Deadly Pursuit

10

“I still can’t believe it. Can’t frigging believe it.”

“It must have been a shock.”

“Oh, fuck, yeah. I mean, when I heard his name on KFWB, it was like whoa, hold on, you know what I mean?”

“Of course.”

“I’m driving home from the movies, and all of a sudden they’re talking about him, about Jack, and I’m like… holy shit. You know?”

“I know.”

Tamara Moore kept her voice neutral, her face carefully blank save for a practiced hint of sympathy in the eyes. She had been listening to Sheila Tate ramble on for forty-five tedious minutes, and despite the possible importance of the interview, she was thoroughly bored.

Sheila, as the FBI surveillance team had already known, had been carrying on a romantic relationship with Jack Dance, spending her nights with him on an irregular basis. She had been a top priority after Dance had disappeared.

Unfortunately, Sheila Tate proved impossible to find. The surveillance unit had followed Jack when he left for work; no one had bothered to put a tail on his girlfriend. It was assumed she would be working at Bullock’s, as usual; but as it turned out, Thursday was her day off.

A stakeout car waited outside her apartment in Santa Monica all day and into the night. She didn’t show. The task force was beginning to worry that Jack had added her to his list of victims when at ten o’clock the watch commander at LAPD’s West L.A. divisional station called with word that Sheila was there.

Apparently she’d spent the day in Malibu, working hard on her tan, then visited Century City to shop, eat, and take in a movie. She hadn’t heard any news until she was driving home. Panicking, she detoured to the police station, afraid to go home while Jack was still at large.

Two LAPD detectives interviewed Sheila long enough to learn the essentials of her story, then delivered her to the FBI field office in Westwood. Lovejoy asked Moore to talk with her privately in a conference room.

Rigid in a straight-backed chair, Moore studied Sheila Tate, sprawled bonelessly on the couch. She was twenty-eight years old, slender and hard-bodied like so many southern California women, with a lustrous suntan and waves of chestnut hair laced with oddly alluring threads of gray. She should have been beautiful, but wasn’t. Her looks were spoiled by her mouth, a sneering, angry mouth well suited to the frequent profanities it uttered.

“Did he really kill all those women?” she asked for the tenth time. Her lower lip still trembled with the aftereffects of shock.

“We believe so.”

“Shit. It might’ve been me next, huh? He might’ve done me?”

“Well, fortunately he didn’t.”

“Could have, though. Jesus, what a wacko. Crazy as the Dahmer guy, and I was practically shacking up with him. Who would’ve known?”

“Sheila, did Jack ever discuss what he did or where he went on the weekends when he was out of town?”

“Nah, and I never asked. Figured he was bopping somebody else on the side.”

“That didn’t bother you?”

“Not as long as he made nice with me. He was generous, you know? Real loose with his money.”

“Do you remember seeing any syringes around the apartment?”

“Needles? No way. Jack isn’t a user. He doesn’t even drink much.”

“Any items that might have come from other women-a ring, a bracelet, even a lock of hair or a button from a blouse?”

“Nothing like that. Why? Did he keep, like, souvenirs?”

“I’m not at liberty to say.”

The lip was quivering again. “He didn’t have pieces of them stashed in a drawer someplace, did he?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

The truth was that searches of Dance’s apartment, office, and car had so far failed to turn up any trophies or syringes. Conclusive evidence linking Dance to the murders continued to elude the task force. His fingerprints on the drinking glass at the Phoenix bar were not enough.

After the print run, it had been hoped that a surreptitious inquiry into Dance’s credit-card accounts and bank statements would yield a record of airline-ticket purchases that could be matched to Mister Twister’s weekend outings. But there was no record of any such purchases. He must have paid cash.

Then it had occurred to someone that Dance was unlikely to have left his Nissan Z in an LAX parking lot, notorious for poor security. LAPD detectives had made the rounds of the privately operated parking lots near the airport and had found the one Jack used. He had paid cash there, too, but that precaution hadn’t helped him; it was standard procedure at the establishment to log in every vehicle, recording the license number, make, and model. The Nissan had been left there each weekend when Mister Twister was at work.

The coincidence of dates still wasn’t sufficient to ensure a conviction. But it had persuaded a judge to sign the arrest and search warrants early this morning.

Now the arrest had been bungled, and the searches had come up empty. If Dance could not be definitely tied to the homicides, he might end up being prosecuted only on multiple counts of telemarketing fraud. After the publicity given to the manhunt, such a reversal would constitute a disaster.

“Was there anything in the apartment that was off limits to you?” Moore asked. “Any room he didn’t want you to enter? Any drawers you weren’t supposed to open?”

“No way. He couldn’t boss me around like that. What do you think, he had me tied around his little finger like some fucking bimbo?”

“Did you ever see him hide anything or cover up something he was looking at?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Did he have a scrapbook, photo album, Polaroids?”

