dangerous criminals in a different light. Maybe it wasn’t a game to him. Maybe it wasn’t a kneejerk desire for authority or even greater celebrity. Maybe, for him, it really was an honorable pursuit.

  She took a deep breath, tried to slow her stampeding heart. She could only hope that Reid Gardner was principled enough that he would allow her to plead her case to him, and make no decisions until she had.

  *

  Reid kept flubbing his lines. He was in the recording booth laying a voice track and making a hash of it. That wasn’t typical for One-Take Gardner. Through the window-sized rectangle of tempered glass opposite the microphone, he could see Sheila and the male audio engineer in the adjacent editing bay exchange glances. Sheila kept giving Reid appraising looks as if she knew something was up. With every tap of her pen against the console, every narrowing of her brown eyes as she gazed in his direction, Reid’s agitation ratcheted up another notch.

  What the hell was he going to do about Annie? And when the hell was he going to do it?

  The engineer leaned toward his mike and a second later his voice filled Reid’s headphones. “Re-take from the third graph. ‘The M.O. of our next fugitive blah blah blah.’”

  “Got it.” Reid cleared his throat and paused for a beat before starting. “The M.O. of our next fugitive is simple and deadly,” he read. “He hurts the ones he claims to love. And he’s been accursed of it often enough—”

  “Stop. Stop.” This time it was Sheila’s voice in his ears. He raised his head to find her shaking her head and wearing a What in the world is wrong with you? expression. “It’s accused,” she said, “not accursed.”

  “Oh.” He hadn’t even noticed the mistake. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat again.

  “You know what?” She kept her eyes on him. “Let’s break for a bit.” She sounded at her wit’s end. She let go of the mike and turned toward the audio engineer. Through the glass Reid watched her lips move, left out of that conversation. No doubt it went something like Maybe Gardner’ll get his act together later. It’s pointless to keep trying now.

  Reid pulled off the headphones and dumped them on the chair behind him, as disgusted with himself as Sheila was. She was right: it was pointless. He had no capacity for work at the moment and he knew why. For the first time in his career, for the first time in his life, he was seriously considering harboring a fugitive.

  Sure, he could quibble with that statement. Annie might not be a bona fide fugitive. As far as he knew, a warrant had not been issued for her arrest. But judging from her behavior, she seemed pretty darn convinced that one would be, and soon. And it would be for murder. Probably for multiple murders. Four, to be exact. Did he believe she committed them?

  It took him longer than it had the day before to come up with an answer, but in the end it was same two-letter verdict. No. No, he didn’t.

  So. Was his gut so golden that he could flout the system and feel good about it?

  He pushed the headphones off the booth’s only chair and sank onto its cracked Naugahyde surface. Didn’t he believe the system worked? What would be so bad if she got arrested, anyway? She’d spend some time in jail while the process played out. Big deal. She could get a lot of writing done. And if he continued to believe in her innocence, he could make sure she retained superior legal counsel. If he were so sure she was innocent, he could hire investigators to try to smoke out the real killer. Meanwhile she’d be safe and he’d be playing within the rules, the way he always did. The way he’d been raised to do. The way that preserved his integrity.

  He raked a hand through his hair. That all worked if the system always did. The problem was, it didn’t. It wasn’t foolproof. Sometimes guilty people got off and innocent people got convicted. Somebody getting framed for a crime didn’t happen too often outside of novels, but it did happen. Annie could be a victim of exactly that. And if the real killer had framed her expertly enough, she’d pay and he would go free.

  Reid shook his head, that same old fire igniting in his gut. Because that was another way the system didn’t always work. Sometimes killers went free. For years. Five years, in one notable case. Reid kept shaking his head, a small but rhythmic motion that built his resolve with every repetition. He hated when killers went free. He really hated when that happened.

  “Reid?”

  He jerked his head up. He hadn’t heard the booth’s door open, or seen Sheila edge in. She remained in the doorway, her brow furrowed, her hand still on the knob. She was wearing red, as she often did, along with the usual assortment of silver bangles. “Are you okay?” she asked him.

  “Oh …” He didn’t know what to tell her. “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Not really.”

  “Well …” She didn’t seem to know what to say to him either. Then, with sudden briskness, she stepped back and motioned for him to follow. “There’s something you should see. Come quick,” and she led him to a group of staffers standing below a wall-mounted television monitor. Their faces were raised to a fortyish blond anchorman. The words SPECIAL REPORT! were supered across the screen.

