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At once, he realized that he had another way to try to contact Tash: Walt.

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

This is crazy, he thought.

He tried the Malibu sheriff’s station. “I need to get in touch with Walt Halliday. Is he on duty tonight?”

“No, sir, and he won’t be on duty tomorrow, either. He isn’t with us anymore.”

“Isn’t with . . .”

“He resigned a couple of days ago.”

Speechless, Coltrane set down the phone.

EXCEPT FOR A LIGHT OVER THE FRONT DOOR AND THE GARAGE, Tash’s house was in darkness, its modernistic assemblage of cubes silhouetted against the moonlit sky. No lamp was on in any of the windows. That wouldn’t have been unusual in the middle of the night, but the time was only ten after nine, and even if Tash had gone out, Coltrane would have expected her to do what most people did — leave a few lights on. There was absolutely no sign that anyone was at home. But there
was
a sign of a different sort. Leaving his headlights on, Coltrane got out of his car to study it: FOR SALE, OCEAN REALTY.

This can’t be happening, he thought. He walked quickly to the front door, rang its doorbell, listened to the hollow echo from inside, and pounded on the door. “Tash!” he yelled. The front of the house was scorched from the fire that had been set on New Year’s Day. Peering through the metal fence that enclosed the incinerated flower garden, he strained to get a view through a window. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that the room was totally empty, its furniture removed. “Tash!” Dismayed, he ran to the end of the street and along the fence to the water, hurrying toward her house from the back. The deck light wasn’t on. The only illumination was from the stars and moon. He tripped on the deck stairs but ignored the pain and scrambled the rest of the way up, his urgent footsteps reverberating as he ran to a window. The metal shutters had not been lowered. Staring in, straining to decipher the blackness, he realized that there wasn’t any furniture in
this
room, either. “
Tash
!” Despite the chill of the ocean breeze, sweat poured off him, soaking his clothes.

“I’M NOT COMFORTABLE GIVING OUT THAT INFORMATION,” the severe-faced woman said. She was in her forties, had frosted hair and long red fingernails, and wore a black designer pantsuit with a blue silk scarf.

“But I’m a friend of hers. I didn’t know she’d moved. I’m trying to get in touch with her.” It was nine in the morning. Coltrane stood in one of the cubicles in the Ocean Realty office. Outside, trucks rumbled by on the Pacific Coast Highway. “Surely she gave you the phone number and the address where she moved.”

“She also gave me strict instructions not to let anyone else know it.” Behind her desk, the woman pressed her back rigidly against her chair, as if wanting to keep as much distance as possible between Coltrane and her. “She told me one of the reasons she was moving was that she’d been threatened by a stalker.”

“I
know
. I helped identify the man who was doing it.”

“Then I’m sure you can appreciate my dilemma.”

“I don’t understand.”

“For all I know,
you’re
the man who was stalking her. She instructed me not to give out her new phone number and address.”

“For Christ sake.”

The woman flinched.

“Okay,” Coltrane said. “I understand your obligation to your client. But would it be violating any confidence if you phoned Tash, gave her my name, and told her I wanted to speak to her? I really am a close friend of hers.”

“I happen to know she won’t be in today. I’ll phone her tomorrow and tell her you want her to get in touch with you.”

Tomorrow
? Coltrane mentally groaned.

JUST IN TIME, Coltrane steered from the PCH as Lyle came out of the coffee shop and approached his cruiser. After skidding to a stop, the squeal of his tires attracting Lyle’s attention, Coltrane hurried from his car and reached the heavyset officer, whom he had never seen in uniform before and who seemed even more heavyset with all the equipment on his gun belt.

Lyle’s hair was cut short, military-style. He looked as wary as the woman in the real estate office.

“The dispatcher at the station told me you usually have coffee here about this time,” Coltrane said. “I’m glad I caught up to you.”

For his part, Lyle didn’t look glad at all. He just nodded and waited.

“Listen, I’m confused about a couple of things,” Coltrane said. “I’m hoping you can help me.”

Lyle shrugged, nothing relaxed about the gesture.

