Double Image

1

“THE NUMBER YOU HAVE CALLED IS NO LONGER IN SERVICE,” a computerized voice said.

In his kitchen, Coltrane set down the phone and frowned. His travel bag was at his feet. I must have rushed and pressed the wrong numbers, he thought. He picked up the phone and tried again.

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

This time, he knew that he hadn’t made a mistake. What the… As soon as he had been released from jail in Acapulco, he had called Tash’s cellular phone but had failed to get an answer. At LAX, he had phoned her again and had still not gotten an answer. Now, in the forty minutes it had taken a taxi to drive him home in the congestion of evening traffic, her phone had been disconnected. What on earth was going on?

At once, he realized that he had another way to try to contact Tash: Walt.

“The number you have called is no longer in service.”

This is crazy, he thought.

He tried the Malibu sheriff’s station. “I need to get in touch with Walt Halliday. Is he on duty tonight?”

“No, sir, and he won’t be on duty tomorrow, either. He isn’t with us anymore.”

“Isn’t with…”

“He resigned a couple of days ago.”

Speechless, Coltrane set down the phone.

2

EXCEPT FOR A LIGHT OVER THE FRONT DOOR AND THE GARAGE, Tash’s house was in darkness, its modernistic assemblage of cubes silhouetted against the moonlit sky. No lamp was on in any of the windows. That wouldn’t have been unusual in the middle of the night, but the time was only ten after nine, and even if Tash had gone out, Coltrane would have expected her to do what most people did – leave a few lights on. There was absolutely no sign that anyone was at home. But there was a sign of a different sort. Leaving his headlights on, Coltrane got out of his car to study it: FOR SALE, OCEAN REALTY.

This can’t be happening, he thought. He walked quickly to the front door, rang its doorbell, listened to the hollow echo from inside, and pounded on the door. “Tash!” he yelled. The front of the house was scorched from the fire that had been set on New Year’s Day. Peering through the metal fence that enclosed the incinerated flower garden, he strained to get a view through a window. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw that the room was totally empty, its furniture removed. “Tash!” Dismayed, he ran to the end of the street and along the fence to the water, hurrying toward her house from the back. The deck light wasn’t on. The only illumination was from the stars and moon. He tripped on the deck stairs but ignored the pain and scrambled the rest of the way up, his urgent footsteps reverberating as he ran to a window. The metal shutters had not been lowered. Staring in, straining to decipher the blackness, he realized that there wasn’t any furniture in this room, either. “Tash!” Despite the chill of the ocean breeze, sweat poured off him, soaking his clothes.

3

“I’M NOT COMFORTABLE GIVING OUT THAT INFORMATION,” the severe-faced woman said. She was in her forties, had frosted hair and long red fingernails, and wore a black designer pantsuit with a blue silk scarf.

“But I’m a friend of hers. I didn’t know she’d moved. I’m trying to get in touch with her.” It was nine in the morning. Coltrane stood in one of the cubicles in the Ocean Realty office. Outside, trucks rumbled by on the Pacific Coast Highway. “Surely she gave you the phone number and the address where she moved.”

“She also gave me strict instructions not to let anyone else know it.” Behind her desk, the woman pressed her back rigidly against her chair, as if wanting to keep as much distance as possible between Coltrane and her. “She told me one of the reasons she was moving was that she’d been threatened by a stalker.”

“I know. I helped identify the man who was doing it.”

“Then I’m sure you can appreciate my dilemma.”

“I don’t understand.”

“For all I know, you’re the man who was stalking her. She instructed me not to give out her new phone number and address.”

“For Christ sake.”

The woman flinched.

“Okay,” Coltrane said. “I understand your obligation to your client. But would it be violating any confidence if you phoned Tash, gave her my name, and told her I wanted to speak to her? I really am a close friend of hers.”

“I happen to know she won’t be in today. I’ll phone her tomorrow and tell her you want her to get in touch with you.”

Tomorrow? Coltrane mentally groaned.

4

JUST IN TIME, Coltrane steered from the PCH as Lyle came out of the coffee shop and approached his cruiser. After skidding to a stop, the squeal of his tires attracting Lyle’s attention, Coltrane hurried from his car and reached the heavyset officer, whom he had never seen in uniform before and who seemed even more heavyset with all the equipment on his gun belt.

Lyle’s hair was cut short, military-style. He looked as wary as the woman in the real estate office.

“The dispatcher at the station told me you usually have coffee here about this time,” Coltrane said. “I’m glad I caught up to you.”

For his part, Lyle didn’t look glad at all. He just nodded and waited.

“Listen, I’m confused about a couple of things,” Coltrane said. “I’m hoping you can help me.”

Lyle shrugged, nothing relaxed about the gesture.

Coltrane had to raise his voice to be heard above the passing traffic. “I’ve been trying to find Tash Adler.”

“She moved.”

“I know that. Do you have any idea where?”

“No.”

“Why did Walt Halliday resign from the sheriff’s department?”

“He didn’t tell me. We weren’t really that close. I just assumed it was on account of the stress of the job.”

“Well, maybe he knows where Tash moved. I tried phoning, but his number’s out of service. Do you have any idea where he lives, so I can talk to him?”

“Lived.”

“Excuse me?”

“The same day Walt resigned, he left town.”

“What?”

“He said he needed a change of scene.”

The asphalt of the parking lot seemed to ripple, threatening to swallow Coltrane. “I don’t get it. What the hell is happening?”

“Seems obvious to me,” Lyle said.

“How?”

“It’s too big a coincidence, both of them making a sudden decision to move at the same time. I had a suspicion there was something between them.”

“What?”

“Even if there wasn’t, it isn’t any mystery why she would have moved: the stress of being stalked.”

“But that’s over. Now that you know Duncan Reynolds was doing it.”

“Excuse me?”

“Duncan Reynolds. Didn’t Tash explain to you?”

“Who the hell is Duncan Reynolds?”

“She didn’t show you the photographs?”

“What photographs?”

Perplexed, Coltrane did his best to organize his thoughts, explaining.

“And you found something in these photographs?” Lyle asked.

“A man taking pictures of her. Duncan Reynolds. I know him. Tash met him once, but he used a different name.”

“So where are these pictures?”

“Tash has them.” The briefcase containing them had not been with Coltrane’s travel bag when the Acapulco police had brought his belongings from the hotel. He had assumed that Tash had gone to the hotel to get her things before she went to the airport, that she had taken the briefcase back to Los Angeles with her – to show the police and make sure Duncan Reynolds didn’t threaten her anymore. “Or maybe…”

“What?”

“Maybe she doesn’t have them. Maybe they were lost when the Mexican police brought my stuff from the hotel. That would explain why she didn’t tell you. She forgot to bring them with her, so she decided to wait until I came back with the proof. In the meantime, Duncan Reynolds kept harassing her, and she moved.”

“Without even a hint to us that she knew who was after her? Does that make sense?”

“No. Not when you put it that way.”

“And you don’t have the photographs, either?”

The asphalt beneath him seemed more unsteady. Instantly, he felt on solid footing. “I have the negatives at home. I can make others.”

“Then make them and bring them to me. But I have to tell you, I think this is bullshit.”

Coltrane blinked as if he’d been slapped.

“I heard about what you claim happened with Carl Nolan in Mexico. He was a damned fine police officer. If you expect me to believe he was jealous of you and flew down to Mexico to get even with you-”

“But that’s the truth.”

“Sure. Except Tash told me a different version. She said Carl went down to rescue her. From you.”

Coltrane’s mind reeled.

“She said she was moving because you were smothering her so much that she had to get away from you.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Are you calling me a liar?”

The parking lot seemed to spin. “Jesus Christ, am I losing my mind?”

5

COLTRANE ALMOST DIDN’T CLOSE HIS FRONT DOOR, so great was his need to rush down to the vault, grab the negatives he had stored there, and hurry into the darkroom to make new prints of Duncan Reynolds spying on Tash.

But after unlocking and opening the vault, Coltrane stood frozen in place, his mouth agape. The envelope of negatives that should have been on the nearest shelf wasn’t there. Telling himself that he must have forgotten which shelf he had put the negatives on, he charged into the vault and examined every shelf, but he still didn’t find them. The darkroom, he thought. I must have left them in… He rushed to search it, but they were gone.

6

“I’M SORRY TO BOTHER YOU.” Hoping that his eyes didn’t look as wild as he felt, Coltrane pointed toward Tash’s house next door. “Your neighbor moved recently.”

The spectacled gray-haired woman held an artist’s brush, wore a painter’s smock, and looked annoyed that Coltrane had rung her doorbell. “The day before yesterday. I saw the van.”

“Did she happen to give you her new address? I’m supposed to deliver some legal documents to her and-”

“She lived next to me for six months and never said a word to me. I can’t imagine why she’d bother to give me her address.”

“You saw a van? I don’t suppose you happened to notice the name on-”

7

“YEAH, I REMEMBER YOU,” the overweight man in the Pacific Movers work shirt said. “We delivered that load of unusual furniture to you. Tubular stuff. Metal.”

“That’s right.”

“Just a minute.” The foreman turned to his two young helpers as they came out of an apartment building in Santa Monica. “Make sure you put all those pads back in the truck.” He looked back at Coltrane. “You say you’ve been looking for me?”

“Your dispatcher told me where you’d be. I’ve got five hundred dollars for you if you’ll do me a favor.”

“It must be a hell of a favor.”

“Not really. All you have to do is go back to headquarters and look up the computer file on a customer named Natasha Adler.”

“And?”

“She’s an old girlfriend of mine.”

“So?”

“I need to know her new address.”

The man nodded conspiratorially.

8

AS THE ROAD TWISTED HIGHER INTO THE SAN BERNARDINO Mountains, the slopes became more rugged. Pine trees fought for space among granite outcrops. The temperature dropped, making Coltrane turn up the car’s heater and be grateful that he’d thought to bring a ski jacket along with a hat, scarf, and gloves. Although dawn had been a half hour earlier, dense gray clouds cast everything in twilight. Sporadic snow flecked his windshield and added to the roadside accumulation. Steering with one hand, he drank hot black coffee from a thermos and peered toward his rearview mirror. For a while after he had turned off the interstate to follow this secondary road into the mountains, he had been able to see the glow of San Bernardino behind him, but now all he saw were snow-covered boulders and fir trees, not even the headlights of a pickup truck that had followed him for about fifteen minutes and then veered off. It won’t be long now, he promised himself.

What he had been given wasn’t really an address, just a post office box. Tash had evidently supplied directions to the van’s driver but not his dispatcher. There wasn’t even a telephone number. But a PO box will do just fine, Coltrane thought bitterly. BIG BEAR LAKE, a road marker indicated, 25 MILES. Soon, he vowed. Soon. Meanwhile, he had plenty to think about: nagging questions that wouldn’t stop threatening to tear his mind apart. Tash!

9

THE COLD AIR PINCHED HIS NOSTRILS AND CAUSED HIS BREATH TO come out as vapor. After parking his car on a side street where it couldn’t be seen from the main road, Coltrane walked past rustic-looking shops, ignoring their Alpine exteriors. Christmas decorations still hung in some windows, but he ignored those also, his waffle-soled hiking boots squeaking on new-fallen snow as he strode around a corner and saw Big Bear’s post office across the street. In contrast with the mountain-resort appearance of many buildings in town, this was the usual antiseptic institutional-style building, with a fake redwood and stone exterior, a low-pitched roof, drop boxes for mail, and an unobscured parking lot in front.

He checked his watch: 8:25. Although the post office staff wouldn’t be on duty until nine, a few people going in and out the front door made clear that the building had been opened earlier so that customers with PO boxes wouldn’t have to wait to pick up their mail. That meant there was a slight chance Tash had already been here to check if she had any. But I doubt it, Coltrane thought. She’ll be tired after shipping her furniture two days ago and then trying to sort through the chaos of boxes yesterday. She’ll give herself a break this morning. She won’t be up to speed for a while yet.

He entered a chalet-style House of Pancakes and asked the waitress for a table at the window.

“Coffee?” she asked.

“Yes. But I’m not sure what I want to eat. I might take a while to order.”

“Take all the time you need.”

