Silence

26

I CAN’T BELIEVE IT,” Sylvie exclaimed. “She was actually out of the car, standing up where I could see her perfectly, and I couldn’t get a shot at her.”

“We can’t open up with two carloads of kids standing around watching us do it. We’ve got to have them someplace where there aren’t witnesses.”

“I know that, Paul.”

Paul refused even to look at her. His eyes were on the rearview mirror. She sensed that she had made a mistake.

“There,” he said. “Duck down.”

She slid on the seat so her head was below the window. Paul leaned to the side over her to stay low. After a few seconds, he sat up, fastened his seat belt, and pulled away from the Laundromat where he had parked, and onto the street. “This is good,” he said. “I thought he’d turn the other way to get back on the freeway.”

“Well, he’s not. Where’s he going?”

“He’s taking the back roads. Get ready and maybe there will be a stretch where we can take them before King City.”

Sylvie pulled her hair back into a ponytail and put a rubber band on it to keep it from blowing around if she opened a window. She took her pistol out of her purse and set it on her lap, then began to prepare herself.

This stupid job was turning into an endurance test. It made her cranky and made Paul silent and withdrawn. This was all just temporary, an unpleasant few days. Now maybe she could end it. If she could just get a clear shot at that woman, the job would be over. Paul would drive away, find a place where they could ditch this car, and then take her home.

She leaned close to Paul and stared at the dashboard. “Do you think you can catch them here?”

“We’ve got twelve minutes, maybe only ten if we’re going to speed up to catch them on this stretch of road. Let’s hope it’s dark and empty ahead.” Paul seemed absorbed in his driving, moving beyond the glow of light from the gas stations and the street lamps, and into the dark countryside. They passed a few houses set at increasing intervals, each one slightly smaller than the last, until they passed a couple that had sides of gray weathered boards and windows that had been broken out years ago. The land in this part of the state had once been divided into small farms, but farms were enormous now, all owned by corporations instead of people.

Sylvie gazed ahead at the red taillights in the distance, then looked back for headlights. “There doesn’t seem to be anybody behind us.”

Paul didn’t respond to the hint. He stared ahead at the taillights, but she could detect no increase in his speed.

She held her gun the way he had taught her, with her finger alongside the trigger guard and her thumb where it could feel the safety. She flicked it off, then on again. “Honey, I’d like to take them on this highway. I’m ready to do it now.”

“So am I. But I don’t want them to see us coming. I’ve got to stay back while the road is straight and try to catch them on the curves, where they can’t see us.”

“Come on. If we catch them, then they’ll be dead, and it won’t matter if they saw us.”

“They’ll speed up.”

“Then they’ll be more likely to lose control and die.”

“So will we.”

“I’m willing to bet my life on you. I’ve done it before.”

Paul turned to look at her, and his expression was amused—not exactly fooled by the flattery, but enjoying it. “All right. We’ll give it a try.”

She could feel the car begin to accelerate, and she pressed her back against the backrest as they built up speed. When the car went over a slight rise in the road, it became almost airborne for a second, rising up on its springs and then sitting down again. When there was a dip, the car skipped over the first part and bounced into the upward incline. Sylvie watched the broken yellow line in the center of the road, the dashes looking shorter and quicker every second, until they looked almost solid.

Sylvie stared ahead as the other car went into a curve to the left, and she was glad she had coaxed Paul into making a move. The timing was just about the way he had wanted: He could speed toward them unseen on the curve, and come out practically on top of them. “I’m ready,” she said.

They went into the curve to the left, and Paul held the car to the inside of the lane, his left tires over the dividing line. Sylvie could feel the centrifugal force trying to push the car outward into the black stands of trees to her right. Her seat belt tightened on her and kept her from sliding into the door.

Paul brought the car well into the curve, but then Sylvie saw light ahead on the trees. “Someone’s coming the other way.”

