“That’s not what I said.”
“You still won’t help me. Still.”
Suddenly she was crying, though she hated herself for it. Crying, her back turned to the cops, hoping they couldn’t see.
“Annie,” Walker said gently, “what do you want me to do?”
“Arrest him. Arrest Gund.”
“He’s not charged with any crime.”
“There’s the photo,” she said desperately. “It’s my property. He stole it, didn’t he?”
“And you stole it back. After breaking and entering.”
“Then arrest me, too, I don’t care!”
“I can’t do it, Annie.”
He couldn’t do it. Naturally. He couldn’t do anything. Except tell her that she was a paranoid head case and Erin was fine, just fine.
Annie wiped her eyes, straightened up. All right, then. If he wouldn’t help her, then she would handle things on her own.
“Annie?” Walker’s voice was curiously tinny. She noticed that she had lowered the telephone handset to the desk. “Annie?”
She cradled the phone, then walked briskly out the door into the warm night.
The cop on duty at the glassed-in cubicle outside nodded to her as she passed by. She didn’t notice.
A pickup truck had parked next to her Miata in the visitors’ lot. Her car door banged the truck’s side panel as she slipped behind the wheel. She didn’t notice that, either.
Cough of ignition, squeal of tires, and she pulled into the street.
Her mind was only marginally focused on the details of driving. She was mapping strategy.
Erin was at Gund’s ranch. Had to be.
The ranch was probably in the general vicinity of Houghton Road.
Annie had a set of keys to that ranch.
Simple enough, then. She would retrace the route Gund had taken this evening. Search the side roads for a ranch whose gate and doors would open to the keys in her pocket.
Of course, there was a chance Gund would go there, too. Might be on his way already. Presumably he knew she was on to him. He might panic, decide to end it all.
If he was there when she arrived…
Well, maybe he wouldn’t be. Maybe he was looking for her at her townhouse or the shop. Or fleeing across the state line, or getting on a plane to Mexico.
Anyway, she would have to risk it. She had no choice.
There was no one to help her, not this time. No one to take charge and spare her the responsibility of action. No one to lead her by the hand, out of the flames.
“Annie? Annie? ”
Walker stabbed the reset button on his kitchen phone and used the memory feature to dial the station.
In their first meeting, Annie Reilly had told him she was impulsive and emotional. She might be wrong about Gund, about Erin, about nearly everything, but on that particular point Walker had to concur.
Ringing on the other end of the line.
“Hackett.” The desk sergeant.
“Ed, this is Walker. That woman who phoned me-is she still there?”
“Just left.”
“Send someone after her. Bring her back.”
“Right.”
Walker waited on hold, the fried eggs on the stove beginning to burn.
He was worried. Annie already had done something crazy when she broke into Harold Gund’s apartment. Now, distraught as she was, she might do something still crazier.
Smoke from the frying pan wafted toward the ceiling. It would set off the smoke detector in the hallway before long. He reached across the kitchen, turned off the burner, then picked up the pan and placed it in the sink.
No eggs tonight. Just as well. His doctor had warned him to watch his cholesterol.
Hackett came back on the line. “Sorry, Michael. She’s gone. Whipped out of the visitors’ lot like a smoking fast ball.”
“Okay, Ed. Thanks.”
He thumbed the reset button again. Then stood motionless, staring out the window at the night sky, thinking hard.
A ranch in the desert, Annie had said. Southeast of town.
If Gund had bought the place, a record of the purchase would be kept at the county tax assessor’s office.
The office was closed for the night. But Walker had a friend who worked there. A friend who owed him for some hard-to-get playoff tickets to a Phoenix Suns game a few years ago, tickets obtained from a former Tucson cop, now part of America West Arena’s security detail.
It would take his friend less than a half hour to drive to the office and find the file, if it existed.
Probably unnecessary. Probably Erin Reilly had left of her own volition, as her letter had stated. Probably Annie was imagining the worst, and this Harold Gund was just a lonely man infatuated with his attractive boss. Probably.
“Oh, hell,” Walker whispered.
He dialed his friend’s home number and called in the favor.
50
Gund, driving fast on Interstate 10, heading southeast.
He would keep going until he crossed the state border into New Mexico. In Las Cruces he could ditch the van and steal a car. Afterward, he would get off the main highway and take the back roads. In Dallas or Houston, he would buy new ID.
Did he have money? None. He’d packed nothing, taken nothing. Panic must have chased all practicalities from his brain.
It didn’t matter. Along the way he would steal whatever he needed.
His grip on the steering wheel tightened. He pushed the speedometer needle to eighty as the concrete miles blurred past.
The engine throbbed, and his head throbbed with it. But at least the tingling of his fingers had faded, as had the unnatural heat at the back of his neck and the distant, unreal chiming in his ears. Those symptoms had vanished sometime during his search of his apartment. He had no idea why.
He wondered how much time he’d wasted in that search, exploring every possible place of concealment, the pistol shaking in his hand. Hatred and humiliation had made him sloppy, the search feverish and inefficient. Frequently he found himself checking the same closet or cubbyhole for the third or fourth time.
Finally he understood that she was gone, had been gone for many minutes, and worse-that she must have driven directly to the police.
She would talk to the detective who’d looked into Erin’s disappearance. The man would believe her this time. He would want to ask Gund some questions. Might already be on his way over.
Fear seized him. He ran from his apartment, not looking back, then got on the interstate and floored the gas pedal, barreling past semi trucks and sticker-festooned campers traveling at sixty-five.
Now he was beyond city limits, coming up on the Valencia Road exit, passing it, with Wilmot Road two miles ahead.
Soon he would leave the Tucson area behind. Christ, he never should have come here in the first place. Never.
“Never,” he murmured under his breath. Distantly he noted how peculiar the word sounded, slurred and indistinct, as if he had been drinking, or as if he were mumbling in his sleep.
The thought skipped lightly along the margin of his awareness, leaving him before he could quite grasp it. Unimportant anyway. What was important was to keep driving, get the hell out of here, never come back.
Shouldn’t have left Wisconsin. Things had been all right there. He had been safe there. Safe and empty inside.
For twenty years he’d worked as a janitor at the university, the lonely monotony of his life interrupted only by the periodic need to kill and the anguish afterward.
Perhaps he could have continued that way for another twenty years
… if he hadn’t seen the article.
It was a scholarly monograph on fire setters, appearing in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology. Some professor had left the slim, glossy publication on a coffee table in the psychology department’s faculty lounge. Gund found it while cleaning up on a winter night in 1992, a few months after the third woman, Deborah Collins, had burned.