Believe me, I intend to, Coltrane thought. Pretending to study the menu, he kept his attention on the post office across the street.

10

TWO HOURS LATER, after the slowest-eaten pancakes, eggs, and sausages of his life, after pretending to read a newspaper over yet another cup of coffee, he decided that he couldn’t hang around any longer without attracting attention. Outside, the air remained gray and cold. He pretended to study merchandise in shop windows within view of the post office. He feigned taking photographs of the area, training his zoom lens on the post office.

By 12:30, the parking lot at the House of Pancakes was almost full. One more vehicle wouldn’t be noticed. He moved his car from the side street, found an inconspicuous spot that gave him a good view of the post office, and settled in to wait. Periodically, he turned on the engine to get warm. A little after two, he went in for lunch. Snow started falling again. While he stalled over a hamburger, fries, and coleslaw, he prayed the weather wouldn’t become so bad that he couldn’t see the parking lot. Unable to put off going to the rest room, he did so as quickly as possible, afraid that Tash would pick up her mail while he was away. Returning to his table, he was tortured by the misgiving that he had failed to see her. At ten after four, standing to pay his bill, he needed all his self-control not to reveal his excitement when he saw Walt getting out of his Mountaineer over there.

“This ought to cover it,” he told his waitress. “Keep the change.”

“That’s very generous.”

“I guess I’m still in the Christmas spirit.”

Outside, seeing Walt go into the post office, Coltrane raced through flurries to get to his car before Walt came out and drove away. He slipped on a patch of ice, struggled to keep his balance, and barely avoided a pickup truck that drove from the restaurant. Breathing rapidly, the cold air burning his throat, he unlocked his car, hurried in, and started it. He was troubled by how much his hands were shaking. Then he concentrated on Walt coming out of the post office, his mustached square face sullen, his gloved hands empty, his trip apparently fruitless.

But not mine, Coltrane thought. He let Walt get a half-block lead, three vehicles between them, before he pulled out to follow. Does Walt know my car? He saw it the night I first met Tash, but in the dark, he didn’t get a good look at it, and anyway, it’s different now – it’s covered with snow.

Two of the cars took side streets. Then Big Bear’s outskirts merged into postcard scenery, Walt’s car, the car in the middle, and Coltrane’s car proceeding along a partially cleared road that paralleled, on the left, the ice-rimmed, pine tree-bordered lake. Making Coltrane nervous, the flurries thickened. Dark clouds hung lower, obscuring the peaks. Ahead, Walt switched on his lights. So did the driver in the middle. Wanting to be invisible, Coltrane resisted. Then, slowing, its signal light flashing, the middle car turned to the right onto a plowed driveway that led to a cabin, and Coltrane found himself fifty yards behind Walt’s Mountaineer.

He dropped back farther, hoping that the increasingly difficult driving conditions would make his sluggish pace seem appropriate. But Walt slowed also. Don’t tell me he figured out who’s behind him, Coltrane thought in alarm. Walt slowed more. Jesus. Then Walt’s right signal light flashed, and the Mountaineer headed up a road. At first there were cottages, then only snow-laden pine trees. After a quarter mile, Walt steered to the left up a lane. By the time Coltrane reached the turnoff, the Mountaineer had disappeared.

He eased to a stop and stared out his driver’s window toward the tracks leading up the lane, toward the curtain of snowflakes that prevented him from seeing past the trees. Is this where Walt was headed, or did he notice me and he’s trying to lead me where there’ll be only the two of us?

The falling snow made a hissing sound, beginning to fill the tracks. So what’s it going to be? Coltrane brooded. If I wait too long, there won’t be any tracks to follow. He shut off the car, put on his hat, gloves, and scarf, adjusted the neck strap on his camera so that the camera was under his ski jacket, then zipped up the jacket and got out of the car.

The cold had deepened. It didn’t matter. Finding Tash mattered. Getting answers mattered. He followed the tracks along the tree-flanked road. The snow came up to his ankles, an inch away from the top of his thick leather hiking boots. The increasingly heavy flakes brushed against his eyelids, making him blink repeatedly. Wary, he studied the drift-covered undergrowth on each side in case Walt might be hiding there. Then the road reached a Y; the tracks headed to the right, and Coltrane followed them nervously.

Except for the hiss of the snow and the muffled tread of his footsteps, the late afternoon was totally silent. Dusk thickened. He went another fifty paces before he lurched to a stop, a huge shadow towering over him, lights punctuating it. This isn’t a road, he realized with a start. I’m on a driveway. I’ve reached a house.

11

A CABIN, he corrected himself, although it certainly looked as sizable as a house: two stories, a roofed porch, a massive chimney. He barely took in these details before he ducked off the driveway into the cover of the pine trees and waited uneasily for any indication that he had been spotted. After a minute passed and the only sound was the intensifying hiss of the falling snow, he slowly rose and took a harder look at the cabin, or as much of it as he could see through the snowfall. The cabin’s base was built from huge rocks held together by concrete. Mortared logs formed the rest of the structure, except for the chimney, and two others that now became apparent, all made from the same huge stones along the cabin’s base. Solid, substantial.

Keeping to the trees, he eased along the edge of the clearing, all the while studying the cabin. The porch continued along the right side. A small balcony projected from the second story. The roof was sharply peaked. A small structure to the side had tire tracks leading into it.

I’m still too exposed, he thought. Even with the snow falling, if I can see the cabin, someone inside can see me.

So what? Now that you’ve found Tash, what difference does it make if you’re seen? Go up on the porch and pound on the front door. Demand to know what’s going on.

But I don’t know for certain Tash is in there. Just because I saw Walt go into the post office, that doesn’t mean he has the same PO box she does. She might be staying in town or at another cabin. If I barge in on Walt and he’s all by himself, what’s that going to look like?

A shadow moved beyond a window, prompting Coltrane to tense. He backed deeper into the forest and relaxed only when the falling snow prevented him from seeing the cabin. The time was a little before five. Dusk, intensified by the weather, became more pronounced. It would soon be dark. The thing to do is find a place to hole up and wait, he thought. It’s not like I haven’t been in snow in the mountains before.

Sure, in Bosnia.

The thought startled him. Where the hell did that come from? Pushing it away, he glanced around and saw a wooded slope behind him. From its top, he would have a vantage point on the cabin as soon as the weather lifted. A drift spilled over the tops of his hiking boots, but his wool socks kept most of it from chilling his ankles. Breathing rapidly from the unaccustomed altitude, he arrived on the bluff, assumed he was in line with the unseen cabin, and took shelter beneath the snow-laden boughs of a fir tree. Its limbs were bent over him in a tent shape.

Again, he had the feeling that he’d done this before.

In Bosnia.

I haven’t come far, he dismally thought.

12

AT SIX, the weather moved on. Stars glistened. Moonlight sparkled off drifts, as did lights from the cabin, now visible below him. His cold-pinched nostrils were pinched even more by the smell of smoke that drifted from the biggest chimney. It was the only imperfection in the Norman Rockwell homeyness of what he saw.

Muscles compacting, he noticed someone move beyond the lamp glow in a window down there. Even though he was confident that the illumination in the house would make the windows like mirrors and prevent anyone from seeing him in the night-cloaked forest, he reflexively crouched behind a fir-tree branch, peering cautiously over its snow-covered needles. At a distance of what he judged to be a hundred yards, he couldn’t make out who was at the window, so he hurriedly unzipped his ski jacket, pulled out his camera, and rezipped the jacket against the cold that attacked his chest. He fumbled with a gloved hand to remove the camera’s lens cap, pocketing it. He peered through the viewfinder and simultaneously held his breath so that frost from his mouth wouldn’t waft up and cloud his vision. Then he zoomed in on the window, adjusted the focus, and felt his chest turn cold again when he saw Walt facing the window, looking down at something, making a stirring motion.

Walt wore a red checked shirt. The magnification of the camera wasn’t strong enough to reveal the slight scar above his right eyebrow, but the sand color of his mustache was readily discernible. Walt turned to his right, Coltrane’s left, and spoke to someone. With the zoom lens at its maximum, Coltrane concentrated on Walt’s lips but couldn’t read them. Someone came into view at a sliding glass door farther to the left. Coltrane aimed the camera in that direction, and if he hadn’t already held his breath to avoid clouding the viewfinder, he would have done so now, for what he saw made his soul ache.

Wearing jeans and a gray rag-wool sweater that accentuated her lush hair hanging loosely, framing her heartbreakingly beautiful features, Tash had both hands gripped around a coffee mug. Coltrane so projected himself within her that his hands could feel the heat from the mug. She looked out at the snow-covered porch, then turned to speak to Walt, who moved toward her, his imposing body close to her. She was tall, but he was taller. He placed his large hands on her shoulders in a gesture of domination. She returned his stare.

He kissed her.

Coltrane flinched, almost charged from cover, almost raced toward the porch. But shock overwhelmed him. He heard a click and whir, and discovered that he had taken a photograph. What am I seeing? he thought. Walt’s hands remained on her shoulders. She made no effort to set down the coffee cup and embrace him. She didn’t move her head to avoid his kiss, but she didn’t accept it, either.

Walt studied her. He asked her a question. Whether Tash’s response was one of rejection or affection, Coltrane couldn’t tell.

I need to get closer. Not caring whether his tracks would be seen in the morning, Coltrane responded to his sense of urgency and headed down the slope. Failing to look down, he stumbled over a snow-covered log and barely managed not to fall. With a lurch that jarred him, he came to the bottom half-running and strained to avoid tree limbs he scraped past. Frantic, he took slower steps and at last came to a stop, alarmed by how forceful his breathing was, how fierce his heartbeat.

In the trees at the edge of the clearing, he was only a hundred feet from the cabin. He didn’t need his zoom lens to see Tash and Walt beyond the sliding glass door. Walt continued to grip her shoulders. Tash continued to stare up at him.

Then Walt kissed her again, and this time, Tash set the mug on a table, raised both hands, and kissed him back. She held him tightly, receiving, giving, and Coltrane heard another click and whir as he took a second photograph. Then he heard something else – an unwilled sound that came from his throat, as if he was being choked.

13

STUNNED, he sank into a drift. With his back against the rough bark of a pine tree, he hugged himself but couldn’t subdue the spasms shaking him. This can’t be happening, he thought. He shook his head insistently from side to side. From where he was slumped, he could still see the sliding glass door, see them kissing. Walt’s hands were under Tash’s sweater. Her mouth was pressed against his. She fumbled at his belt, and Coltrane screamed.

Before he knew it, he was on his feet, surging from the trees. He raced across the clearing and charged onto the hollow-sounding wooden porch, seeing the startled look on their faces when he yanked at the sliding glass door. His shoulder felt a shock of pain as the door held firm.

“I want to talk to you!”

Tash stumbled back.

Walt lunged toward something on the right.

“You told me I meant something to you!” Coltrane yelled.

His belt still dangling, Walt reappeared, jabbed at the lock, and shoved the door open.

Coltrane tried to veer past him. “Why did you lie to me?”

Walt struck him.

Coltrane lurched back. Ignoring his bleeding mouth, the same spot where Nolan had struck him in Mexico, he again tried to get to Tash. “Why did you make me think you loved me?”

Walt knocked him off the porch. But the moment Coltrane landed in a drift, he scurried to try to stand, only to lose all power of movement when he saw the revolver six inches from his face, aimed between his eyes.

“I could blow your head off.” Walt’s breathing was hoarse.

“Why did you lead me on?” Coltrane screamed at Tash.

“With your history. With the two men you’ve already killed,” Walt said.

“What?”

“Peeking through windows, taking pictures. Stalking a law-enforcement officer, trying to break into my home. There isn’t a grand jury anywhere that would blame me for defending myself.”

Tash backed away in fright.

“Especially if I put an unregistered pistol in your hand,” Walt said, “and squeezed a shot through that glass door, so you’d have powder residue on your glove and there’d be no doubt about your intentions. So go ahead. Try to get past me. Give me a reason to pull this trigger.”

“Why did you lie to me?”

“You just don’t pay attention,” Walt said.

