Whispers

"Yes. There was a man--"

A second detective, taller and darker than the first, appeared out of the night and interrupted her before she could finish the sentence. "Is he on the premises?"

"What?"

"Is the man who assaulted you still here?"

"Oh, no. Gone. He's gone."

"Which way did he go?" the blond man asked.

"Out this door."

"Did he have a car?"

"I don't know."

"Was he armed?"

"No. I mean, yes."

"Which is it?"

"He had a knife. But not now."

"Which way did he run when he left the house?"

"I don't know. I was upstairs. I--"

"How long ago did he leave?" the tall dark one asked.

"Maybe fifteen, maybe twenty minutes ago."

They exchanged a look that she did not understand but which she knew, immediately, was not good for her.

"What took you so long to call it in?" the blond asked.

He was slightly hostile.

She felt she was losing some important advantage that she could not identify.

"At first I was ... confused," she said. "Hysterical. I needed a few minutes to get myself together."

"Twenty minutes?"

"Maybe it was only fifteen."

Both detectives put away their revolvers.

"We'll need a description," the dark one said.

"I can give you better than that," she said as she stepped aside to let them enter. "I can give you a name."

"A name?"

"His name. I know him," she said. "The man who attacked me. I know who he is."

The two detectives gave each other that look again. She thought: What have I done wrong?

***

Hilary Thomas was one of the most beautiful women Tony had ever seen. She appeared to have a few drops of Indian blood. Her hair was long and thick, darker than his own, a glossy raven-black. Her eyes were dark, too, the whites as clear as pasteurized cream. Her flawless complexion was a light milky bronze shade, probably largely the result of carefully measured time in the California sun. If her face was a bit long, that was balanced by the size of her eyes (enormous) and by the perfect shape of her patrician nose, and by the almost obscene fullness of her lips. Hers was an erotic face, but an intelligent and kind face as well, the face of a woman capable of great tenderness and compassion. There was also pain in that countenance, especially in those fascinating eyes, the kind of pain that came from experience, knowledge; and Tony expected that it was not merely the pain she'd suffered that night; some of it went back a long, long time.

She sat on one end of the brushed corduroy sofa in the book-lined study, and Tony sat on the other end. They were alone.

Frank was in the kitchen, talking on the phone to a desk man at headquarters.

Upstairs, two uniformed patrolmen. Whitlock and Farmer, were digging bullets out of the walls.

There was not a fingerprint man in the house because, according to the complainant, the intruder had worn gloves.

"What's he doing now?" Hilary Thomas asked.

"Who?"

"Lieutenant Howard."

"He's calling headquarters and asking someone to get in touch with the sheriff's office up there in Napa County, where Frye lives."

"Why?"

"Well, for one thing, maybe the sheriff can find out how Frye got to L.A."

"What's it matter how he got here?" she asked. "The important thing is that he's here and he's got to be found and stopped."

"If he flew down," Tony said, "it doesn't matter much at all. But if Frye drove to L.A., the sheriff up in Napa County might be able to find out what car he used. With a description of the vehicle and a license number, we've got a better chance of nailing him before he gets too far."

She considered that for a moment, then said, "Why did Lieutenant Howard go to the kitchen? Why didn't he just use the phone in here?"

"I guess he wanted you to have a few minutes of peace and quiet," Tony said uneasily.

"I think he just didn't want me to hear what he was saying."

"Oh, no. He was only--"

"You know, I have the strangest feeling," she said, interrupting him. "I feel like I'm the suspect instead of the victim."

"You're just tense," he said. "Understandably tense."

"It isn't that. It's something about the way you're acting toward me. Well ... not so much you as him."

"Frank can seem cool at times," Tony said. "But he's a good detective."

"He thinks I'm lying."

Tony was surprised by her perspicacity. He shifted uncomfortably on the sofa. "I'm sure he doesn't think any such thing."

"He does," she insisted. "And I don't understand why." Her eyes fixed on his. "Level with me. Come on. What is it? What did I say wrong?"

He sighed. "You're a perceptive lady."

"I'm a writer. It's part of my job to observe things a little more closely than most people do. And I'm also persistent. So you might as well answer my question and get me off your back."

"One of the things that bothers Lieutenant Howard is the fact that you know the man who attacked you."

"So?"

"This is awkward," he said unhappily.

"Let me hear it anyway."

"Well..." He cleared his throat. "Conventional police wisdom says that if the complainant in a rape or an attempted rape knows the victim, there's a pretty good chance that she contributed to the crime by enticing the accused to one degree or another."

"Bullshit!"

She got up, went to the desk, and stood with her back to him for a minute. He could see that she was struggling to maintain her composure. What he had said had made her extremely angry.

When she turned to him at last, her face was flushed. She said, "This is horrible. It's outrageous. Every time a woman is raped by someone she knows, you actually believe she asked for it."

"No. Not every time."

"But most of the time, that's what you think," she said angrily.

"No."

She glared at him. "Let's stop playing semantical games. You believe it about me. You believe I enticed him."

"No," Tony said. "I merely explained what conventional police wisdom is in a case like this. I didn't say that I put much faith in conventional police wisdom. I don't. But Lieutenant Howard does. You asked me about him. You wanted to know what he was thinking, and I told you."

She frowned. "Then ... you believe me?"

"Is there any reason I shouldn't?"

"It happened exactly the way I said."

"All right."

She stared at him. "Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you believe me when he doesn't?"

"I can think of only two reasons for a woman to bring false rape charges against a man. And neither of them makes any sense in your case."

She leaned against the desk, folded her arms in front of her, cocked her head, and regarded him with interest. "What reasons?"

"Number one, he has money, and she doesn't. She wants to put him on the spot, hoping she can pry some sort of big settlement out of him in return for dropping the charges."

"But I've got money."

"Apparently, you've got quite a lot of it," he said, looking around admiringly at the beautifully furnished room.

"What's the other reason?"

"A man and a woman are having an affair, but he leaves her for another lady. She feels hurt, rejected, scorned. She wants to get even with him. She wants to punish him, so she accuses him of rape."

"How can you be sure that doesn't fit me?" she asked.

"I've seen both your movies, so I figure I know a little bit about the way your mind works. You're a very intelligent woman, Miss Thomas. I don't think you could be foolish or petty or spiteful enough to send a man to prison just because he hurt your feelings."

She studied him intently.

He felt himself being weighed and judged.

Obviously convinced that he was not the enemy, she returned to the couch and sat down in a swish of dark-blue silk. The robe molded to her, and he tried not to show how aware he was of her strikingly female lines.

She said, "I'm sorry I was snappish."

"You weren't," he assured her. "Conventional police wisdom makes me angry, too."

"I suppose if this gets into court, Frye's attorney will try to make the jury believe that I enticed the son of a bitch."

"You can count on it."

"Will they believe him?"

"They often do."

"But he wasn't just going to rape me. He was going to kill me."

"You'll need proof of that."

"The broken knife upstairs--"

"Can't be connected to him," Tony said. "It won't be covered with his prints. And it's just a common kitchen knife. There's no way we can trace it to the point of purchase and tie it to Bruno Frye."

"But he looked so crazy. He's ... unbalanced. The jury would see that. Hell, you'll see it when you arrest him. There probably won't even be a trial. He'll probably just be put away."

"If he'a lunatic, he knows how to pass for normal," Tony said. "After all, until tonight, he's been regarded as an especially responsible and upstanding citizen. When you visited his winery near St. Helena, you didn't realize you were in the company of a madman, did you?"

"No."

"Neither will the jury."

She closed her eyes, pinched the bridge of her nose. "So he's probably going to get away clean."

"I'm sorry to say there's a good chance that he will."

"And then he'll come back for me."

"Maybe."

"Jesus."

"You wanted the unvarnished truth."

She opened her lovely eyes. "I did, yes. And thank you for giving it to me." She even managed a smile.

He smiled back at her. He wanted to take her in his arms, hold her close, comfort her, kiss her, make love to her. But all he could do was sit on his end of the couch like a good officer of the law and smile his witless smile and say, "Sometimes it's a lousy system."

"What are the other reasons?"

"Excuse me?"

"You said one reason Lieutenant Howard didn't believe me was because I knew the assailant. What are the other reasons? What else makes him think I'm lying?"

Tony was about to answer her when Frank Howard walked into the room.

"Okay," Frank said brusquely. "We've got the sheriff looking into it up there in Napa County, trying to get a line on when and how this Frye character left town. We also have an APB out, based on your description, Miss Thomas. Now, I went to the car and got my clipboard and this crime report form." He held up the rectangular piece of masonite and the single sheet of paper affixed to it, took a pen from his inside coat pocket. "I want you to walk Lieutenant Clemenza and me through your entire experience just once more, so I can write it all down precisely in your own words. Then we can get out of your way."

