by Thomas Perry
Catherine had been a cop for seven years now. She had seen traumatized people—witnesses and victims—suffer various kinds of aftereffects, and she recognized that hers was a very mild one. But she also knew that as long as Tanya Starling entertained some fantasy of killing her, it was not a great idea to rebuild the house and live in it alone.
When she had talked to Joe Pitt on the telephone about her burned house, she had started to cry. He had said, “What’s the matter? Are you hurt or something?”
“No. I guess I’m crying about my house.”
“What about it? Wasn’t it insured?”
“Of course it was. I just miss it.”
“So you’ll rebuild it, exactly the same, except maybe fireproof and with a great alarm system.”
“It won’t be the same. And besides, I don’t even know if I want to. It wasn’t that great, objectively. I just loved it.”
“So while you’re thinking about it, I’ll come up there and rent a house for a while. You can live with me.”
That brought up even more complications. She had been holding Joe Pitt at bay. She had kept him from flying up to Portland the minute he’d learned that her house had burned. Every day he called, and every day he repeated the offers: they could rent a house or apartment together and he would protect her. She appreciated that instinct in men, that unfounded confidence that their sheer bulk and aggressiveness would prevent disasters.
Joe Pitt was the first man she’d had romantic feelings for in a long time, and she was cautious: she didn’t want to suddenly collapse and become dependent on him, and she feared that artificial intimacy might be worse for the relationship than too much distance at this stage. She said, “As soon as you finish the cases you’ve taken on and feel like coming up, I’d love to see you in Portland. If I get any time off, I’ll use it to fly to L.A. But I won’t live with you right now. And I don’t plan to go anywhere until I’ve got Tanya.”
She had stopped calling the case “the Dennis Poole murder.” It was now “Tanya Starling” when she thought of it, and she thought about it all the time. Tanya was evolving. She killed more easily, and with increasing frequency, but she seemed to be able to disappear afterward. She was going to keep killing until somebody stopped her, and stopping her was becoming more difficult.
Catherine stayed at the office late for the next two evenings, backtracking, making telephone calls to the witnesses who had met Tanya Starling in any of her guises. She called neighbors, people who had bought Tanya’s cars, clerks at hotels. She asked them everything she could think of that might help her find Tanya. She was looking for quirks, for compulsive behavior, preferences and habits that might limit the search area or give her an idea of where to look and what to look for.
She spoke with homicide detectives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Flagstaff to be sure that any new information from the crime scenes was being sent to her, and asked them for any new theories they might have, any leads they might be following. When there was spare time, she would send pictures of Tanya Starling to businesses that might find themselves dealing with Tanya Starling under some new name: banks, car rental agencies, hotels.
At night when she came back to her apartment there were telephone messages. Each night she had to spend time reassuring her parents that she was all right, that she would not be better off living with them than in a small dingy apartment with practically no furniture, and that she was eating and sleeping regularly. Always she had to fend off Joe Pitt’s offers of help, protection, and various kinds of comfort. She was becoming increasingly devoted to finding Tanya Starling, and increasingly isolated. Comfort was distraction.
On the third night after the fire, Catherine had just returned to her new apartment when an unfamiliar buzz startled her. It seemed so loud that it made her stiffen, but even as her muscles tensed she realized that the buzz was only the intercom on the wall near her door. She pressed the talk button. “Yes?”
The voice from the speaker said, “Catherine? Is that you inside this box?”
She laughed. “Joe?”
“I guess it is you in there,” he said. “If this is a bad time I can come back at a worse one.”
She pressed the other button, which released the outer door lock. “Get in here.”
Catherine waited inside her apartment for a few seconds, then flung open her door, walked to the door of the elevator, and waited there. She was angry at herself. She had said too much to Joe on the telephone, sounded weaker and needier than she was. She had made him drop everything to fly all the way to Portland to hold her hand when they both had important things to do. She had used up a call for help, wasted one of her chances to say, “I’m in trouble and I need to be with you right now.”
The elevator door opened and Joe Pitt stepped out. He was grinning, holding a briefcase in one hand and a long white box in the other. He kissed her on the cheek and handed her the box.
“Thanks. I don’t suppose these are roses?”
“I’m a bit ashamed of that, because I’m usually more original, so don’t tell any of the other girls, okay?”
“I’ll keep it to myself.” She led him to the door of her apartment and pushed it open. “I’d hate to see your legend crumble.”
“I knew you’d understand.”
She closed the door and locked the bolt, then set the box on the dining table and opened it. There were a dozen long-stemmed roses with pink and orange petals. She said, “They’re gorgeous, Joe.” She put her arms around him and gave him a deep, lingering kiss. After a moment she pulled away to look down. “Are you handcuffed to your briefcase?”
“I was being distracted by an erotic daydream and forgot.” He set the briefcase on the table, opened it, and pulled out a salt shaker and a small freshly baked loaf of bread. “Somebody had to bring bread and salt to inaugurate your new place, so I got some on the way to the airport.”