The gunshot was deafening. The heat of the bullet sped past the left side of Coltrane’s head, singeing his hair. He didn’t hear the impact of the bullet behind him. Couldn’t. Could hardly hear Walt shout in his face, “Get out of here! Before I think twice and aim where I should have! If I ever see you around here again, if I ever see you anywhere-”

Walt fired again, this time to the right side of Coltrane’s head, and the agony of the assault on Coltrane’s ears made him clutch them and fall back, writhing in the snow. Walt pulled Coltrane’s hands away and grabbed his camera strap, yanking the camera over Coltrane’s head, hurling it against the side of the cabin, smashing it. He dragged Coltrane to his feet and shoved him across the clearing, thrusting him out of the driveway and onto the road, where Coltrane fell in a daze, gripping his ears again, unable to stop the torturous disabling roar in them.

14

“I NEED A ROOM.”

The motel clerk straightened. “My God, what happened to you?”

Coltrane could barely hear him. “I had a skiing accident.”

“Man, you look like you ran into a tree.”

“Another skier.”

“Does he look as messed up as you?”

“He never got a scratch.”

15

THE ROOM WAS SPARTAN BUT CLEAN – a small bed, a nineteen-inch television, a plastic ice bucket. Coltrane barely noticed. All he cared about was locking the door behind him, going over to the window, opening the draperies, and satisfying himself that traffic was vividly close. The motel was on Big Bear’s outskirts, close to the road that Walt would have to use to drive into town. With the glare of headlights, Coltrane knew that he had little chance of recognizing Walt’s Mountaineer if it went past tonight, but tomorrow would be another matter.

He picked up the phone and called Big Bear information, his ears still ringing so badly that he had trouble hearing the operator. “Do you have a listing for Natasha Adler?… How about Walt Halliday?”

He used a pencil and notepad on the bedside table to write down the number.

The phone on the other end rang five times. Maybe they’re out, he thought.

“Hello?” Tash’s throaty voice made Coltrane feel pressure in his chest.

“Just help me understand! Tell me why-”

Click.

Coltrane frantically pressed the numbers again.

The phone was picked up halfway through the first ring.

“You’re going to be very sorry about this,” Walt said.

The connection was broken.

Coltrane pressed the numbers again, but this time, all he heard was the pulsing beep of a busy signal. He called every ten minutes and continued to hear it.

16

THE DAY WAS CLEAR AND BRIGHT. In his chair, Coltrane stared out the window, traffic close enough for him to read license plates. Wrappers from sandwiches that he had picked up the night before littered the floor around him. Using the television as radio, he heard the CNN anchors tell him about a famine in Africa, an explosion at a school in Northern Ireland, a mass murder in Germany, an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, and mysterious deformities in frogs all over the world. Yeah, things are tough, he thought, never taking his gaze from the window.

The Mountaineer passed Coltrane’s window just after four in the afternoon, Walt’s big-boned no-nonsense face behind the steering wheel, Tash next to him. Coltrane sprang to his feet and grabbed his ski jacket. His car was directly outside the door of his motel room. Thirty seconds later, staying far enough back to hide in traffic, he again had the Mountaineer in sight.

It parked at the post office, but both Tash and Walt went into the building, so Coltrane lost that chance to speak to Tash alone. They came out and drove to a hardware store, both entering. Another lost chance. They drove to the parking lot of a duplex movie theater, bought tickets, and went in. After giving them time to get settled, he bought a ticket for Meg Ryan’s newest film, but when he sat in the back, he didn’t see any profiles that resembled Tash’s and Walt’s, so he went out, pretended to use the bathroom, ducked into Tom Cruise’s latest, and saw them almost at once.

They were on the aisle, about halfway down on his right. At this hour on a weekday, there were plenty of seats available. Choosing one in the middle at the back, Coltrane watched them watch the movie. They ate popcorn and sipped from straws in paper cups. They leaned toward each other and whispered. Totally focused on their silhouettes, Coltrane had no idea what was happening on the screen.

But despite his concentration on Tash, she almost caught him by surprise when she stood and came up the aisle. He slid down just in time to avoid being noticed. A light haloed her as she opened the door and went out to the lobby. Immediately, Coltrane exited through the door on the other aisle, but not in time to intercept her as she walked down a corridor next to the door she had used and entered a door at the end marked WOMEN.

Coltrane stalled by buying popcorn. He stalled longer by going into the corridor and lingering over a water fountain next to the men’s room. He pretended to show interest in posters for coming attractions. He turned as the door to the women’s room opened and Tash came out.

She froze.

“Just give me an explanation,” Coltrane said.

She stepped back, trying to escape into the women’s room, but Coltrane grabbed her arm. “What changed? Why did you-”

“Let go of me.”

“How can everything suddenly be so different?”

“You’re hurting my arm.”

“Just tell me why-”

“You heard the lady,” a gravelly voice said. “You’re hurting her arm. Let go of it.”

Coltrane swung toward the right, where a broad, burly man in a San Bernardino County sheriff’s uniform stood in the open door to the men’s room. The man’s face had the grain of weathered barn board. His hand was on his nightstick.

“I…”

“One more time – take your hand off her arm.”

Coltrane did. Movement in the lobby attracted his attention, a door opening, Walt coming out. Walt stopped and crossed his arms, not at all surprised by the scene that faced him.

“This was a setup?” Coltrane pivoted toward Tash, raising his voice. “Christ, all you had to do was explain to me and-”

“Mr. Coltrane,” the sheriff said. The use of the name eliminated any doubt that the sheriff was here by coincidence. “California’s antistalking law-”

“Antistalking law? What are you talking about? I’ve got a right to speak to this woman. I’ve got a right to know why-”

“-stipulates that for a crime to be committed a victim must be willfully, maliciously, and repeatedly harassed. After your intrusion on Ms. Adler last night, your numerous unwelcome phone calls, and the behavior I just witnessed, I’d say that you’re perilously close to inviting me to arrest you.”

The theater’s ticket taker and its popcorn seller peered nervously around a corner.

“But Ms. Adler is reluctant to take the matter to that level. She tells me she wants to avoid trouble. She won’t make a formal complaint. I think she’s wrong. I think she’s already got trouble. I think you’re the trouble she had when she was living in Malibu. I think the only way to get rid of that trouble is for me to put you under arrest. If the state of California leans on you, believe me, you’ll wish to God you’d never leaned on this woman.”

“But…” Coltrane felt light-headed with confusion. “I’m not a stalker.”

Aren’t you? a part of him thought. How else would you describe what you’ve been doing? You’ve become your father.

He felt sick.

“So this is the deal I’m going to offer you,” the sheriff said. “Get out of Big Bear and never come back. If I see you here again, I’ll arrest you for the assault I just witnessed. At a minimum. Because next time, I’m willing to bet, Ms. Adler won’t be so generous about not pressing charges. Leave town. Now.”

Coltrane looked at Tash. “Okay, damn it, if you don’t want me to have anything to do with you, I’m out of here. Forget about why you made me think there was something special between us. Forget about how you lied.”

“Mr. Coltrane.”

“Just tell me one thing. What happened to the photographs? How did the negatives disappear from my house?”

“What photographs? Negatives?” Tash shook her head. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Of Duncan Reynolds.”

“Who?”

“Jesus,” Coltrane said, “you are some piece of work. I don’t know what game you’re playing, but I’m not going to be a part of it anymore.”

“Mr. Coltrane.” The sheriff’s tone was filled with warning.

“Don’t worry, I’m leaving. I finally got my mind straight. Go to hell, Tash. You’re not worth it.”

“Wrong,” Walt said as Coltrane passed him. “She’s the best thing that ever happened to me.”

17

THE NEGATIVES OF DUNCAN REYNOLDS. How had they disappeared from the vault? The question kept nagging at Coltrane all the while he drove angrily down from the mountains. Darkness obscured the peaks, but he wouldn’t have paid attention to them even if he had been able to see them. There was too much on his mind. When he had discovered that the negatives were missing, he hadn’t thought clearly about the implications. He had taken for granted that someone had broken into his house and stolen them, and that their disappearance was related to Tash’s disappearance. If he could find out what happened to Tash, he would find out what happened to the negatives, he had reasoned. Both were tied together, because Tash was the only person besides himself who knew that he had taken photographs of Duncan Reynolds spying on her. The logical conclusion, then, was that Tash had been responsible for their theft, but that explanation hadn’t made sense. Why would Tash want to steal evidence that would help imprison the man who was stalking her?

Stalking. The memory of what he had been accused of sent a shock wave through his mind. The sheriff had even gone so far as to imply that Coltrane was the person who had stalked Tash in Malibu. Dear God, what have I gotten myself involved in? He felt he was being sucked into a spinning vortex, totally without balance and direction.

The dismaying sensation was reinforced by a sharp curve in the mountain road that his headlights didn’t reveal in time for him to reduce his speed. He almost veered out of control and narrowly avoided careening into the trees at the side of the road. His palms sweating, he fought with the steering wheel, steadied the car past the curve, and sped onward through the night.

Tash. Because it had seemed improbable for her to steal evidence that would help her, Coltrane had automatically rejected the idea. With no other explanation, however, the mystery had been thought-jamming, another on Coltrane’s list of many baffling questions that he needed to ask her. But not anymore. Now that Tash had denied any knowledge of the negatives and Duncan Reynolds, Coltrane’s thoughts were no longer blocked. Without his bias in favor of Tash, he saw the problem in the direct way that it should have struck him at the start. His house had not been broken into; there had not been any sign of forced entry. So how could Tash have gotten past the locks and the intrusion detector? She couldn’t have. But someone else could have – the one person who stood to benefit by the theft of the negatives: Duncan Reynolds.

Coltrane hadn’t had time to change the locks – Duncan still had a key. Although Coltrane had changed the numerical code on the intrusion detector, most number pads could be programmed with several codes, and Duncan must have known about an existing one that Coltrane did not know. Motive and means. It was the only way to explain so clean a theft. The reason Coltrane hadn’t suspected Duncan was that Duncan hadn’t been aware of the incriminating photographs Coltrane had taken of him. Duncan wouldn’t have had a reason to invade Coltrane’s house and steal negatives that he didn’t even know existed.

Unless Tash had warned him.

Why?

Coltrane shot around another curve and saw the glow of Riverside below him. But instead of taking Highway 10 northwest toward the Hollywood Hills and home, he headed west, toward Newport Beach.

18

THE RED-AND-BLUE FLASHING EMERGENCY LIGHTS STARTLED HIM as he rounded the corner. Outside the estate that Duncan had inherited from Packard, police cars blocked part of the exclusive street. An ambulance was in the open-gated driveway. An unmarked car with a flashing dome light pulled in behind it. Radios squawked. Policemen came and went along the driveway. Feeling as cold as when he had hiked through the snow to reach Walt’s cabin at Big Bear, Coltrane parked far enough back that his car wouldn’t be in the way, then got out in a daze, slowly approaching the commotion. Neighbors had left their houses and formed troubled groups on the sidewalk.

“What happened?” Coltrane asked numbly, reaching the nearest group.

The well-dressed neighbors eyed his battered lips with suspicion.

“Do you live around here?” a policeman asked.

“No.” The flashing lights were oppressive as Coltrane watched an attendant open the back doors of the ambulance in Duncan’s driveway.

“Then please get back in your car, sir, and-”

“I came to visit the man who lives in that house.” Coltrane’s voice sounded faint to him, far away.

“Duncan Reynolds?”

“Yes.” Coltrane felt colder. “I haven’t talked to him in awhile. I was in the area. I thought I’d see if he was home.”

“When was the last time you spoke with him?”

“A couple of weeks. What happened here?”

“Was he depressed about anything? Money problems? Problems in a relationship? Problems with-”

“No money problems. His employer died in November. The will was generous.”

“Did the death hit him hard?”

“What are you getting at?”

The policeman hesitated. “A gardener noticed a smell. He hadn’t seen your friend in several days. All the doors were locked. He peered through a back window and saw a trouser leg projecting from behind a chair.”

“Dear Lord.” Coltrane’s mouth was so dry that he had trouble forming the words.

“When we forced the door open – I’m sorry to have to tell you this – we found your friend’s body.”

“What caused-”

“I’m not the medical examiner, but the way it looks now, he shot himself.”