Coltrane had to raise his voice to be heard above the passing traffic. “I’ve been trying to find Tash Adler.”

“She moved.”

“I know that. Do you have any idea where?”

“No.”

“Why did Walt Halliday resign from the sheriff’s department?”

“He didn’t tell me. We weren’t really that close. I just assumed it was on account of the stress of the job.”

“Well, maybe
he
knows where Tash moved. I tried phoning, but his number’s out of service. Do you have any idea where he lives, so I can talk to him?”

“Lived.”

“Excuse me?”

“The same day Walt resigned, he left town.”

“
What
?”

“He said he needed a change of scene.”

The asphalt of the parking lot seemed to ripple, threatening to swallow Coltrane. “I don’t get it. What the hell is happening?”

“Seems obvious to
me
,” Lyle said.

“How?”

“It’s too big a coincidence, both of them making a sudden decision to move at the same time. I had a suspicion there was something between them.”

“
What
?”

“Even if there wasn’t, it isn’t any mystery why
she
would have moved: the stress of being stalked.”

“But that’s
over
. Now that you know Duncan Reynolds was doing it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Duncan Reynolds. Didn’t Tash explain to you?”

“Who the hell is Duncan Reynolds?”

“She didn’t show you the photographs?”

“
What
photographs?”

Perplexed, Coltrane did his best to organize his thoughts, explaining.

“And you found something in these photographs?” Lyle asked.

“A man taking pictures of her. Duncan Reynolds. I
know
him. Tash met him once, but he used a different name.”

“So where are these pictures?”

“Tash has them.” The briefcase containing them had not been with Coltrane’s travel bag when the Acapulco police had brought his belongings from the hotel. He had assumed that Tash had gone to the hotel to get her things before she went to the airport, that she had taken the briefcase back to Los Angeles with her — to show the police and make sure Duncan Reynolds didn’t threaten her anymore. “Or maybe . . .”

“What?”

“Maybe she
doesn’t
have them. Maybe they were lost when the Mexican police brought my stuff from the hotel.
That
would explain why she didn’t tell you. She forgot to bring them with her, so she decided to wait until I came back with the proof. In the meantime, Duncan Reynolds kept harassing her, and she moved.”

“Without even a hint to us that she knew who was after her? Does that make sense?”

“No. Not when you put it that way.”

“And
you
don’t have the photographs, either?”

The asphalt beneath him seemed more unsteady. Instantly, he felt on solid footing. “I have the negatives at home. I can make others.”

“Then make them and bring them to me. But I have to tell you, I think this is bullshit.”

Coltrane blinked as if he’d been slapped.

“I heard about what you claim happened with Carl Nolan in Mexico. He was a damned fine police officer. If you expect me to believe he was jealous of you and flew down to Mexico to get even with you—”

“But that’s the truth.”

“Sure. Except Tash told me a different version. She said Carl went down to
rescue
her. From
you
.”

Coltrane’s mind reeled.

“She said she was moving because you were smothering her so much that she had to get away from you.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

The parking lot seemed to spin. “Jesus Christ, am I losing my mind?”

COLTRANE ALMOST DIDN’T CLOSE HIS FRONT DOOR, so great was his need to rush down to the vault, grab the negatives he had stored there, and hurry into the darkroom to make new prints of Duncan Reynolds spying on Tash.

But after unlocking and opening the vault, Coltrane stood frozen in place, his mouth agape. The envelope of negatives that should have been on the nearest shelf wasn’t there. Telling himself that he must have forgotten which shelf he had put the negatives on, he charged into the vault and examined
every
shelf, but he still didn’t find them. The darkroom, he thought. I must have left them in . . . He rushed to search it, but they were gone.

“I’M SORRY TO BOTHER YOU.” Hoping that his eyes didn’t look as wild as he felt, Coltrane pointed toward Tash’s house next door. “Your neighbor moved recently.”

The spectacled gray-haired woman held an artist’s brush, wore a painter’s smock, and looked annoyed that Coltrane had rung her doorbell. “The day before yesterday. I saw the van.”