“Not that I ever saw.”

“Did he act strange at times?”

“Strange, how?”

“Secretive. Defensive. Paranoid.”

“That’s not the way…” Her lashes batted, and a small crease of concentration appeared above the bridge of her nose. “Well, there was one kind of weird thing.”

“Tell me.”

“Well, see, one time I walked in on him when he wasn’t expecting me. He’s on the phone. Sees me and goes ballistic. Says I should ring the goddamn doorbell next time. I say, then what’d you give me a goddamn key for?” She shrugged. “Doesn’t sound like shit, but man, it felt really bizarre. I mean, he never gave a crap whether I rang the doorbell any other time.”

“Which room was he in?”

“Uh… the bedroom.”

“Who was he talking to?”

“I don’t know. He must have hung up right after.”

A knock on the door, and Peter Lovejoy stuck his head in.

“Just got off the phone with Drury.” Deputy associate director. “He wants us on a plane to Miami ASAP.”

“I’m not finished here.”

“How about letting Baxter take the rest of Miss Tate’s statement?” Linda Baxter was a street agent in the L.A. office.

“Right.” Moore smiled at Sheila. “Got to run. Sorry.”

“Is Jack in Miami? Is that why you’re going there?”

“We don’t know where he is,” Moore said, rising. She left before Sheila could press her with another question.

Lovejoy was already heading for the elevator, wiping his runny nose. Moore caught up with him in the hallway. “My things are at the hotel.”

“Mine, too. We’ll pick them up on the way.” He checked his watch. “It’s eleven-forty. Delta has a redeye to Atlanta at twelve-fifteen. We can connect with an eight-twenty flight to Miami and get in at ten a.m. Eastern time.”

“Can we stop off at Dance’s apartment first?”

“Why? The girlfriend tell you something?”

“She may have.”

The apartment building was only a few blocks east of the FBI office. Moore watched the Wilshire corridor blur past. It reminded her of Phoenix at night. Tall modern buildings, elegant landscaping, many lights. Wealth built beauty; she’d always known that.

And the absence of wealth… She knew about that, too. The Oakland projects. The urine-stained stairwells, the caged light bulbs, the concrete walls of her mother’s apartment, beading with sweat on summer afternoons.

The worst part of poverty was the grinding ugliness of it. That feeling of never being clean. She wondered if Sheila Tate had ever known that feeling, or ever would.

She turned to Lovejoy at the wheel. “How positive are we that Jack flew to Miami?”

“Maybe eighty percent. Miami P.D. got the flight attendants out of bed to look at his mug shot. One of them is almost certain she remembers him.”

“Wearing glasses?”

“Right. And blue jeans. Just like Mr. Markham said.”

Hugh Markham represented a lucky break for the task force, and a bad break for Jack Dance. Sixty-eight years old, a retired bus driver, he ate lunch at a Burger King in Encino every day, usually lingering over the L.A. Times. Said his wife was grateful to have him out of the house for a while.

Markham was a people-watcher. In thirty years of driving for RTD, he had seen a parade of characters pass in and out of the bus’s folding doors. He noticed things.

He had been watching when a man in a blue business suit, carrying two shopping bags, entered the restaurant via a side door and disappeared immediately into a rest room. For a few minutes Markham tried idly to guess what line of work the man was in. It was a game of his.

Then it occurred to him that the man was taking a long time to come out. He found this mildly interesting. He went on watching the rest-room door over the top of his newspaper.

Five minutes. Ten.

Finally the door opened, and someone emerged. But it couldn’t be the same man. The outfit was different, the hair was different, the shopping bags were gone.

No, it was him, all right. He’d undergone a complete transformation. Left without ordering any food, too. Very odd.

When he told his wife about it, she made him watch the local news, waiting for an update on the day’s big story, the manhunt for Jack Dance. “Was that the man you saw?” she asked when Jack’s picture appeared on the screen.

Hugh Markham said it was. Twenty minutes later, he was saying the same thing to a West Valley cop.

Markham had a good memory for details. He ticked off the specifics of Jack’s new look: moussed hair, glasses, denim shirt, blue jeans, knapsack.

A sketch artist altered the mug shot accordingly. Police circulated copies of it in the vicinity of the Burger King. A taxi driver stationed outside a hotel two blocks away recalled driving Jack to LAX. The American Airlines terminal.

The ticket clerks had already gone home for the day. LAPD tracked them down and showed them the picture. One clerk remembered selling that man a one-way ticket to Miami.

“Miami P.D. is still trying to find someone who might have observed him in the terminal,” Lovejoy said. “So far they’ve had no luck. Of course, it’s late there-three a.m.-and they can’t roust all the employees.”

“If the flight attendant can’t make a definite ID, how do we know Jack was ever on the plane? He might have bought the ticket just to throw us off. He could still be in L.A.”

