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“I’m a private investigator, and I have some important information about the case you’re prosecuting against Eric Fuller.”

“Just hold it a minute.” She stepped quickly to the phone and lifted it. “Carl? I’ve got to call you back. Two, three minutes. Honest.” She set the telephone in its cradle. “Come in.”

Till entered the small, cluttered space and looked for a place to sit. There was one chair, but it appeared to be the permanent place for a stack of files. She saw the direction of his eyes and started toward the chair, but he held up his hand. “Don’t bother. I’ll only be here for a few minutes. I saw the newspaper a little while ago. I came to let you know that there’s been a mistake. You can’t prosecute Eric Fuller, or anybody else, for the murder of Wendy Harper.”

She bristled. “I can’t?”

“No. Wendy Harper is alive.”

Linda Gordon leaned against the wall behind her desk with her arms folded. “Go on.”

Jack Till recognized the gesture. She was protecting herself unconsciously—from him? She was blocking what he was saying. All he could do was keep trying. “The reason you don’t have a body is that she’s still using it.”

“Have you talked to the police?”

“Not yet. I came straight here.”

“Well, that’s the normal way to do things when you have information. The detective in charge is Sergeant Max Poliakoff at Homicide Special in the Parker Center. If you’ll just—”

“I know him. I was the one who trained him when he was in Hollywood Homicide.”

“Trained him? You’re a police officer?”

“Retired.”

“And you want to give me this evidence?”

“Yes. I can go over and talk to Max Poliakoff first, if you’d prefer it.”

She stared at him for a second, and he could see that she was thinking far ahead. “All right. At this point I’d better stop you. I want to record what you’re saying on my tape recorder. Is that all right with you?”

“Okay.”

She took a small pocket recorder from her purse, slipped a new tape cassette into it, and clicked a button. “This is Linda Gordon, Assistant District Attorney, and I’m interviewing a gentleman who has come to my office on Wednesday, May 13. It’s now eight-fifty-three A.M. And your name is?” She held out the recorder as though she were challenging him to run.

“John Robert Till.”

“Spell it?”

“T-I-L-L.”

“Now, you have not been placed under oath. But you have told me that you’re a retired police officer, so you know that it is a crime to lie to a law-enforcement official about a homicide case. You are, of course, aware of that?”

“Yes. I am.”

“Then say what you wish to say.”

“I’m here to advise you not to pursue a case against Eric Fuller for the murder of Wendy Harper because I know that she’s not dead.”

“How do you know that? Have you seen her?”

“Not recently. I saw her six years ago, after the last time she was seen in Los Angeles.”

“So you were the last one to see her alive?”

“Not at all. But I was the last one to see her here. I’m a private investigator. She hired me. She had been attacked by a man one night when she was coming home from her restaurant. He beat her up in a way that sounded to me as though he intended to disable her and then kill her.”

“How can you know what he intended to do?”

“He used a baseball bat. He started with her legs and arms, then hit her a glancing blow on the head, but he was interrupted by a couple of cars before he could keep her still long enough for his big swing.”

Till could see the description had elicited an expression of pure revulsion in Linda Gordon, and that she had not intended him to see it. She set her recorder down on the desk and resumed the pose with her arms folded and the desk between them. “What was the purpose of this attack?”

“I believe it was to murder her and make it look like a predatory, opportunistic killing rather than a practical sort of homicide. Somebody was after her, and she knew it.”

“Who was after her?”

“She said that a friend—a woman who sometimes worked at her restaurant—had a boyfriend she thought might be dangerous.”

“Dangerous in what way?”

“The woman had told her some things about him, some things he had done to her.”

“Why would he be after Wendy?”

“One night Wendy was outside the restaurant after closing. She saw the guy when he came to pick up the friend, and he saw her. A few days later, the friend was gone. She stopped coming to work. Her apartment was empty. Wendy believed she was dead.”

“What was the boyfriend’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“What was the waitress’s name?”

“I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know? Didn’t you ask?”

“Sure. She wouldn’t tell me the woman’s name, and claimed not to know the man’s name.”

“That’s it? That’s all? You gave up?”

“I was no longer a police officer, and had no way of compelling her to tell me anything. A responding officer had interviewed her the night of the attack and a detective talked to her afterward, in the hospital. If I’d had a month or so, I might have persuaded her that telling me more would make her safer, but at the time, she was too terrified to listen. She wanted to leave Los Angeles immediately. She was convinced that if she stayed in Los Angeles long enough for this boyfriend to find her again, she was going to die.”

“Was she right?”

“I honestly don’t know. I don’t know who her friend’s boyfriend was, or who the man he’d hired to beat her was. I offered to protect her, to act as contractor to get her some bodyguards, or to put her house and her restaurant under surveillance. But if this man wanted her badly enough—”

“So what did you do?”

“I gave her the help she wanted, the help she was willing to take.”

“Which was?”

“I drove her to a hotel in Solvang. I hid her there for a few days. We stayed in her room most of the time, and I told her how I would go about finding a person who didn’t want to be found.”

“Explain.”

“I told her the methods professionals might use to find her. And then I taught her ways to avoid those methods.”

“And then what?”

“Then she left.”

“Just like that. She left. You never saw her again, or heard from her.”

“No. That was one of the things I warned her about. If you have contact with people you used to know, you’ll get caught. She had not told anyone she was going to hire me, but if someone had already been watching her, then he might know. We were definitely not followed to Solvang. But later on, a potential killer might monitor my mail or my phone and wait for her to write or call.”

Linda Gordon was finding his clear, unemotional delivery maddening. “Let me ask you something. What evidence can you give me that any of this ever happened, or that you ever met her?”

“I tried to be sure there wasn’t any. Keeping evidence could have endangered her. I wouldn’t be telling you any of this now if you hadn’t charged someone with killing her.”

“Did Eric Fuller know she simply went away voluntarily?”

“No. She wanted him to believe she was dead, and go on with his life. She felt there was nothing to be gained by telling him anything. She believed that if he knew, he would try to find her and possibly get them both killed.”

“I thought she was in love with him. That’s the story we’ve been told. I’m sure that’s going to figure in his defense. You expect me to believe she would leave him like that?”

Jack Till looked at her, beginning to lose his optimism. She wasn’t really listening to what he said. She was formulating arguments against it. “They were a couple when they came to Los Angeles. They had gone to college together and had been close friends. At different times, that friendship took a lot of different forms. They were roommates, and they were engaged to be married, and they started a business together. When the romantic relationship went away, nothing else changed. They were still closer to each other than they were to anyone else, and they trusted each other. They stayed partners and the restaurant did well.”