19

COLTRANE’S THOUGHTS WERE SO DISJOINTED THAT DRIVING down the hill toward his house, he was slow to notice the car parked in front: a BMW. A minute earlier, he would have sworn that his emotions couldn’t possibly have gotten more complicated. He would have been wrong. After pressing the garage-door opener, he steered into the driveway, stopped in the garage, and got out. On the street, the BMW’s door opened and closed. High heels clicked on concrete, coming toward him.

Jennifer, wearing a blue business suit, her short blond hair glinting from the light above the garage, stopped in front of him.

He felt awkward, embarrassed – didn’t know what to say.

She broke the silence. “I promised I wasn’t going to bother you again.”

“Actually, I’m glad to see you.”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard him. “I’ve got a speech prepared. I don’t want to forget any of it.”

“Then you’d better not stop.”

“I vowed I wouldn’t phone you. Not show up at your home. Not happen to cross paths with you the way I did the last time we broke up. But here I am. The fact is, I’ve been leaving messages on your machine for the last two days. When you didn’t get back to me, I figured you were determined to avoid me.”

“I didn’t know about the messages. I’ve been away.”

“So I had to break my word and show up here and wait for you.”

“You might have had a long wait,” Coltrane said.

“It already has been. As soon as I got off work, I drove over here. Three hours ago.”

“Somehow, I get the feeling it’s not because of my irresistible charm.”

Jennifer nodded. “You pretty much wiped out your charm the last time we talked.”

“Then…”

“Just because I’m furious at you, that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t feel terrible if something happened to you. Her real name isn’t Natasha Adler.”

“What?”

“And men have a habit of dying around her.”

20

THEY SAT IN THE TUBULAR CHAIRS IN COLTRANE’S LIVING ROOM, two cans of diet Pepsi open, glasses filled, neither of them drinking.

“After you told me to get lost,” Jennifer said.

“I hope I wasn’t that blunt.”

“Everything’s a matter of perspective. From my perspective…” She took a long breath. “Anyway, let’s just say I felt hurt. I felt used. I…”

Coltrane looked down at his hands.

“I’m not trying to throw this back at you,” Jennifer said. “The only reason I’m going into this is to make you understand why I did what came next.”

“After what I’ve been through the past couple of days, believe me, I understand what you felt. Throw it back at me. I deserve it.”

“I felt angry. And confused. And deeply deeply troubled. Not just about our breakup, but about Tash Adler. Maybe you thought it was normal to fall in love with her on the spot. But given your usual reluctance to make an emotional commitment, I thought your sudden commitment to her was disturbing as hell.”

Coltrane felt stung.

“Those photographs of Rebecca Chance,” Jennifer said. “Tash Adler’s uncanny resemblance to her. The whole business didn’t only baffle me; it struck me as being unnatural. So I decided to try to make sense of it. Not because I thought I might find some dirt that would help get us back together. I had no hope of that. I still don’t. It’s not why I’m here. For all I know, you’re going to tell me I’m making all this up so I can cause trouble between you and Tash. But I have to try. Because if something happened to you, I’d never forgive myself for not having warned you.”

“Don’t worry. You can’t cause any more trouble between Tash and me than there already is,” Coltrane said. Coming into the house, Jennifer had asked about the gashes on his mouth. He had told her what happened in Mexico and Big Bear.

“If I’m right, there could be a lot more trouble,” Jennifer said. “I think you’re in real danger.”

“Keep talking.”

“I wanted to find out just who this woman is that she could set your mind spinning the way she did.”

“And? You said her real name isn’t-”

“She was born Melinda Chance.”

“How do you know?”

“I hired the same private detective you did when you wanted to find out where Natasha Adler lived. He didn’t have much to go on, just what you’d told me about the stores she owns and her connection with Rebecca Chance. But that was enough. The stores aren’t owned in her name. They’re controlled by a corporation she runs, called Opportunity Inc. The private detective followed the trail of that corporation and worked backward, but I’m going to explain from the beginning and work forward.” Jennifer opened a briefcase that she had brought with her. “Here’s a copy of a birth certificate. Melinda Chance. Born April twenty-ninth, 1972, Fresno, California. Father unknown. Mother – Stephanie Chance.”

“All that proves is that some woman had the same last name.”

“Here’s a copy of a page from a Fresno high school yearbook.”

His stomach fluttering, Coltrane peered down at the copy she set before him. It was a good-quality photographic reproduction. He scanned the rows of students’ faces and fixed almost at once on the features of a young woman gazing back at him. Her dark hair was a little shorter, and her features were more girlish than womanly, but she had the same smoldering coals in her eyes. Tash. Except that the name under the photograph was Melinda Chance.

“When was this yearbook issued?”

“When she was seventeen. Just before she left Fresno.”

“What’s this caption under her name? ‘Destined to launch a thousand ships’?”

“A compliment about her looks. At first, it puzzled me, too, but it reminded me of a quotation from something, so I asked a reference librarian to track it down for me. ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships…?’ It’s from a Renaissance play by Christopher Marlowe. The face that’s referred to is Helen of Troy’s. I thought the allusion was a little fancy for a high school yearbook, but then I noticed that below the caption it says ‘Favorite activity: the Drama Club.’ Here’s a photocopy of another page from the yearbook. These are the members of the Drama Club. Melinda Chance is easily the eye-catcher. As the caption indicates, among other things, the club practiced by reading scenes from classic plays. Must have been a tough teacher. Portions from Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. That’s the play with the ‘thousand ships’ quote. You can see the title on the cover of the book she’s holding in this photograph. It’s about a man who sells his soul to the Devil.”

Coltrane felt a chill. “What are you getting at?”

“She never finished high school in Fresno. She and her mother left town. The reason they left is that Melinda Chance also enjoyed being on the football team’s cheerleading squad. She gave two of the players quite a bit of extra encouragement. The quarterback killed a fullback because of her.”

Coltrane’s chill worsened.

“Stabbed him in a parking lot after the spring prom.”

“My God.”

“The killer was eighteen, old enough to be tried as an adult,” Jennifer said. “His family didn’t have any social position. But the boy who got stabbed was sixteen, and his father was a bank president. The jury found the older boy guilty. The sentence was ten years.”

“And Melinda Chance moved on.”

“To Sacramento. She finished high school there and went to college. But by then, her name was Vivian Breuer. B-r-e-u-e-r. It’s a distinctive spelling. I’ll get to why that’s important. In college, she majored in drama, but the drama she was involved in didn’t happen only on a stage. A young man she was dating fell from the ten-story-high balcony of her apartment. The police questioned another boyfriend of hers who was in her apartment at the time of the fall. That second young man was eventually arrested for harassing her. Meanwhile, the chairman of the Drama Department, a forty-six-year-old man with a wife and two children, shot himself to death after the final performance of the Drama Club’s spring production. The play was Tennessee Williams’s Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. You’ll never guess who played Maggie, the character Elizabeth Taylor played in the movie, and you’ll also never guess who was suspected of having had an affair with the professor.”

“You can prove all this?”

“Here are photocopies of articles from the Sacramento newspaper. I’ve underlined Vivian Breuer’s name. By now, she was smart enough not to allow herself to be photographed for the yearbook, but the private detective I hired tracked down cast members from that production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and they identified Vivian Breuer from Melinda Chance’s photos in the Fresno high school yearbook. They’re also the ones who suspected she was having an affair with the professor who killed himself. These are the private detective’s notes of the conversations he had with the cast members, and these are the tape recordings of the same conversations.”

Coltrane looked with horror at the accumulating materials.

“She transferred to Humboldt State University in Arcata, California, still majoring in drama, but now she changed her name to Linda Erikson. That last name’s important, too. I’ll explain why in a little while. In Arcata, the lead actor in William Inge’s Picnic beat his male costar to death in an argument after the production’s dress rehearsal. Do you remember the movie of that play?”

“William Holden was the star.”

“Right, and Cliff Robertson was the male costar, and the plot had to do with how Holden, playing a drifter, showed up in a small town in Kansas and stole Robertson’s girlfriend. Kim Novak played the girl.”

“And Tash had the Kim Novak role? You’re suggesting that what happened in the play also happened in life?”

“Except that in the play, one of the male costars doesn’t beat the other one to death. Here are copies of the Arcata newspaper articles about the murder. Note that Linda Erikson managed to avoid getting her photograph taken. The student actor admitted that he killed the other actor because he was jealous about Linda. For her part, Linda professed to be as shocked as everyone else. She said that she was too disturbed about what had happened to continue her studies, and she moved on as soon as she finished testifying at the trial. The student actor got eight years. Here are transcripts and tape recordings of conversations that my private investigator had with members of the Picnic cast whom he tracked down. He showed them Melinda Chance’s high school yearbook photographs. They identified her as Linda Erikson.”

Coltrane’s feet and hands turned numb.

“Meanwhile, the young man who was arrested for harassing her in Sacramento set out to find her as soon as he got out of jail. His search took him to – guess where – Arcata, where his body washed up on the beach one morning. The medical examiner’s report suggested that he had drank too much, gone swimming at night, passed out, and drowned. Here’s a copy of it. You ready for more?”

“No, but I think I’d better hear it.”

“The next place she showed up was San Francisco, but she wasn’t interested in college any longer. She suddenly had the money to start half a dozen clothing boutiques, and now her name was Evelyn Young.”

“I assume that last name’s important, too,” Coltrane said.

“Yes, but this time she’s making a joke.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You will.”

“The money for the stores. Where did she-”

“From the Acapulco Venture Group.”

The name had uncomfortable overtones and filled Coltrane with misgiving.

“A subsidiary of Orange Coast Investments,” Jennifer said, “which is a division of Seaview Enterprises” – she paused – “which was owned by Randolph Packard.”

Coltrane looked down at the table and saw double for a moment. “So she lied to me when she said she didn’t know about Packard.”

“One of the things my private investigator couldn’t find out is why Packard would have given her money.”

“Because Packard thought he was her grandfather.” Coltrane explained what he had learned in Mexico.

“Maybe Packard was her grandfather,” Jennifer said.

Coltrane shook his head and regretted it, aggravating a splitting pain. “No. Rebecca Chance told her servant that Winston Case was.”

“Assuming Rebecca Chance told the truth.”

Coltrane’s blurred vision cleared as a terrible thought occurred to him. “She made each man think he was the father? She was trying to set Randolph Packard and Winston Case against each other? She wanted them to fight over her?”

“Like grandmother, like granddaughter.”

“And a lifetime later, Packard finally found his daughter and a granddaughter he didn’t know about, and he gave them money.”

“Or maybe earlier. The fact that in Fresno her mother and she used the last name Chance suggests that maybe they wanted to be found. Maybe they were found in Fresno. From what the private detective was able to learn, they had a lot of money.”

“What happened when she showed up in San Francisco?”

Jennifer shrugged fatalistically. “She changed her technique and joined a sailing club. Two prominent male members competed for her. All three went out on a boat for a weekend up the coast. Only she and one of the men came back. The inquest didn’t dispute their story – that the other man went on deck during the night, lost his balance, and fell overboard. The body was never recovered.”

“Something she did on the boat made the two men fight over her.”

“Of course. Two months later, the man who’d survived was arrested for harassing her.”

“Just like the student in Sacramento,” Coltrane said.

“And just like that student, he drowned shortly after he was released from jail. In this case, he took a boat out by himself, and it capsized.”

“Or maybe she arranged for him to have an accident so there’d be one less person who knew how she got her kicks,” Coltrane said. “The survivors of love affairs with her don’t have much luck.”

“You’re a survivor. Think about that while I tell you about San Diego,” Jennifer said. “She changed her name to Donna Miller.”

“Is that a significant last name, too?”

“You bet. You’ll understand why in a minute. She opened more clothing boutiques, ran them for a while, then turned them over to a manager and left on a yearlong around-the-world vacation. That was six months ago.”

“Six months?” The number nudged at something in Coltrane’s memory. “A neighbor of hers told me that’s when Tash showed up in Malibu.”

“As much as the investigator could determine, nothing happened in San Diego. He thinks she’s planning to keep it uncontaminated. A home base. But Malibu was another matter. Melinda Chance or Tash Adler or whatever you want to call her was up to her old tricks – with a new variation that added more excitement. She pretended to be stalked so she could have policemen around her, big men with big guns, whom she would manipulate to fight over her.”

