Silence

10

JACK TILL DROVE HARD in the summer night, still driving the way he had when he had been a cop, pushing the speed limit just enough to move him past the trucks that were pushing it, too, but letting the future organ donors flash past him. To his left was the endless dark ocean, with only the ruler-straight row of lighted oil platforms in the channel to relieve the blackness. On his right were the high sand hills that in daylight seemed to be held there by goldenrod and wildflowers, but at night were only looming shadows. He had the air conditioning on high, so the interior of the car was cold and kept him alert. Twenty minutes later, he began to pass the Santa Barbara exits. He waited until he had reached the Storke Road exit, took it, and then the second ramp onto Sandspit Road. He went past the airport entrance to the row of car rentals, pulled into the first lot and stopped.

He got out of the car, stepped around to the trunk and removed his suitcase. As he stood there pretending he was searching the trunk for something else, he kept his eyes on the road he had just driven, watching for headlights. When he had satisfied himself that he had not been followed, he closed the trunk and walked into the long, low car rental building.

He had made the only deadline that mattered. The car rentals here would close ten minutes after the last incoming flight of the evening at eleven. He went to the desk and he knew the young man behind it was probably as pleased to see him as he looked. He was alone and undoubtedly had been for most of his shift.

Till showed his rental club card and a set of keys. “I rented a car in L.A., and I’d like to trade it for another model.”

The young man said, “What kind of car would you like, sir? Compact, full size, luxury?”

Till said, “What have you got that’s luxury? Cadillacs and Town Cars?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Have any out there and ready to go?”

“Yes, I believe we do.”

“I’ll take a Cadillac.”

The young man tapped his computer keyboard and looked at the screen, quickly produced a rental form from a shelf under the counter and checked the lines Till was to sign, then went to a cabinet to get a set of keys. “Here you are, sir. A Cadillac DeVille. The third space from the right in the second row.”

“Thanks.” Till stepped outside. He went to the car quickly, tossed his suitcase into the trunk, and drove the Cadillac onto the road.

Till had been a private detective for seven years now, and a police officer for twenty before that, and he knew that this was the kind of job that required him to submerge, to go beneath the surface and emerge looking slightly different. He needed to be part of the background, undifferentiated and maybe a bit out of focus. But first, he had to give himself time to be sure nobody was watching.

On the way to Santa Barbara there had been lots of traffic, but no single vehicle had seemed to stay with him for long. Since he had left the freeway, there had been only empty highway behind him. It was disconcerting, because he had expected that there would be people watching him. Whoever had gotten Eric Fuller charged with Wendy Harper’s murder had forced Jack Till to the surface. From the moment when Till had put his name on the advertisements for Wendy, they should have been watching him.

He had made only a halfhearted attempt to hide his departure from Los Angeles, because he wanted to see who was following. Tonight he had given them opportunities to reveal themselves, but there still was no sign of them. He had stopped once for coffee and once to change cars, but no other car had stopped, too.

He turned the car onto Hollister Avenue and doubled back into Santa Barbara. He took a couple of turns onto small streets, parked for a few minutes and waited, but there were no cars that showed any inclination to follow. He returned to Hollister and kept driving. Hollister turned into State Street, and brought him into the center of town to Figueroa. He parked near the police station.

Till stepped into the front entrance and up to the counter and said to the female officer behind it, “I’m Jack Till. Sergeant Kohler was going to leave something for me to pick up.”

She said, “May I see your identification, please?”

He removed his LAPD identification card from his wallet and held it with his index finger over the word “retired.”

She looked at the picture on it, then at his face, and said, “Come with me.” She came around the counter, opened a swinging door, and called over her shoulder to a male officer at a desk, “I’ll be right back.”

Till followed her to an open office with five desks, where several plainclothes police officers were at work. She stopped at one of the desks, picked a manila envelope off the blotter and handed it to Till. “He said you were welcome to look at it here, if you’d like. You can use his desk.”

“Thank you,” said Till. He sat down, opened the envelope, and extracted a packet of papers. The heading on the first page was “Southwest Airlines Flight 92, Departure Santa Barbara 7:05 A.M., arrival San Francisco 8:35 A.M.” Each sheet recorded a different flight. Kohler had requested the passenger lists for all of the flights that had left Santa Barbara on August 30 six years ago.

