Nightlife: A Novel

54

The next evening, Catherine drove up Adair Hill and parked her rental car across the street from her parents’ house. She walked up the porch steps and tried the knob. It was locked. She had been hoping it would be, but she couldn’t help feeling a cold, sad sensation as she took out her key and opened the door.

“Hello?” she called. “Anybody home?”

“Where would we be?” It was her father. He came around the corner from the kitchen and let her kiss him on the cheek.

“I don’t know,” she said. “You’re old enough to make your own decisions, and to live with the consequences.”

“Thank you, dear,” her mother called from the kitchen. “Nice of you to come by. Did they close the police bureau and kick you out?”

“No, I left voluntarily.” She came into the kitchen, followed by her father. She kissed her mother, once again surprised by the incredible softness that her mother’s cheek had developed in the past few years, and savoring the faint scent of gardenia soap she had smelled since childhood.

Catherine sat at the kitchen table and accepted the cup of coffee her father set in front of her. He sat down with a glass of water and eyed her as he would a suspect. “Hard day, kid?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know anymore. Since we found that guy yesterday and Tanya’s fingerprint in his shower, nothing much else has turned up. Maybe that’s good. We’re not up to our armpits in new bodies. But it doesn’t feel like we’re winning.”

“It never does until it’s over,” said her father. “I was betting she would be recognized by now, though.”

Catherine’s mother seemed to be more and more agitated as her husband and daughter talked. She said, “How about your life outside of work? Anything interesting happening?”

“Not that I’ve noticed. I seem to be the same bitter divorcée I’ve been for years.”

“We haven’t seen you much. Has Joe Pitt been around?”

Catherine’s father seemed to remember something else he had to do. He took his glass of water with him to another room.

“A couple of weeks ago. He’s back in Los Angeles doing his own cases. We call each other a lot.”

“What do you talk about?”

“Meaning what?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I think I mean, are you serious about him?”

“Or is he serious about me.”

“Both ways.”

“Headline: Mother Wants Daughter to Settle Down.”

“Or not,” said Martha Hobbes. “Maybe you’re getting too settled as it is. Is being a cop all you ever want to do?”

“Is that such an odd idea?”

“It’s a big joke on me, I can tell you. I spent twenty-five years waiting for your father to get to retirement age without any holes in him. And now I worry about you. Marriage might not be so bad compared to having murderers burning your house down around your ears.”

“I was married, remember? That’s how I realized I should be a detective. I detected that my husband was screwing everybody he could reach.”

Her mother stared at her. “Is that funny to you?”

“Funnier than it used to be,” said Catherine. “Believe me, I’ve come a long way toward your way of thinking in the past few weeks.”

“You mean you really are serious about him?”

“Yes, I’m very serious. But I’m not making plans for any weddings. I wasn’t going to go out with him at all until I purposely forgot everything my mother had told me about men.”

“He lives in Los Angeles, doesn’t he? What would you do if he asked you to move there?”

“He hasn’t.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to put off thinking about it until he does.”

“I don’t get it. Have you decided you want me to move to L.A., or that you don’t want me to?”

“I want you to be happy.”

“Good. I’m happy.”

“I mean really happy.”

“Mother, make yourself happy. Make Daddy happy. I’m not in a position to be ‘really happy’ right now. I have a reasonable facsimile of a boyfriend. We’re seeing where it goes, but at the moment it’s not going anywhere. Long-distance relationships are everything they’re cracked up to be, which is horrible. We tell jokes and say ‘I miss you.’ Half the time when I talk to him I’m sure he’s watching some game on television with the sound off.”

“There. Was that so hard?”

“What?”

“Telling me what I asked you in the first place.”

Catherine closed her eyes and took two deep breaths, then opened them again. “No, I guess it wasn’t.”

Her father came in, carrying a newspaper. “Have you tried the emergency rooms?”

“Huh?”

“She killed this big fellow, right? Sometimes while they’re killing somebody, they get hurt. Wood or glass chips fly, people you think are dead aren’t. She could be hurt.”

“She’s not. This one was blindfolded, lying naked in bed. All the blood in the apartment is his.”

“Oh,” he said. “How about parking tickets? I picked up a few suspects by seeing what cars got ticketed near the scene. There’s a description of the car and the license number on the summons.”

“Tried it.”

“How about security videotapes? That apartment is in a neighborhood that’s mostly commercial.”

“Tried that too.”

“That’s my girl.” He wandered off again.

Catherine’s mother said quietly, “Does he ever make any sense?”