“Pretended to?” Coltrane said. “No, you don’t understand. Duncan Reynolds was in fact stalking her. He-” Instantly, another piece of the puzzle slid horrifyingly into place. “Jesus, he wasn’t stalking her. He was her accomplice. He was doing what Tash asked him to do so the police would believe she was being threatened and she could manipulate her bodyguards until they turned on one another. That explains how Duncan knew about the photographs I took of him. Tash is the only one who could have told him. She must have ordered him to take the evidence and cover her tracks. And then-”

“What’s the matter?”

“What else was stolen?” Coltrane sprang to his feet.

21

AS COLTRANE SCRAMBLED DOWN THE STAIRS, he heard Jennifer running after him. Frantic, he reached the vault, unlocked it, and charged inside. He flicked at the light switch without stopping, raced past the shelves, reached the false wall in the far left corner, and shivered from more than the vault’s chill when he stooped to free the catches and pull out the wall.

Behind him, Jennifer’s heels sounded urgently on the concrete floor, but his attention was totally directed toward the hidden chamber, the vault’s glaring overhead lights making him squint toward the shadows in there.

“She’s gone.” His voice broke.

Rebecca Chance’s face no longer peered out at him. The life-sized photograph of her haunting features no longer hung on the back wall of the chamber. He took a half step back, as if he’d been pushed, then moaned and lurched into the chamber, knowing what he wouldn’t find but needing to search anyhow. The effort was worthless. The chamber was empty. Every box of photographs had been removed.

Coltrane spun toward Jennifer. “Duncan didn’t know about this chamber. Tash must have told him. Jesus.” Feeling off balance, he groped for a shelf. “When I confronted her in Big Bear, she denied knowing anything about the negatives or Duncan. It didn’t make sense. Why would she lie? So I drove to Duncan’s house in Newport Beach to confront him. Too late. Several days ago, he shot himself.”

“Duncan?” Jennifer turned pale. “Why would he…”

“Maybe Tash helped him along, the way we assume she helped two of her old boyfriends along. One less piece of evidence, one less person who knew the truth.”

The implications reduced them to stunned silence.

“What about the last names she used? Tell me why they’re significant,” Coltrane said.

“Breuer. Erikson. Young. Miller. Adler. In college, before I got into graphic arts, I thought about a career in psychology. I took a lot of classes in it. The names Erikson and Adler had a lot of associations when I saw them together. That made me think about the other names. They all fit. Every one of them is a famous psychotherapist. Breuer and Adler were colleagues of Freud. Adler was one of his disciples.”

“I never heard of a famous psychotherapist called Young.”

“Spell it differently. J-u-n-g. She’s making a joke. Or she chose the names without realizing the connection among them, a subconscious slip. My private investigator found out that, under each of these names, she went to a therapist in each of the cities she lived in.”

“And what about Miller?”

“Alice Miller. The subtitle of one of her books is Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness.”

Coltrane’s voice was an uneasy whisper. “Childhood trauma?”

“There’s one other thing I have to tell you.”

“You mean it gets worse?”

“She told you her mother was dead. Well, she’s batting a thousand, because that isn’t true, either.”

22

IN POINT-AND-SHOOT CAMERAS, the viewfinder and the lens have different openings. As a consequence, the image seen through the viewfinder is not quite the same as that received through the lens and recorded on film, making precise framing difficult. The difference between what the viewfinder sees and what the lens sees is known as the parallax effect, and that is what Coltrane suffered now. What he had thought was happening was so at odds with what had truly been happening that the parallax threatened to drive him insane.

At ten the next morning, after he and Jennifer had caught a 7:00 A.M. flight to Oakland, he walked apprehensively along a corridor in the Redwood Rest Facility. In room after room, aged men and women lay in beds. A recreation room revealed a dozen residents in wheelchairs watching a game show on television. In the hallway, a few residents managed to get around with the aid of walkers. Coltrane nodded respectively to them, then stopped where a white-uniformed male attendant waited outside a room.

The attendant was in his twenties, with wire-rim glasses and his hair tied back in a ponytail. “You’d better prepare yourselves. The odds are, she won’t know you.”

“I don’t expect her to,” Coltrane said. “It’s been years since we met,” he lied. “The last time I saw her was when we lived on the same street in Sacramento. But I have these photographs I took of her daughter.” Coltrane held up a packet. “And when her daughter found out I was coming to Oakland for a photo assignment, she asked me to visit her mother and give these to her.” The camera hanging from Coltrane’s neck gave credence to his story.

“Sometimes her language can be a little frank.”

“No problem. I admire elderly women who speak their mind,” Jennifer said.

“Well, maybe frank isn’t the right word,” the attendant said.

Coltrane tilted his head in puzzlement.

“Shocking would be more accurate,” the attendant said. “But who knows, you might get lucky and catch her in one of her occasional ladylike moods. The doctor said the photographs you’re bringing might improve her mental outlook. Nothing else has, so let’s hope.” The attendant reached for the doorknob. “Just give me a minute to go in and see that she’s presentable.”

“Take all the time you need,” Coltrane said. While the attendant went in, his apprehension swelled.

“So far so good. The story about the photographs worked,” Jennifer said.

“I wish it hadn’t. I don’t want to go in there.”

The photographs of Tash that Coltrane had brought were from the film he had exposed in Acapulco. He had developed the prints the night before, careful to shield Jennifer from the nudes but inadvertently processing an image that he hadn’t even known he had taken. When Carl Nolan had tried to strangle him with the camera strap, Coltrane had fumbled to attempt to pry the hands away and had accidentally pressed the camera’s shutter button. The resultant image, tilted on a forty-five-degree angle, showed the blur of what might have been the side of a hand on the right and the blur of what was possibly a shoulder on the left. Between them, Tash’s face was distinct. Coltrane had never seen an expression of such animalistic delight. He had almost been embarrassed to look at it, so open was the sexual pleasure that she took from watching Carl and him fight because of her.

The door hissed open, the attendant stepping out. “I can’t tell her mood, but she’s ready to see you.”

Am I ready, though? Coltrane asked himself.

After an uncertain glance toward Jennifer, he felt encouraged by the touch of her hand on his arm. He entered the room.

The rest home’s administrator had given Coltrane a sense of what to expect. Even so, he was caught by surprise, faltering as Jennifer closed the door.

“There’s been a mistake. We’re in the wrong room.”

“No mistake,” Jennifer said.

“But…” Coltrane stared at the apparently sleeping woman on the bed. “Tash’s mother was born in 1934. Depending on when her birthday is, she’d be sixty-three or sixty-four now. But this woman is-”

“What are you whispering about?” the woman on the bed complained. She sounded as if she had broken glass caught in her throat.

“Sorry,” Coltrane said. “We thought you were asleep. We were trying to decide whether to wake you.”

“You mean you were trying to decide if I was asleep so you could feel me up.”

“Uh…” Coltrane lost the power of speech. The woman in the bed, who should have looked in her early sixties, seemed in her nineties: stringy, thinning white hair, rheumy red eyes, shriveled skin, a prematurely shrinking and collapsing body. A scar disfigured each of her cheeks. But the most disturbing aspect about her was that, in spite of all the ravages her body had endured – “From alcohol and drugs,” the administrator had explained – she was recognizably Rebecca Chance’s daughter and Tash’s mother, as if this was how Rebecca Chance would have looked had she lived and led a hard life, or as if this was how Tash was destined to end.

“Go ahead. Feel me up. The attendants do it all the time.” The prematurely old woman pawed at her spiderweb hair, as if combing it.

Coltrane looked at Jennifer, shocked and sickened.

“Stephanie?” Jennifer approached the bed.

“Who the hell are you?”

“My name’s Jennifer. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“No women allowed.”

“We brought you some photographs of your daughter.”

“No women allowed.”

“If I leave, do you promise to talk to my friend?”

“Did he come here to…”

The suggestion she made turned Coltrane’s stomach sour.

“I’m afraid the attendants wouldn’t like him to do that,” Jennifer said. “They might get angry.”

“Good.”

“They might start a fight.”

“Yes.”

“You enjoy that?”

“Make them fight. They deserve to be punished.”

“Why?”

“For wanting me.”

“Does your daughter like men to fight?”

“The little…” The next word was shocking.

“Why do you call her that?”

“Thought she was better than me. Took my men away from me.”

“When she was in college?”

“Hah.”

“In high school?”

“Hah. When I was asleep, she got a razor, snuck up, and did this to my cheeks. Couldn’t stand her momma to get all the attention. Thought she could destroy the competition. Didn’t work. I’m still as beautiful as ever.” She gave Coltrane the most demanding look he had ever received. “Aren’t I?”

“Yes.”

“Then…”

What she said next made Coltrane look away.

“What good are you? Get yourself a new boyfriend, missy. This one can’t cut it. Pictures? Did you say you brought pictures of my daughter?”

“Yes,” Coltrane managed to say.

“Burn them. Send her to hell. And get out of here. Quit wasting my time. I’ve got men lined up waiting to-”

“You’re right,” Coltrane said. “We’re wasting your time. I’m sorry we bothered you.”

23

ON THE PILLARED STEPS OF THE REST HOME, Coltrane sank and put his head between his knees. It took him several deep breaths before his swirling sensation passed and his stomach became still. From the bay, a salt-laden breeze drifted over him, cooling the sweat on his brow.

Finally he was able to peer up at Jennifer. “You’re the one who took all the psychology courses.”

“It’s called being a sexual predator,” Jennifer said. “In women, it’s very rare.”

“But how did…”

“Heredity or environment. Take your pick.”

“Or both. In other words, who knows,” Coltrane said.

“My abnormal-psych prof said that emotional illness can be inherited.” Jennifer eased down next to him, crossing her arms over the knees of her gray slacks. “We don’t know anything about Rebecca’s mother, but she and her daughter and her granddaughter are all beautiful women so obsessed with their beauty, so self-conscious and uncomfortable about it, that they feel self-worth only when men fight over them.”

“Or they were all abused as children and they’re so ambivalent about men, so bitter, that they want to punish men for finding them attractive,” Coltrane said.

“Which takes us from heredity to environment. We don’t know how that pathetic woman in there was raised. It could be Winston Case was a monster. But from what she said about the way Tash or Melinda or whatever you want to call her was raised, it’s clear that even as a child, Tash felt jealous about all the men her mother had around her. She needed attention, but since she couldn’t get it from her mother, she got it from her mother’s boyfriends. The trouble is, she may have gotten more attention than she bargained for. If Tash was molested, I’m not surprised that she feels so angry at men now that she’s grown up. On the one hand, she feels compelled to tempt them. On the other hand, she needs to punish them for wanting her. Having sex with her is unforgivable.”

Coltrane felt his cheeks turn warm.

“I have a terrible feeling you’re next on her list of get-evens,” Jennifer said. “But even if you hadn’t had sex with her, you know she was lying about the negatives and Duncan Reynolds. You see through her act, and that puts you in a position to make trouble for her. If she’s true to form, she’ll protect herself by finding a way to get rid of you.”

“Just as she got rid of Duncan and her former boyfriends. That’s what she’s doing with Walt. She’s setting him up to use him against me.”

“We have to warn him.”

24

“MR. COLTRANE, this is Eliot Blaine,” a concerned voice said from the speaker on Coltrane’s car phone. As soon as he and Jennifer had gotten back to the Los Angeles airport, he had called his home to find out if he had any messages on his answering machine. A series of hang-up calls had troubled him, reminding him of Ilkovic, making him wonder if it was Walt. Then Blaine said, “I’m the attorney for Randolph Packard’s estate. I don’t know if you’ve heard this from another source. If not, forgive me for being the messenger of bad news. I know you spent time with Randolph’s assistant, Duncan Reynolds. He confided to me that he was fond of his chats with you. I’m… There’s no easy way to say this. You’ll be as dismayed as I was to learn that Duncan’s body was found at his home last evening. Apparently, he’d been dead for several days. The police seem to think he committed… It’s more appropriate if we discuss this in person. Please call me at my office. About a week ago, Duncan came to me with a strange request. I respected his privacy and didn’t question him about it, but it now seems obvious that he was taking care of personal matters before… I have a package he wanted me to give you in the event of his death.”

