When she emerged from the kitchen she was horrified. It was the woman who was making the noise. Somehow she had tripped Paul and now she was on him, scratching and biting. He was using his left hand to hold her off, and his right forearm to protect his face, but he couldn’t get a grip on her, and she kept reaching for the gun, and when he pulled it away, she would go for his eyes.
Sylvie rushed forward and poked her gun against the woman’s head. “Stop it! Stop!” she shouted, but the woman whirled suddenly, her eyes alive, almost joyful as she snatched at Sylvie’s gun.
Sylvie fired into her head. The woman’s body fell where it was, straddling Paul in the narrow corridor, while he lay on his back. He pushed at her body, then rolled and kicked himself free of it. “Shit,” he said. He stood up with difficulty. “This is a fucking disaster.”
Sylvie stared at him, the horror undiminished since the instant when she had heard that growl. Paul was wet with the dead woman’s blood. Her blood had spattered the hallway, even a few drops on the ceiling, but the wound had emptied onto Paul’s chest and neck, so his clothes were soaked. He had three long red scratches on his left cheek, where the woman’s nails had raked him, and a nail mark under his right eye. He pulled his shirt away from his chest and opened it a couple of buttons, then looked at the skin beneath.
“Oh, God, she bit you!”
“Yeah. Bit, scratched, tried to get my eyes.”
“She was crazy.”
“Yeah. I just looked away from her for a second when you went toward the kitchen. She was waiting for it, I guess.” He looked down at the body. “I sure wish you hadn’t killed her.”
“What?”
“That was what she wanted, not what I wanted. Sylvie, you knew we needed her alive to answer questions.”
“What could I do? She was hurting you.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s over. No use in arguing.”
“But what did you want me to do?”
“You could have shot her anywhere, but not in the head. She would have been in pain and too weak to cause trouble. We could have kept her alive and made her talk.”
Sylvie walked into the kitchen.
“Wait. Where are you going?”
“I don’t want to think of you as an asshole. I’m going to give you a chance to stop being one.”
“Sylvie, this isn’t the time. We need to do some searching. Find some rubber gloves and get started while I get her out of the way.”
“What do you want me to look for?”
“Anything that would tell us where Wendy Harper is—a stub from a plane ticket, an address book, a letter. Use your imagination.”
Sylvie fought her sense of injustice. She had saved his life, and now he was blaming her for losing what the woman knew. She opened the cabinet below the sink, found a box of disposable rubber gloves, and put a pair on. She searched drawers and cabinets, leaving them open so she wouldn’t look in the same place twice.
She passed by the entrance to the hallway and looked at Paul without letting him see her. He was cleaning up—wrapping the body in a blanket. She kept moving. Let him do it by himself. She had tried to do something nice for him by killing her, and he had not appreciated it. Let him think about that for a while.
Sylvie moved through the house, opening drawers and cabinets, feeling her way through stacks of folded linens, moving cans and bottles aside to see if something was hidden behind them. She found a drawer where old bills were kept, but none of them seemed to contain any information that she could use. She found a sheet of names and addresses printed out beside the computer in one of the spare rooms, but then another sheet below it, and another, a whole stack of dozens of pages. They seemed to be mailing lists of customers for some kind of business.
Sylvie woke up the computer and tried to sign on, but the password had not been stored. She had started typing passwords like “Ann” and “Ann’s computer” and “Open sesame” when she saw the purse. It was a reddish brown Coach shoulder bag with a small silver clasp, and Sylvie’s first thought was that she liked it, but she pushed that thought out of her mind and picked it up.
She looked inside, and found an address book. She didn’t have much hope it would say “Wendy Harper,” but it might contain the computer password or something else she could use. She searched through every page, but found nothing that she could identify as useful. She found Ann Delatorre’s cell phone, turned it on and began to scroll through the stored phone numbers, then the recently called numbers. They were all local.
She looked inside the wallet. There were a few credit cards, a library card, a couple of business cards from companies around Las Vegas. The driver’s license looked real, but it didn’t say Ann Delatorre. It said L. Ann Delatorre. She found no passwords or out-of-town addresses, but in the back of the wallet, she found something that made her draw in her breath suddenly. It was a printed card that had come with the wallet. It said, “If found, please call” and in a woman’s handwriting it gave a telephone number and the word “Reward.”
Sylvie looked at the number on the desk telephone. That was a 702 number. She checked Ann Delatorre’s cell phone. The little screen showed a 702 number, too.
She understood Ann Delatorre, without knowing her at all. She had been a woman who had been absolutely resolved to protect Wendy Harper. She would never have written down her phone number for herself. She had memorized it a long time ago and would remember it forever. She had known that she wouldn’t lose her wallet. But she had also known that someday she might be killed. There would be police, or at least someone who found her body and would go through her purse. They would call the number. And on the other end, Wendy Harper would learn that Ann Delatorre was dead. “Paul?” she called. “I’m pretty sure I found the phone number. It’s a 415. Isn’t that San Francisco?”
16
IT WAS PROBABLY the last flight of the night—certainly the last flight to San Francisco. The long-distance number Ann Delatorre had called was in the 415 area code, so now Jack Till was in an airplane looking out the small plastic window at the lighted maintenance area beside the flight line. The ten minutes or so while he waited for the seats beside him to fill always guaranteed a low level of suspense. The seats on Southwest were not assigned, so anybody could sit anywhere, and night flights usually had a few empty seats.
Till watched attractive women walking up the aisle clutching their purses and oversized carry-ons, their big, liquid eyes narrowing in pure self-interest as they hunted for the seat they considered the best. He was sometimes amused in a cold way when he saw what they chose. They did not often choose to sit beside Jack Till.
Till was tall but thin, and didn’t have the sort of frame with elbows and shoulders that encroached on a neighbor’s space. He always wore a good sport coat and crisply pressed shirt when he was working, and travel was work. He knew he wasn’t ugly. But he supposed he looked like what he was: a retired cop whose face showed some wear.
He watched the next woman’s eyes zigzag from one side of the aisle to the other, reading faces. They passed over his quickly, not quite afraid of him, at least not in an airplane, but not comfortable near him, either. He supposed it was because after all of those years protecting people like her, he had picked up the look of the people he’d been protecting them from. It didn’t matter. He wasn’t interested in company.
His mother would have been offended on his behalf, but his mother had been a difficult woman who was offended regularly. She married his father in an act of speculation, like buying a piece of land cheap on the guess that any chunk of the planet might have something valuable on it. Ray Till had already been drafted for the war when she met him, and she might easily have been a young widow. But he returned from Europe a couple of years later a captain, with three battlefield promotions and a silver star. He was a quiet man with blue eyes that had beneath them an underlying toughness, and maybe the toughness had been what had attracted her. He became an electrician and wired whole developments in the San Fernando Valley during the building boom, when vast orange and lemon groves were cut down and incinerated in bonfires to make room for the new houses.