Nightlife (36 page)

49

C
atherine Hobbes knew exactly how she wanted to conduct her hunt. The only success she’d had so far was the result of circulating the pictures of Tanya Starling and Rachel Sturbridge. This time she had printed five hundred flyers with the two color pictures, the physical description, and the list of murders. The words “armed and dangerous” were in larger, darker type.

During the early part of the afternoon, uniformed officers went to the businesses where the Catherine Hobbes credit card had been used, left flyers, and talked to salesclerks and waiters to find out what they could remember about the girl. Catherine had gone to Stahlmeyer’s Department Store herself.

The women’s-wear manager had checked the computerized record to find out exactly what purchases Tanya had made. As she walked Catherine to the right part of the fourth floor and began to show her the items Tanya had bought, Catherine felt the hairs on the back of her neck begin to stand.

Tanya had bought designer pantsuits. Two of them were almost exactly like the ones Catherine had bought at Stahlmeyer’s a week before, tailored so the coats were not pinched inward to the waist but had a bit of drape. They were cut to hang from the shoulders, like a man’s suit, so they allowed Catherine to carry a concealed weapon. Tanya was doing the same thing.

Catherine went outside to retrieve the digital camera in the trunk of the unmarked car, then carried one sample of each of the four suits Tanya had bought into a dressing room and photographed them. The blouses Tanya had chosen to go with them were conservative, very like the ones that Catherine had bought.

Catherine knew that Tanya must have seen her on television in Arizona and probably in Portland. It wasn’t difficult to find clothes like Catherine’s in a big city. But why was she buying them? What did Tanya hope to accomplish by imitating Catherine Hobbes? Did it have something to do with getting the credit card accepted?

Maybe Tanya was working up to doing a killing and then taunting Catherine. She might rent a getaway car in Catherine’s name, or leave a charge receipt with Catherine’s name on it at a crime scene.

The idea that Tanya might be making her killings into a game was not a welcome one. The list of killers who had begun teasing the police and leaving riddles for them was long and ugly. From the time when they began to taunt the police until the time they were caught, they became more active and prolific. Catherine hoped that whatever Tanya was doing, she was not getting ready to kill somebody just to torment Catherine Hobbes.

Catherine drove back to the bureau, downloaded the photographs into her computer, and made copies for the evening-shift patrol officers in the downtown district. Then she went to the second floor, to the vice squad office, and found Rhonda Scucci.

Rhonda looked up from a file she was reading, and said, “Hello, Cath. What’s up?”

“Hi, Rhonda. I’ve got to go out tonight looking like somebody else.”

“What are we talking—whore? Drug mule?”

“This is a single woman, maybe five years younger than I am, if the light is dim enough. She works nine to five in an office. She might be out with a female friend or two. She hasn’t got a date. You know the Mine? Metro? That’s the kind of place. All I have to do is not stand out and not get recognized.”

“Yeah, there’s a lot of that around this building. But don’t worry. I know those places. You want what? A skirt and blouse? Shoes? Probably a raincoat tonight, just to protect our investment.”

“I can use anything you can get me. But the part I need most is the wig. The hair is really important.”

“So the suspect has seen your face?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, Cath. A homicide suspect? Is that what they ask you to do these days?”

“Don’t worry. I’m going to be backed up.”

“Just be sure it’s close backup.” Rhonda led her down the hall to a storeroom and unlocked it. It looked as though it had been a broom closet originally, but now it held shelves full of electronic equipment for stings—microphones, tape recorders, video cameras—and a wide array of clothes for men and women on hangers. Rhonda picked a few things off the rack and held them up to Catherine until they agreed on an outfit. Then she helped Catherine try on wigs.

The third one looked right. Catherine could tell as soon as she looked in the mirror. The hair was dark brown, long, and straight, parted in the middle. It wasn’t eye-catching, and if she ducked her head a bit, it would fall forward to hide her face if she wanted it to. “What do you think?”

“What the hell do you care? It’s to impress a killer. Want him to die excited?”

50

C
atherine was on the street, walking the district where Tanya Starling had used the Catherine Hobbes credit card. Catherine had spent time in this neighborhood during vacations from college. Part of the attraction had been that the area had a bar scene full of young single people even then, and part of it had been that it had not been part of her father’s precinct. She had been very careful to stay out of the parts of town where she might meet Lieutenant Frank Hobbes on business.

After that she had married Kevin and moved to Palo Alto. When that had fallen apart, and she had come home and become a cop too, she had not been assigned to fashionable places like this. She had spent her time as a patrol officer in the parts of town where people got robbed or killed, or bought ten-dollar bags of drugs.