She only had time to say it when she saw the headlights coming at them, and then they flashed past, and she heard a long blare of the horn, the Doppler effect taking it higher on the scale as the two speeding cars diverged. “God!” she muttered. The curve seemed to her to become more severe, but then they were out of it again, going straight. The taillights of Till’s rental car were directly ahead, only a couple of hundred feet away. “Beautiful, baby,” she said.

Paul was still gaining. “All set?”

“Yes. Just tell me when.”

“I’ll get him to pull into the right lane to let me pass. As soon as we’re beside their car, fire into Till’s head.”

“Okay.” She pushed the button on the door’s armrest to lower her window. The wind that came in was incredibly strong, brushing her right cheek and making it hard to keep her eyes open. She kept blinking, then held her left forearm up to divert its direct force. She turned to see how it was affecting Paul.

His hair was only a couple of inches long, but it was fluttering wildly, as though he were in a hurricane. She could still see his jaw set, see both his hands gripping the wheel, and feel the car accelerating.

Paul flashed his high-beam headlights at the other car, signaling that he wanted to pass, but Till hugged the left side of the road. “He knows,” Paul said.

“What?”

“He knows. He’s not letting me pass. He would let me pass him, like any normal person, if he didn’t know we were trying to get them.”

“Are you going to back off?”

“We’re committed. He’s seen this car. We’d have to ditch it, and we’re a long way from home. I’ll try to get closer, but you’ll just have to take the shots you have, and hope he’s hit or makes a mistake.”

Sylvie held the gun out the window and rested her arm on the door to fire, but at this speed every tiny bump in the road bounced her arm upward. Twice when her arm came down, the door was on the way up to hit her elbow. The jolt almost made her drop the gun. As she tried to sight the pistol, it bobbed and slid over Till’s image, and she couldn’t seem to hold it steady on target. “A little closer,” she said.

Paul kept the car accelerating, and it seemed to Sylvie that he was testing it, bringing the speed up an increment at a time and then holding it there for a few seconds to see if the wheels wobbled or the engine overheated. Paul moved to the left into the oncoming lane to give Sylvie a better angle. She extended her arm, held the sight on the speeding car ahead of them, and fired. The shot kicked her arm upward, but she fought it back down against the wind and fired again.

This time the rear window of the car ahead of them turned milky and then blew out of its frame, falling like a curtain of ice onto the trunk and sliding off onto the road. Some of the pieces, glittering in the glare of Paul’s headlights, blew into the air and ticked against the windshield and grille of Paul and Sylvie’s car. Sylvie ducked back inside to avoid being hit.

“Keep firing.”

Sylvie leaned out again and aimed, and this time she could see the two headrests clearly. She aimed at the one on the left where Jack Till’s head was, and fired twice, then a rapid volley of four shots. She had no way of knowing how many of her shots had missed Till’s car entirely, but she could see two holes in the trunk, and the safety glass of the windshield had a white impact splash of pulverized glass in the upper-left corner.

Sylvie released the gun’s empty magazine and dropped it in her purse while Paul pulled back into the right lane. A car, then two more, flashed past in the oncoming lane. Sylvie fished in her purse for the spare magazine.

Jack Till’s car made an unexpected move to the left as though he were unable to keep it straight. It drifted to the left into the oncoming lane. Paul said, “Look! You must have hit him.”

Till’s car veered across the left lane, off the pavement at an angle. As it crossed the shoulder, it kicked up gravel and a cloud of dust that made it hard for Sylvie to see. She listened for a crash, then looked for red taillights. When she found them, they were off the road in the field beside it, bouncing up and down wildly in the darkness.

Paul turned his car and crossed the road to the left shoulder, and Sylvie said, “No, you’re not—” But he was already on the shoulder by then and following Till’s car. As they left the road, Sylvie could hear the steady swish of weeds on the underside and rocker panels. The car hit a rut and bounced, aiming the headlights up into the sky, then down again. She could see that Paul was driving into a field of weeds that had probably belonged to a farm long ago. Everything on both sides was night-black emptiness, but ahead under the headlights she could see the dry yellow-brown weeds, and the swath that Jack Till had marked, pressed down flat where the tires had touched, and only half-down in the middle where the undercarriage had passed and bent them over.