“Did she happen to give you her new address? I’m supposed to deliver some legal documents to her and—”

“She lived next to me for six months and never said a word to me. I can’t imagine why she’d bother to give me her address.”

“You saw a van? I don’t suppose you happened to notice the name on—”

“YEAH, I REMEMBER YOU,” the overweight man in the Pacific Movers work shirt said. “We delivered that load of unusual furniture to you. Tubular stuff. Metal.”

“That’s right.”

“Just a minute.” The foreman turned to his two young helpers as they came out of an apartment building in Santa Monica. “Make sure you put all those pads back in the truck.” He looked back at Coltrane. “You say you’ve been looking for me?”

“Your dispatcher told me where you’d be. I’ve got five hundred dollars for you if you’ll do me a favor.”

“It must be a hell of a favor.”

“Not really. All you have to do is go back to headquarters and look up the computer file on a customer named Natasha Adler.”

“And?”

“She’s an old girlfriend of mine.”

“So?”

“I need to know her new address.”

The man nodded conspiratorially.

AS THE ROAD TWISTED HIGHER INTO THE SAN BERNARDINO Mountains, the slopes became more rugged. Pine trees fought for space among granite outcrops. The temperature dropped, making Coltrane turn up the car’s heater and be grateful that he’d thought to bring a ski jacket along with a hat, scarf, and gloves. Although dawn had been a half hour earlier, dense gray clouds cast everything in twilight. Sporadic snow flecked his windshield and added to the roadside accumulation. Steering with one hand, he drank hot black coffee from a thermos and peered toward his rearview mirror. For a while after he had turned off the interstate to follow this secondary road into the mountains, he had been able to see the glow of San Bernardino behind him, but now all he saw were snow-covered boulders and fir trees, not even the headlights of a pickup truck that had followed him for about fifteen minutes and then veered off. It won’t be long now, he promised himself.

What he had been given wasn’t really an address, just a post office box. Tash had evidently supplied directions to the van’s driver but not his dispatcher. There wasn’t even a telephone number. But a PO box will do just fine, Coltrane thought bitterly. BIG BEAR LAKE, a road marker indicated, 25 MILES.
Soon
, he vowed. Soon. Meanwhile, he had plenty to think about: nagging questions that wouldn’t stop threatening to tear his mind apart. Tash!

THE COLD AIR PINCHED HIS NOSTRILS AND CAUSED HIS BREATH TO come out as vapor. After parking his car on a side street where it couldn’t be seen from the main road, Coltrane walked past rustic-looking shops, ignoring their Alpine exteriors. Christmas decorations still hung in some windows, but he ignored those also, his waffle-soled hiking boots squeaking on new-fallen snow as he strode around a corner and saw Big Bear’s post office across the street. In contrast with the mountain-resort appearance of many buildings in town, this was the usual antiseptic institutional-style building, with a fake redwood and stone exterior, a low-pitched roof, drop boxes for mail, and an unobscured parking lot in front.

He checked his watch: 8:25. Although the post office staff wouldn’t be on duty until nine, a few people going in and out the front door made clear that the building had been opened earlier so that customers with PO boxes wouldn’t have to wait to pick up their mail. That meant there was a slight chance Tash had already been here to check if she had any. But I doubt it, Coltrane thought. She’ll be tired after shipping her furniture two days ago and then trying to sort through the chaos of boxes yesterday. She’ll give herself a break this morning. She won’t be up to speed for a while yet.

He entered a chalet-style House of Pancakes and asked the waitress for a table at the window.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes. But I’m not sure what I want to eat. I might take a while to order.”

“Take all the time you need.”

Believe me, I intend to, Coltrane thought. Pretending to study the menu, he kept his attention on the post office across the street.

TWO HOURS LATER, after the slowest-eaten pancakes, eggs, and sausages of his life, after pretending to read a newspaper over yet another cup of coffee, he decided that he couldn’t hang around any longer without attracting attention. Outside, the air remained gray and cold. He pretended to study merchandise in shop windows within view of the post office. He feigned taking photographs of the area, training his zoom lens on the post office.