The feel of the area had not changed, but it was much more crowded, much more expensive, and more stylish than it had been when she was in college. She supposed she could have said the same about all of Portland. It had spent the time filling up with the people who had ruined California.

Tonight was the third night of a persistent rain, and it was a weeknight, but it didn’t matter. Men and women in their twenties and early thirties, some of them in suits and skirts from the office, were going into the restaurants and gathering at the bars, standing in knots while holding drinks in warm, wood-paneled taprooms.

Catherine needed to get used to the district again, and to develop a feeling for the spots where Tanya had used the credit card. She studied the entrances to the nightspots, picked out front windows where she might get a table to watch for Tanya, or where Tanya might be sitting right now.

All of Tanya’s credit card charges had been between Eleventh Avenue and Fifteenth, as far north as Lovejoy Street and as far south as Glisan Street. The rain gave Catherine a chance to walk up each of the streets studying the buildings and the crowds, carrying an umbrella and wearing a hooded raincoat that hid her face. In Portland, rain didn’t make anybody think of staying home, but Catherine’s rain gear made it easy for her to study faces without much risk of being studied in return.

She patrolled systematically tonight, learning the traffic patterns. She began at the corner of Eleventh and Glisan and headed north to Lovejoy, then turned left and left again to go south on Twelfth. Each time she came to one of the places where Tanya had already been—the Mine, Sybil’s, Metro, La Mousse—she lingered a few minutes, watching the doors, surveying the buildings.

One of the things she was trying to do was to evaluate the ambience and the customers. She needed to get a sense of whether the place would appeal to Tanya Starling or was somewhere she had gone once, had not liked, and would never revisit. Tanya seemed to like luxury—the bars in good hotels, nice restaurants—and the clothes she had bought in Portland were expensive. La Mousse and Sybil’s were essentially the kind of restaurant that Tanya chose in every city, so Catherine was satisfied with them.

Catherine spent more time searching the parking lots and the nearby streets looking for Tyler Gilman’s car. By now, Tanya might have sold it or abandoned it, as she had done with other cars, but until it turned up, there was a chance that she had kept it and might drive it to this district on a rainy weeknight. The little blue Mazda was just the sort of car that Tanya might convince herself would not attract any attention, and Tanya would not want to show up at a restaurant or a club looking like a wet rat. She would want to look good to attract the next man.

Catherine had not been able to find any record of Tanya’s having done anything for a living but accept gifts from men. She seemed to have lived in the high-rise apartment building in Chicago for an extended period of time. The building manager had said he didn’t know how long she had been around, but he remembered seeing her occasionally for years. The apartment had been rented by a man named Carl Nelson, and her name had never appeared on the lease or the mailbox. About a year ago, Carl Nelson had died of a heart attack during a trip to Europe.

After Nelson had died, Tanya had gone to Aspen and found Dennis Poole. He had supported her and given her money and expensive gifts. She seemed always to be looking for a man to take care of her, and always finding that she had to move on.

Tanya should have left Portland. She had made an attempt on Catherine and killed Calvin Dunn, so Portland could hardly be considered a safe place to stay. She should be in the next city by now, but this time something was different. The charges on the Catherine Hobbes card had begun after Catherine’s house had burned, not before. Catherine had to act on what Tanya was doing, not on what Tanya should be doing.

Catherine kept walking along the streets, her hood up, staying in the shadows and moving quickly past the lighted windows, then pausing in the entranceways of closed businesses or under awnings near bus stops, where her presence would raise no questions.

Part of her consciousness was always devoted to watching for Tanya. Every time she came near a restaurant where a young couple was coming out, putting up umbrellas or trotting toward their parked car, she studied the woman. Whenever there was a woman visible through a front window, Catherine’s eyes had to focus on her and find some disqualifying feature before she could release her from her gaze. When a car glided past her searching for a parking space, Catherine looked for Tanya inside.

She was also making mental notes about how to expand her search. The ideal way to do it would be to post a plainclothes officer at the bar in each of the district’s clubs and restaurants for a few weeks, doing nothing but watching the door to see if Tanya entered. It was impossible, of course, but she thought maybe she could talk her captain into sparing one team. If there was one cop in Metro, Sybil’s, the Mine, and La Mousse for a few nights, all of them connected by radio to a control van in the middle of the district, something good might happen. If Catherine drew the right male cops, Tanya might even try to pick up one of them.

