The Night Crew

'I'll drive her,' Anna said. 'She can leave her car here in the hospital ramp.'

'All right. Coughlin will be there at nine.' He looked at Glass. 'You be careful.'

Glass kissed Creek good-bye, and she and Anna left together, Glass carrying the remnants of the newspaper. Anna caught their reflection in the elevator doors as they waited: side by side, with the slight blurring in the stainless steel, they could have been mistaken for each other. Glass was perhaps an inch taller, Anna had just slightly wider shoulders. Both had short, efficient haircuts.

So what if the guy came for her, and they took him down, and she wasn't even there to see it? Anna touched the gun in her jacket pocket, then shook her head. No. They wouldn't take him that way.

'I'd hate to deal with this guy one on one,' Glass was saying. 'Most guys, you can manipulate. But you get a guy like this. have you ever gotten tangled up with a guy who's nuts?'

'No.' They got in the elevator and pushed a button.

'When I was on the street, we got a call about a guy in a halfway house: he'd done some time on some sex offenses, mostly exhibitionism, most of it aimed at little girls,' Glass said. 'Anyway, he was drunk, out on the street, flashing everybody who came by. When we got there, we couldn't find him. He'd walked off. He wasn't supposed to be dangerous or anything, so me and my partner split up, trying to find him. I walked down to this ice cream shop and stopped to ask some people at a bus stop, and he came out of the shop behind me and saw the uniform and freaked out and came up behind me and wrapped his arms around me and picked me up off the ground and started squeezing.'

'Jeez.'

'Yeah. He was huge. Strong. I felt like an egg, I felt like he could crush me. I couldn't move my arms, I just kept trying to talk to him, but he was nuts: he had a mind like a little mean kid having a temper tantrum. I couldn't get him to put me down, and the more I struggled, the tighter he squeezed until I couldn't breathe.'

'How'd you get loose?'

'My partner came along, called for backup and started whacking the guy with his baton. But the guy kept turning in circles and squeezing me, and then the backup arrived and the three guys got us all down on the ground and pried his arms off. I was black and blue. my ribs looked like the American flag, where his arms were. Great big stripes.'

The elevator door opened and Anna said, 'It's a weird thing, men and muscles. It's like they think about it all the time.'

'What makes me mad is that some wimpy little jerk who never lifts anything heavier than a fork can whack me around because he'd got fifty pounds on me and he's twice as strong, and he's not even trying. It's all hormones.'

'Yeah, but. that's why God made us smarter,' Anna said.

'That's true,' Glass conceded.

Glass lay in the back seat of Anna's car, reading the comics, as Anna drove back home. Harper's BMW was squeezed into a tight space in front of the house, and Anna had to maneuvre the car to get it into the garage. They went inside, and found Harper at the kitchen table, eating a bowl of Golden Crisp with milk.

'What?' he asked.

Anna gave him a quick rundown, and he looked at Glass. 'Put on the right clothes, at night. it'll work. Keep moving, though.'

'Anything at all on Clark?'

'Mmm,' Harper said. He quickly finished the cereal and carried the bowl to the sink. 'Just a little thing.'

'He won't find out.'

'No, no. I've got a friend in a law firm there, they've got a researcher on staff. She walked over and talked around the music department. She said she was checking on a mortgage history.'

'So what'd she find?' Anna asked impatiently. 'The little thing.'

'There's a rumor of a sexual harassment complaint made by a graduate studenta woman graduate studentin a composition seminar. Apparently nothing was ever filed, no legal action, but there was. something.'

'Just a rumor,' Anna said dismissively.

'No. There was something,' Harper said. 'We can't really find out what, unless we ask more directly. And he'd most likely hear about it.'

Anna shook her head. 'Then don't.'

Glass glanced at Harper, then said, 'Anna, this is a little more important than your feelings. Or his. Remember China Lake.'

'I remember China Lake. But Clark didn't do it.'

'One of his students has a recital tonight; he'll be there. Eight o'clock at Schoenberg Hall,' Harper said.

'Yeah?' Anna's eyebrow went up.

'We could pick him up after the recital,' Harper said, his voice casual. 'Find out what he does with his evenings.'

'And we'd have time to stop by Kinko's first, and talk to Catwell again,' Anna said.

'We could do that,' Harper said.

Coughlin would pick Glass up at the regular night-crew starting time, ten o'clock. If they left any earlier, they thought the stalker would miss them.

Glass said, 'When we go out tonight, if we don't find anybody tailing us, we'll probably cruise just long enough to seem legitimate, then come back here, like I was picking up something. Then go back out again. Give him another chance to pick us up. If we still don't get anything, we'll be back around midnight.'

'So you're gonna lay low until then?' Harper asked.

'I gotta get some sleep,' Glass said. She yawned: 'Watching Creek is tiring.'

'Keep the doors locked,' Harper said. 'The guy's been here at least twice.'

Anna snuck out to Harper's car after dark, and curled up on the back seat, out of sight.

'I don't have much faith in this Catwell thing,' Harper said over the seat.

'We just have to keep talking,' Anna said. 'The cops keep saying that I know the guy. Sooner or later, I'll pick him out. I probably should have already.'

Bob Catwell was not at Kinko's.

An unconsciously beautiful young blonde woman told them that Catwell had rented a room in some frat house up on the hill. Down in the basement, you have to walk around the side on this gravel tracklike thing, and you see this door. Like, his room used to be the coal bin or something.'

She drew a sketch on a piece of copy paper, and Anna thanked her and they headed out.

'Do you think she knows how beautiful she is?' Harper asked on the way to the car.

'Somewhere down in her brain she knows that she gets special treatment,' Anna said. 'Unless she's particularly stupid, and she didn't seem to be.'

The frat house was built on the side of a hill, with a narrow, rutted drive leading around back. Harper found a parking place and they walked back, and down the drive. Eight or nine feet of old poured-concrete foundation was exposed along the back side. The only window was boarded over with a sheet of plywood, but they could see light through a hairline crack at one edge. And at the door, they could smell the burning dope.

'You could get high standing outside,' Harper said.

He turned the knob and pushed: the door unexpectedly popped open, and he stepped through, Anna at his elbow. Catwell was sprawled on a battered green sofa in front of a seventies color television, watching 'Ren and Stimpy' reruns. He sat up, scared, when they burst in, dropped the joint he was smoking, recognized them, then scrambled to get the joint out of the couch. 'What the fuck do you want? Did you. get the fuck out of here.'

'Gotta talk,' Anna said, stepping around Harper. Catwell finally found the joint and then stood there, looking at it, not sure what to do with it. 'Give me that,' Anna said.

He handed it to her, and she took a hit, exhaled and handed it back: 'Now we're all criminals together, huh? So relax, and we gotta talk.'

Catwell, uncertain, hit on the joint himself, a last time, then pinched it out.

'Like a doper's bowling alley in here,' Harper said, waving at a layer of smoke that hung two-thirds of the way to the ceiling.

'You don't like it, get lost,' Catwell said.

'Both of you, shut up,' Anna said. To Catwelclass="underline" 'Listen, we need to talk again. We need to know more about what Jason was doing. Not who he bought the dope from, just in general.'