But the intention was clear. She wanted to satisfy herself that he was not being followed. From whatever vantage she was watching, she wanted to be sure that none of the cars behind him had grown too familiar. She was being cautious and wary. She would keep him circling until she was sure he was alone.
And it didn’t help Kinkaid’s state of mind to have the phone suddenly start bleating every fifteen or twenty or thirty seconds, the intervals just irregular enough that he couldn’t anticipate them. Once, twice—he would pick up on the third ring, if it ever came. You never knew. And you never knew what it might mean when it did come. Probably that was part of the fun. Driving around like that, going nowhere, was like having one’s nerve fibers drawn out with a pair of tweezers.
Once, twice. This time he got it in the middle of the third ring. He didn’t speak. He just held the handset to his ear and listened.
“Stop the car, Jim.”
She always called him “Jim,” and she always spoke in the same calm, almost reassuring voice, as if she were sitting beside him, giving directions from a map she had spread out over her lap.
“Anywhere—it doesn’t matter. Just pull over. There. Good. Now, you see the diner across the street? There’s parking in the back. Leave the Jag where it is and walk over to the lot. Don’t worry, Jim. I’ll let you know which car when you get there. The keys will be under the floor mat.”
He was on Judah Street, heading east. A light rain spattered the windshield as he picked up the tape recorder from the seat beside him and put it in his jacket pocket. He took nothing else, not even the car keys. When he opened the door he was surprised by the force of the wind coming off the ocean.
The rain had come up suddenly, just in the last few seconds. On the sidewalk opposite a woman and a little girl were still laughing as they scurried along, clutching each other, on their way to some safe, dry place. They were dressed for warm weather. The wind caught at the hems of their weightless dresses.
Kinkaid walked across the street, his hands thrust into his pockets, at least partly to disguise the lump made by the tape recorder. He did not hurry. The rain was startlingly cold on his face, as if to remind him he was alive.
The parking lot behind the diner had spaces for about twenty cars, but that late in the afternoon there were only four. One of them was a Chevy Cavalier, dark blue, with the front window on the driver’s side rolled halfway down. Almost as soon as Kinkaid noticed the window he heard a phone ringing. He opened the car door and climbed in. He let the phone ring several times before he picked it up.
“I noticed a couple of police cars slow when they saw you, Jim. But maybe they were just admiring the Jag. I don’t think they’ll pay any attention now, do you?”
He didn’t answer. Instead he reached into his jacket pocket and took out the tape recorder, snicking it on as he hid it under the seat while he took the keys from under the floor mat. The tape would run for an hour. He had the feeling that would be more than enough.
“Where’s your sense of humor, Jim? Mad at me?”
“Where do you want me to go?” he said, his voice heavy, as if he were half asleep.
“Very well—if you’re going to pout. Drive up to Nineteenth Avenue and turn right.”
“Nineteenth and turn right,” he repeated, once he had hung up the phone. The volume control on the tape recorder was turned up as high as it would go.
When he reached Nineteenth Avenue he knew at once that they had stopped playing hide-and-seek. It was the approach to the Presidio, and beyond that the Golden Gate Bridge.
He was on his way through the Park when she called again.
“If you look in your ashtray you’ll find three dollars for the toll. Isn’t that thoughtful of me?”
“I notice you haven’t made provision for a return trip.”
“Now, Jim, you mustn’t jump to conclusions. As it happens they don’t charge in the other direction.”
“There’s only about a quarter of a tank of gas in this car.”
“Don’t worry. You won’t have far to go.”
“Angel, pretty quick I’m going to have to hear from Lisa again, or all bets are off.”
“It’s all arranged, darling.”
Darling. She’d never called him that before, not even when they were kids.
“I want so much to see you, Jim. I really do.”
Then the line began to hum again and he hung up. Kinkaid found himself wondering if she imagined they were still lovers, that nothing in between mattered—not Lisa, not all those murders, nothing. Probably she was just playing with him, teasing him before the kill, but both were possibilities. Perhaps that was what it was to be insane, the capacity to feel conflicting emotions and not know that they conflict.
Perhaps he would find out. Doubtless he would find out a lot of things in the next few hours, and then he could carry it all into the oblivion that Angel had prepared for him. It never occured to him to doubt that she meant to kill him.
In the beginning he had felt so safe. A list of names, bad boys who had climbed Mrs. Wyman’s wall to fool around with her granddaughter—kids, whose only offense had been to answer the call of their adolescent hormones. He had climbed that wall too, but he had been too shy to take advantage of what was so plainly offered. That, he had thought, set him apart. He had loved Angel Wyman, who after all was only sixteen, and he had wanted to do the right thing.
But apparently Angel hadn’t seen it that way, because now he was going to join the others and suffer whatever humiliating death she had picked out for him.
But the thought of that death left him strangely unmoved. It only takes a second to die, and the embellishments that came after wouldn’t matter to him then. He could accept dying if he could trade his life for Lisa’s—and maybe, while he was at it, put a stop to Angel.