She decided that the parking lot behind Sybil’s, on Fourteenth near Irving, would be a good place for the van. The lot was used by a bank and about three smaller businesses during the day, but at night the only one that was open was Sybil’s. When Sybil’s was packed, there were still at least a few empty parking spaces. A plain white van parked in the far corner near the rear driveway would look as though it belonged to the restaurant or one of its suppliers.

She reached the Mine, at Fifteenth and Johnson, at eleven-twenty. There were no windows, but every time the door opened to admit more customers, she could see inside, where the crowd surged on the dance floor and the music blared and thumped briefly, and then was muffled as the door closed on it. The place was dimly lighted except for the stage, which she couldn’t see from outside.

As she walked closer, Catherine had a subtle feeling that grew with each step: Don’t walk past. Look inside. The Mine wasn’t like a restaurant, where someone might make a second visit after a month or two. It was a nightclub. Tanya could go there every night. The place was crowded, and the lights were low and wavering. Catherine should get a better look. As she walked toward the door, the rain picked up slightly, so three girls who had been smoking outside headed for the door. Catherine pushed back her hood, closed her umbrella, and moved in among them.

The music was loud, and she could feel the pounding of the bass in her stomach. She glanced involuntarily at the stage, a simple reflex of the brain because it needed to know where so much sound was coming from. She noted that it was a girl band, and returned her eyes to the crowd.

The patrons were of the right age and the right style for Tanya. There were at least two hundred people of both sexes in the big room, their faces sometimes illuminated by the glow of the spotlights on the stage, sometimes held in the dark for long periods. As she scanned the faces—smiling, laughing, trying to talk to each other over the music—she felt a shiver of fear for them. They looked like Tanya, clean-faced and alert, between twenty-one and thirty, all with good haircuts and dressed as though they were employed in some white-collar job. Tanya could slip in among them and be so like them that she would be unmemorable and invisible, until one of them was dead. It could happen any night that Tanya felt the urge. It could be happening now.

Catherine began to make her way through the crowd, squeezing into the border between the dance floor and the outer ring of patrons lined up for a turn at the bar. She would move sideways a few feet, then extend a hand between two people and let the arm and shoulder follow, repeating, “Excuse me. Pardon. Excuse me” as she went, her voice just part of the mixture of voices to be heard trying to climb over the music but barely over it, so that she needed to be within a foot of the next person before he knew anyone was talking. Catherine slowly made it closer to the destination she had set for herself, the ladies’ room.

She had known that in a crowd this size there would be a line of women waiting to use the ladies’ room. No matter what else was true of Tanya, if she was here, she would have to wait in that line sometime. Catherine came within sight and began to move laterally in the crowd, studying the faces of the women in the line. Tanya was not among them.

Catherine devoted a few minutes to studying the layout of the Mine more closely. There were two fire exits at this end of the building, and probably another behind the stage. If there was a sighting of Tanya here, Catherine would have to remember to have those exits watched. She turned and began to inch her way through the mass of moving bodies toward the door. She was blocked suddenly as a tall man stepped into her path. “Excuse me,” she said.

“Dance with me.” He was handsome, but he knew it.

“No, thanks. Got to go.”

“Come on,” he said. His confidence grew until he became repulsive. “You know you want to.”

To his right Catherine saw something that didn’t fit, the flash of a face and then a sudden movement that went against the beat of the music. She saw a couple moving off in the crowd ahead of her. “Excuse me,” she said as she tried to go around him.

He held her arm. “Please. I’m in love with you. The marriage is on.”

She looked at his arm clutching hers, then up into his eyes. “Want a really nasty surprise?”

He let go, held up both hands, and stepped backward. She used the space that he opened between them to slip past him and make six feet of progress before the next obstacle formed.

“Excuse me,” she said to a group of young women who had just come in. The nearest of the women turned to look at her, just an aura of blond hair to frame an expression that was utterly empty.

Catherine said, “You won’t be able to get in unless you let people out.”

The woman reluctantly stepped aside six inches. Catherine brushed by her and the next two, and was out the door. She squinted into the rain, then down the street the other way, but she could not see the couple. She had lost them.

She tried to analyze the impression she’d had. It wasn’t that the woman looked like Tanya—she had not been able to tell what she looked like in the dim light. It had just been the impression of furtiveness that had made her want to get a closer look.

She began to walk again, this time heading for Metro. She had noticed something, and it had not quite reached her consciousness until a moment ago. Every place where the Catherine Hobbes credit card had been used had one thing in common. They were all very dim. She hoped that when the officers had gone around this afternoon they had asked the owners of the businesses to post the circulars where people could see them.