Lovejoy nodded. “I raised that possibility with Drury, strictly on a conjectural basis.” Strictly to cover your rear, Moore corrected silently with a brief smile. “But it appears unlikely. If Jack were trying to divert us, he would most probably have charged the plane fare on one of his credit cards. That way we’d be certain to know about it.”

“True.”

“Anyway, Miami appears to be our best lead, and Drury wants us to follow up.”

“Why can’t the Miami field office handle it?”

“They will. But we’ll supervise.”

“Drury say anything about the, uh, problems with the arrest?”

“Oh, yes.” Lovejoy showed her a tight, nervous smile, and for the first time she realized how scared he was. “Yes, he said a great deal.”

Moore looked away. She’d had no opportunity to consider any implications of the botched raid this morning other than Jack Dance’s continued elusiveness. Now she saw the matter from a different perspective: Peter Lovejoy’s career. He was the task force leader. He would take the heat for the screw-up that had allowed Jack to evade capture.

Every facet of Lovejoy’s life, every detail of his daily routine, even his mannerisms and vocabulary, had been carefully selected to protect him from the ultimate catastrophe of a career meltdown. Tonight he was facing that nightmare-perhaps already had faced it, in his talk with the deputy director.

She glanced at his face in profile, read no expression there. His hands gripped the wheel a little tighter than usual. That was all.

He was taking it well. Better than she would have expected. She wondered if she had underestimated him. She hoped so.

The whine of electric saws was the first thing she and Lovejoy heard as they emerged from the elevator on the penthouse floor of Jack’s high-rise. The search team, having finished with the Nissan and the CSGI office, had returned to the apartment, where they were methodically tearing apart walls. Complaints from the neighbors about the noise had been ignored.

The wholesale dismantling of an apartment was perhaps outside the strict parameters of a legal search. But the task force was convinced that Dance had hidden the syringe somewhere. It had not turned up in any of the obvious places. And, after all, the suspect had already demonstrated a fondness for secret panels.

Passing under the yellow crime-scene ribbon strung across Dance’s doorway, Moore followed Lovejoy inside.

The living room was three times the size of her entire apartment in Denver, lavish and plush, the giant windows framing a Cinemascope view. It must have been spectacular before the thick pile carpet had been torn free of the tacks, the paintings taken off the walls, the sofa cushions unzipped and emptied of stuffing, the drapes removed, the wall fixtures unscrewed.

Now it was a scene of orderly wreckage and controlled destruction, unoccupied save for the Justice Department attorney in charge of evidence recovery. He lounged on what remained of Dance’s sofa, listening to Jay Leno over the high-pitched howls of power tools.

In the bedroom two FBI men, Tobin and Mays, were cutting neat vertical slices in the plasterboard. They shut off their saws and raised their goggles when Lovejoy and Moore entered.

“What’s up?” Tobin asked. Five o’clock shadow darkened his cheeks and gave him a slightly disreputable appearance that was not improved by an overlay of plaster dust and sweat.

“I need to look at something,” Moore said, moving toward the nightstand.

“Nothing in the drawers. Believe me, we checked. Took out all his papers and knickknacks, even X-rayed some of them with the portable fluoroscope.”

“I’m not interested in the drawers.” She lifted the telephone handset off its cradle, studied it.

Sheila had said Jack was on the phone. But apparently she hadn’t heard him talking. She had merely seen him with the phone in his hand.

The handset was thin and lightweight. She saw no sign of tampering. But the cradle…

Heavy. Thick. She turned it over. The bottom plate was attached with two small screws.

Squinting at the screws, she saw abrasions on the minuscule grooves of the heads.

“This phone has been taken apart,” she said quietly. “More than once, I’d say.”

“Well, what do you know,” Tobin breathed.

Mays got a small Phillips screwdriver and carefully removed the screws, then lifted off the plate.

Inside the cradle, in a narrow cavity between the plate and the guts of the phone, was a single plastic syringe.

“Physical evidence.” Lovejoy showed Moore a broad smile, his first since the raid. “Thank God.”

“We would have found it eventually,” Mays said with a note of defensiveness.

Lovejoy ignored that. “You’d better get the syringe over to the LAPD lab and see if they can find enough fluid in it for serological analysis. Also, see about matching the needle to the puncture wounds in the victims’ necks. And find out if there’s any sort of brand name on this thing, some way of tracing its origin and distribution, determining how he got hold of it.”

Tobin already knew the procedure. “Right. Right.”

“And get Justice in here to preserve chain of evidence.” Lovejoy moved toward the bedroom doorway. “And check the other phones-Jack’s office phones, too-in case he tried the same gimmick twice. And-”

Moore, smiling, gave him a gentle shove from behind.

“And we need to get going, Peter. We’ve got a plane to catch.”