She led them to the foyer and began her story with a detailed recounting of Bruno Frye's surprise appearance from the coat closet. Tony and Frank followed her to the overturned sofa, then upstairs to the bedroom, asking questions as they went. During the thirty minutes they needed to complete the form, as she reenacted the events of the evening, her voice now and then became tremulous, and again Tony had the urge to hold and soothe her.

Just as the crime report was completed, a few newsmen arrived. She went downstairs to meet them.

At the same time, Frank got a call from headquarters and took it on the bedroom phone.

Tony went downstairs to wait for Frank and to see how Hilary Thomas would deal with the reporters.

She handled them expertly. Pleading weariness and a need for privacy, she did not allow them into her house. She stepped outside, onto the stone walk, and they gathered in front of her. A television news crew had arrived, complete with a minicam and the standard actor-reporter, one of those men who had gotten his job largely because of his chiseled features and penetrating eyes and deep fatherly voice. Intelligence and journalistic ability had little to do with being a performer in televsion news; indeed, too much of either quality could be seriously disadvantageous; for optimum success, the career-minded television reporter had to think much the same way that his program was structured--in three- and four- and five-minute segments, never dwelling longer than that on any one subject, and never exploring anything at great depth. A newspaperman and his photographer, not so pretty as the television man and a bit rumpled, were also present. Hilary Thomas fielded their questions with ease, answering only those that she wanted to answer, smoothly turning away all of those that were too personal or impertinent.

The thing that Tony found most interesting about her performance was the way she kept the news people out of the house and out of her most private thoughts without offending them. That was no easy trick. There were many excellent reporters who could dig for the truth and write fine stories without violating the subject's rights and dignity; but there were just as many of the other kind, the boars and the con men. With the rise of what The Washington Post glowingly referred to as "advocacy journalism"--the despicable slanting of a story to support the reporter's and the editor's personal political and social beliefs--some members of the press, the con men and the boars, had gone on a power trip of unprecedented irresponsibility. If you bristled at a reporter's manner and methods or at his obvious bias, if you dared to offend him, he might decide to use his pen to make you look like a fool, a liar, or a criminal; and he would see himself as the champion of enlightenment in a battle against evil. Clearly, Hilary was aware of the danger, for she dealt masterfully with them. She answered more questions than not, stroked the news people, accorded them respect, charmed them, and even smiled for the cameras. She didn't say that she knew her assailant. She didn't mention the name Bruno Frye. She didn't want the media speculating about her previous relationship with the man who had attacked her.

Her awareness forced Tony to reevaluate her. He already knew that she was talented and intelligent; now he saw she was also shrewd. She was the most intriguing woman he had encountered in a long time.

She was nearly finished with the reporters, carefully extricating herself from them, when Frank Howard came down the stairs and stepped to the doorway, where Tony stood in the cool night breeze. Frank watched Hilary Thomas as she answered a reporter's question, and he scowled fiercely. "I've got to talk to her."

"What did headquarters want?" Tony asked.

"That's what I've got to talk to her about," Frank said grimly. He had decided to be tight-lipped. He wasn't going to reveal his information until he was damned good and ready. That was another of his irritating habits.

"She's almost through with them," Tony said.

"Strutting and preening herself."

"Not at all."

"Sure. She's loving every minute of it."

"She handles them well," Tony said, "but she really doesn't seem to enjoy it."

"Movie people," Frank said scornfully. "They need that attention and publicity like you and I need food."

The reporters were only eight feet away, and although they were noisily questioning Hilary Thomas, Tony was afraid they might hear Frank. "Not so loud," he said.

"I don't care if they know what I think," Frank said. "I'll even give them a statement about publicity hounds who make up stories to get newspaper coverage."

"Are you saying she made this all up? That's ridiculous."

"You'll see," Frank said.

Tony was suddenly uneasy. Hilary Thomas brought out the chivalrous knight in him; he wanted to protect her. He didn't want to see her hurt, but Frank apparently had something decidedly unpleasant to discuss with her.

"I've got to talk to her now," Frank said. "I'll be damned if I'll stand around cooling my heels while she sucks up to the press."

Tony put a hand on his partner's shoulder. "Wait here. I'll get her."

Frank was angry about whatever headquarters had told him, and Tony knew the reporters would recognize that anger and be irritated by it. If they thought there was progress in the investigation--especially if it looked to be a juicy bit, a scandalous twist--they would hang around all night, pestering everybody. And if Frank actually had uncovered unflattering information about Hilary Thomas, the press would make headlines out of it, trumpet it with that unholy glee they reserved for choice dirt. Later, if Frank's information proved inaccurate, the television people most likely wouldn't make any correction at all, and the newspaper retraction, if there ever was one, would be four lines on page twenty of the second section. Tony wanted her to have an opportunity to refute whatever Frank might say, a chance to clear herself before the whole thing became a tawdry media carnival.

He went to the reporters and said, "Excuse me, ladies and gentlemen, but I believe Miss Thomas has already told you more than she's told us. You've squeezed her dry. Now, my partner and I were scheduled to go off duty a few hours ago, and we're awfully tired. We've put in a hard day, beating up innocent suspects and collecting bribes, so if you would let us finish with Miss Thomas, we would be most grateful."

They laughed appreciatively and began to ask questions of him. He answered a few of them, giving out nothing more than Hilary Thomas had done. Then he hustled the woman into her house and closed the door.

Frank was in the foyer. His anger had not subsided. He looked as if steam should be coming from his ears. "Miss Thomas, I have some more questions to ask you."

"Okay."

"Quite a few questions. It'll take a while."

"Well ... shall we go into the study?"

Frank Howard led the way.

To Tony, Hilary said, "What's happening?"

He shrugged. "I don't know. I wish I did."

Frank had reached the center of the living room. He stopped and looked back at her. "Miss Thomas?"

She and Tony followed him into the study.

***

Hilary sat on the brushed corduroy couch, crossed her legs, straightened her silk robe. She was nervous, wondering why Lieutenant Howard disliked her so intensely. His manner was cold. He was filled with an icy anger that made his eyes look like cross sections of two steel rods. She thought of Bruno Frye's strange eyes, and she could not suppress a shiver. Lieutenant Howard glowered at her. She felt like the accused at a trial during the Spanish Inquisition. She would not have been terribly surprised if Howard had pointed a finger and charged her with witchcraft.

The nice one, Lieutenant Clemenza, sat in the brown armchair. The warm amber light from the yellow-shaded floor lamp fell over him and cast soft shadows around his mouth and nose and deeply set eyes, giving him an even gentler and kinder aspect than he ordinarily possessed. She wished he was the one asking questions, but at least for the moment, his role was evidently that of an observer.

Lieutenant Howard stood over her, looked down at her with unconcealed contempt. She realized that he was trying to make her look away in shame or defeat, playing some police version of a childish staring contest. She looked back at him unwaveringly until he turned from her and began to pace.

"Miss Thomas," Howard said, "there are several things about your story that trouble me."

"I know," she said. "It bothers you that I know the assailant. You figure I might have enticed him. Isn't that conventional police wisdom?"

He blinked in surprise but quickly recovered. "Yes. That's one thing. And there's also the fact that we can't find out how he got into this house. Officer Whitlock and Officer Farmer have been from one end of the place to the other, twice, three times, and they can't find any sign of forced entry. No broken windows. No smashed or jimmied locks."

"So you think I let him in," she said.

"I certainly must consider it."

"Well, consider this. When I was up there in Napa County a few weeks ago, doing research for a screenplay, I lost my keys at his winery. House keys, car keys--"

"You drove all the way up there?"

"No. I flew. But all my keys were on the same ring. Even the keys for the rental car I picked up in Santa Rosa: they were on a flimsy chain, and I was afraid I'd lose them, so I slipped them on my own key ring. I never found them. The rental car people had to send out another set. And when I got back to L.A., I had to have a locksmith let me into my house and make new keys for me."

"You didn't have the locks changed?"

"It seemed like a needless expense," she said. "The keys I lost didn't have any identification on them. Whoever found them wouldn't know where to use them."

"And it didn't occur to you they might have been stolen?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

"No."

"But now you think Bruno Frye took the keys with the intention of coming here to rape and kill you."

"Yes."

"What does he have against you?"

"I don't know."

"Is there any reason he should be angry with you?"

"No."

"Any reason he should hate you?"

"I hardly know him."

"It's an awfully long way for him to come."

"I know."

"Hundreds of miles."

"Look, he's crazy. And crazy people do crazy things."

Lieutenant Howard stopped pacing, stood in front of her, glared down like one of the faces on a totempole of angry gods. "Doesn't it seem odd to you that a crazy man would be able to conceal his madness so well at home, that he would have the iron control needed to keep it all bottled up until he was off in a strange city?"

"Of course it seems odd to me," she said. "It's weird. But it's true."

"Did Bruno Frye have an opportunity to steal those keys?"

"Yes. One of the winery foremen took me on a special tour. We had to clamber up scaffolding, between fermentation vats, between storage barrels, through a lot of tight places. I couldn't have easily taken my purse with me. It would have been in my way. So I left it in the main house."

