Silence

18

JACK TILL got off the plane in San Francisco and made his way to the car-rental counters. While he waited for the keys to a car, he kept turning his head and scanning the changing, moving crowds of people behind him, looking for some constant, some person who stayed in sight.

His search for Wendy Harper was different now that Ann Delatorre was dead. Till had not been able to stay in Henderson to wait for the crime lab and the autopsy, but he had seen enough bodies to know that she’d been beaten before she had died. Probably her assailant had been trying to get information. It had ended with a shot to the side of the head near the back from less than a foot away—close enough to singe her hair a little. He hoped it had been a shot taken out of anger and frustration at a failure to make her talk.

The angle of the shot to her head hinted at more bad news: Judging from the marks on the wall in the hallway where the blood was, and the marks on the right side of her forehead, he believed that the person who had beaten her had used his right hand to hit her head against the wall. A shot to the left side of the head at the back meant a person holding a gun in his left hand. To Till, the difference raised the possibility that there had been two people involved in the killing.

Till had to go to the baggage-check office to pick up his gun in its locked carrying case before he went to his rental car. A day ago he would probably not have opened the case, but now everything had changed. Now that Ann Delatorre had been killed, he knew that the danger wasn’t theoretical or distant. He drove his car out of the airport onto the 101 freeway, then took the next exit and pulled into the first big open-air parking lot near a Costco store. He unlocked the case, loaded the gun, put it into its holster, and clipped it to his belt.

He drove into San Francisco with the last of the morning traffic. He had called Max Poliakoff from Las Vegas to convert Wendy Harper’s telephone number into an address in San Rafael. He had been hoping to get to the house before Wendy Harper went off to work or whatever she did, but it was already past eleven, so he had probably missed her.

Till headed northward into the city and through its center, across the Golden Gate Bridge to San Rafael. After Max Poliakoff had given him the address, he had used a computer at the hotel in Las Vegas to go onto a real-estate site where he had found the name of the legal owner and a description of the house. The house had been bought four years ago. It had four bedrooms, four bathrooms, and a pool, and was 4,500 square feet on a half acre of land.

Wendy Harper’s luck seemed to have improved. She had apparently started badly in Las Vegas, floundering, living in a cheap apartment building among people who were essentially transients and fugitives. She had made a very lucky meeting in the woman she renamed Ann Delatorre, but a big part of her luck was that she didn’t meet anyone who would hurt her or make an effort to find out what betraying her might be worth.

Till drove along the streets of San Rafael, watching the signs for the right one. The listing had said the house belonged to Dennis Donnelly. That was a ploy that Till admired. Wendy Harper must have converted herself to Ann Donnelly, put a bid on the house, and invented a husband who was too busy to come to the escrow office to sign the papers, so she had to take them to him and get them notarized. Or maybe she had simply bought the house in one name and transferred ownership to the other to make her nonexistent husband the owner.

Jack Till found the street and coasted past the house, looking in his practiced way at every aspect of it without letting his foot touch the brake, and then studying the mental image of it he had filed away. It was long and low, with a lot of expensive wooden detail work along the eaves and windows and the front door. The big pieces of natural wood gave the place a look that was somewhere between Craftsman and Japanese. It was the sort of architecture that had characterized the house she had owned with Eric Fuller and the enclosed area at the back of their restaurant, where the tables began inside the dining room and spilled out through an open glass wall onto the stone patio with groves of dwarf evergreens. That had been in Los Angeles, where bad weather was mostly theoretical, and the sun shone three hundred and fifty days a year. He supposed that up here in the Bay Area, things like rain and cold wind weren’t unusual, and the doors would be more substantial.

He had also spotted two signs on the lawn and one on the gate that said “NATIONAL PACIFIC SECURITY—ARMED RESPONSE.” He stopped the car around the corner and called 4-1-1.

“What city, please?”

“San Rafael.”

“Go ahead.”

“Do you have a number for National Pacific Security?”

There was a pause. “There’s no number for San Rafael. No listing for Marin. Nothing for San Francisco. Nothing for Oakland. You could try San Jose.”

“Thank you very much.” Till disconnected. If there was a security company that responded when its alarms went off, it would have to maintain an office nearby. The sign was a fake, one of those signs that people picked up to fool burglars into thinking the place was wired when it wasn’t. Everything that Wendy Harper did showed a growing knowledge of how to stay hidden. Putting up signs probably gave her most of the protection an alarm system would.