And he had an idea how he might do that. If he was reading her right, there was just a chance.
Beyond the Park the city seemed to fall away. There was a golf course, although the rain, which was picking up, seemed to have driven everyone inside. Then there was a short tunnel, and then the direct approach to the Bridge.
The car phone, which had been silent for five whole minutes, suddenly bleeted into life again. Kinkaid didn’t wait for the third ring before picking up the receiver.
“Just a thought, Jim. On the off chance you had something in mind. When you get to the toll plaza, choose the third booth from the right. I don’t suppose the police can have a man in all of them, do you?”
Clever girl, he whispered to himself, so the tape recorder wouldn’t pick it up. Clever little Angel. Once more she had anticipated him.
The toll lines were mercifully long that Sunday afternoon, so he had a few seconds to rummage through the car. What he found, in the glove compartment, was the rental agreement, made out to one “Agnes Wycott,” initials A.W., in case anyone needed a hint.
Doubtless Angel had a whole library of phony identities, so Agnes Wycott would remain a dead end for the police. But the agreement did contain a description of the car and the license number. Maybe Pratt would be able to make something out of that.
Kinkaid folded the agreement until he could wrap a twenty-dollar bill around it. Then, when he finally made it up to the tollbooth window, he passed them both to the clerk.
“Call the FBI and tell them you’ve spoken to Kinkaid,” he told the man, who seemed on the verge of handing his money back to him. “This isn’t a joke. Wait five minutes and then call the FBI. Remember ‘Kinkaid’. Tell them I’ll stay on the line—and keep the change.”
Then he rolled up the window and drove through, before there was any chance of a reply. He knew that, considering the circumstances, the sense of triumph he experienced was absurd.
41
It was on the Bridge itself that Kinkaid first caught sight of her. He glanced in his rearview mirror and saw that the car behind him was coming up fast—it even flashed its headlights once to attract his attention.
The rain was becoming intense, and up there on the bridge the wind from the ocean was strong enough that you really had to steer to keep from drifting over into the next lane. But there she was, maybe fifteen feet behind him at sixty miles an hour. She was wearing sunglasses, but she took them off so he could see her face.
He had no more than a glimpse of her before she fell back and switched to another lane, effectively losing herself in the flow of traffic.
The phone rang just as he got off the Bridge.
“You had a long conversation with the toll collector, Jim. Did you give him the rental slip I left in the glove compartment for you? Did you read it? It’s for another car, Jim. Same make and year, but gray. And of course different plates. It ought to keep the police amused for a few hours.”
Check and mate. Kinkaid put down the receiver without having uttered a word. What the hell was there to say? He was playing Angel’s game and, predictably, she was winning.
And why not? What else did she do but play this game? She was clever, and she had years of experience. By comparison, he was an amateur.
You don’t win by letting opposing counsel define what the case is about, as one of his law professors had been fond of saying. You win by insisting on your own definition.
The initiative was all with Angel. Somehow he had to take it away from her. He was a lawyer, not a criminal or a conspirator. He had to think like a lawyer.
He had to take Angel where she had never gone before.
“There’s a turnoff about two miles ahead. After that I’ll give you directions. We need to talk, Jim”
The road was narrow and apparently deserted. It seemed to go on forever. Then there was a bit of cleared ground and an abandoned building that looked as if it might once have been some sort of store. There was a car parked in front, a metallic green Plymouth he suddenly realized he had seen half a dozen times that afternoon without really noticing it.
Angel was waiting for him on the porch that occupied the front of the deserted building. He sat in his car for a moment, watching her from behind the swish of his windshield wipers as she stared out at him.
She was wearing a dark raincoat and there was a scarf over her hair. The rusted screens that ran around the porch on three sides obscured her face just enough that for that sliver of time she was not the person he had known, much less the monster which had slowly taken shape in his mind, but simply a small, sad-looking woman, all alone, taking shelter from the storm.
And he knew, if by some miracle he survived this terrible day, if he lived another fifty years, that in a part of his mind she would always remain this fragile, forlorn little creature, that he would never be certain if in this moment he had not glimpsed the secret of her soul.
And then she raised her arm and gestured for him to come to her, and the spell was broken.
The rain was coming down hard now, and there were gusts of wind that seemed to blow it sideways then all at once swirled it around so there was no escaping. The soft ground fairly smoked with dampness. Kinkaid hurried to the screen door, which slammed shut behind him a sound like a whip cracking.
And there she was. In her right hand was a small pistol, a snubnose revolver, which she held pointed down at the board floor, but with her left she reached up to pull away the scarf that covered her hair while she looked at him a little questioningly, as if trying to measure the effect.
“Oh, Jim—I’ve waited so long for this. I can hardly believe it.”
And, yes, it was a kind of miracle. Ten years had gone by, she had passed from sixteen to twenty-six, but the change from schoolgirl to woman seemed no more substantial than a shift of mood, as if the one could step back into the other almost at will.