“Thank you,” said Catherine. “You think just like my grandmother.”
He turned in place and looked around at the sparse, utilitarian furniture and the bare walls. “And quite a place it is too. It’s a lot like the apartments in L.A. favored by hookers from the former Soviet bloc. They like the no-frills aesthetic. I’ve only seen them on a professional basis, of course.”
“Theirs?”
“Mine,” he said.
“That’s good,” said Catherine. “I think like my grandmother too, and we have an agreement.”
“I haven’t forgotten,” he said. “It’s been kind of hard to be away from you.”
She could foresee that he was going to bring up the idea of living together again, so she diverted his attention back to the briefcase. “Are you using that thing as an overnight bag?”
“No. I dropped my suitcase off at the hotel while I was waiting for you to get home from work.” He reached into the briefcase and pulled out a thick stack of manila file folders. “These are just a few odds and ends I dug up for you. I stopped by Jim Spengler’s office and picked up copies of interview transcripts from people who saw Nancy Mills in L.A. He also had some stills made up from security tapes at the Promenade Mall. One of them places her there at the same time as Rachel Sturbridge’s bank manager from San Francisco, who got picked up there and killed. There’s an analysis from a profiler, some reports from a blood-spatter expert and a ballistics expert.”
Catherine looked at the thick stack of files, then picked up the profiler’s file and looked at the first page. “This isn’t from the LAPD. It says ‘Property of Pitt Investigations.’ You paid a profiler? This one says ‘Pitt’ too. And this one.”
Joe waved his hand to dismiss it. “I had a few people I’ve used on cases before take a look at what we had, that’s all. There isn’t much there that you haven’t already figured out on your own, and there isn’t anything to tell you where Tanya is, but sometimes one little item in a report can give you an idea.”
Catherine looked up at him. “Flowers and case files? What could be more romantic?”
He shrugged. “It’s what we do, Cath. There’s no use pretending you’re somebody else, or that I am. We hunt down killers. I hope something here helps you get her.”
“You’re worried about me.”
“Of course I am.”
“Joe, this is my fault, and I’m sorry. I’ve been whining to you about the case, and about my house, and I’m sure I’ve played the whole episode for all the sympathy I could get. I guess I’ve felt so close to you intellectually and so far from you in miles that I didn’t remember to use restraint. You were too far away to do anything about my troubles except listen. I talked my head off, but not so you would come and solve my problems for me. I just wanted to talk about them. You understand?”
“Sure I do. I was reacting to what happened, not to what you said about it. She’s tried to get you killed in two different ways. I want her caught now.”
“Me too.” Catherine picked up the roses, took them into the kitchen, and started searching the cupboards.
“What are you looking for?”
“I just realized I don’t own a vase anymore.” She opened the refrigerator, took out a large jar that had a little Italian sauce in the bottom, rinsed it in the sink, filled it with fresh water, snipped the stems of the roses, and arranged them in it.
Joe watched her. “Very beautiful.”
She looked at him for a moment. “I really am glad to see you, Joe. I mean anytime. I just didn’t want to drag you all the way up here to be my caretaker.”
“That wasn’t why I came. I just grabbed any excuse I could get to see you.”
“How long do you plan to devote to that?”
“I have a return ticket for Monday. I’ve got to meet with a guy who knows something about a case I’m working on.”
“Three days. That’s probably enough time.”
“For what?”
She took his hand. “I’m going to your hotel with you now, and I’m going to do my best to make you really, really glad you brought those roses in person.”
Catherine and Joe spent the next three days in isolation. It was really Catherine’s isolation, but she had opened herself to let Joe into it. During the sunlit hours they went over the outside experts’ reports together, compiling and evaluating possible avenues of investigation. In the evenings they ate late dinners at restaurants along the river and talked about their families, beliefs about love, theories of witness behavior and forensic evidence. Then they walked back to Joe’s hotel holding hands and made love until they could hear the footsteps of the hotel’s early-morning staff in the hallways.
On the last morning, Catherine drove Joe to the airport. As they stood beside Catherine’s small gray rental car outside the terminal, he said, “Well? When is the next time going to be?”
“Whenever either one of us gets a chance,” she said. “The second I can leave here, I’ll be on your doorstep.”
While she was driving to her apartment to get ready for work, she found that she was crying. She drove around the block while she dried her eyes, then left her rental car on the street in front of her building, took her overnight bag inside, and opened her apartment door. The first thing she saw was the jar of roses. The weekend with Joe had begun and ended so quickly that the petals were still fresh and a few buds were not fully open. If it had not been for the roses, she might have thought she had imagined it.
Catherine spent the next few days working more intensely than before, following the most promising leads and theories that she and Joe had developed, and then, when those failed, moving to the less promising leads. All of them served to verify evidence she already had. None of them seemed to take her to the next step, finding the place where Tanya Starling was right now.
One night about two weeks after the fire, she called the number of her bank and listened to the long menu: “For check orders, press four. For credit card billing inquiries, press five.” She supposed that what she wanted was probably closest to five. After a pause, a woman answered. “This is Nan. How can I help you?”
