Silence

39

AFTER DARK, Jack Till walked along the sidewalk away from the hill and headed back toward Linda Gordon’s house. He had watched the men and women beyond the yellow POLICE LINE DO NOT CROSS tape, searching for the brass casing from the rifle or any impression left on the dirt by the shooter’s shoes, but Till had been forced to keep his distance. The police would stay at the scene for a while trying to get everything that there was, but he had known for hours that there was nothing left to find.

He walked back to the house. There were two cops still working the front yard, looking for the bullet that had passed through Linda Gordon’s shoulder. They had a faint hope that it had gone into a tree trunk or a fence or the next house. He could see that others were finishing their door-to-door interviews in the neighborhood with the usual hopeless questions: “Did you happen to see?” “Did you happen to hear?” “Will you please call us right away if you hear of someone else who did?”

He went in the door and saw that Max Poliakoff was back inside, using the small kitchen table as his headquarters while the other cops searched. Till said, “Max, can I talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure.”

“Have you found out anything about Kit Stoddard yet?”

“Hell, Jack. One crisis at a time. You gave me the name yesterday, and I’ve got a man on it. There was such a person, but the name probably was an alias, as you thought. She’s not on any list that he’s checked yet. Nobody he’s talked to knows where she went.”

“What about Scott?”

“Well, yeah, that’s the important one, isn’t it? He’s even harder to find because we don’t know where to begin. Apparently nobody knew anything about him even at the time when he was dating Kit Stoddard, including his last name—if Scott was his first name. He could have been from out of town—out of the country, even. He was seeing Kit, but none of her friends met him.”

“I have a feeling,” said Till.

“What’s your feeling?”

“Ever since I went to talk to Linda Gordon a couple of months ago, I’ve thought there was something odd about her. She seemed to have an abnormal interest in how this case came out. She didn’t want to hear that the victim was alive, she wanted Eric Fuller to go to trial. Did she strike you the same way?”

Poliakoff looked down at the table for a moment. “Yeah, actually, she did. I asked around, talked to some people in the department, and then a couple of contacts I have in the DA’s office. The word is that she’s always a competitor. But she really likes these cases where some guy victimizes a woman. It seems to inspire her, to make her feel like she’s fighting for something. It makes her tough to beat in front of a jury. So the head deputy DA assigns a lot of them to her.”

“You’re telling me that what we saw here today was normal?”

Poliakoff shrugged. “What’s normal?”

“If you hadn’t thought she was behaving strangely, then you wouldn’t have asked around about her.”

“All right. That’s true. But I can believe she just got carried away. Everybody here must have seemed like they were on the other side, trying to push her into rushing her decision. Maybe she felt cornered.”

“There were four witnesses who had known Wendy Harper six years ago, and a police forensics technician who as good as told her that the picture he took of Wendy today matched her old driver’s license. But she wanted to try to keep Wendy in town and vulnerable. You heard her trying to dream up charges to file to keep her here.”

Poliakoff held up his hands. “What do you want from me, Jack? She’s the prosecutor in the case.”

“She just got shot.”

“She got shot because all that blond hair made her look from a distance like Wendy Harper, and no other reason.”

“She’s an attempted murder victim, and it happened right here. This house is a crime scene. It’s got her blood splattered on the front of it.”

“You’re telling me to search her house? What’s the probable cause?”

“You don’t need a warrant. You were already inside when the crime was committed, and the scene belongs to the detective in charge until he releases it.”

“What the hell would I even be looking for?”

“What I’d be looking for is something that proves she knows a man named Scott.”

“Scott? That’s a stretch. There’s no evidence that she’s anything but overeager and suspicious.”

“So look for some, and you might find it,” Till said.

Poliakoff looked at him for a moment. “Wendy is waiting for you. Do you want to drive her to the station, or do you want us to do it?”

“I will. Is she alone?”

“She’s out back talking to Eric Fuller.”

Till walked to the front door, stepped carefully past the dried pool of Linda Gordon’s blood, and then out onto the porch. He took a deep breath of the night air, then walked up the driveway to the corner of the house and stopped to compose himself. As he came around the corner, he saw Eric and Wendy sitting on a porch swing together. Were they holding hands? He couldn’t tell from here.

Till stopped walking and said, “Hello. I’m sorry to interrupt.”

Wendy turned toward Till and he advanced. He could see that she had been crying. She didn’t rise, nor did Eric. Instead, she turned away from Till toward Eric and said, “I don’t ever want to lose touch with you again.”

Eric stood up and shook Till’s hand. “I suppose you have to take her somewhere, right?”

Till nodded. “They want her at the station.”

Eric said, “All right, then. It’s the middle of dinner, and my sous-chefs and cooks have been making my new lobster risotto without me. I’d better show up and give them a hand.” Eric’s eyes were moving, staying away from anyone else’s eyes. He turned, walked around the house, and up the driveway.

Till saw that Wendy was still crying. He tried to think of something to say.

She caught him looking at her. “I told him what I had been doing since we last saw each other.”

“Oh,” Till said. “Sometimes I think honesty is overrated.”

“I think I knew that once, but forgot. Well, where are we going to go now? To the police station?”

“That’s the second stop. First, St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s where the ambulance took Linda Gordon.”

They got into Till’s rental car. He drove up the street a few yards, turned around, and headed out toward Ventura Boulevard, then turned east toward Burbank. They were quiet for a time, and then Wendy said, “We saved Eric. We accomplished what we had to do. Has it occurred to you yet that maybe what we ought to do next is get the hell out of here?”

“This isn’t six years ago. Last time there didn’t seem to be much choice, but this time, you aren’t the only one who thinks that this Scott guy is a killer. If the cops keep at it, they’ll get him, and this will be over forever.”

“Then why don’t we leave town and let them have at it?”

“Because I believe that for now you’ll be safer here than running. And if I’m here, I can push some leads that I don’t think the cops can follow.”

“At the hospital?”

“To start.”

“You’re going to get in to see her by pretending you’re still a cop, aren’t you?”

“Maybe. I’m pretty good at it.”

“Jack, even if you fool everybody and get in, she’s not going to talk to you. She hates you. She hates me.”

“Right now I’ll bet she hates the man who shot her even more.”

Till drove from Ventura Boulevard up Vineland. When he turned right onto Riverside for the last few blocks toward the hospital, he could see the lights of several police cars and a couple of ambulances blinking on Riverside. There were other emergency vehicles parked on the left side of the street. “There’s something up ahead,” he said.

Till drove up to the area, and found that the police were waving cars on, keeping them moving. He pulled off Riverside at Ponca, parked, and got out. “Come on. I don’t want you alone in the car.”

They walked across the street, and made their way through the crowd of people who had gathered. There was more police tape, and there were police officers busy working the area as a crime scene. There were two bodies lying in different parts of the alley. Till asked the man beside him, “What happened?”

“Those guys got shot a while ago. See?” He pointed at the bodies.

“What was it, a robbery?”

“I don’t really know. I heard it was a carjacking.”

Till edged closer to the nearest body. The police forensic people were kneeling on the rough pavement beside it, trying to measure angles and examine the ground for evidence. Till took Wendy’s arm. “Look at this.”

“I don’t want to.”

He pulled her closer. “Look.”

She said, “My God! It’s that guy. The one in Morro Bay.”

Till pointed down the alley, where other officers were working beside a second body. “There’s the man from the locker room.” He took Wendy’s arm. “Start walking.” They began to walk toward the street. “I don’t know who did this to them, but he didn’t do it for us.”