She said, “I’m not sure I even hit him. Maybe I didn’t. He can still drive.”

“Keep trying.”

With difficulty, she braced herself against the car’s bouncing, drew the full magazine from her purse and inserted it into the pistol. She pushed it home with the heel of her hand, and tugged back the slide to cycle the first round into the chamber. She held the gun out the window, gripped her elbow with her left hand to steady it, and fired again.

This time she was sure her shot had gone high. She tried again, but her correction looked low. It was much harder to aim now than it had been on the road. The two cars were bucking and rocking as they crossed the field, but they were still going at least forty miles an hour. “Get him. Get closer,” she said. “We’ve got to be closer.”

Paul was wrestling with the steering wheel. When the tires hit uneven ground, he had to wrench the wheel back to correct it, then wrench it the other way. But he didn’t argue with her, and she felt the car speeding up a bit. The next jolt brought her up off her seat, so the seat belt tightened painfully across her chest and shoulders.

Till’s car reached the end of the flat field and bobbed down an incline, then went up a hill on the far side. Sylvie could see that this was pastureland, where the native short bushes, live oaks and dry grass reasserted themselves. She could see rocky outcroppings in a few places, and then Till’s car climbed a ridge and disappeared over the top.

Paul coasted to the edge of the field and stopped.

“What’s wrong?”

“We can’t drive up there.”

“He did.”

“He’s taking us off into the woods where there’s cover, and I can’t see a damned thing. It’s an ambush. He’s going to lie down in the right place, aim his gun, and wait for us to come creeping along at five miles an hour. Besides, if we wreck a wheel or something and get stuck out here, we’re finished.”

She was relieved. She sensed that she would be in a stronger position if she didn’t exactly agree, but only acquiesced. “Okay.” Men didn’t really want consensus. They wanted to be obeyed.

Paul turned the car in a slow, wide circle until the headlights illuminated the path of flattened weeds he had followed to get here. Sylvie could look up the path to the end of the headlights’ beam where the weeds faded into the dark. Till had led them far from the road.

“ARE YOU ALL RIGHT?”

“Yes.”

Till’s rental car was tilted to one side in a creek bed. The only sound was a trickle of water a few inches wide that ran out from under the car and meandered among the stones into the dark. After a few seconds, Ann Donnelly realized the water was probably from a puncture in the car’s radiator.

Jack Till switched off the headlights, pushed his door open against gravity until it stayed, and pulled himself up and out. Then he held on to the side of the car and walked around to Ann Donnelly’s door. “Come on. We’ve got to get away from the car.” He opened her door, reached across her and released her seat belt, then held her to keep her from sliding out too quickly. She put her feet down and found her footing.

They climbed up the far bank of the creek together. In the moonlight Till could see taller vegetation along the creek. He conducted her to a spot about fifty feet downstream where the brush was thick. He said softly, “We’ll wait here for them to catch up.”

Ann sat down beside the thick bushes. She looked closely at the leaves and realized they were probably young oak trees competing for space and light at the edge of the creek. Even in the dark, she could tell the back of the car was a mess. Besides the blown-out rear window and the holes punched in the trunk, there were dents and scratches along one side and one of the wheels had been knocked askew by the rock Jack had hit when the car went into the creek bed.

They waited for a long time without speaking or moving. Finally Ann Donnelly was more uncomfortable than afraid. She wanted to lie down on the bed of leaves where she was sitting, but the darkness was deep enough to let her imagine snakes and poisonous spiders. Just as her imaginary spiders had become scorpions, Jack touched her arm and whispered, “I don’t think they’re coming for us.”

“No?”