Till had known Kohler slightly in the old days. He had been one of the young detectives coming up in the department, and Till had spoken to him only a few times, but he had left a good impression. Till remembered he had been big, with an open expression and a reputation for hard work. When Till had called Max Poliakoff to ask about the passenger lists, Max had mentioned that Kohler was in Santa Barbara, and that a request for lists from flights out of Santa Barbara would raise fewer questions if it came from a Santa Barbara cop. Till had decided to presume on the acquaintance.

As Till went through the airline-passenger lists he remembered something Wendy Harper had said on the day when she had come to his office.

She had said, “Why did you quit the police department?”

He had said, “Because of the money.”

What had really happened was that Till had simply looked up from the body of a fourteen-year-old boy lying on the street as the morning light was almost imperceptibly altering the deep darkness of night, thought about how many bodies he had seen like this, and realized that it was time. He had not told Wendy Harper about that, but remembering it had helped him understand the decision she was making. She not only believed that leaving Los Angeles was necessary, but as soon as she had begun contemplating it, she had realized it was time. That part of her life was over.

He finished sorting the passenger lists. He had set aside all of the flights that had taken off before noon on August 30 because he had left her at the airport right at noon that day. He studied each of the later flights: three to San Francisco, three to Las Vegas, five to Los Angeles. Those were all possibilities because in any of those airports she could have switched to a plane to anywhere in the world. If she had changed planes, she would have stayed up on the second level past the security checkpoints and not gone down to the ticket counters and baggage areas, where it was dangerous. He had taught her that if she had to wait in an airport, she should stay in a ladies’ room because the people she had to fear would almost certainly be men.

His problem now was that he had also taught her a few ways to get false identification papers that weren’t exactly false. People loitering in MacArthur Park every afternoon could produce a fairly good-looking California driver’s license for two hundred bucks, but the license would be too crude for a person to use to start a new identity. She needed real documents.

Till had gone with her to take out a marriage license. Then he had taught her to forge the last name of her husband to give him—and herself—whatever new name she wanted. Almost nobody ever tampered with the names on marriage licenses, so they had not been made difficult to alter. All she had to do was take the marriage license and her driver’s license to the DMV and pay a fee to get a new license in her husband’s last name. As soon as she was settled somewhere else, she could exchange the California license for a driver’s license in her new state. She could repeat the process there, and end up with a second new last name. Any artifice could be unraveled, but no conceivable inquiry about Wendy Harper was likely to lead a hunter through two states and three names to her new identity.

The Social Security number was just as easy. She had to obtain a genuine birth certificate for herself, change the surname and birth date, and apply for a number for a newborn daughter with a name that was a variant of her own. Since the card didn’t carry a birth date, she could use it.

Once she had the major documents, there were hundreds of ways of bolstering her new identity: Open a bank account, rent an apartment, and pay her utility bills for a month, and she would be a new person. Applying for a library card, a health-club membership and a few other easy cards would fill out her identity. She didn’t need to fool a squad of FBI agents, just the kid handling the desk at Blockbuster Video or the lady who worked part-time at the gift shop.

Till could still see her face, giving the incredulous look. “It’s that easy?”

“The key is avoiding resistance.”

“What kind of resistance?”

“You don’t just go around in a flurry applying for things. You wait until somebody asks you and then sign up. You wait for those letters that say ‘Your acceptance is assured.’ It’s not, but they’re hungry for your business. Deal with people who want to help you fool them.”

“Then what? Am I going to have to lay low and go out only at night or something? Live some kind of half-life?”

He said, “At first you will have to lay low. It won’t be pleasant or easy. After a while, you’ll feel safe enough to be with people. Stay out of hip restaurants and bars. Go where nobody is going to be looking for you—get a job that keeps you out of sight in the day, go to night classes. From the first day, you’ve got to have a story about yourself, and you’ve got to stick to it. Once you have a friend or two, they’ll help keep you safe. You’ll go places with them instead of alone, and that will make you look different. They’ll introduce you to their friends and tell them your story, and the new people will believe it because they heard it from them, not you.”

He had made sure he didn’t know the name she chose for her first doctored marriage license, so now he had no idea what she had called herself on her airline ticket. He sat in the Santa Barbara police station at his borrowed desk and examined the passenger lists for flights that departed between 12:01 P.M. and 11:59 P.M. He began by crossing off the names of men and boys. That eliminated more than half. Then he went through again and found the names of women and girls who had seats beside people with the same surname. That was another third. The remaining names belonged to women traveling alone.