25

“AN AUDIOCASSETTE?” Coltrane looked puzzled at the object he removed from the envelope.

Seated in a soft-looking brown leather chair behind a large glass desk, Blaine slid a signed letter in Coltrane’s direction, his manicured fingernails glistening. “At the time, I thought it was a strange request, but in my profession, strange requests aren’t unusual. Duncan’s instructions to me were that you should listen to the tape in my presence. When you telephoned to say you were coming, I instructed my secretary to rearrange my schedule so that we could do so now.”

“Thank you.”

“I always made time for Duncan. He was more than a business associate.”

“Yes, I thought of him as a friend, too.”

Blaine was in his fifties, of medium height and weight, with cautious eyes. His hair was perfectly trimmed, his suit expensively tailored, his shoes so shiny that they looked as if they had just come out of their box.

He stood and put the cassette into a player on a stack of stereo components next to law books. As a soft hiss came from speakers at each end of the shelf, he returned to his chair, interlocked his fingers on his desk, and hardened his patrician jaw in concentration.

The hiss on the tape continued. Something made a hollow thumping noise, as if a microphone was being moved. The clinking of what sounded like ice cubes in a glass was followed by the gulp of a large mouthful of liquid being swallowed.

“This message is for Mitch Coltrane,” Duncan’s slurred voice said. “If you’re listening to this tape, you know I’m dead.” Another strained breath. “What an odd thing to hear myself say.”

More clinking of ice cubes. More liquid being swallowed. Duncan didn’t speak again for what seemed like fifteen seconds.

His breathing was forced. “I thought about running, but that would only make her decide I’m a greater liability than I suspect she already thinks I am. Besides, I can’t stand to be away from her. What she lets me do to her… A man of my years, with my ordinary looks, with my physical limitations. I never dreamed I could know such… To be indulged by… Maybe she doesn’t think I’m a liability. Maybe I don’t have a reason to be afraid. Maybe things will go on as they are, and she’ll continue to let me…”

“What on earth is he talking about?” Blaine asked.

Coltrane held up a hand for Blaine to be silent.

“If only you hadn’t taken those photographs of me,” Duncan said. “You weren’t supposed to get to the South Coast Plaza. Melinda told Carl that you’d be at the first stop, at the Beverly Center, photographing the crowd, trying to find the stalker. She had Carl worked up to the point where she knew he’d use force to discourage you from seeing her again. We were certain that you’d be sufficiently disabled not to go on to the other stores. When the photographs I took of her at the South Coast Plaza arrived at her house in the mail, our assumption was that you’d realize how close you had come to getting an image of the stalker. You’d have become more determined. That would have made Carl more determined. Eventually…”

A labored breath. “But damn you, you had to keep going, and now, if you’re still alive, you’ve figured out that she destroyed the photographs you took of me and that I’m the only one who had access to your house to steal the negatives. But that still leaves you and me. For the first time, someone knows my connection to her. How will she destroy that evidence?”

A bump led to unnerving silence, not even a hiss, as if the tape machine had been turned off. The tape’s hiss resumed.

“I thought I heard her,” Duncan said. “I keep expecting her footsteps to come down the hall. She’ll smile and put her arms around me and tell me who she’s going to be next and the next game she’s going to play. But when she makes me a drink, will she put something in it? Or will she get me more drunk than usual and take me out to the dock for a moonlight stroll and push me underwater – the way she did to that kid who managed to follow her from Sacramento to Arcata?”

“Would someone explain-” Blaine started to say.

“Quiet.”

Duncan chuckled bitterly. “She certainly had that kid jumping through hoops. But then she had us all jumping through hoops. Randolph knew what she was. Knew what her mother was. Knew what Rebecca Chance was. But he was powerless to resist, the same as I am. Even after he got so angry with Rebecca that he pushed her off that cliff in Mexico, he couldn’t get away from her spell. He had to spend years trying to find the daughter that he wasn’t even sure was his, and when he finally found her and his granddaughter, he fell into the same trap. In the name of love, he excused the terrible things they did. Melinda was happy to take his money, but she never came to see him, never made the slightest effort to delude him into thinking he was loved. Poor Randolph. Such a lonely man. He wanted the comfort of a family, but I was the only one who provided it. He finally had his will amended so that she would inherit the place he most hated, where he killed the woman he never stopped loving, even though he hated her for having manipulated him.”

Duncan’s voice was unsteady. “I have to stop. I don’t dare let her catch me with this tape recorder. I’d warn you right now in person, but what if I’m wrong? What if she hasn’t turned against me? I can’t give her up. And if I’m right to be suspicious about her? In that case, I’m dead. I’ve got nothing to lose. Make sure she doesn’t destroy you the way she did me. Get even for me, even though I deserve whatever she might do to me. I have absolutely no loyalty to her. God help me, though, how I need her.”

The tape hissed. Something made a scraping sound, possibly Duncan’s hand setting down the microphone. Then the tape became silent, although Coltrane could see it continuing to turn in the tape deck.

“Now?” Blaine asked. “Now would you explain what this is about?”

26

WHEN JENNIFER FINISHED, BLAINE LEANED BACK FROM THE documents she had spread on the desk.

“We have to take this to the police,” Coltrane said.

Blaine shook his head. “I don’t know what good it would do. These materials don’t prove anything.”

“What are you talking about?”

“A skillful defense attorney would have a case predicated on these flimsy connections dismissed before it went to trial. You’re filling in blanks without any support for your conclusions. In the eyes of the law, the theory you’re proposing is wildly circumstantial.”

“But what about all the names she used?”

“To protect her privacy. The defense would argue that she’s an unfortunate young woman who, through no fault of her own, has been plagued by men who want to dominate her. A chain of terrible consequences, for which she bears no responsibility, has forced her to keep changing her name and where she lives. You can’t prove she manipulates men into fighting over her. You can’t prove she arranges for the victors to have lethal accidents. The law deals with facts, not supposition.”

“What about Duncan’s tape?”

“The ravings of a man deranged enough to commit suicide. The defense would deny any sexual connection between her and Duncan. It would argue that Duncan was fantasizing. In my professional opinion, these materials are worthless.”

“But they might convince the police to look more closely into Duncan’s death. It’s clear now that he didn’t commit suicide. He was murdered.”

“Clear to you. But if Melinda Chance is as calculating as you believe she is, I think it’s highly unlikely that she left anything to incriminate herself.”

Coltrane started to say something, then gestured in frustration.

“But my personal opinion is another matter,” Blaine said. “I think this woman is dangerous. I think you should give this material to the police in the hopes that they might finally investigate her. Then I think you should run like hell.”

27

“I BOUGHT A REVOLVER AND A SHOTGUN HERE BEFORE Christmas.”

The clerk at the gun shop nodded.

“But I couldn’t take the handgun because of the five-day waiting period.”

“You’ve come to pick it up?”

“Yes – and another shotgun.”

28

JENNIFER’S FACE WAS STARK WITH DISMAY AS COLTRANE SET THE shotgun in the backseat along with the briefcase-like container that the revolver came in. “It’s happening again.”

“I know how you feel about guns,” he said. “But I don’t see another choice. It’s my fault I got into this mess. If I’d stayed away from her… You don’t deserve to be at risk. You’ve already helped a great deal. I’m going to take you home and-”

“Like hell you are.”

Coltrane blinked.

“She makes me furious,” Jennifer said.

The force of her words made Coltrane study her in surprise.

“I’m furious at the way she used you,” Jennifer said. “At the way she’s threatening you. At what she did to us. So don’t give me any bullshit about taking me home. I’m going to do my damnedest to help you stop her.” Jennifer thought about her tone and started to laugh.

“What’s funny?”

“Just like old times. Did you ever argue with…”

“Her?”

“Yes.”

He shook his head.

Their laughter subsided.

“Never,” he said.

Jennifer remained silent for a long, somber moment. “Maybe you and I just aren’t a match.”

“Because we disagree about some things? Hey, it’s easy not to disagree when someone’s playing a role and constantly lying the way Tash was.”

“Maybe that’s my problem. I always tell the truth,” Jennifer said.

“I wouldn’t call that a problem… If I know what’s good for me, you said. I’ll tell you what’s good for me. You are.”

Jennifer studied him. Studied her hands. “But how will you feel tomorrow?”

“The way I feel right now,” Coltrane said. He couldn’t help thinking, If we’re still alive tomorrow.

29

HE HAD CHOSEN A REVOLVER BECAUSE HIS LACK OF EXPERIENCE with handguns warned him to get something simple. There wasn’t any magazine to be loaded and inserted, any slide to be pulled back, any slight possibility of jamming, characteristics of a semiautomatic pistol. With the weapon he had chosen, a Colt.357 Python, all he had to do was press a lever on the left side of the frame, tilt out a cylinder, push six rounds into its chambers, and shove the cylinder back into place. As easy as that, it was ready to use, an important consideration for someone with Coltrane’s inexperience. Granted, a semiautomatic in a similar caliber held more than twice as many rounds as the Python, but Coltrane had concluded that a weapon he didn’t feel comfortable with was almost as bad as not having a weapon at all.

He explained this to Jennifer after he pulled into his garage, loaded the handgun, and shoved it under his sport coat. It gouged his skin.

“You’re going to carry that with you?”

“If we need it, it’s no use in a drawer.” Coltrane loaded the shotgun. “You remember I showed you how to use this?”

“I swore I never would.”

“That was then. What about now?”

“Yes, I remember how to use it.”

Coltrane had closed the garage before loading the weapons. Now he held the shotgun in his left hand, used his right hand to unlock the garage’s entrance into the house, and pushed the door open. Jennifer came behind him. She closed the door as he turned to disarm the intrusion detector, but a fidgety corner of his mind was already warning him that something was wrong. The detector should have let out a thirty-second beep, reminding him to deactivate the system before it went into full alarm mode.

But it wasn’t beeping.

“No,” Coltrane said.

Jennifer secured the dead bolt on the door. “What’s wrong?”

The glowing words on the keypad chilled him: READY TO ARM.

He spun toward the murky stairs that went up and down, aiming the shotgun. “I turned on the alarm when I left, but now it’s off. Somebody’s in the house.”

Jennifer bumped backward against the shadowy wall.

It had to be Tash, Coltrane thought. Duncan had known the secondary codes that disarmed the intrusion detector. She must have made him tell her the sequence.

“Coltrane.” The man’s voice was deep, hoarse with anger. It came from the right, from upstairs in the dark living room.

“Walt?”

Jesus, if he sees me with this shotgun, he might not give me a chance to talk, Coltrane thought. Sweating, he set the shotgun on the entryway’s floor, close to the wall, where it might not be noticed. He buttoned his sport coat, concealing the revolver under his belt. “I’m glad you’re here.”

“The feeling’s mutual.” The husky voice was unsteady with greater anger.

Coltrane flicked a light switch near the front door, activating a lamp in the living room. “I’m coming up. I’ve got something to show you.”

“What a coincidence. I’ve got something to show you.”

Coltrane took a deep breath and started up the stairs. Jennifer followed, her briefcase tight in her hand.

One step.

Another.

Coltrane gradually came up to the living room and saw Walt diagonally across from him, farthest from the illuminated lamp at the top of the stairs. His face in shadow, Walt was seated in one of the black tubular chairs, his hands on his knees.

“If you’ll give me a minute,” Coltrane said, “I need to tell you something.”

“You read my mind again.”

“Oh?”

“Because I came here to tell you something.”

“This is Jennifer.”

“If she’s smart, she’ll get out of here.”

“Let me explain. In her briefcase, she’s got-”

“I don’t give a damn about what’s in her briefcase.” Walt stood, his rigid body rising like sections of an unfolding machine. “What I do give a damn about-”

Coltrane winced when he saw that as Walt rose, he lifted something from beneath the chair.

A baseball bat.

Holding it in his right hand, patting its hitting surface against the palm of his left hand, Walt had never looked so tall and menacing.

“-is making sure you get my message this time.” Walt stepped forward.

“For heaven sake, listen. Tash has done this before.”