“No. We need cops, but calling them from here probably won’t help. They’d take hours to find us. Let’s walk out to the highway and call.”

“Okay. Should I take my suitcase?”

“No. If we make it out, we can get our stuff when they tow the car.”

They began to walk. Till led her farther down the creek bed to a place where it was dry and wide and the slopes were gradual, and then up onto the empty field. She said, “You were right. They seem to have left.”

“Yes. It’s kind of a mixed outcome. I was hoping that what I did to our rental car would happen to their car, too.”

“I’ll bet you’re wondering how you get involved in things like this.”

“I don’t wonder. I know why I do.”

“Why?”

He didn’t answer because he had his telephone to his ear. “Yes. My name is Jack Till. A few minutes ago, two people in a car ran me off Highway G15. They fired a few shots at me and hit my rental car. They were in a green Toyota, late model, one of the bigger ones, probably a Camry or an Avalon.”

He listened for a moment. “My friend and I are stranded, but we’re not hurt. I can’t give you the exact location, but it’s a big field of weeds on the east side of the road about halfway between Soledad and King City. We’re walking back from a dry arroyo where our car got stuck. We’ll be near the road in a few minutes watching for a police car. Can you ask them to run their warning lights for us? I want to be sure the car I flag down isn’t the one that was chasing me. Thanks.”

Till disconnected and kept walking. “The cops will be coming along the road pretty soon. Probably by the time we can walk there.” He thought about what Ann Donnelly had asked—why he got involved in things like this. He had told her the truth. He did know exactly why, and it was a secret he had been living with and lying about for so long that the secret was a part of him. He never thought about it anymore except when something reminded him.

Till had graduated from UCLA at twenty-two with a major in history and no job, found temporary work as a clerk in a liquor store during the day, and waited tables in the evenings. A week after his roommates had moved on, Till found his own apartment in Hollywood, where rents were cheaper in the older buildings.

Two young cops named Johnny and José would visit the liquor store about once a week. The store was on their regular rounds because there were some street characters in the neighborhood who acted as snitches for them, and snitches didn’t like to be seen outdoors chatting with a pair of cops. Sometimes while they were waiting, Johnny and José would talk to Till. Late that fall, one of them said to him, “You’re a smart kid, Jack. You should be a cop.” He had laughed and said, “Not me, man. I’m a lover, not a fighter.”

He remembered the words later because that was the night when the girl picked him out. He was in the Cobra Club, standing in a fluid crowd of people who were gradually making their way to the bar when she had simply appeared at his shoulder. He glanced down and noticed her long, dark hair, and then found that her brown eyes were already fixed on him. He had the presence of mind to smile and dispel the discomfort.

She smiled, too. “Hi,” she said. “Do we know each other?”

“No. I wish we did, though. Can I buy you a drink?”

“Sure. White wine.” The meeting had been that quick and simple, as they always were when two people wanted to meet. She had stood with him and they had talked while they waited their turn at the bar. She said she had never been to this club before, but liked it, and he told her that he had heard of it a year ago but had never gotten around to a visit. Three times other men emerged from the crowd to ask her to dance, but she had turned a dimmer version of her smile on them and said, “No, thank you.” He had wondered if he was supposed to get rid of them for her, but he couldn’t see what that could accomplish other than a bar brawl that would scare her off.

He bought their drinks and they made an attempt to dance on the crowded floor, and then moved farther from the music until they could hear each other. He said he was Jack Till, and she said she was Nicole. He knew they were going to leave together and so did she, so he wondered why she didn’t want him to know her last name.

At one-thirty, she asked him to follow her home in his car. He was parked very close to the Cobra Club. When he had arrived after work at eleven-thirty, another car had just been pulling out of a prime space, so he had pulled in. He drove her to her car, and they kissed before she got out. He watched her step to her car, a little red Honda Civic, and felt astonished at his good fortune. She was extremely appealing, and they seemed to have formed an instant attraction. He was already aware that women often made their final decisions about men within a few seconds, but still wondered at her interest in him. As he drove east on Hollywood Boulevard, then north to follow her into the curving streets into the hills, he had misgivings. She was too pretty for him. Why had she picked him out among all of those men?