"Frye's house."

"Yes."

He was crackling with energy, supercharged. He began to pace again, from the couch to the windows, from the windows to the bookshelves, then back to the couch again, his broad shoulders drawn up, head thrust forward.

Lieutenant Clemenza smiled at her, but she was not reassured.

"Will anyone at the winery remember you losing your keys?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

"I guess so. Sure. I spent at least half an hour looking for them. I asked around, hoping someone might have seen them."

"But no one had."

"That's right."

"Where did you think you might have left them?"

"I thought they were in my purse."

"That was the last place you remembered putting them?"

"Yes. I drove the rental car to the winery, and I was sure I'd put the keys in my purse when I'd parked."

"Yet when you couldn't find them, you never thought they might have been stolen?"

"No. Why would someone steal my keys and not my money? I had a couple hundred dollars in my wallet."

"Another thing that bothers me. After you drove Frye out of the house at gunpoint, why did you take so long to call us?"

"I didn't take long."

"Twenty minutes."

"At most."

"When you've just been attacked and nearly killed by a maniac with a knife, twenty minutes is a hell of a long time to wait. Most people want to get hold of the police right away. They want us on the scene in ten seconds, and they get furious if it takes us a few minutes to get there."

She glanced at Clemenza, then at Howard, then at her fingers, which were tightly laced, white-knuckled. She sat up straight, squared her shoulders. "I ... I guess I ... broke down." It was a difficult and shameful admission for her. She had always prided herself on her strength. "I went to that desk and sat down and began to dial the police number and ... then ... I just ... I cried. I started to cry ... and I couldn't stop for a while."

"You cried for twenty minutes?"

"No. Of course not. I'm really not the crying type. I mean, I don't fall apart easily."

"How long did it take you to get control of yourself?"

"I don't know for sure."

"Fifteen minutes?"

"Not that long."

"Ten minutes?"

"Maybe five."

"When you regained control of yourself, why didn't you call us then? You were sitting right there by the phone."

"I went upstairs to wash my face and change my clothes," she said. "I've already told you about that."

"I know," he said. "I remember. Primping yourself for the press."

"No," she said, beginning to get angry with him. "I wasn't 'primping' myself. I just thought I should--"

"That's the fourth thing that makes me wonder about your story," Howard said, interrupting her. "It absolutely amazes me. I mean, after you were almost raped and murdered, after you broke down and wept, while you were still afraid that Frye might come back here and try to finish the job he started, you nevertheless took time out to make yourself look presentable. Amazing."

"Excuse me," Lieutenant Clemenza said, leaning forward in the brown armchair. "Frank, I know you've got something, and I know you're leading up to it. I don't want to spoil your rhythm or anything. But I don't think we can make assumptions about Miss Thomas's honesty and integrity based on how long she took to call in the complaint. We both know that people sometimes go into a kind of shock after an experience like this. They don't always do the rational thing. Miss Thomas's behavior isn't all that peculiar."

She almost thanked Lieutenant Clemenza for what he had said, but she sensed a low-grade antagonism between the two detectives, and she did not want to fan that smoldering fire.

"Are you telling me to get on with it?" Howard asked Clemenza.

"All I'm saying is, it's getting late, and we're all very tired," Clemenza told him.

"You admit her story's riddled with holes?"

"I don't know that I'd put it quite like that," said Clemenza.

"How would you put it?" Howard asked.

"Let's just say there are some parts of it that don't make sense yet."

Howard scowled at him for a moment, then nodded. "Okay. Good enough. I was only trying to establish that there are at least four big problems with her story. If you agree, then I'll get on with the rest of it." He turned to Hilary. "Miss Thomas, I'd like to hear your description of the assailant just once more."

"Why? You've got his name."

"Indulge me."

She couldn't understand where he was going with his questioning. She knew he was trying to set a trap for her, but she hadn't the faintest idea what sort of trap or what it would do to her if she got caught in it. "All right. Just once more. Bruno Frye is tall, about six-four--"

"No names, please."

"What?"

"Describe the assailant without using any names."

"But I know his name," she said slowly, patiently.

"Humor me," he said humorlessly.

She sighed and settled back against the sofa, feigning boredom. She didn't want him to know that he was rattling her. What the hell was he after? "The man who attacked me," she said, "was about six-feet-four, and he weighed maybe two hundred and forty pounds. Very muscular."

"Race?" Howard asked.

"He was white."

"Complexion?"

"Fair."

"Any scars or moles?"

"No."

"Tattoos?"

"Are you kidding?"

"Tattoos?"

"No."

"Any other identifying marks?"

"No."

"Was he crippled or deformed in any way?"

"He's a big healthy son of a bitch," she said crossly.

"Color of hair?"

"Dirty blond."

"Long or short?"

"Medium length."

"Eyes?"

"Yes."

"What?"

"Yes, he had eyes."

"Miss Thomas--"

"Okay, okay."

"This is serious."

"He had blue eyes. An unusual shade of blue-gray."

"Age?"

"Around forty."

"Any distinguishing characteristics?"

"Like what?"

"You mentioned something about his voice."

"That's right. He had a deep voice. It rumbled. A gravelly voice. Deep and gruff and scratchy."

"All right," Lieutenant Howard said, rocking slightly on his heels, evidently pleased with himself. "We have a good description of the assailant. Now, describe Bruno Frye for me."

"I just did."

"No, no. We're pretending that you didn't know the man who attacked you. We're playing this little game to humor me. Remember? You just described your assailant, a man without a name. Now, I want you to describe Bruno Frye for me."

She turned to Lieutenant Clemenza. "Is this really necessary?" she asked exasperatedly.

Clemenza said, "Frank, can you hurry this along?"

"Look, I've got a point I'm trying to make," Lieutenant Howard said. "I'm building up to it the best way I know how. Besides, she's the one slowing it down."

He turned to her, and again she had the creepy feeling she was on trial in another century and that Howard was some religious inquisitionist. If Clemenza would permit it, Howard would simply take hold of her and shake until she gave the answers he wanted, whether or not they were the truth.

"Miss Thomas," he said, "if you'll just answer all of my questions, I'll be finished in a few minutes. Now, will you describe Bruno Frye?"

Disgustedly, she said, "Six-four, two hundred and forty pounds, muscular, blond, blue-gray eyes, about forty years old, no scars, no deformities, no tattoos, a deep gravelly voice."

Frank Howard was smiling. It was not a friendly smile. "Your description of the assailant and Bruno Frye are exactly the same. Not a single discrepancy. Not one. And of course, you've told us that they were, in fact, one and the same man."

His line of questioning seemed ridiculous, but there was surely a purpose to it. He wasn't stupid. She sensed that already she had stepped into the trap, even though she could not see it.

"Do you want to change your mind?" Howard asked. "Do you want to say that perhaps there's a small chance it was someone else, someone who only resembled Frye?"

"I'm not an idiot," Hilary said. "It was him."

"There wasn't even maybe some slight difference between your assailant and Frye? Some little thing?" he persisted.

"No."

"Not even the shape of his nose or the line of his jaw?" Howard asked.

"Not even that."

"You're certain that Frye and your assailant shared precisely the same hairline, exactly the same cheekbones, the same chin?"

"Yes."

"Are you positive beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was Bruno Frye who was here tonight?"

"Yes."

"Would you swear to that in court?"

"Yes, yes, yes!" she said, tired of his badgering.

"Well, then. Well, well. I'm afraid if you testified to that effect, you'd wind up in jail yourself. Perjury's a crime."

"What? What do you mean?"

He grinned at her. His grin was even more unfriendly than his smile. "Miss Thomas, what I mean is--you're a liar."

Hilary was so stunned by the bluntness of the accusation, by the boldness of it, so disconcerted by the ugly snarl in his voice, that she could not immediately think of a response. She didn't even know what he meant.

"A liar, Miss Thomas. Plain and simple."

Lieutenant Clemenza got out of the brown armchair and said, "Frank, are we handling this right?"

"Oh, yeah," Howard said. "We're handling it exactly right. While she was out there talking to the reporters and posing so prettily for the photographers, I got a call from headquarters. They heard back from the Napa County Sheriff."

"Already?"

"Oh, yeah. His name's Peter Laurenski. Sheriff Laurenski looked into things for us up there at Frye's vineyard, just like we asked him to, and you know what he found? He found that Mr. Bruno Frye didn't come to Los Angeles. Bruno Frye never left home. Bruno Frye is up there in Napa County right now, right this minute, in his own house, harmless as a fly."

"Impossible!" Hilary said, pushing up from the sofa.

Howard shook his head. "Give up, Miss Thomas. Frye told Sheriff Laurenski that he intended to come to L.A. today for a week-long stay. Just a short vacation. But he didn't manage to clear off his desk in time, so he cancelled out and stayed home to get caught up on his work."

"The sheriff's wrong!" she said. "He couldn't have talked to Bruno Frye."

"Are you calling the sheriff a liar?" Lieutenant Howard asked.