“I warned you to stay away from her.”

“I have stayed away from her.”

“You call following her everywhere yesterday staying away from her?” Walt came closer, patting the bat.

“I didn’t. I’ve been in Oakland!”

“Sure.”

“Ask Jennifer.”

“He’s right,” Jennifer said quickly. “Mitch was with me in-”

“You’re lying!” Walt smashed an Art Deco lamp, the impact ear-torturing, glass and beads flying.

Coltrane had never seen a more furious gaze.

“If the two of you were in Oakland, how could you have followed Tash and me to the stores she owns?” Walt demanded.

“Followed? But I didn’t-”

Walt shattered a glass table, shards exploding.

“Every damned store we went to, the minute we entered, the phone rang, and it was for her. From you!”

“Tash is the one who’s lying.” Coltrane made a placating gesture, startled to see that when Walt raised his arms to swing, his leather windbreaker hiked up and revealed a semiautomatic pistol in a holster clipped to his belt.

Oh Jesus, if he realizes I’m wearing a handgun, too, he might drop the bat and reach for – Suddenly, buying the gun seemed a terrible idea.

“She must have somebody helping her,” Coltrane said. “Maybe she phoned ahead and told somebody in each store to claim she had a phone call when the two of you walked in. Then she pretended the call was from me.”

“Bullshit! Why would she-”

“To make you so mad that you’d come after me!”

“What are you talking about? You stalked her in Malibu. You’re stalking her now. But I swear you’ll never do it again!”

Walt swung, his body movement warning Coltrane just in time for him to jump back. The bat whistled past his head and walloped against the wall.

“She likes men to fight over her!” Coltrane shouted.

As Walt swung in the reverse direction, Coltrane dodged again, and Jennifer dove to the floor. The bat missed Coltrane by an inch, the fierce movement of air cooling the sweat on his brow.

“Listen to me!” Coltrane shouted. “She wasn’t being stalked in Malibu! She was making it up! She had help!”

“You expect me to believe that crap?”

“But it’s true!” Jennifer yelled from the floor. “I’ve got the proof in my briefcase. Her name isn’t Natasha Adler. It’s Melinda Chance. She’s had half a dozen different identities and-”

“Lady, I warned you to stay out of this!”

“Men keep killing each other because of her!” Jennifer rose with her briefcase, offering it in a crouch. “Just let me open this and show you what I-”

“You asked for it!”

Walt put all his weight behind his swing, delivering the full force of the bat against the briefcase, jolting it out of Jennifer’s hands. It burst open and flipped through the air. Documents flying, the briefcase rebounded off the wall and landed among the broken glass of the table. Simultaneously, Jennifer shrieked, falling back.

Walt was poised to reverse the swing of his bat, aiming at Jennifer as she raised her hands to protect her head. Walt balked, suddenly seeming to realize what he had become.

“I-”

Whatever he meant to say, it was too late. Coltrane charged. The terror in Jennifer’s eyes had released a fury in him beyond anything he had ever felt. He struck Walt from the side and collided with the table upon which the only light in the room sat. Their combined weight slammed down onto it, buckling the table, breaking the lamp, sending the room into darkness. As they rolled, Walt had to release his grip on the bat to block Coltrane’s punches. The hard edges of Coltrane’s revolver tore against his side, making him groan. Then the revolver slipped free, falling among the wreckage, and Coltrane struggled upward with Walt. Amid the roaring fury of his frantic breathing and his savage heartbeat, he heard Jennifer shouting, “No!”

She was pleading, wailing, “Stop! This is what she wants!”

But Coltrane was far beyond reason. With no doubt whatsoever that Walt meant to destroy him, he had to do to Walt what Walt meant to do to him. They lurched this way and that, striking each other, groaning, blood mixing with the sweat on their faces. Legs weakening, Coltrane charged with all his remaining might. His body hit Walt so hard that Walt jerked backward, but the force of Coltrane’s attack propelled Coltrane with him, and they hurtled through a French door, glass bursting like a bomb going off.

Kept hurtling.

Struck the railing of a balcony.

And plummeted over.

30

FOR A MOMENT, Coltrane had the sensation of floating in darkness. Then his stomach rose. Air rushed past him, or the other way around, as he and Walt rushed through air, falling, twisting, locked in each other’s arms. Their impact was shocking, cold black water engulfing them. They struck the pool so hard that their momentum took them all the way to the bottom, jolting against it. His breath knocked out of him, Coltrane gasped, inhaled water, and panicked, struggling toward the surface. He broke through, gulped air, and was thrown underwater again as Walt gripped his shoulders and pressed down. Lungs burning, Coltrane twisted free, braced his bent legs against the pool’s bottom, and thrust himself upward, breaking the surface again, straining to breathe.

Lights came on all around him, in the living room, from which they had fallen, in the lower level that gave access to the pool, in the shrubs of the backyard, in the pool itself. Temporarily blinded, Coltrane splashed backward just in time to avoid Walt’s hands around his throat.

“Stop!” Jennifer’s pleading voice was close. She must have turned on the lights and run down to the pool, but Coltrane paid no attention, too busy avoiding Walt’s attempts to push him under. As Walt lost his balance in the shoulder-high water, Coltrane dove beneath the surface, rocketed to the surface behind Walt, grabbed him from behind, and pushed him beneath the water.

“No!”

A pole banged against the back of Coltrane’s neck. Feeling bristles on the end of it, Coltrane vaguely realized that Jennifer was using one of the pool-cleaning tools to try to stop them from fighting.

Walt wrestled free, gasped for air, spun, and came at Coltrane as Jennifer dropped the pole between them and threw a cushion from a deck chair.

“Stop!”

They had each other by the throat. Coltrane felt his face bulging as he tightened his grip and -

The shotgun blast was so startling that he jerked his hands away. Stumbling back, he lost his footing, went under, splashed to the surface, breathed frantically, saw that Walt had reacted much as he had, and was astonished to discover Jennifer at the side of the pool, holding the shotgun.

Down the street, a dog barked in alarm. Several houses away, a man yelled, “What was that?”

Her movements unpracticed, Jennifer awkwardly racked a fresh shell into the shotgun’s firing chamber. The spent shell arced through the air, clattering onto concrete. “Look at yourselves! It’s what she wants! Don’t you understand you’re being used? For God’s sake, what do I have to do to make you stop?”

Jennifer looked so surprised, her eyes fierce, obviously uncomfortable with the shotgun, doing her best to keep it balanced in her hands, that Coltrane suddenly had a sense of how out of control he had become.

“She’s right.” He stared at Walt. “I don’t want to-”

Laughter interrupted him.

From above. Deep-throated, sensuous laughter.

Baffled, he looked upward and saw Tash leaning over the balcony on the topmost level, her beautiful features radiant with amusement. Her laughter swelled until she had to throw her head back to release it.

“Tash?” Walt murmured.

“Do you understand now?” Coltrane asked.

Peering down from two stories above them, Tash wiped away tears of laughter.

“But…” Walt became speechless with bewilderment.

“Read the documents I had in my briefcase!” Jennifer said.

Tash shook her head in delight. “Make her shoot again! Make her jump in and try to stop you!”

“Tash,” Walt said, this time with realization. “You-” The word sounded like a curse as he splashed through the water. He reached the side, pulled himself out, glared up, dripping, and suddenly broke into a run, charging toward the house.

As Walt disappeared into the bottom level, Coltrane forced his way to the side of the pool. He crawled out, ignored the cold air on his wet skin, and raced after him.

Jennifer hurried next to him, the two of them passing the darkroom and the vault, pounding up the stairs. Higher, Walt was shouting something, Tash continuing to laugh. Coltrane reached the living room and surveyed the wreckage, the incalculable damage that Walt had inflicted on the priceless furniture. He saw the revolver that he had lost during the fight, and he picked it up, but he didn’t see Walt, although he did hear a commotion above him and raced higher. When he and Jennifer came to the third level and rushed into the bedroom, Coltrane was shocked. The bedroom was the only room on that level. A flower-rimmed balcony led along all four sides, and through the windows, Coltrane saw Tash gamboling from one section to the next, taunting Walt as he pursued her.

The effect was dizzying: Coltrane in the middle of his bedroom, turning, peering outward, watching Tash sprint from one section of the balcony to the next. Walt was slowing, his chest heaving. For her part, Tash seemed to have an endless reservoir of energy, skipping, spinning, evading Walt. She wore an all-white ankle-long cotton dress of a type that Coltrane had seen in Mexico. Loose, it flared provocatively as she skipped and spun. A red shawl was draped over her shoulders, tied at her cleavage. Watching her and Walt round another corner, Coltrane turned, dizzier, amazed at the sudden burst of speed that Walt mustered. Thrusting out a hand, Walt grabbed the back of Tash’s shawl and jerked her up short, causing her to gasp, but before Walt could pull her toward him, she ducked her head and slipped free of the shawl’s tied loop. He shot out another hand, clutching her arm as she started to run. When he spun her toward him, he tossed away the shawl and drew back his hand to strike her.

She stared defiantly.

He hesitated.

“What’s the matter? Are you afraid to hit a woman?”

“You’re not a woman.”

“You sure thought I was three hours ago when I-”

“That doesn’t make you a woman.”

Tash laughed. “No? What does it make me?”

Walt said a word, the crudity of which was devastating.

The laughter halted.

“I don’t know what I saw in you,” Walt said. “I’m going to have to burn my clothes and scour myself with bleach to get rid of the slime you left on me.”

Tash’s eyes darkened.

“You’re a cesspool.” Walt turned to enter the bedroom.

“Hey,” Tash said.

Seeing Walt come through the doorway, Coltrane was overwhelmed by the look of absolute revulsion on Walt’s face.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Tash demanded.

Walt came farther into the bedroom.

“I’m not through with you,” Tash said.

“The important thing is, I’m through with you.” Walt kept crossing the bedroom, not bothering to look at her.

“Nobody walks away from me!”

“Watch.”

“Come back here!”

“Go to hell.”

“You first!” Tash grabbed a heavy pot from a row of flowers, rushed into the bedroom, and hurled it against the back of Walt’s head.

For an instant, Coltrane thought that the cracking sound he heard was the pot breaking, but then the pot thudded intact onto the floor, and Coltrane realized that the sound had come from Walt’s skull. The burly policeman staggered toward Coltrane, reached for support, but never got that far. His eyes rolled up. His body became a collapsing rag doll. When his face struck the carpeted floor, the back of his head had an indentation covered with blood.

“Oh,” Tash said.

The room seemed to shrink.

“Now look what you’ve made me do.”

31

COLTRANE WAS SO STARTLED THAT HE COULDN’T MOVE. Next to him, Jennifer gaped at Walt’s unmoving body.

The next thing, Tash was hunkered next to Walt’s body, fumbling through his pockets. “It’s not supposed to happen this way.” She glared up at Coltrane. “You’ll pay for this.”

For the first time, Coltrane noticed that her hands were shiny.

She was wearing plastic gloves.

From Walt’s leather jacket, she pulled out a small black electronic object that resembled a miniature remote control. She picked up Walt’s left hand, wedged his fingers around the device, and used his thumb to press a button on it. “Make you pay.”

“I’m calling the police,” Coltrane said.

Starting toward the bedside phone, he saw Tash grope hurriedly beneath Walt’s jacket, understood, and yelled to Jennifer, “Get back down the stairs!”

Immediately, Tash pulled Walt’s semiautomatic free of its holster, pressed it into his right hand, inserted his index finger into the trigger guard, and squeezed the trigger. The gunshot was deafening, not as loud as the shotgun blast had been, but ear-slamming all the same. The unaimed bullet missed Coltrane by a wide margin, blasting into a wall, but he had the sense that the next bullet would be very deliberately aimed. He scrambled toward the stairs as Tash removed the weapon from Walt’s hand and sighted expertly along it.

“Jesus.” Diving, Coltrane heard the shot as he felt a bullet whiz by him. He hit the stairs on his side, winced, and tumbled to the landing, seeing the blurred figure of Jennifer racing down the continuation of the stairs.