Had she made a bet with a girlfriend that she could pick up a guy before the girlfriend could? No. Men did that kind of thing, not women. Had she seen someone in the club she wanted to avoid? Maybe one of those guys who had hit on her while she was at the bar with him?

When Nicole arrived at her apartment building, pulled into the driveway, and waited for the barred gate to rise and let her drive down under the building to park in her assigned space, Till stopped his car at the curb across the street and watched. He half-expected her to go upstairs on the inner staircase and lock her door. Instead, she walked across the street and stood beside his car until he got out, then took his hand and said, “I didn’t see you behind me. I was afraid I lost you on one of those turns.”

“No, but if you were hoping you had, there won’t be any hard feelings.”

“I invited you.”

“But you might have changed your mind on the way.”

“You’re going to have to stop that.”

“What?”

“Asking me if I really mean the opposite of what I say.”

“Sorry.”

Jack followed Nicole into the building, up the carpeted steps and through her door. Her apartment was newer, cleaner and larger than his. She had a real living room with matching furniture and pictures on the wall like respectable adults had, and not an ill-assorted collection of garage-sale castoffs and dubious bargains like the furnishings in Till’s studio. A few minutes later, he discovered that she also had matching sheets and pillowcases that didn’t clash with the bedspread. After that he didn’t see much of the decor because he was devoting all of his attention to her. It was very late when she said, “Jack, I’m afraid you’ve got to go home now. I need to sleep before work.”

He memorized her telephone number and address, then read her full name off her mailbox on his way out: Nicole Kelleher. He got into his car and began to drive. As he retraced the route back out of the hills toward Hollywood, he was surprised to see that there was another car behind him taking the same turns.

He ignored the car at first, but then he began to wonder if Nicole was trying to catch him because he had forgotten something. He pulled over to the curb, left his motor running and his lights on, and looked into the rearview mirror to watch the other car overtake him. It didn’t. The car simply pulled to the curb a half block away and turned off its lights. Jack pulled away from the curb and the car followed. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising. As an experiment, he took a turn to the left, away from the predictable route into Hollywood. The second car followed.

Jack made more turns, trying to see what the other car looked like under lighted streetlamps at intersections. He determined that it was a year-old BMW, and there was only one person in it. It was after four o’clock in the morning, and it was clear that the car’s presence wasn’t a coincidence. In his experience, nobody who could afford a BMW needed to rob Jack Till, but he wasn’t willing to bet his life on it. He watched the driver’s behavior, and gradually limited the possibilities to one: The driver was trying to follow him home. Till made a few turns, crossed Hollywood Boulevard to the south, and kept going. He began to form a picture in his mind of the right place to stop, and then searched for it as he drove.

Finally, after fifteen minutes of driving, he turned abruptly into a dark street, then into a driveway that led into a loading dock at the back of some kind of business. The other car went past the driveway, and Till could see the driver staring after him. The driver was a white male about his age, wearing a yellow hooded windbreaker. Till quickly backed out of the driveway, but instead of turning around and going the other way, he drove after the BMW.

The BMW stopped abruptly in the middle of the street. When Till pulled forward to pass, the BMW moved in the same direction to block him. Till tried going to the right, but the BMW pulled to the right and cut him off. The door of the BMW flew open and the driver emerged, running toward Till. Till’s headlights revealed that the man had something in his right hand, but there was no time to see what it was. The man swung his arm and hit Till’s side window. It shattered, the glass flying against Till’s chest and into his lap.

