Till looked at Linda Gordon. “Then I’ll take Miss Harper out of here, and someday we can all hear officially what we already know.”
“Don’t leave Los Angeles,” said Linda Gordon. “And make sure my office knows exactly where you are at every moment.”
“What?” said Wendy.
“You heard me. If you aren’t Wendy Harper, then what you’ve just done is an obstruction of justice, for starters. Mr. Till will be your codefendant. If you are Wendy Harper, then there are other things that you need to talk about with the police. We understand you have been withholding information about a possible homicide that occurred six years ago. You also may be charged with grand theft in connection with a fraudulent life-insurance claim. I’m being very casual about this because you came on your own. But don’t test me.”
“Excuse me,” Chernoff broke in. “Since this isn’t over, we might as well get a few more things on the record. Don’t anyone leave just yet.”
Till said, “All right, Jay. What is it?”
“Give me a few more minutes.” He took out his cell phone and dialed. “Okay. Pull up ahead of my car and come in. We’re expecting you.”
Linda Gordon turned to stare at Chernoff. “What are you doing? This isn’t the time for the kind of antics you pull in the courtroom. We all have other things to do.”
“Nothing as important as this,” Chernoff said.
“This is ridiculous,” she said. “Your client isn’t sitting in a cell surrounded by psychopaths. He’s in his very expensive house or his famous restaurant.”
“His reputation is priceless, and his arrest has been all over the press. He deserves to be exonerated as quickly as possible. And when it’s appropriate, as visibly as possible.”
There was the sound of a car’s tires scraping the curb across the street, then a car door slamming, then another. Poliakoff pushed the curtain aside a few inches to look out the front window, then stepped to the door and opened it.
The first person in the door was a pretty woman about thirty years old with long brown hair and blue eyes. “Wendy!” She rushed to throw her arms around Wendy Harper. “Where have you been?”
Wendy said, “Olivia. Did you come back just for this?”
“No,” she said. “I’ve been back for three years. I still work at Banque.”
A man in the doorway came forward. “Wendy, it’s really good to see you again.” He took his turn to hug Wendy, but there was a self-conscious, reserved quality to the embrace. “We were all afraid you were dead.”
Wendy said, “It’s nice to see you too, David. Are you still at the restaurant, too?”
“No,” he said. “Except once in a while if somebody is sick. I’ve been getting work as an actor. Olivia and I are married.”
Olivia held her left hand out to Wendy, and Wendy said, “Wow, look at that rock!”
Olivia said, “David got an airline commercial. He makes a cute pilot.”
Till watched Wendy as a third person came in the door, and her eyes began to fill with tears. “Eric!”
He stepped forward, looking tired and shaken, and said, “Do I get one of those hugs, too?”
“Try and stop me.” She threw her arms around his neck and they embraced hard. “I missed you so much.” After a few seconds, she pulled back to look at him. “You look good for a condemned man.”
“Thank God you came back,” he said. “I’ve heard what you’ve had to go through to get here. Why did you ever leave in the first place?”
“I was just so scared, and I had to get away. I never imagined you could be accused of killing me.” Her eyes drifted to Jack Till. “I came back because this whole nightmare has got to end.” She hugged Eric again and then, after a few seconds, they parted.
Linda Gordon turned to Chernoff. “Do you want to tell me the purpose of all this?”
“Depositions,” Chernoff said. “You and I and Sergeant Poliakoff and Officer Fallon can go into your kitchen and take some official statements.” He turned to the newcomers. “I assume you can all swear on pain of perjury that this woman is the same Wendy Harper you knew six years ago?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “Let’s get it over with so we can catch up on things.”
“I don’t see any point in deposing anyone,” Linda Gordon said. “We’ll have irrefutable scientific evidence in a couple of weeks, and it will make witnesses irrelevant.”
Jack Till said, “You weren’t shy about taking an official statement from me when I went to see you the first time. It doesn’t matter if you won’t take a statement from them, though. Sergeant Poliakoff is the detective in charge of a murder investigation. He can interview anyone he pleases, tape-record their statements, or take his own notes.”
“You came to me and offered to give me your statement voluntarily, so I took it,” Linda Gordon said. “But this is no longer a matter for the opinions of witnesses. Either she is Wendy Harper, or she isn’t.”
Poliakoff had made a decision. “Tim, take a few pictures of everyone here.”
“What’s that for?” Linda Gordon asked.
“It will help me identify them later.”
She turned to stare at Chernoff, who seemed uncharacteristically silent. “You’re planning to call me in front of the judge, aren’t you? You’ll put me under oath and force me to say that all of these people recognized each other.”
“I don’t want to do anything theatrical.”
“Do you honestly not understand why I feel it’s best to wait until the positive scientific evidence is in?”
“I don’t.”
“All right, then. We’ll take depositions.”
Chernoff said, “Olivia? Would you like to go first?”
“Yes.” And she walked into the kitchen ahead of the others. The two lawyers swore her in and explained perjury to her. Then each of them asked her questions. “How long did you know Wendy Harper?”
“Ten years.”
“Don’t count the six when she was missing.”
“Four years, then.”
“How often did you see her?”
“Every day.”
Her husband David said, “I knew her for four years at the restaurant. Olivia was the first person hired to work at Banque, and then she persuaded Wendy to hire me.”
“Wendy hired you, not Eric?”
“Wendy ran the dining room and the bar. I was a bartender.”
“How well did you know her?”
“Extremely well.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“She and I, um, dated once.”
Jack Till was the last one in the kitchen. Linda Gordon began, “Do you swear that the woman you brought here today is the same Wendy Harper you helped to disappear six years ago?” Then: “Did you ever reveal to anyone what you had done?”
“Not until the day I read in the paper that Eric Fuller had been charged with her murder.”
“But otherwise you didn’t reveal it to anyone?”
“No.”
“You know that there was a large life insurance policy on Miss Harper that Eric Fuller collected on?”
“I’ve heard that. You’ll have to ask him.”
“You know you’re guilty of assisting him in a life-insurance fraud?”
“No, I’m not,” Till said.
Chernoff said, “Hold it, Miss Gordon. I need to interrupt this for a moment.” He turned off the tape recorder.
“Is there a problem?”
“Yes. I see you’re searching for a pretext to try to detain either Miss Harper or Mr. Till. The reason I stopped the tape was to save you from going on the record with something that would have terrible consequences for you. I assure you that any charges will be dropped, and you’ll spend the rest of your career fighting to keep from being fired and disbarred.”