"He ... he must have talked to someone who was covering for Frye," Hilary said, knowing how hopelessly implausible that sounded.

"No," Howard said. "Sheriff Laurenski talked to Frye himself."

"Did he see him? Did he actually see Frye?" she demanded. "Or did he only talk to someone on the phone, someone claiming to be Frye?"

"I don't know if it was a face to face chat or a phone conversation," Howard said. "But remember, Miss Thomas, you told us about Frye's unique voice. Extremely deep. Scratchy. A guttural, gravelly voice. Are you saying someone could have easily imitated it on the phone?"

"If Sheriff Laurenski doesn't know Frye well enough, he might be fooled by a bad imitation. He--"

"It's a small county up there. A man like Bruno Frye, an important man like that, is known to just about everyone. And the sheriff has known him very well for more than twenty years," Howard said triumphantly.

Lieutenant Clemenza looked pained. Although she did not care much what Howard thought of her, it was important to Hilary that Clemenza believed the story she had told. The flicker of doubt in his eyes upset her as much as Howard's bullying.

She turned her back on them, went to the mullioned window that looked out on the rose garden, tried to control her anger, couldn't suppress it, and faced them again. She spoke to Howard, furious, emphasizing every word by pounding her fist against the window table: "Bruno--Frye--was--here!" The vase full of roses rocked, toppled off the table, bounced on the thick carpet, scattering flowers and water. She ignored it. "What about the sofa he overturned? What about the broken porcelain I threw at him and the bullets I fired at him? What about the broken knife he left behind? What about the torn dress, the pantyhose?"

"It could be just clever stage dressing," Howard said. "You could have done it all yourself, faked it up to support your story."

"That's absurd!"

Clemenza said, "Miss Thomas, maybe it really was someone else. Someone who looked a lot like Frye."

Even if she had wanted to retreat in that fashion, she could not have done it. By forcing her to repeatedly describe the man who attacked her, by drawing several assurances from her that the assailant had been none other than Bruno Frye, Lieutenant Howard had made it difficult if not impossible for her to take the way out that Clemenza was offering. Anyway, she didn't want to back up and reconsider. She knew she was right. "It was Frye," she said adamantly. "Frye and nobody else but Frye. I didn't make the whole thing up. I didn't fire bullets into the walls. I didn't overturn the sofa and tear up my own clothes. For God's sake, why would I do a crazy thing like that? What reason could I possibly have for a charade of that sort?"

"I've got some ideas," Howard said. "I figure you've known Bruno Frye for a long time, and you--"

"I told you. I only met him three weeks ago."

"You've told us other things that turned out not to be true," Howard said. "So I think you knew Frye for years, or at least for quite a while, and the two of you were having an affair--"

"No!"

"--and for some reason, he threw you over. Maybe he just got tired of you. Maybe it was another woman. Something. So I figure you didn't go up to his winery to research one of your screenplays, like you said. I think you went up there just to get together with him again. You wanted to smooth things over, kiss and make up--"

"No."

"--but he wasn't having any of it. He turned you away again. But while you were there, you found out that he was coming to L.A. for a little vacation. So you made up your mind to get even with him. You figured he probably wouldn't have anything planned his first night in town, probably just a quiet dinner alone and early to bed. You were pretty sure he wouldn't have anyone to vouch for him later on, if the cops wanted to know his every move that night. So you decided to set him up for a rape charge."

"Damn you, this is disgusting!"

"It backfired on you," Howard said. "Frye changed his plans. He didn't even come to L.A. So now you're caught in the lie."

"He was here!" She wanted to take the detective by the throat and choke him until he understood. "Look, I have one or two friends who know me well enough to know if I'd been having an affair. I'll give you their names. Go see them. They'll tell you I didn't have anything going with Bruno Frye. Hell, they might even tell you I haven't had anything going with anyone for a while. I've been too busy to have much of a private life. I work long hours. I haven't had a lot of time for romance. And I sure as hell haven't had time to carry on with a lover who lives at the other end of the state. Talk to my friends. They'll tell you."

"Friends are notoriously unreliable witnesses," Howard said. "Besides, it might have been that one affair you kept all to yourself, the secret little fling. Face it, Miss Thomas, you painted yourself into a corner. The facts are these. You say Frye was in this house tonight. But the sheriff says he was up there, in his own house, as of thirty minutes ago. Now, St. Helena is over four hundred miles by air, over five hundred by car. He simply could not have gotten home that fast. And he could not have been in two places at once because, in case you haven't heard, that's a serious violation of the laws of physics."

Lieutenant Clemenza said, "Frank, maybe you should let me finish up with Miss Thomas."

"What's to finish? It's over, done, kaput." Howard pointed an accusing finger at her. "You're damned lucky, Miss Thomas. If Frye had come to L.A. and this had gotten into court, you'd have committed perjury. You might have wound up in jail. You're also lucky that there's no sure way for us to punish someone like you for wasting our time like this."

"I don't know that we've wasted our time," Clemenza said softly.

"Like hell we haven't." Howard glared at her. "I'll tell you one thing: If Bruno Frye wants to pursue a libel suit, I sure to God will testify for him." Then he turned and walked away from her, toward the study door.

Lieutenant Clemenza didn't make any move to leave and obviously had something more to say to her, but she didn't like having the other one walk out before some important questions were answered. "Wait a minute," she said.

Howard stopped and looked back at her. "Yeah?"

"What now? What are you going to do about my complaint?" she said.

"Are you serious?"

"Yes."

"I'm going to the car, cancel that APB on Bruno Frye, then call it a day. I'm going home and drink a couple cold bottles of Coors."

"You aren't going to leave me here alone? What if he comes back?"

"Oh, Christ." Howard said. "Will you please drop the act?"

She took a few steps toward him. "No matter what you think, no matter what the Napa County Sheriff says, I'm not putting on an act. Will you at least leave one of those uniformed men for an hour or so, until I can get a locksmith to replace the locks on my doors?"

Howard shook his head. "No. I'll be damned if I'll waste more police time and taxpayers' money to provide you with protection you don't need. Give up. It's all over. You lost. Face it, Miss Thomas." He walked out of the room.

Hilary went to the brown armchair and sat down. She was exhausted, confused, and scared.

Clemenza said, "I'll make sure Officers Whitlock and Farmer stay with you until the locks have been changed."

She looked up at him. "Thank you."

He shrugged. He was noticeably uncomfortable. "I'm sorry there's not much more I can do."

"I didn't make up the whole thing," she said.

"I believe you."

"Frye really was here tonight," she said.

"I don't doubt that someone was here, but--"

"Not just someone. Frye."

"If you'd reconsider your identification, we could keep working on the case and--"

"It was Frye," she said, not angrily now, just wearily. "It was him and no one else but him."

For a long moment, Clemenza regarded her with interest, and his clear brown eyes were sympathetic. He was a handsome man, but it was not his good looks that most pleased the eye; there was an indescribably warm and gentle quality in his Italian features, a special concern and understanding so visible in his face that she felt he truly cared what happened to her.

He said, "You've had a very rough experience. It's shaken you. That's perfectly understandable. And sometimes, when you go through a shock like this, it distorts your perceptions. Maybe when you've had a chance to calm down, you'll remember things a little... differently. I'll stop by sometime tomorrow. Maybe by then you'll have something new to tell me."

"I won't," Hilary said without hesitation. "But thanks for ... being kind."

She thought he seemed reluctant to leave. But then he was gone, and she was alone in the study.

For a minute or two, she could not find the energy to get out of the armchair. She felt as if she had stepped into a vast pool of quicksand and had expended every bit of her strength in a frantic and futile attempt to escape.

At last she got up, went to the desk, picked up the telephone. She thought of ringing the winery in Napa County, but she realized that would accomplish nothing. She knew only the business office number. She didn't have Frye's home phone listing. Even if his private number was available through Information--and that was highly unlikely--she would not gain any satisfaction by dialing it. If she tried calling him at home, only one of two things could happen. One, he wouldn't answer, which would neither prove her story nor disprove what Sheriff Laurenski had said. Two, Frye would answer, surprising her. And then what? She would have to reevaluate the events of the night, face the fact that the man with whom she had fought was someone who only resembled Bruno Frye. Or perhaps he didn't look like Frye at all. Maybe her perceptions were so askew that she had perceived a resemblance where there was none. How could you tell when you were losing your grip on reality? How did madness begin? Did it creep up on you, or did it seize you in an instant, without warning? She had to consider the possibility that she was losing her mind because, after all, there was a history of insanity in her family. For more than a decade, one of her fears had been that she would die as her father had died; wild-eyed, raving, incoherent, waving a gun and trying to hold off monsters that were not really there. Like father, like daughter?

"I saw him," she said aloud. "Bruno Frye. In my house. Here. Tonight. I didn't imagine or hallucinate it. I saw him, dammit."

She opened the telephone book to the yellow pages and called a twenty-four-hour-a-day locksmith service.

