"So that's it? You want to stay, you stay?"
"It's a little more complicated. I dug in my heels, though. I needed to stay a little while, make sure Bobby was okay."
"Bobby?"
"Robyn. That's what I called her, because – " He shook his head. "Anyway, I stayed to make sure she was okay, only she wasn't."
Damon was quiet a moment before continuing. "The thing about Robyn? She's always in control. Day before our wedding, the bakery calls to say they're overbooked. So what's she do? First she demands a refund and negotiates a free cake for my parents' thirtieth anniversary. Then she calmly reschedules her manicure so she'll have time to bake our wedding cake." His smile faded as fast as it came. "Point is, whatever you throw at her, she can handle it. But this? This was too much. Too sudden. Too senseless. When she couldn't make sense of it, she just… shut down."
"So you've been following her. What did you see that night? At Bane?"
"I haven't seen Bobby since she got to L.A. It sounded like a great plan, sticking around, making sure she was okay, but it didn't take long to see some serious flaws in the logic. What if she's not okay? What the hell can I do about it? I can't talk to her, can't touch her. I can only watch her suffer."
He addressed the window again. "Whatever grand power let me stay also ran out of patience. When Bobby came to L.A., I lost her. Eventually I found out she'd taken a job with Portia Kane and, when I got over the shock of that, I figured finding Bobby would be simple – Portia Kane isn't exactly a recluse. But whenever I get close to her, something blocks me. If they can't make me cross over, they're going to take away my reason for staying."
"That doesn't seem to be working out too well."
A flash of white teeth. "Yeah, I'm stubborn. I know Bobby will get better; I just need to see it. So I – "
The super hurried in, breathing hard. "So sorry. He is always complaining. Not like Miz Peltier."
"I think I'm done here. Just one question. The bedroom closet door. It wasn't open when I came through here last night."
"Oh, yes, that was the girl. Miz Kane's cousin."
"Cousin?"
The super explained that Portia Kane's cousin had come by earlier to pick up a shirt Peltier had dry-cleaned for Kane.
"She talked to the other officers. They said it was okay."
The officers hadn't mentioned it to Finn when he'd stopped by their car. An oversight? He doubted it.
"So what did she take?"
"A blouse. A very nice blouse."
"From this closet?"
The super nodded.
"Was it in a wrapper from the cleaners?"
"No. Miz Peltier must have taken it off."
Finn could believe Portia Kane would make her PR rep pick up her dry cleaning. And he could believe Kane's family would send someone to retrieve it after her death, worried their daughter's employee might "forget" to return a valuable item. But for Peltier to put it into her closet with her own clothing after removing the dry-cleaning wrapper?
Finn took out his notebook. "Could I get a description of Ms. Kane's cousin?"
The super looked alarmed. "She asked the officers. They said it was okay. And she was a very nice girl – "
"I'm sure she was and I'm sure she did speak to them. But I need to make a record of it, and you probably got a better look at her than they did."
He jotted down the information. Why would anyone lie to get into Peltier's apartment? If Peltier was holed up with a friend, Finn could imagine that friend sneaking in to get her some clothing. But a single shirt? Or was it something about the shirt? He tried to recall what witnesses said Peltier had been wearing that night. A dress, the one found at Judd Archer's.
He told the super he'd check with the officers and get their details, and ask them not to let anyone else in without an escort. The super got the message: don't open this apartment door again.
Finn's "Persons Of Interest" list for the Portia Kane case was starting to look like a roster of ghosts. Phantoms, at least.
As he suspected, no young woman had asked the stakeout officers for access, so he had one more nameless description to add to his list, along with Peltier's Indo American friend, her boyfriend and the red-haired teenage boy. Not to mention the most elusive ghost of all – Peltier herself.
Next the team met for another update so Finn could report to brass. When the meeting finished, Finn gathered his papers and headed for the coffee room. It was more of a closet than a room, barely big enough for the tiny table with the coffeemaker. Someone had made good use of the space, though, covering the walls in the safety posters the department was required to post.
He laid the pages on the table, facedown, and reached for a Styrofoam cup. Beside the stack, the ancient drip machine hissed. The quarter-filled pot was so stained it looked as if they'd misread the "auto-stop" feature as "auto-clean," and hadn't so much as rinsed it since buying it.
Finn lifted the pot and swirled the contents.
"Please tell me you aren't going to drink that," Damon said.
Finn sniffed the opening, judging the degree of burning by both the smell and the quantity of floating flakes. He filled his cup halfway.
"Oh, man. Please. There's got to be a coffee shop around."
"Block away. Two bucks a cup." He added creamer. Sniffed. Added more. "Got two hits for Peltier's friend."
Damon stopped eyeing the coffee cup and went very still.
"The one she was at Bane with Thursday night," Finn continued. "I called a buddy at the Times. He came up with two journalists matching the description." Finn picked up his pages and showed the top one to Damon. "One's a photojournalist with the Times. The other's a copyeditor at La Opinión. "
Finn waited. It took almost a minute.
"Neither of those is the woman you're looking for," Damon said finally. "Her name is Hope Adams. She's a reporter with True News."
ROBYN
Like any couple, Damon and Robyn each had interests the other hadn't shared. Damon loved detective shows; Robyn couldn't see the attraction, but had watched them with him anyway. If someone had asked her whether she'd learned anything from them, she would have laughed and said she barely paid any attention, usually using the time to mentally plan her week's schedule. In the last couple of days, though, she discovered that even if she hadn't been actively watching, obviously she'd learned something.
Today's lesson? Stalking 101.
For three blocks she'd been following the man who'd stopped at her motel door and she'd come to a matching number of conclusions.
One, he wasn't red haired. What she'd seen through the distorted image in the peephole had been a dark red baseball cap.
Two, he wasn't from around here. The fact that he'd walked four blocks in car-obsessed L.A. suggested it. His constant stopping and looking around, as if getting his bearings, confirmed it.
Three, if he was a private investigator, he wasn't very good at his job. Despite all his looking around, he never once glanced backward to see whether anyone was following him. He just strolled along, confident and unhurried.
Robyn did look over her shoulder. Repeatedly. She could be following the guy who'd killed Judd and planned to do the same to her. Shut her up permanently.
She bit back a giggle. There was a classic bad movie line. As silly as it sounded, though, to dismiss the idea would be sillier still. She'd seen two people die and even if common sense told her this was more likely a private investigator than an assassin, she wasn't taking any chances.
So she wasn't doing anything as stupid as following this guy down an alley. But there weren't any alleys here. The motel was in some part of L.A. 's endless suburban sprawl. Which part, she didn't know, and blasted herself for not paying better attention yesterday when Karl had driven her in. Around here, though, it was difficult to be on the edge of anything for long and, as Karl had said, it had taken only a short walk before she found herself in a warren of strip malls, three-story walkups and offices. A neighborhood in serious need of a planner.