He rolled, the next gunshot making his ears ring, plaster exploding from the wall, stinging his face. Jolting to a painful halt in the living room, he only then realized that he was still holding the revolver that he had picked up before climbing the stairs to the bedroom. Reflexively, he pointed it upward and pulled the trigger, his aim bad, missing Tash as she ducked back from the landing above him.

Her surprise at being shot at slowed her enough that Coltrane had time to race down to the front-door landing before Tash fired again. He collided with Jennifer, who was fumbling to unlock the front door. “No time!” he yelled, dragging her down the further continuation of the stairs an instant before two bullets whacked holes in the door.

They were on the bottom level now, but the overhead light exposed them, and Jennifer flicked switches, sending the bottom level of the pool area into darkness. The next moment, Tash appeared at the landing, fired three times into the shadows, and dove back out of sight. Before his eyes could tell his brain to stop the impulse, Coltrane fired at the empty landing, the gun awkward in his hand, the recoil unnerving.

“Jennifer?”

“Here.” Her voice was unsteady behind him.

“Are you hurt?”

“No.”

Coltrane’s heart pounded so hard that he feared his arteries would burst. Crouching behind a concrete pillar, he aimed up toward the landing.

“The garden.” Jennifer’s voice shook. “We can get away through the back.”

“No, we’d be trapped. There’s a wall around it. We’d only have bushes for cover. She could pick us off from the living room balcony. Tash!”

No answer.

“Tash!” Coltrane raised his voice louder.

Still no answer.

“Melinda!” Jennifer called.

“What?”

“The neighbors will have heard the shots! They’ll have phoned the police!” Jennifer said. “It’s finished!”

“Not yet!” Tash/Melinda said. “But it soon will be!”

What’s she talking about? Coltrane wondered. She isn’t stupid enough to hang around until the police come. Why is she waiting?

And why is she wearing plastic gloves?

So she won’t leave fingerprints, he thought.

Then why did she press Walt’s semiautomatic into his hand and use his finger to pull the trigger?

So his hand would have gunpowder residue. Isn’t that what Walt said up in Big Bear? He threatened to shoot me, then put a pistol in my hand and squeeze off a shot. “So you’d have powder residue,” Walt had said. So it would look like I’d shot at Walt and he was forced to defend himself.

That’s what she’s doing. She wants to make it look as if Walt did the shooting, not her.

But there’ll be other evidence she can’t hide, he thought. How does she plan to -

What was that remote control she pressed Walt’s thumb on?

“Do you smell smoke?” Jennifer murmured.

Coltrane whirled. Even in the darkness, he could see thick gray smoke billowing behind him.

From the darkroom.

It wafted up his nose and made him bend over, coughing, his eyes watering, the smoke so dense that it cloaked the exit to the pool.

Walt must have planted an incendiary device among the chemicals in there. The remote control Tash pressed Walt’s thumb on set off -

“Jennifer, get away from-”

The door to the darkroom exploded, flames bursting out, flashing across the corridor, whooshing toward the ceiling. But as loud as the eruption was, it didn’t muffle Jennifer’s scream as she sprinted toward the concrete pillar behind which Coltrane crouched.

Tash shot at her silhouette against the flames.

Coltrane shot back.

“Jesus, my hair.” Jennifer pawed at it, brushing out sparks.

“Now it’s almost over!” Tash said.

Coltrane cast a panicked glance toward the roaring wall of flames behind him.

“So I’ll give you a choice!” Tash said. “You can burn to death, or you can let me shoot you.”

“And then drag Walt’s body down here to make it look like he killed us but got caught in the fire he set?”

“Sounds good to me!” Tash said.

“But you’re running out of time! I hear sirens!” Jennifer said.

“I don’t! It’s only been a couple of minutes! Nice try, though!”

Coltrane felt the heat of the fire through the back of his sport coat. His hair felt warm. Smoke seared his throat. Doubled over, coughing, he knew that he and Jennifer had only a few more seconds before they would have to run toward the stairs. Although the house was made of reinforced concrete, the walls, floors, and ceilings of the interior had conventional wooden frames. Held in by the concrete, the flames would shoot along the wood like a firestorm. We have to get out of -

The vault, he thought, unable to stop coughing. It’s fireproof. He almost struggled toward it before he remembered that it had a halon-gas fire-extinguishing system. Not sufficient to put out the flames in the rest of the house but certainly enough to suffocate the two of them if they tried to seek shelter in there.

We have to rush the stairs and hope she doesn’t shoot us before we -

As the heat on his back became unbearable and he braced himself to run, he heard a scream from the front-door landing. A shot. But the bullet wasn’t aimed toward the lower level. It was aimed toward the figure who toppled down the stairs toward where Tash crouched out of sight at the side of the landing. The figure collided against her and sent her sprawling in full view of Coltrane. The figure was Walt. The blow to his head hadn’t killed him. Regaining consciousness, he must have lurched downstairs toward the sound of shouting on the bottom level. His husky body pinned her. His hands groped for her throat as she screamed again and pulled the trigger, blasting a spray of crimson from the back of his already-battered skull. In a panic, she squirmed to get out from under Walt’s now-truly deadweight.

Jennifer took advantage of the distraction and raced toward her. Caught by surprise, Coltrane took a second longer to rush from the fire.

Tash pushed Walt’s body off her and down the stairs, then aimed at Jennifer, who lost her balance when she dodged Walt’s tumbling body. The bullet meant for her hit Coltrane’s shoulder, knocking him backward onto the floor. For an instant, he blacked out. The heat of the spreading fire stung him back to panicked consciousness, the pain in his right shoulder sending his nervous system into spastic overdrive. As the flames seethed closer, he struggled to stand and saw Jennifer grappling with Tash on the landing. Tash pulled the trigger on her pistol, but nothing happened, the slide staying back, the magazine out of ammunition.

She threw the handgun, grazing Jennifer’s head. As Jennifer moaned and stumbled back, Tash turned, slipped, and scurried on all fours up the stairs. Jennifer grabbed for her, snagging the ankle-long hem of her dress. When Tash kicked backward, Jennifer held firm, but Tash’s frantic movements tore the dress, exposed her right leg to the knee, and left Jennifer holding a scrap of cloth.

Again, Tash tried to scurry up the stairs. Again, Jennifer grabbed at the dress, ripping more of it away, unable to restrain her. The two of them raced higher.

Jennifer doesn’t know I’ve been hit, Coltrane thought in dismay. His right shoulder throbbed as he wavered up the stairs. She thinks I’m coming to help her.

Amid the roar of the flames behind him, he heard noises outside the house: shouts, approaching sirens. Thank God, he thought, as he managed somehow to unlock the front door. But the crash of something being thrown above him and a wail of pain warned him that Jennifer needed him.

He struggled to climb higher, his mind swirling when for a second time that night he came to the wreckage of the furniture in the living room. And again he heard a commotion from even higher. Dripping blood, he wavered up the stairs.

To the bedroom.

It all came back to the bedroom, he thought.

The place was in darkness. When he groped to flick the switch on the wall and achieved no result, he realized that the crash he had heard was the room’s floor lamp being smashed.

The room’s silence unnerved him.

“Where is she?” Jennifer asked from the corner on Coltrane’s right.

“I don’t know. My eyes haven’t adjusted to the darkness. I-”

A heavy object struck him in the chest, knocking the wind out of him, aggravating the agony in his shoulder. Dizzied by pain, he fell against a bureau, grabbed it for support, and touched a camera he had set there.

“Are you okay?” Jennifer whispered from the darkness to his right.

“No, I’ve been-”

Another object walloped against the wall near where Jennifer had spoken. “Where the hell is she throwing from?”

“I don’t know,” Coltrane said. “She’s wearing white. Even in the darkness, we ought to be able to see her.”

“She was wearing white.”

Coltrane didn’t understand the remark. Crouching, he grasped the camera.

Outside, the sirens grew closer, louder.

Across the room, he saw what looked like a single pulse from a firefly. The spark came and went so suddenly, he wondered if his eyes were playing tricks on him, baffled until he remembered Tash’s problem with static electricity. Readying the camera, he aimed it toward where he had seen the spark, activated the flash, and pushed the shutter button.

The stab of light caught her in midmotion, crawling toward the open door to the balcony. Because the flash was directed away from him, it didn’t hurt his eyes and presumably Jennifer’s as much as it did Tash’s. She winced, her hand raised to protect her vision. At once it was dark again, and Tash scurried toward the balcony as Jennifer leapt from her hiding place. Jennifer’s cryptic remark that Tash wasn’t wearing white any longer now made sense – because her white dress had been torn from her. She was naked, her sleek tan body hard to see in the darkness. Jennifer’s own clothes had been torn, a sleeve of her navy blazer ripped off, the buttons of her silk blouse yanked open.

She caught up to Tash on the balcony, and Tash’s supple body fought back in a way reminiscent of a feral cat. She was clawing, twisting, lunging, spitting, streaks of blood suddenly appearing on Jennifer’s cheeks.

“Bitch!” Jennifer screamed, the ferocity of her attack increasing.

The flames from the bottom level lit up the night. Smoke rose toward the struggling figures, and from behind. The stairway filled with a haze that drifted into the bedroom.

As Jennifer lunged in a fury, Tash sidestepped, shouldered Jennifer against the railing, grabbed her feet, and upended her, throwing her over the side.

32

COLTRANE’S HEART STOPPED.

With a shock, it restarted, urging him toward the railing. Jennifer had gripped the railing as Tash flipped her over, and now Jennifer dangled, straining to hang on as Tash pounded at her fingers and tried to peel them off. Below, flames roared from both levels, and the swimming pool didn’t extend to this side – beneath the flames, there was only a tiled patio.

“No!” Thrusting Tash aside, Coltrane reached his good arm toward Jennifer to pull her up.

The punch to his wounded shoulder drove him nearly insane with anguish. Seeing Tash try to hit him a second time, he managed to block the blow, but not without further pain to his wound.

“I can’t hold on!” Jennifer shouted.

But Coltrane couldn’t pull her up. He had to let go and defend himself against Tash, who lifted a heavy flowerpot to throw at him as she had at Walt. The effort to raise the pot above her head tilted her off balance, and when Coltrane pushed her as hard as he could, she hit the railing, so top-weighted that when he slammed her shoulders, she, too, went over the side.

Jennifer jerked. “She grabbed me! I can’t hang on!”

In a rush, Coltrane leaned over the side and slung his good arm under Jennifer’s chest, straining to support her weight. Below her, he saw Tash dangling from Jennifer’s ankles, the flames from both levels roaring up at her. Losing his hold, desperate, he tested his wounded arm, using it to try to pull Jennifer up. Blood pulsed. His injured muscle failed.

“No!” He strained harder with his good arm, feeling Jennifer slip. All the while, he stared down at Tash, who clawed her way up Jennifer’s legs, almost to her knees.

Coltrane wept with the effort to keep Jennifer from falling.

Tash groped higher.

Jennifer jerked her right leg free and kicked.

Tash reached up.

Jennifer kicked again.

“Why… don’t… you” – Jennifer kicked harder, and Coltrane couldn’t help thinking about Walt’s last words to Tash and where Tash’s mother had said she wanted her – “go… to… hell.”

As Coltrane felt Jennifer slipping away from him, Jennifer gave one last kick, and Tash lost her grip, screaming, plummeting into the flames below. The roar of the fire was so intense that Coltrane couldn’t hear the impact of her body hitting the patio two levels down.

Jennifer felt weightless. “Hang on to me! Don’t let go!”

“I’m trying as hard as I can!”

Jennifer pulled herself toward him. “My shoes are on fire!”

She struggled upward, Coltrane lifting, and abruptly they were sprawled on the balcony, Coltrane ignoring the sharp misery of his wound, burning his hands as he yanked off Jennifer’s smoking shoes and threw them away.

But flames filled the stairway to the bedroom. So weak that they could hardly walk, they wavered toward the section of the balcony farthest from the flames. From there, they had a view of the flashing lights of emergency vehicles in front of the house, of the crowd that had gathered and firefighters spraying water at the blaze.

A woman in the crowd shouted, “My God, someone’s up there!”

Two firemen stared toward the upper balcony, turned off the hose they had trained on the house, and ran toward the ladder truck, raising it to save the two figures they had seen.