***

After he fled Hilary Thomas's house, Bruno Frye drove his smoke-gray Dodge van out of Westwood. He went west and south to Marina Del Rey, a small-craft harbor on the edge of the city, a place of expensive garden apartments, even more expensive condominiums, shops, and unexceptional but lushly decorated restaurants, most with unobstructed views of the sea and the thousands of pleasure boats docked along the man-made channels.

Fog was rolling in along the coast, as if a great cold fire burned upon the ocean. It was thick in some places and thin in others, getting denser all the time.

He tucked the van into an empty corner of a parking lot near one of the docks, and for a minute he just sat there, contemplating his failure. The police would be looking for him, but only for a short while, only until they found out that he had been at his place in Napa County all evening. And even while they were looking for him in the L.A. area, he would not be in much danger, for they wouldn't know what sort of vehicle he was driving. He was sure Hilary Thomas had not seen the van when he left because it was parked three blocks from her house.

Hilary Thomas.

Not her real name, of course.

Katherine. That's who she really was. Katherine.

"Stinking bitch," he said aloud.

She scared him. In the past five years, he had killed her more than twenty times, but she had refused to stay dead. She kept coming back to life, in a new body, with a new name, a new identity, a cleverly constructed new background, but he never failed to recognize Katherine hiding in each new persona. He had encountered her and killed her again and again, but she would not stay dead. She knew how to come back from the grave, and her knowledge terrified him more than he dared let her know. He was frightened of her, but he couldn't let her see that fear, for if she became aware of it, she'd overwhelm and destroy him.

But she can he killed, Frye told himself. I've done it. I've killed her many times and buried many of her bodies in secret graves. I'll kill her again, too. And maybe this time she won't be able to come back.

As soon as it was safe for him to return to her house in Westwood, he would try to kill her again. And this time he planned to perform a number of rituals that he hoped would cancel out her supernatural power of regeneration. He had been reading books about the living dead--vampires and other creatures. Although she was not really any of those things, although she was horrifyingly unique, he believed that some of the methods of extermination that were effective against vampires might work on her as well. Cut out her heart while it was still beating. Drive a wooden stake through it. Cut off her head. Stuff her mouth full of garlic. It would work. Oh, God, it had to work.

He left the van and went to a public phone close by. The damp air smelled vaguely of salt, seaweed, and machine oil. Water slapped against the pilings and the hulls of the small yachts, a curiously forlorn sound. Beyond the plexiglas walls of the booth, rank upon rank of masts rose from the tethered boats, like a defoliated forest looming out of the night mist. About the same time that Hilary was calling the police, Frye phoned his own house in Napa County and gave an account of his failed attack on the woman.

The man on the other end of the line listened without interruption, then said, "I'll handle the police."

They spoke for a few minutes, then Frye hung up. Stepping out of the booth, he looked around suspiciously at the darkness and swirling fog. Katherine could not possibly have followed him, but nevertheless, he was afraid she was out there in the gloom, watching, waiting. He was a big man. He should not have been afraid of a woman. But he was. He was afraid of the one who would not die, the one who now called herself Hilary Thomas.

He returned to the van and sat behind the wheel for a few minutes, until he realized that he was hungry. Starving. His stomach rumbled. He hadn't eaten since lunch. He was familiar enough with Marina Del Rey to know there was not a suitable restaurant in the neighborhood. He drove south on the Pacific Coast Highway to Culver Boulevard, then west, then south again on Vista Del Mar. He had to proceed slowly, for the fog was heavy along that route; it threw the van's headlight beams back at him and reduced visibility to thirty feet, so that he felt as if he was driving underwater in a murky phosphorescent sea. Almost twenty minutes after he completed the telephone call to Napa County (and about the same time that Sheriff Laurenski was looking into the case up there in behalf of the L.A. police), Frye found an interesting restaurant on the northern edge of El Segundo. The red and yellow neon sign cut through the fog: GARRIDO'S. It was a Mexican place, but not one of those norte-americano chrome and glass outlets serving imitation comida; it appeared to be authentically Mexican. He pulled off the road and parked between two hotrods that were equipped with the hydraulic lifts so popular with young Chicano drivers. As he walked around to the entrance, he passed a car bearing a bumper sticker that proclaimed CHICANO POWER. Another one advised everyone to SUPPORT THE FARM WORKERS' UNION. Frye could already taste the enchiladas.

Inside, Garrido's looked more like a bar than a restaurant, but the close warm air was redolent with the odors of a good Mexican kitchen. On the left, a stained and scarred wooden bar ran the length of the big rectangular room. Approximately a dozen dark men and two lovely young señoritas sat on stools or leaned against the bar, most of them chattering in rapid Spanish. The center of the room was taken up by a single row of twelve tables running parallel to the bar, each covered with a red tablecloth. All of the tables were occupied by men and women who laughed and drank a lot as they ate. On the right, against the wall, there were booths with red leatherette upholstery and high backs; Frye sat down in one of them.

The waitress who hustled up to his table was a short woman, almost as wide as she was tall, with a very round and surprisingly pretty face. Raising her voice above Freddie Fender's sweet and plaintive singing, which came from the jukebox, she asked Frye what he wanted and took his order: a double platter of chili verde and two cold bottles of Dos Equis.

He was still wearing leather gloves. He took them off and flexed his hands.

Except for a blonde in a low-cut sweater, who was with a mustachioed Chicano stud, Frye was the only one in Garrido's who didn't have Mexican blood in his veins. He knew some of them were staring at him, but he didn't care.

The waitress brought the beer right away. Frye didn't bother with the glass. He put the bottle to his lips, closed his eyes, tilted his head back, and chugged it down. In less than a minute, he had drained it. He drank the second beer with less haste than he had consumed the first, but it was also gone by the time she brought his dinner. He ordered two more bottles of Dos Equis.

Bruno Frye ate with voracity and total concentration, unwilling or unable to look away from his plate, oblivious of everyone around him, head lowered to receive the food in the fevered manner of a graceless glutton. Making soft animal murmurs of delight, he forked the chili verde into his mouth, gobbled up huge dripping bites of the stuff, one after the other, chewed hard and fast, his cheeks bulging. A plate of warm tortillas was served on the side, and he used those to mop up the delicious sauce. He washed everything down with big gulps of icy beer.

He was already two-thirds finished when the waitress stopped by to ask if the meal was all right, and she quickly realized the question was unnecessary. He looked up at her with eyes that were slightly out of focus. In a thick voice that seemed to come from a distance, he asked for two beef tacos, a couple of cheese enchiladas, rice, refried beans, and two more bottles of beer. Her eyes went wide, but she was too polite to comment on his appetite.

He ate the last of the chili verde before she brought his second order, but he did not rise out of his trance when the plate was clean. Every table had a bowl of taco chips, and he pulled his in front of him. He dipped the chips into the cup of hot sauce that came with them, popped them into his mouth whole, crunched them up with enormous pleasure and a lot of noise. When the waitress arrived with more food and beer, he mumbled a thank you and immediately began shoveling cheese enchiladas into his mouth. He worked his way through the tacos and the side dishes. A pulse thumped visibly in his bull neck. Veins stood out boldly across his forehead. A film of sweat sheathed his face, and beads of sweat began to trickle down from his hairline. At last he swallowed the final mouthful of refried beans and chased it with beer and pushed the empty plates away. He sat for a while with one hand on his thigh, one hand wrapped around a bottle, staring across the booth at nothing in particular. Gradually, the sweat dried on his face, and he became aware of the jukebox music again; another Freddie Fender tune was playing.

He sipped his beer and looked around at the other customers, taking an interest in them for the first time. His attention was drawn to a group at the table nearest the door. Two couples. Good-looking girls. Darkly handsome men. All in their early twenties. The guys were putting on an act for the women, talking just a fraction too loud and laughing too much, doing the rooster act, trying too hard, determined to impress the little hens.

Frye decided to have some fun with them. He thought about it, figured out how he would set it up, and grinned happily at the prospect of the excitement he would cause.

He asked the waitress for his check, gave her more than enough money to cover it, and said, "Keep the change."

"You're very generous," she said, smiling and nodding as she went off to the cash register.

He pulled on the leather gloves.

His sixth bottle of beer was still half-full, and he took it with him when he slid out of the booth. He headed toward the exit and contrived to hook a foot on a chair leg as he passed the two couples who had interested him. He stumbled slightly, easily regained his balance, and leaned toward the four surprised people at the table, letting them see the beer bottle, trying to look like a drunk.

He kept his voice low, for he didn't want others in the restaurant to be aware of the confrontation he was fomenting.

He knew he could handle two of them, but he wasn't prepared to fight an army. He peered blearily at the toughest looking of the two men, gave him a big grin, and spoke in a low mean snarl that belied his smile. "Keep your goddamned chair out of the aisle, you stupid spic."

The stranger had been smiling at him, expecting some sort of drunken apology. When he heard the insult, his wide brown face went blank, and his eyes narrowed.