  “—still sketchy,” the anchorman said, “but again, the Orange County sheriff’s department has confirmed that bestselling mystery novelist Michael Ellsworth has been found dead at his home in the tony oceanside community of Corona del Mar.”

  Reid watched live video of the scene outside the property. Sheriff’s deputies were cordoning off the area with sawhorses and crime tape, keeping reporters and photogs and gawkers at bay.

  “Ellsworth’s housekeeper found the body this morning. Authorities will be conducting an autopsy to pinpoint the time of death and have not released details on how the bestselling author was killed. But they have confirmed that it is murder.”

  Sheila nudged him with her elbow. “The fourth one,” she murmured. “Can you believe it?”

  “No.” He didn’t need to lie. “I can’t.”

  “Reid?”

  He spun around. His assistant was calling to him from her desk outside his office. “You’ve got a call. He didn’t want to go to voicemail.”

  Automatically he began to move in her direction. “Who is it?”

  “Lionel Simpson. FBI.”

  Reid froze in mid-step. Decision time.

  *

  “Have you heard?” Simpson asked.

  Reid knew there was no point pretending he didn’t understand what the agent was referring to. Reid would only raise Simpson’s suspicions if he feigned ignorance on a major breaking crime story. “I just did.”

  “I’m on my way down there.”

  Reid nodded. It was obvious from the background noise on Simpson’s cell phone that he was at an airport. “What do you know about the murder so far?”

  “It happened overnight. His throat was slashed. Annette Rowell was there.”

  Boom boom boom. Reid was surprised by how forthright Simpson was being. Those last two pieces of information were not public knowledge. Maybe Simpson wanted to startle Reid into a revelation. After all, the last time Simpson had seen Annette Rowell, who was with her? None other than Reid Gardner. Reid knew that was why he was receiving this phone call so early in the investigation. Simpson was trying to find Annie and thought Reid might be able to help him do it.

  Well, he was right. Reid could, if he chose. But that was an irrevocable decision he wasn’t yet prepared to make. So he remained in Q&A mode, the appropriate stance for a crime-show host with an interest in a case but no inside information. “How do you know she was there?” he asked.

  “Her stuff is all over the guesthouse. Lots of people saw them together yesterday. So much for my request that she stay in Bodega Bay.” Simpson snorted. “You know she and Ellsworth were supposedly good friends?”

  “I know they went to Maggie Boswell’s funeral together.” So Annie hadn’t bothered to keep a low profile while in Corona del Mar. Standard serial-killer beha
vior? Not hardly. “Do you have any idea where she is now?”

  “No. She was gone by the time the housekeeper arrived at the property. She fled in a rental car, it looks like, an ’09 white Kia Sephia.”

  Fled. That wasn’t a verb one used to describe the actions of an innocent party. Then again, innocent people didn’t hightail it to parts unknown when their friends got their throats cut.

  Simpson was speaking again, over the noise of a public-address system announcing a flight departure. “There’s something else you should know.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Those dead frogs we unearthed from Rowell’s back yard? It turns out they were poisoned by curare. You can test doses on small mammals, gauge how much you need to off a human.”

  Synapses fired in Reid’s brain. It was remarkable how every single clue in this case drove investigators to one inescapable conclusion. Frogs poisoned by curare are buried in shallow holes in Annie’s back yard. Crimewatch is tipped off to search there. Annie is on the premises when the next victim is murdered.

  Combined with her presence at the other murders and her fingerprints on one of the murder weapons, one hell of a circumstantial case had been built against her. And soon, Reid was sure, investigators would have physical evidence linking Annie to Michael Ellsworth’s murder.

  Reid gazed out his office window, which afforded a view, if you could call it that, of the ramp leading to the subterranean garage. He wondered if Annie was still down there waiting for him. Or if she’d thought better of it and left. Fled. “Have you issued a warrant?” he asked Simpson.

  “Yeah. Along with an APB.”

  No more gray areas now. Annette Rowell was officially a fugitive. The case was coming together like a beautiful package, with every edge wrapped and the ribbon prettily tied. Hand-delivered with the suspect’s name in big block letters so no one could miss it.

  “She’s probably in Mexico by now,” Reid heard himself say.