The man raised his arm for a second swing, and Till pushed his door open as hard as he could into the man, his whole body behind it as he emerged from the car. He heard the man grunt and saw him stagger backward. Till could see that what the man was holding was a claw hammer, like the ones carpenters used. Till said, “What the hell are you doing? I don’t even know you.”

“Well, I know you, asshole!” The man’s face was contorted with rage, his teeth bared and his eyes squinted in hatred. “You were with Nicole.”

“What’s it got to do with you? Are you an old boyfriend or something?”

The man lunged toward him, taking a wide swing with the hammer. Till dodged it, and the man’s swing of the heavy hammer brought his arm across his body so he was momentarily off balance and defenseless. Till delivered a hard punch to the middle of his face, into his nose and upper teeth, that rocked him back and made him fall to the pavement. Till said, “Leave the hammer on the ground and we’ll talk.”

The man rose and sprang at Till again, but Till dodged and hit him as he went past. The punch connected with the added force of the man’s momentum, and Till felt it all the way to his shoulder. He relaxed for a moment because he was sure the fight was over, but this time the man’s recovery was a genuine surprise. The man should have gone down, but he pivoted and swung the hammer again, and this time he didn’t miss.

The hammer hit Till’s side, just below his rib cage. The hammer’s head had turned in the man’s hand, so the injury was more painful than damaging. Till instantly spun to face the man, and as his body reacted to protect itself, it took his mind with it. Till was wild with hurt and anger as he charged the man. He hit him just as he was trying to get a better grip on the hammer, and knocked it to the pavement. As the man reached for it, Till punched him four or five times in a combination, driving him back out of reach of the hammer. Till kept coming, knocked him down, threw himself on him, and hit him three more times. Each of his punches drove the man’s head into the pavement. He stared down at the man and waited for the next move, the next trick, his right arm drawn back to hit him again.

But this time the man didn’t move. His eyes were closed. His mouth was now bloody, his nose broken and out of line. His face had acquired a flat, loose look, as though the muscles weren’t under his control anymore. He seemed to be unconscious. Till stood up and took a step backward, waiting for the man’s next move: a kick to trip him and bring him down, another weapon, a sudden tackle. There was no movement. Till gave the man’s leg a kick. There was no reaction, no twitch of an eyelid. The man’s head was cocked to the side a little. Fine. Let the son of a bitch be knocked out, Till thought. He can wake up in a few minutes and think about what a fool he is.

Till picked up the hammer, got into his car, turned around, and drove back the way he had come. As he prepared to make the first turn to the west toward Hollywood, he looked into the rearview mirror. The man lay on the pavement just as Till had left him, his car parked in the middle of the street above him.

Till turned and drove away.

A few hours later, when Till’s alarm woke him for his job at the liquor store, he turned on the television. The reporter was saying, “Sometime in the early hours of the morning, Steven Winslow of La Canada was beaten to death in a quiet neighborhood near the center of the city. Police say the body of Winslow, who was twenty-six years old, was found at seven A.M. in the two-hundred block of Pilcher Avenue. He appears to have been killed in an attempted robbery of some kind, possibly a carjacking. The street was apparently chosen because it is in an industrial block where businesses had been closed for hours, and is partially obscured by the soundstages of a small movie studio. No one reported hearing the victim’s cries. Police are asking that anyone who has any information about the crime, or who saw Mr. Winslow at any time last evening, call the Rampart Station.”

Till remembered the moment when he had straddled Steven Winslow, his fist raised, waiting for any movement. He had, at that moment, been ready to kill him—he had thrown off all compunction. He realized now that Winslow probably had already been dead, but that hardly mattered.

He called in sick to the liquor store and watched television as long as there were reports, then went out to buy the afternoon edition of the papers. He read about the crime and waited for the police to come and knock on his door. There was no question what was going to happen then. His car window was shattered. His hands were scraped, and his right knuckle had a deep cut where he had hit Winslow’s teeth. He had snatched the hammer off the street before he had left, and it was still on the floor of his car. When the police began to ask questions, they would learn that he had picked up Winslow’s girlfriend at a club, and spent the night at her apartment. They would look at the crime scene again and realize that Winslow had died in a fight. Who else would he have been fighting with, and what else would he have been fighting about? Nicole would tell them what had happened between them and who he was.