Before that man could get up, Frye swung to the other one and said, "Why don't you get a foxy lady like that blonde back there? What do you want with these two greasy wetback cunts?"

Then he made swiftly for the door, so the fight wouldn't start inside the restaurant. Chuckling to himself, he pushed through the door, staggered into the foggy night, and hurried around the building to the parking lot on the north side to wait.

He was only a few steps from his van when one of the men he had left behind called to him in Spanish-accented English. "Hey! Wait a second, man!"

Frye turned, still pretending drunkenness, weaving and swaying as if he found it difficult to keep the ground under his feet. "What's up?" he asked stupidly.

They stopped, side by side, apparitions in the mist. The stocky one said, "Hey, what the hell you think you're doin', man?"

"You spics looking for trouble?" Frye asked, slurring his words.

"Cerdo! the stocky one said.

"Mugriento cerdo!" said the slim man.

Frye said, "For Christ's sake, stop jabbering that damn monkey talk at me. If you have something to say, speak English."

"Miguel called you a pig," said the slim one. "And I called you a filthy pig."

Frey grinned and made an obscene gesture.

Miguel, the stocky man, charged, and Frye waited motionless, as if he didn't see him coming. Miguel rushed in with his head down, his fists up, his arms tucked close to his sides. He threw two quick and powerful punches at Frye's iron-muscled midsection. The brown man's granite hands made sharp hard slapping sounds as they landed, but Frye took both blows without flinching. By design, he was still holding the beer bottle, and he smashed it against the side of Miguel's head. Glass exploded and rained down on the parking lot in dissonant musical notes. Beer and beer foam splashed over both men. Miguel dropped to his knees with a horrible groan, as if he had been poleaxed. "Pablo," he called pleadingly to his friend. Grabbing the injured man's head with both hands, Frye held him steady long enough to ram a knee into the underside of his chin. Miguel's teeth clacked together with an ugly noise. As Frye let go of him, the man fell sideways, unconscious, his breath bubbling noisily through bloody nostrils.

Even as Miguel crumpled onto the fog-damp pavement, Pablo came after Frye. He had a knife. It was a long thin weapon, probably a switchblade, probably sharpened into cutting edges on both sides, certain to be as wickedly dangerous as a razor. The slim man was not a charger as Miguel had been. He moved swiftly but gracefully, almost like a dancer, gliding around to Frye's right side, searching for an opening, making an opening by virtue of his speed and agility, striking with the lightning moves of a snake. The knife flashed in, from left to right, and if Frye had not jumped back, it would have torn open his stomach, spilling his guts. Crooning eerily to himself, Pablo pressed steadily forward, slashing at Frye again and again, from left to right, from right to left. As Frye retreated, he studied the way Pablo used the knife, and by the time he backed up against the rear end of the Dodge van, he saw how to handle him. Pablo made long sweeping passes with the knife instead of the short vicious arcs employed by skilled knife fighters; therefore, on the outward half of each swing, after the blade had passed Frye but before it started coming back again, there was a second or two when the weapon was moving away from him, posing no threat whatsoever, a moment when Pablo was vulnerable. As the slim man edged in for the kill, confident that his prey had nowhere to run, Frye timed one of the arcs and sprang forward at precisely the right instant. As the blade swung away from him, Frye seized Pablo's wrist, squeezing and twisting it, bending it back against the joint. The slim man cried out in agony. The knife flew out of his slender fingers. Frye stepped behind him, got a hammerlock on him, and ran him face-first into the rear end of the van. He twisted Pablo's arm even farther, got the hand all the way up between the shoulder blades, until it seemed something would have to snap. With his free hand, Frye gripped the seat of the man's trousers, literally lifted him off his feet, all hundred and forty pounds of him, and slammed him into the van a second time, a third, a fourth, a fifth, a sixth, until the screaming stopped. When he let go of Pablo, the slim man went down like a sack of rags.

Miguel was on his hands and knees. He spit blood and shiny white bits of teeth onto the black macadam.

Frye went to him.

"Trying to get up, friend?"

Laughing softly, Frye stepped on his fingers. He ground his heel on the man's hand, then stepped back.

Miguel squealed, fell on his side.

Frye kicked him in the thigh.

Miguel did not lose consciousness, but he closed his eyes, hoping Frye would just go away.

Frye felt as if electricity was coursing through him, a million-billion volts, bursting from synapse to synapse, hot and crackling and sparking within him, not a painful feeling, but a wild and exciting experience, as if he had just been touched by the Lord God Almighty and filled up with the most beautiful and bright and holy light.

Miguel opened his swollen dark eyes.

"All the fight gone out of you?" Frye asked.

"Please," Miguel said around broken teeth and split lips.

Exhilarated, Frye put a foot against Miguel's throat and forced him to roll onto his back.

"Please."

Frye took his foot off the man's throat.

"Please."

High with a sense of his own power, floating, flying, soaring, Frye kicked Miguel in the ribs.

Miguel choked on his own scream.

Laughing exuberantly, Frye kicked him repeatedly, until a couple of ribs gave way with an audible crunch.

Miguel began to do something he had struggled manfully not to do for the past few minutes. He began to cry.

Frye returned to the van.

Pablo was on the ground by the rear wheels, flat on his back, unconscious.

Saying, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah," over and over again, Frye circled Pablo, kicking him in the calves and knees and thighs and hips and ribs.

A car started to pull into the lot from the street, but the driver saw what was happening and wanted no part of it. He put the car in reverse, backed out of there, and sped off with a screech of tires.

Frye dragged Pablo over to Miguel, lined them up side by side, out of the way of the van. He didn't want to run over anyone. He didn't want to kill either of them, for too many people in the bar had gotten a good look at him. The authorities wouldn't have much desire to pursue the winner of an ordinary street fight, especially when the losers had intended to gang up on a lone man. But the police would look for a killer, so Frye made sure that both Miguel and Pablo were safe.

Whistling happily, he drove back toward Marina Del Rey and stopped at the first open service station on the right-hand side of the street. While the attendant filled the tank, checked the oil, and washed the windshield, Frye went to the men's room. He took a shaving kit with him and spent ten minutes freshening up.

When he traveled, he slept in the van, and it was not as convenient as a camper; it did not have running water. On the other hand, it was more maneuverable, less visible, and far more anonymous than a camper. To take full advantage of the many luxuries of a completely equipped motor home, he would have to stop over at a campground every night, hooking up to sewer and water and electric lines, leaving his name and address wherever he went. That was too risky. In a motor home, he would leave a trail that even a noseless bloodhound could follow, and the same would be true if he stayed at motels where, if the police asked about him later, desk clerks would surely remember the tall and extravagantly muscled man with the penetrating blue eyes.

In the men's room at the service station, he stripped out of his gloves and yellow sweater, washed his torso and underarms with wet paper towels and liquid soap, sprayed himself with deodorant, and dressed again. He was always concerned about cleanliness; he liked to be clean and neat at all times.

When he felt dirty, he was not only uncomfortable but deeply depressed as well--and somewhat fearful. It was as if being dirty stirred up vague recollections of some intolerable experience long forgotten, brought back hideous memories to the edge of his awareness, where he could sense but not see them, perceive but not understand them. Those few nights when he had fallen into bed without bothering to wash up, his repeating nightmare had been far worse than usual, expelling him from sleep in a screaming flailing terror. And although he had awakened on those occasions, as always, with no clear memory of what the dreams had been about, he had felt as if he'd just clawed his way out of a sickeningly filthy place, a dark and close and foul hole in the ground.

Rather than risk intensifying the nightmare that was sure to come, he washed himself there in the men's room, shaved quickly with an electric razor, patted his face with aftershave lotion, brushed his teeth, and used the toilet. In the morning, he would go to another service station and repeat the routine, and he would also change into fresh clothes at that time.

He paid the attendant for the gasoline and drove back to Marina Del Rey through ever-thickening fog. He parked the van in the same dockside lot from which he had made the call to his house in Napa County. He got out of the Dodge and walked to the public phone booth and called the same number again.

"Hello?"

"It's me," Frye said.

"The heat's off."

"The police called?"

"Yeah."

They talked for a minute or two, and then Frye returned to the Dodge.

He stretched out on the mattress in the back of the van and switched on a flashlight he kept there. He could not tolerate totally dark places. He could not sleep unless there was at least a thread of illumination under a door or a night light burning dimly in a corner. In perfect darkness, he began to imagine that strange things were crawling on him, skittering over his face, squirming under his clothes. Without light, he was assaulted by the threatening but wordless whispers that he sometimes heard for a minute or two after he awakened from his nightmare, the blood-freezing whispers that loosened his bowels and made his heart skip.

If he could ever identify the source of those whispers or finally hear what they were trying to tell him, he would know what the nightmare was about. He would know what caused the recurring dream, the icy fear, and he might finally be able to free himself from it.