There were no Wendys. He had been expecting a Wendy. The method that he had taught her was to appear to have had her surname changed in a marriage, but that would still make her a Wendy. As he went over the lists again, wondering if he had missed one, he thought of another possibility. He took out his cell phone and looked at the card he carried in his wallet, then dialed Jay Chernoff’s home phone number. When he heard Chernoff’s voice say, “Hello,” he said, “What’s her middle name?”

“What?”

Till said, “Sorry to call you at night. But I never heard her middle name, or if I did, I forgot it.”

“It’s on some of the court papers. The indictment will have it, if nothing else. Let me get my briefcase and look.” He was gone for at least a minute, and then he returned. “It’s Ann, with no e.”

“A-N-N. Got it. Thanks, Jay. I’ll try not to bother you again for a while.”

“Where are you?”

“I’d rather not say on the telephone, just in case they put something on your line. Let’s make them work for it.”

“All right. Then good luck.”

“Thanks.”

Till disconnected. As they were speaking, he had already begun running his finger down the lists of passengers looking for Anns. He knew that he had been right. She would have been able to use whatever new surname she had put on the marriage license, but her driver’s license would still say Wendy Ann Something. She could call herself Ann and still use the license as identification to get on the plane. There were plenty of people whose parents had inflicted names on them that they hated, so they used their middle names.

He found three women named Ann who had flown out of Santa Barbara that day traveling alone. There was Ann Mercer, who had flown to San Francisco. There was Ann Wiggett, who had flown to Los Angeles, and Ann Delatorre on a flight to Las Vegas.

He tried to put himself inside Wendy’s mind. The name Ann Wiggett sounded like Wendy Harper looked. Wendy was white-blond, with fine hair and very light skin that sometimes seemed transparent. She could easily be the sort of woman whose ancestors all had names like Wiggett and Hemsdale. But would Wendy choose that name?

Ann Mercer sounded like a practical name for Wendy Harper. Mercer was common enough to be unsurprising to the people she met, and it was the same length as Harper, easy to fit into documents she wanted to alter.

He swiveled in his chair and looked at the cop behind him, a young detective who was reading something that looked from a distance like an autopsy report. Till said, “Excuse me. I’m Jack Till, from Los Angeles. Kohler is helping me on a case.”

“I figured,” said the cop. “I’m Dave Cota.”

“I wondered if you had a phone directory I can use.”

“Sure. It’s up there on the table.”

“Thanks.” Till had intentionally not said he was a private investigator. He stood at the table and leafed through the book quickly. Regular telephone books had been useless for years because most people paid to keep their numbers unlisted. He had to use the special police directory that listed everybody while he was here in the station. He started with the name Wiggett.

There were three numbers, all under the name Howard Wiggett. He dialed the first Wiggett number, and a man who was probably Howard Wiggett answered. Till said, “May I speak with Ann Wiggett, please?”

“I’m sorry,” said the man. “Mrs. Wiggett has already retired for the evening. May I help you?”

Till decided to go for complete verification. “I’m calling from United Airlines. I have a record that on August 30 six years ago, Mrs. Wiggett flew from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles. Was there a piece of luggage belonging to her that was misplaced?”

The man hesitated. “Six years? That’s a long time. It’s quite likely that she was on the flight. She used to visit her parents in New York, and the flights usually stopped in Los Angeles. But I can’t recall her ever losing any luggage. Can I take your number and call you back tomorrow?”

“Certainly,” Till said. “800-555-0600. I’ll make a note that we spoke. Thank you.” Then he hung up.

He tried Mercer. There were four Mercers, including one Ann. He dialed her number and when a woman answered, he said, “Is this Ann Mercer?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I’m calling from Southwest Airlines, and there’s something I’d like to check with you. If you don’t remember, we’ll certainly understand. On August 30, six years ago, did you fly from Santa Barbara to San Francisco?”

“Wow. That’s a long time ago. Let’s see. I probably did. I fly up there a couple of times every summer. What’s the problem?”

“No problem at all, ma’am. We’re cross-checking our reservation system right now to match it with our security system, and using old flight information as a test. Thank you for your cooperation.”

“But what—”

Till hung up. He called long-distance information for Las Vegas, and asked for Ann Delatorre’s number. A recording came on: “We’re sorry, but that number is not listed.”

He stood up, gathered his passenger lists, waved good-night to Detective Cota, and walked out of the office to the lobby and the street.

He felt pride in Wendy Harper. She had done well.