“My house burned down about two weeks ago, and I called the next day and asked that my credit card be replaced. I haven’t received it yet, and I thought I’d check to be sure that there’s no problem.”
“Your name please?”
“Catherine Hobbes, H-O-B-B-E-S.”
“And your card was destroyed in the fire?”
“Yes. I ordered a new one right after the fire, and so it’s been almost two weeks.”
“Two weeks? That doesn’t sound right. Let me check. Do you have your account number?”
“No. When my house burned, so did all the old bills and records.”
“Social security number?”
Catherine recited the number, listened to the clicking of computer keys.
“I’m not sure what happened. It looks as though they tried to call you and verify your information before they mailed you a new card, and couldn’t reach you. Do you have a new phone number and address to give me?”
“Yes.” Catherine gave it to her. Then she added, “When I called before, I gave them my work number and address. I’m a police officer.”
“I suppose it’s possible somebody there answered the phone and said, ‘Police,’ and our person figured it was a hoax. Let’s try to get this expedited so your new card goes out as soon as possible. It will have a new number on it. We always do that when the other one isn’t in your possession.”
“When should I expect it?”
“Tomorrow or the next day, if we can get it done without another glitch, and they’re pretty rare. I’m very sorry about the mix-up. Have you ordered new checks and so on?”
“Yes, but if you have a way of verifying that that’s being done, I’d appreciate it.”
“Happy to do it. And one more thing. If you’re a police officer, you’ve probably already thought of this, but I usually advise people to order reports from the three credit services to be sure all your cards really were destroyed and nobody picked one up. I can tell you that nothing has been charged to your account at this bank during that time, but you should still run the credit check.”
“That’s a good idea,” she said. “I’ll do that.”
She let a day go by, and then another. Her replacement card came, and she forgot about the credit reports. But at the end of the week she remembered while she was in the office and called the three phone numbers to order her credit reports.
When Catherine came home from work two days later, the reports were in her mailbox in the lobby of the apartment building. She took them to her apartment, sat at the kitchen table, and opened them warily. For the past eight years, she had always been uncomfortable when she thought about credit. That was something she had gotten as part of the settlement after her failed marriage.
Kevin had been an optimist. When the marriage had ended, the extent of Kevin’s optimism had become apparent. He had been running up the balances on his credit card accounts for a long time, on the theory that his future salary increases would make the overruns seem tiny. After Catherine divorced him, the credit companies had been quick to inform her that the growing balances on debts he had incurred before the divorce were her responsibility as much as his. It had taken time for her to legally separate her portion of the debt from his, get a second mortgage on the house she had bought in Portland, and pay off the credit companies.
It had been a painful process for Catherine, and not only because it was a time when she’d needed money, but because she couldn’t keep herself from thinking about where the debt had come from. Kevin had assured her that he had gone into debt only to spend money on her. He had not been very specific, so she looked at two years of old bills. The credit cards had been used for lunches and dinners at restaurants where she had never been, and hotels in Palo Alto, the town where they had lived. Cheating on Catherine had been expensive.
Today, when Catherine read the three credit reports, she was relieved to see that her credit was extremely good. She supposed that payi
ng off her half of Kevin’s debts must have healed whatever wounds her marriage to him had inflicted on her rating. Maybe she’d gotten a few extra points for being a sucker.
She went carefully down the list of open accounts. There were a couple of department store charge cards that she had forgotten. She had accepted them years ago because they had been offering large discounts to customers who opened charge accounts. They had approached her when she was buying her first bed after the marriage. It had cost eleven hundred dollars, and getting the card had saved her about two hundred. The other occasion was when she was still in the academy and making practically nothing, and was forced to agree to go out to dinner with a visiting couple from the days when she had been married to Kevin. She had known that they were still in touch with him, and she’d needed to have them tell him that she looked magnificent, so she had bought a dress, coat, and shoes that she couldn’t really afford.
There was one account that she could not remember opening. It was a Visa. She looked for the issuing company. The issuer was the Bank of the Atlantic. Her stomach dropped: Kevin? How could he have done that to her? She had already paid for his girlfriends. She repeated the question to herself. How could he have done that to her? He couldn’t. It would have come to her attention at some point in the past eight years. She looked at the date. It wasn’t eight years ago. The account had been opened a month ago.
She kept staring at the entry. It wasn’t right. The social security number wasn’t hers. And it said, “Additional card.” What did that mean? Could this be somebody else’s credit card that had been added to her credit report by mistake?
She looked at the reports from the other two services. The card was listed on all of them. The one from Experion said, “Primary cardholder SSN” and listed a second social security number. That explained the “additional card” business. The Catherine Hobbes Visa card was on someone else’s account. Her eyes widened as all of the implications began to pass through her consciousness at once. A person on the run could get a credit card in her own name and an additional one in a false name. She could travel under the false name, and any business that ran the credit card would get the response that it was genuine.