The problem was that whenever he woke and heard the whispers, that tailend of the dream, he was in no state of mind to listen closely and to analyze them; he was always in a panic, wanting nothing more than to have the whispers fade away and leave him in peace.

He tried to sleep in the indirect glow of the flashlight, but he could not. He tossed and turned. His mind raced. He was wide awake.

He realized that it was the unfinished business with the woman that was keeping him from sleep. He had been primed for the kill, and it had been denied him. He was edgy. He felt hollow, incomplete.

He had tried to satisfy his hunger for the woman by feeding his stomach. When that had not worked, he had tried to take his mind off her by provoking a fight with those two Chicanos. Food and enormous physical exertion were the two things he had always used to stifle his sexual urges, and to divert his thoughts from the secret blood lust that sometimes burned fiercely within him. He wanted sex, a brutal and bruising kind of sex that no woman would willingly provide, so he gorged himself instead. He wanted to kill, so he spent four or five hard hours lifting progressive weights until his muscles cooked into pudding and the violence steamed out of him. The psychiatrists called it sublimation. Lately, it had been less and less effective in dissipating his unholy cravings.

The woman was still on his mind.

The sleekness of her.

The swell of hips and breasts.

Hilary Thomas.

No. That was just a disguise.

Katherine.

That was who she really was.

Katherine. Katherine the bitch. In a new body.

He could close his eyes and picture her naked upon a bed, pinned under him, thighs spread, squirming, writhing, quivering like a rabbit that sees the muzzle of a gun. He could envision his hand moving over her heavy breasts and taut belly, over her thighs and the mound of her sex ... and then his other hand raising the knife, plunging it down. jamming the silvered blade into her, all the way into her softness, her flesh yielding to him, the blood springing up in bright wet promise. He could see the stark terror and excruciating pain in her eyes as he smashed through her chest and dug for her living heart, trying to rip it out while it was still beating. He could almost feel her slick warm blood and smell the slightly bitter coppery odor of it. As the vision filled his mind and took command of all his senses, he felt his testicles draw tight, felt his penis twitch and grow stiff--another knife--and he wanted to plunge it into her, all the way into her marvelous body, first his thick pulsing penis and then the blade, spurting his fear and weakness into her with one weapon, drawing out her strength and vitality with the other.

He opened his eyes.

He was sweating.

Katherine. The bitch.

For thirty-five years, he had lived in her shadow, had existed miserably in constant fear of her. Five years ago, she had died of heart disease, and he had tasted freedom for the first time in his life. But she kept coming back from the dead, pretending to be other women, looking for a way to take control of him again.

He wanted to use her and kill her to show her that she did not scare him. She had no power over him any more. He was now stronger than she was.

He reached for the bundle of chamois cloths that lay beside the mattress, untied them, unwrapped his spare knife.

He wouldn't be able to sleep until he killed her.

Tonight.

She wouldn't be expecting him back so soon.

He looked at his watch. Midnight.

People would still be returning home from the theater, late dinner, parties. Later, the streets would be deserted, the houses lightless and quiet, and there would be less chance of being spotted and reported to the police.

He decided that he would leave for Westwood at two o'clock.

Three

THE LOCKSMITH came and changed the locks on the front and back doors, then went on to another job in Hancock Park.

Officers Farmer and Whitlock left.

Hilary was alone.

She didn't think she could sleep, but she knew for sure she couldn't spend the night in her own bed. When she stood in that room, her mind's eye filled with vivid images of terror: Frye smashing through the door, stalking her, grinning demoniacally, moving inexorably toward the bed and suddenly leaping onto it, rushing across the mattress with the knife raised high.... As before, in a curious dreamlike flux, the memory of Frye became a memory of her father, so that for an instant she had the crazy notion that it had been Earl Thomas, raised from the dead, who had tried to kill her tonight. But it was not merely the residual vibrations of evil in the room that put it off limits. She was also unwilling to sleep there until the ruined door had been removed and a new one hung, a job that couldn't be taken care of until she could get hold of a carpenter tomorrow. The flimsy door that had been there had not held long against Frye's assault, and she had decided to have it replaced with a solid-core hardwood door and a brass deadbolt. But if Frye came back and somehow got into the house tonight, he would be able to walk right into her room while she slept--if she slept.

And sooner or later he would come back. She was as certain of that as she ever had been about anything.

She could go to a hotel, but that didn't appeal to her. It would be like hiding from him. Running away. She was quietly proud of her courage. She never ran away from anyone or anything; she fought back with all of her ingenuity and strength. She hadn't run away from her violent and unloving parents. She had not even sought psychological escape from the searing memory of the final monstrous and bloody events in that small Chicago apartment, had not accepted the kind of peace that could be found in madness or convenient amnesia, which were two ways out that most people would have taken if they'd been through the same ordeal. She had never backed away from the endless series of challenges she had encountered while struggling to build a career in Hollywood, first as an actress, then as a screenwriter. She had gotten knocked down plenty of times, but she had picked herself up again. And again. She persevered, fought back, and won. She would also win this bizarre battle with Bruno Frye, even though she would have to fight it alone.

Damn the police!

She decided to sleep in one of the guest rooms, where there was a door she could lock and barricade. She put sheets and a blanket on the queen-size bed, hung towels in the adjoining guest bathroom.

Downstairs, she rummaged through the kitchen drawers, taking out a variety of knives and testing each for balance and sharpness. The large butcher's knife looked deadlier than any of the others, but to her small hand it was unwieldy. It would be of little use in close quarters fighting, for she needed room to swing it. It might be an excellent weapon for attack, but it was not so good for self-defense. Instead, she chose an ordinary utility knife with a four-inch blade, small enough to fit in a pocket of her robe, large enough to do considerable damage if she had to use it.

The thought of plunging a knife into another human being filled her with revulsion, but she knew that she could do it if her life was threatened. At various times during her childhood, she had hidden a knife in her bedroom, under the mattress. It had been insurance against her father's unpredictable fits of mindless violence. She had used it only once, that last day, when Earl had begun to hallucinate from a combination of delirium tremens and just plain lunacy. He had seen giant worms coming out of the walls and huge crabs trying to get in through the windows. In a paranoid schizophrenic fury, he had transformed that small apartment into a reeking charnel house, and she had saved herself only because she'd had a knife.

Of course, a knife was inferior to a gun. She wouldn't be able to use it against Frye until he was on top of her, and then it might be too late. But the knife was all she had. The uniformed patrolmen had taken her .32 pistol with them when they left right behind the locksmith.

Damn them to hell!

After Detectives Clemenza and Howard had gone, Hilary and Officer Farmer had had a maddening conversation about the gun laws. She became furious every time she thought of it.

"Miss Thomas, about this pistol...."

"What about it?"

"You need a permit to keep a handgun in your house."

"I know that. I've got one."

"Could I see the registration?"

"Its in the nightstand drawer. I keep it with the gun."

"May Officer Whitlock go upstairs and get it?"

"Go ahead."

And a minute or two later:

"Miss Thomas, I gather you once lived in San Francisco."

"For about eight months. I did some theater work up there when I was trying to break in as an actress."

"This registration bears a San Francisco address."

"I was renting a North Beach apartment because it was cheap, and I didn't have much money in those days. A woman alone in that neighborhood sure needs a gun."

"Miss Thomas, aren't you aware that you're required to fill out a new registration form when you move from one county to another?"

"No."

"You really aren't aware of that?"

"Look, I just write movies. Guns aren't my business."

"If you keep a handgun in your house, you're obliged to know the laws governing its registration and use."

"Okay, okay. I'll register it as soon as I can."

"Well, you see, you'll have to come in and register it if you want it back."

"Get it back?"

"I'll have to take it with me."

"Are you kidding?"

"It's the law, Miss Thomas."

"You're going to leave me alone, unarmed?"

"I don't think you need to worry about--"

"Who put you up to this?"

"I'm only doing my job."

"Howard put you up to it, didn't he?"

"Detective Howard did suggest I check the registration. But he didn't--"

"Jesus!"

"All you have to do is come in, pay the proper fee, fill out a new registration--and we'll return your pistol."

"What if Frye comes back here tonight?"

"It isn't very likely, Miss Thomas."

"But what if he does?"

"Call us. We've got some patrol cars in the area. We'll get here--"

"--just in time to phone for a priest and a morgue wagon."

"You've got nothing to fear but--"

"--fear itself? Tell me, Officer Farmer, do you have to take a college course in the use of the cliché before you can become a cop?"

"I'm only doing my duty, Miss Thomas."

"Ahhh ... what's the use."

Farmer had taken the pistol, and Hilary had learned a valuable lesson. The police department was an arm of the government, and you could not rely on the government for anything. If the government couldn't balance its own budget and refrain from inflating its own currency, if it couldn't find a way to deal with the rampant corruption within its own offices, if it was even beginning to lose the will and the means to maintain an army and to provide national security, then why should she expect it to stop a single maniac from cutting her down?