“Always. He’s trying to think of a way to shortcut this for me.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” she muttered. “It’s hard to tell if you’re just humoring him.”

“I’m not, but I would.”

Her mother put a piece of cherry pie on a plate and set it in front of Catherine. Catherine cut it in half and returned half to the pan without comment. Then she ate the other half and listened to her mother talk about the past few days in the neighborhood.

The stories were a peculiar comfort to Catherine. They calmed her and reassured her that the rhythms of the real world were intact. The sun dried the rain-soaked gardens, the roses bloomed, and Lydia Burns put a letter in a mailbox and accidentally dropped her car keys in with it.

At eleven Catherine went into the living room, where her father was watching the local news. He looked up. “Have you had uniformed officers circulate her picture to the mom-and-pop stores?”

Catherine said, “What am I missing?”

“She’s got to buy food and toothpaste somewhere. Supermarkets are full of people standing in line staring at one another, and four or five assistant managers watching customers. Maybe instead, she shops at one of those little stores run by immigrant couples who can’t tell one young American woman from another, or are afraid to cause trouble.”

“I’ll give it a shot. Thanks, Daddy.” She kissed his cheek.

He said, “Are you going?”

“Yeah. I’ve had my free slice of pie, so I guess I’ll be on my way.”

“I drove by to check out your apartment building.”

“And you hated it?”

“I don’t work for Architectural Digest. I like that it has a locked door with an intercom and a lot of people around. Looks like a lot of doctors.”

“They’re all interns,” she said. “The ones that are old enough to be keepers must all have houses.”

“When you park in that lot behind the building, look around before you get out of your car, and then watch your back.”

“I always do,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night, kid.”

She went out and stepped onto the porch. Her eyes took in the configuration of trees and houses that were so familiar to her they were the landscape of her dreams. She could see it was all as it had been for as long as she could remember, and there was no shadow that she had not memorized. She walked toward her car slowly, looking up and down the quiet street.

The day after Tanya had burned her house, Catherine had requested that a plain car be posted a hundred feet below here, on the curve of the road, so that an officer could get a close look at the face of anyone who drove or walked by. After a week there had been no adequate justification for keeping a car any longer. There had been no indication that Tanya had looked for Catherine’s parents, but tonight something felt wrong.

She continued her walk to her car, stopped beside it, and reached into her purse, pretending to search for her keys while she watched and listened. There was no unfamiliar sound, no sign that anything was out of place. She stood there a bit longer, waiting, giving Tanya a chance to move. Nothing happened.

Catherine got into the car and started it, then turned on the lights and drove farther up the hill. She turned around in the spot where she would have hidden if she had been Tanya, just on the uphill side of the Tollivers’ high hedges. Then she coasted down the road, turning the wheel slightly now and then to shine her headlights on the best hiding spots along the narrow street.

She kept encouraging her mind to feel its discomfort, trying to let it intensify so she could identify what it was. If she had seen something too subtle to interpret, it was gone: no troubling image formed in her memory. As she reached the bottom of the hill and turned left toward the bridge, she realized what it was: timing.

She had listened to the stories of her father and other old cops and had read files from hundreds of cases of serial killers. Serial killers were almost all male, and most of them seemed to be acting out some fantasy that was a mixture of violence and sex. Many appeared to search for a particular kind of victim. Others seemed to be trying to reproduce exactly some scene they had concocted in their imaginations. It was not clear to Catherine what Tanya was doing when she killed someone. It seemed to Catherine that it had something to do with power. Maybe in some part of her past, Tanya had been powerless, and had been harmed or abused in some way. It seemed to Catherine that with the killings she had created a method of making herself safe.

Tanya seemed to be driven by fear. Every time she killed someone she had more to fear, so she had to kill again to feel safe. Whenever Tanya felt she might be losing control, she proved she wasn’t by killing somebody. What was bothering Catherine tonight was that she had become accustomed to Tanya’s rhythm, and it seemed to Catherine to be time.

She pulled her rental car into the parking lot behind the apartment building, and her father’s advice came back to her. She turned the little car in a full circuit of the perimeter, letting the headlights shine on the low brush that came to the edge of the pavement. She selected a space in the middle and got out of her car, her left hand holding her purse and keys, and her right hand free to reach for her sidearm.

Catherine took a last look around her before she unlocked the back entrance of the building, stepped inside, and closed it behind her, listening for the click of the lock. She walked up the hall to the staircase at the front of the building instead of riding up in the elevator. When she was inside her apartment on the third floor she locked the door and flipped the latch across it. Then she headed for the shower.