Till left his car where it was, walked to the front door of the house, and rang the bell. There was no answer, no sound of movement inside, so he tried the bell twice more and waited. There was still no sound from inside, so he walked around to the back. There was a high wooden fence that ran from the house to the garage. He reached over the gate to feel for the latch, and opened it. He waited for a few seconds, scanning the yard for a sign that Wendy Harper owned a dog.

There was no dog. He was mildly surprised. Wendy had seemed to him to be a person who would see a dog as a cheap form of security. He stepped along the stone path from the gate, glanced at the pool, and felt her presence: She’d had it landscaped with a lot of rocks and a fake waterfall that reminded him again of the gardens outside the restaurant in Los Angeles.

He stepped close to the sliding glass door at the rear of the house and looked in. He could see a grand piano with framed photographs on it, and a few more on the mantel over the fireplace. He strained his eyes, hoping to pick out a picture of the woman of the house. He could see a few of a man and some small children, but none of a woman. He supposed that having no pictures of herself around confirmed that this was Wendy’s house. She was also certainly capable of getting some pictures of a man and some children to leave around and make her seem even more like other women her age.

Till saw something else, and he felt his breathing deepen and his muscles tighten. There was a frame lying flat with its back opened. The glass lay beside it. Someone had removed the photograph. Till hurried along the back of the house, looking in windows and doors. He wanted desperately not to find broken windows or forced doors. If everything was intact, then maybe she had taken the photograph with her.

But he saw it as soon as he turned the corner: a broken window that led to the master bedroom. The sash had been opened and left that way. He moved closer, his gaze automatically drawn to the bed, and then to the floor. There was no body. He used his handkerchief to touch the outer edge of the window where he would not be destroying fingerprints, lifted it higher, and then stepped over the sill into the room. He took out his gun and began to move forward cautiously, listening for sounds that would indicate the intruders were still in the house.

Maybe he had been unrealistic about Ann Delatorre. She had not been able to resist the beatings, and had given the killers this address. He moved from room to room listening and looking. There were two children. One looked from her picture to be about seven and the other about five. There was a man—not just a name on a deed, but an actual man who left his shoes lying on the floor and had coats hanging in the closet and shirts in the laundry hamper.

The kids had the same kind of thin blond hair that Wendy Harper had had six years ago, but they were too old to be her biological children. He scanned the collection of pictures on the piano and found a snapshot of a wide beach with big rocks, with Wendy kneeling there, hugging the kids and grinning. Biological or not, they were hers. He found a good picture of the man standing in front of a brownish Nissan Maxima that was no more than a year old.

The man was a shock to Till. When he realized that there was a real Dennis Donnelly, he felt an unexpected heaviness in his stomach. He tried to tell himself that what he had done six years ago had led her to this pleasant place and given her a life with a wonderful family. It was futile. Six years ago, Till had not wanted to take advantage of a desperate woman. He had not wanted to risk his daughter Holly’s safety by bringing home a woman who was a target for murderers. He had reminded himself that Wendy Harper was a client. Six years ago, he had resisted his strong attraction to her for the best reasons, and he had regretted it a thousand times since then.

He knew she’d given him plenty of reasons not to care about her. She’d had knowledge of a probable murder, but wouldn’t tell anyone who the murderer was, or even who the victim was. He had given her his standard ex-cop lecture about her responsibility to the community to help get a killer out of it. He had told her she would have a share of the guilt for the killing of the next woman this man met.

She had listened, she had agreed with the premise, but she had not told him anything he could use. She’d said she didn’t know the man’s name, couldn’t even describe him very well. In the end, Jack Till had accepted the argument that she had a right to leave town, and acknowledged that if she didn’t she would probably be killed. She had not done anything to invite the danger, and she had a right to get out of it.

Till looked hard at the man in the photograph, at Dennis Donnelly. He was young—maybe thirty-one or -two, but with a square-jawed, open face that seemed good-natured and pleasant. Till tried to decide whether he would have liked it better if Donnelly had looked ugly or stupid, but he realized he wouldn’t have. He had wanted Wendy to succeed, to have a happy life, and he supposed the man was part of what he should have wanted for her.

Till went through the rest of the house, but nothing had been disturbed except the empty picture frame. He knew that they had taken the photograph to use in their search for her. He avoided moving or even touching anything else, and left the house the way he had come in.

The hunters had gotten here first, but Wendy Harper was out, and she was alive.