He waited all day for the police to come. The next day he went to work, and when he came home he read in the Times that Winslow’s fiancée, Nicole Kelleher, twenty-one, had been interviewed. She said she could not imagine why such a tragedy had occurred, because Winslow was one of those people who had never had any enemies: “Everyone just loved Steve.” She and Winslow had been planning to be married in about a year, but had not yet set a date. They had dated exclusively for nearly three years, but had been engaged for only four weeks.

Even while Till was consumed with guilt and regret for what he had done, part of his mind was mulling over the evening with Nicole and remembering the sensation that something was wrong. When he looked at the photograph of the girl in the newspaper and read her statements to the reporters, he realized what it was.

She must have known that Steven was spying on her. Till wasn’t sure what had been going through her mind at the time, but he knew she had been aware he was watching and she had staged their liaison. Now that he thought about it, she had behaved as though she was trying to make sure Steven kept watching and following.

All kinds of small observations that had puzzled Till now made sense, beginning with her choice of him at the Cobra Club. Till had not been the sort of man this girl would pick. She was bait for the ex-prom-kings and the boys home from Princeton for the summer. At twenty-two, Till was tall and lean, with a face that had already taken a few punches. He made no sense as her partner in a summer one-night stand. But he was a perfect choice as an adversary for somebody like Steven.

She had definitely wanted to be seen. She had approached Till in the middle of the dance floor of the club, and stood right there under the lights talking to him for a long time, even though she kept attracting other men and turning them down. When Till and Nicole had left together, she had made a point of getting into his car with him right in front of the club, and having him drive her the short distance to where her car was parked instead of walking her there. She had kissed him before she got out of the car, and he remembered that she had opened the door so the dome light went on while she was still kissing him.

She had asked him to follow her car to her apartment. She had driven slowly and waited at traffic signals to make it easy for him to follow and, he knew now, for Steven to follow. She had parked in her space and then come back out, standing in the center of the street with him as though she wanted to be seen. He remembered her looking down the street, almost furtively. She had probably been verifying that Steven’s car had arrived, and was parked there with its lights off.

Nicole Kelleher and Steven Winslow had changed his life. What had made Till feel that he had to perform some kind of public service was killing Steven Winslow. What had made him know he should be a detective was Nicole Kelleher.

Years later, after he had made Homicide, he took a look at the murder book that the detectives of the time had made for the death of Steven Winslow. He opened the single looseleaf notebook and found that there was nothing much in it—no interviews with eyewitnesses, no motive, no suspects, not even a reliable time of death. The cause of death had been blunt trauma to the back of the head. Jack Till was surprised to learn that the blood found at the scene had all belonged to Steven Winslow, because he remembered his own bleeding hands. It was clear that the technicians had taken samples at a number of places at the scene, and had simply missed whatever drops had belonged to Till. Since those days, the search for DNA evidence at crime scenes had grown feverish, but at the time the blood had merely been sampled and typed.

He read with intense interest the police interviews with Nicole Kelleher. She had shown the detectives only the grieving young wife-to-be. She had been planning to see Steve at noon that day. He had told her they were going to look for a present for her, and she thought he was planning to take her to pick out her engagement ring. They were that kind of couple. Steve would never have bought her a ring in advance and slipped it on her finger when she had said yes to his proposal. In families like theirs, the ring would be a lifetime investment and cost a lot of money, so the shopping was a serious task.