She was more polished now, more expensive looking. She wore her hair shorter, and she was better dressed. There was about her now a certain exquisiteness of surface that had been missing in the girl to whom he had brought a glass of lemonade on the rear porch of his father’s house, but that girl had shown him a worldliness which now had simply found a different expression.
Yet in herself she seemed not to have changed at all. Angel at sixteen had looked older than she was. Now she looked younger.
And as he stood there, staring at her, he experienced a kind of awe that was so close to what he had once thought of as love that he could hardly find a way to distinguish them. It frightened him. It frightened him precisely because it could not dispel the horror of what he now knew her to be. She was a monster. She had killed at least nine people and probably more. And yet in that moment he was back on his father’s porch, unable to turn his eyes from her, as if the sight of her alone was the promise of paradise.
She took a step toward him, then another, then one more.
“I can’t,” she said, her voice husky with emotion. “I can’t resist . . .”
And then, when they were only a few feet apart, she raised the pistol and let the muzzle come to rest just an inch below his rib cage. The pressure was faint but unmistakable, like the warning. I will kill you, it said, if you make me.
But with her left hand she reached up and touched his face, letting the tips of her fingers slide over his eye and cheek. She seemed to want to reassure herself of his reality.
“I’m here,” he answered gently. “I’m here because you wanted it. Now you have to tell me what else you want.”
She snatched her hand away as if she had burned it. Then she stepped back. The pistol muzzle remained against his side.
“Why are you so cruel to me? How can you speak to me like that after all this time?”
“There’s only one thing you can do with a gun, Angel. Do you intend to do it?”
A flash of surprise registered in her eyes.
“You aren’t afraid then?” she asked—apparently a serious question. “You don’t think I’d do it?”
“Kill me? Maybe.” His voice seemed to come from within some impenetrable calm. “I guess I’ll find out, either now or later. But if not now, then put the gun away.”
It was a direct challenge, not so much to her advantage over him as to her sense of theater. She had to make good on the implied threat or back down.
So she stepped back a few paces, until she was well outside his reach, and then lowered the pistol.
“You have something I want, Angel. I’m willing to trade for it, but I mean to have it back.”
“You mean the girl?” She allowed herself a brief, almost voiceless syllable of laughter. “Is she really so important to you?”
He didn’t answer, because he didn’t need to. She had known the answer when she kidnapped Lisa.
And she seemed to realize at once that attempting to diminish her hostage was a tactical error.
“I’m not sure it’s possible for you to have her back . . . .”
This time it was his turn to laugh.
“Anything is possible for you, Angel. You can rise from the grave—don’t I have your death certificate in my desk drawer?”
“Then you know about that?”
“Yes, I know about that. I also know about your grandmother’s money laundering schemes. I know about how your mother’s boyfriend beat her to death. And I know about Sherman’s Crest. I’m the family lawyer, remember?”
All the time he was speaking she watched him with an oddly speculative light in her eyes, and Kinkaid didn’t have to guess what she was thinking. Everything he had told her she knew he could have figured out from an intelligent inspection of her grandmother’s check stubs, and none of it was particularly damning. She was wondering what he didn’t know—or might suspect.
Kinkaid had a friend who had gone straight from Yale Law School to become an assistant district attorney in New Haven, and who had made quite a name for herself prosecuting domestic violence cases. She had once told him that the worst and most brutal criminals are the most credulous optimists, that the guy who beats his wife and four-year-old daughter to death with a nine-iron will confess to everything, will supply you with a precisely
circumstantial account of how he did it and give you everything you need to put him away for life plus twenty, if you just stand aside for a little and allow him to talk himself into the idea that the fact that he had been roasting his brain all day with cocaine somehow constitutes a mitigating circumstance.
They are all looking for The Out, she had said. They all want that little open window through which they are going to crawl to freedom and another chance to victimize the world. And the deeper the dungeon their crimes have prepared for them the more fervently they believe they can see its light.
So Kinkaid, with his carefully edited summary of the evidence, was hoping that Angel was hoping that somehow, in spite of appearances to the contrary, she was in the clear. People are never so reckless as when they think they have nothing to lose, so if she believed that after all there was a chance she might still be going home to Five Miles it could make her just a little more cautious about spilling blood.
“She put me there,” Angel said finally, her eyes hardening at the injustice of it. “My own grandmother put me in that gentrified madhouse, just because I was inconvenient.”
“And then she thought better of it and got you out again.”
“Yes. She got me out.”
“And gave you a new identity and a new life, and all the money.”
“Yes.”
“Did she supply the corpse? The girl who’s buried up there, in your grave?”
“I never knew anything about that.” She said it as if the Jaws of Hell had just opened to receive her—the scene really was remarkably well played. “Jim, you’ve got to believe me. I never knew anything about that.”
“Then it was the perfect crime. She’s beyond the law’s reach now, your grandmother. She got away with it.”
For a moment they stood there without speaking, as if listening to the rain, which banged loudly on the tin roof over their heads. The rusted screens around three sides of the porch shivered in the wind, which seemed constantly to be changing direction.
Angel Page 36