Winslow’s father, Steve Senior, was the owner of a company that sold protective clothing for people who handled toxic substances, and he had done well. His son Steve would have taken over when he retired. Nobody in the family had anything helpful to say about Steve’s associates, his activities, or his habits. The detectives had left notes to indicate that Steve had been charged with assaulting a woman at the age of seventeen, but the charges had been dropped when the victim changed her mind about testifying. It was clear to Till that the father had paid off the victim. There had also been a record of speeding tickets, two disorderly conducts, and a DUI. The father said those were all just the result of high spirits, that Steve was a great source of pride, and that Nicole would always be considered a member of the Winslow family.

By then Till had learned a few more lessons about human behavior, and the assault charge and the disorderly conducts had made him consider the possibility that the reason Nicole had wanted Steven to meet Jack Till was that Steven had taken up hitting her when he was displeased. At that point, Till closed the murder book, returned it to the cold-case archives, and never looked at it again.

Jack Till and Ann Donnelly hiked across the derelict field toward the road. His legs were long, and he had moved a pace ahead of her, ostensibly so they could walk single file in the tire tracks instead of fighting through the tall weeds.

“Have you ever been married?” she asked.

“Not lately.”

“What does that mean?”

“I wasn’t very good at it.”

“I don’t think it’s about skills. I think it’s about attraction and connection. There’s no skill to those things.”

She walked on for a few steps, and Jack Till began to think she was satisfied for the moment. He was relieved. He had kept the story of Rose’s leaving him a secret for so long because he felt he needed to protect Holly. The story seemed to belong to her, not to him.

“So why did you really decide to come and bring me back?”

“Because Eric Fuller was arrested for your murder. Maybe I felt some responsibility.”

“And maybe you feel a connection with me.”

“Maybe. Maybe I think that you and I share the responsibility.” Lights were visible ahead, and Jack Till waved his arms over his head and trotted toward the highway. After a moment the police car stopped, and a bright spotlight swept the field and found him. He held his arms out from his sides, then half-turned to call to her. “Show him you have nothing in your hands. I don’t want any doubts about who the good guys are.”

HOURS LATER, Till stood by a tree on the edge of the dry creek bed and watched the oversized tow truck drag his rental car up the incline toward level ground. The winch tightened and he saw the hook slip and scrape the bottom of the car, but that hardly mattered. Somebody’s insurance company was going to be paying the cost of a new car. There wasn’t much glass left, the front end seemed to be cocked to the right, and there were bullet holes in the trunk and in some of the sheet metal at the rear of the car.

He turned away from the car when the older cop walked back to talk to him. Till could see that his partner was still sitting in the police car beside Ann Donnelly. The older cop said, “Well, she verified your crazy story in all its particulars. I guess that surprised me more than it surprises you.”

“Maybe a little,” Till agreed. “This has been pretty stressful for her.”

“I checked you with the LAPD,” the cop said. “It seems that maybe what I ought to be asking is just what we can do to help you.”

Till held his eyes on him. “I was trying to drive her to the DA’s office in Los Angeles without being spotted, but that didn’t work out. So I would appreciate it if you would do a couple of things for us.”

“What are they?”

“Get her fingerprints and take her picture—front and side mug shots ought to do it. That way, if for some reason we don’t make it, then at least Eric Fuller won’t get convicted of killing her.”

“We’d be happy to do that,” said the cop. “Just tell me where to send it.”

“If you’ll give me your notebook, I’ll write it down for you.”

The cop handed him a small notebook and a pen, and Till talked as he wrote. “Sergeant Max Poliakoff, Homicide Special. Here’s his number, and the address at Parker Center.”

The cop accepted the notebook and turned his flashlight on it. “You have a good memory.”

“Not that good. It was my desk before it was his.” Till looked over at the police car, where Ann Donnelly was still sitting with the other police officer, and turned away so she couldn’t read his lips. “The other thing you can do is drive me to a place where I can rent another car. I want to find a quiet place where she and I can stay out of sight for a day or two, then take her into Los Angeles when I think the time is right. And I’d appreciate it if nobody writes down where we went. The man who’s hiring these people won’t give up while she’s alive.”