She had learned long ago that it was not easy to find someone in whom she could place her faith and trust. Not her parents. Not relatives, every one of whom preferred not to get involved. Not the paper-shuffling social workers to whom she had turned for help when she was a child. Not the police. In fact, she saw now that the only person anyone could trust and rely on was himself.

All right, she thought angrily. Okay. I'll deal with Bruno Frye myself.

How?

Somehow.

She left the kitchen with the knife in her hand, went to the mirrored wet bar that was tucked into a niche between the living room and the study, and poured a generous measure of Remy Martin into a large crystal snifter. She carried the knife and the brandy upstairs to the guest room, defiantly switching off the lights as she went.

She closed the bedroom door, locked it, and looked for some way to fortify it. A highboy stood against the wall to the left of the door, a heavy dark pine piece taller than she was. It weighed too much to be moved as it was, but she made it manageable by taking out all the drawers and setting them aside. She dragged the big wooden chest across the carpet, pushed it squarely against the door, and replaced the drawers. Unlike many highboys, this one had no legs at all; it rested flat on the floor and had a relatively low center of gravity that made it a formidable obstacle for anyone trying to bull his way into the room.

In the bathroom, she put the knife and the brandy on the

floor. She filled the tub with water as hot as she could stand it, stripped, and settled slowly into it, wincing and gasping as she gradually submerged. Ever since she had been pinned beneath Frye on the bedroom floor, ever since she'd felt his hand pawing at her crotch and shredding her pantyhose, she had felt dirty, contaminated. Now, she soaked herself with great pleasure, worked up a thick lilac-scented lather, scrubbed vigorously with a washcloth, pausing occasionally to sip Remy Martin. At last, when she felt thoroughly clean again, she put the bar of soap aside and settled down even farther in the fragrant water. Steam rose over her, and the brandy made steam within her, and the pleasant combination of inner and outer heat forced fine drops of perspiration out of her brow. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the contents of the crystal snifter.

The human body will not run for long without the proper maintenance. The body, after all, is a machine, a marvelous machine made of many kinds of tissues and fluids, chemicals and minerals, a sophisticated assemblage with one heart-engine and a lot of little motors, a lubricating system and an aircooling system, ruled by the computer brain, with drive trains made out of muscles, all constructed upon a clever calcium frame. To function, it needs many things, not the least of which are food, relaxation, and sleep. Hilary had thought she would be unable to sleep after what had happened, that she would spend the night like a cat with its ears up, listening for danger. But she had exerted herself tonight in more ways that one, and although her conscious mind was reluctant to shut down for repairs, her subconscious knew it was necessary and inevitable. By the time she finished the brandy, she was so drowsy that she could hardly keep her eyes open.

She climbed out of the tub, opened the drain, and dried herself on a big fluffy towel as the water gurgled away. She picked up the knife and walked out of the bathroom, leaving the light on, pulling the door halfway shut. She switched off the lights in the main room. Moving languorously in the soft glow and velvet shadows, she put the knife on the nightstand and slid naked into bed.

She felt loose, as if the heat had unscrewed her joints.

She was a bit dizzy, too. The brandy.

She lay with her face toward the door. The barricade was reassuring. It looked very solid. Impenetrable. Bruno Frye wouldn't get through it, she told herself. Not even with a battering ram. A small army would find it difficult to get through that door. Not even a tank would make it. What about a big old dinosaur? she wondered sleepily. One of those tyrannosaurus rex fellas like in the funny monster pictures. Godzilla. Could Godzilla bash through that door...?

By two o'clock Thursday morning, Hilary was asleep.

***

At 2:25 Thursday morning, Bruno Frye drove slowly past the Thomas place. The fog was into Westwood now, but it was not as turbid as it was nearer the ocean. He could see the house well enough to observe that there was not even the faintest light beyond any of the front windows.

He drove two blocks, swung the van around, and went by the house again, even slower this time, carefully studying the cars parked along the street. He didn't think the cops would post a guard for her, but he wasn't taking any chances. The cars were empty; there was no stakeout.

He put the Dodge between the pair of Volvos two blocks away and walked back to the house through pools of foggy darkness, through pale circles of hazy light from the mist-cloaked streetlamps. As he crossed the lawn, his shoes squished in the dew-damp grass, a sound that made him aware of how ethereally quiet the night was otherwise.

At the side of the house, he crouched next to a bushy oleander plant and looked back the way he had come. No alarm had been set off. No one was coming after him.

He continued to the rear of the house and climbed over a locked gate. In the back yard, he looked up at the wall of the house and saw a small square of light on the second floor. From the size of it, he supposed it was a bathroom window; the larger panes of glass to the right of it showed vague traces of light at the edges of the drapes.

She was up there.

He was sure of it.

He could sense her. Smell her.

The bitch.

Waiting to be taken and used.

Waiting to be killed.

Waiting to kill me? he wondered.

He shuddered. He wanted her, had a fierce hardon for her, but he was also afraid of her.

Always before, she had died easily. She had always come back from the dead in a new body, masquerading as a new woman, but she had always died without much of a struggle. Tonight, however, Katherine had been a regular tigress, shockingly strong and clever and fearless. This was a new development, and he did not like it.

Nevertheless, he had to go after her. If he didn't pursue her from one reincarnation to the next, if he didn't keep killing her until she finally stayed dead, he would never have any peace.

He did not bother to try opening the kitchen door with the keys he had stolen out of her purse the day she'd been to the winery. She had probably had new locks installed. Even if she hadn't taken that precaution, he would be unable to get in through the door. Tuesday night, the first time he had attempted to get into the house, she had been at home, and he had discovered that one of the locks would not open with a key if it had been engaged from inside. The upper lock opened without resistance, but the lower one would only release if it had been locked from outside, with a key. He had not gotten into the house on that occasion, had had to come back the next night, Wednesday night, eight hours ago, when she was out to dinner and both of his keys were useable. But now she was in there, and although she might not have had the locks replaced, she had turned those special deadbolts from the inside, effectively barring entrance regardless of the number of keys he possessed.

He moved along to the corner of the house, where a big mullioned window looked into the rose garden. It was divided into a lot of six-inch-square panes of glass by thin strips of dark, well lacquered wood. The book-lined study lay on the other side. He took a penlight from one pocket, flicked it on, and directed the narrow beam through the window. Squinting, he searched the length of the sill and the less visible horizontal center bar until he located the latch, then turned off the penlight. He had a roll of masking tape, and he began to tear strips trom it, covering the small pane that was nearest the window lock. When the six-inch square was completely masked over, he used his gloved fist to smash through it: one hard blow. The glass shattered almost soundlessly and did not clatter to the floor, for it stuck onto the tape. He reached inside and unlatched the window, raised it, heaved himself up and across the sill. He barely avoided making a hell of a racket when he encountered a small table and nearly fell over it.

Standing in the center of the study, heart pounding, Frye listened for movement in the house, for a sign that she had heard him.

There was only silence.

She was able to rise up from the dead and come back to life in a new identity, but that was evidently the limit of her supernatural power. Obviously, she was not all-seeing and all-knowing. He was in her house, but she did not know it yet.

He grinned.

He took the knife from the sheath that was fixed to his belt, held it in his right hand.

With the penlight in his left hand, he quietly prowled through every room on the ground floor. They were all dark and deserted.

Going up the stairs to the second floor, he stayed close to the wall, in case any of the steps creaked. He reached the top without making a sound.

He explored the bedrooms, but he encountered nothing of interest until he approached the last room on the left. He thought he saw light coming under the door, and he switched off his flash. In the pitch-black corridor only a nebulous silvery line marked the threshold of the last room, but it was more marked than any of the others. He went to the door and cautiously tried the knob. Locked.

He had found her.

Katherine.

Pretending to be someone named Hilary Thomas.

The bitch. The rotten bitch.

Katherine, Katherine, Katherine....

As the name echoed through his mind, he clenched his fist around the knife and made short jabbing motions at the darkness, as if he were stabbing her.

Stretching out face-down on the floor of the hallway, Frye looked through the inch-high gap at the bottom of the door. A large piece of furniture, perhaps a dresser, was pushed up against the other side of the entrance. A vague indirect light spread across the bedroom from an unseen source on the right, some of it finding its way around the edges of the dresser and under the door.

He was delighted by what little he could see, and a flood of optimism filled him. She had barricaded herself in the room, which meant the hateful bitch was afraid of him. She was afraid of him. Even though she knew how to come back from the grave, she was frightened of dying. Or maybe she knew or sensed that this time she would not be able to return to the living. He was going to be damned thorough when he disposed of the corpse, far more thorough than he had been when he'd disposed of the many other women whose bodies she had inhabited. Cut out her heart. Pound a wooden stake through it. Cut off her head. Fill her mouth with garlic. He also intended to take the head and the heart with him when he left the house; he would bury the pair of grisly trophies in separate and secret graves, in the hallowed ground of two different churchyards, and far away from wherever the body itself might be interred. Apparently, she was aware that he planned to take extraordinary precautions this time, for she was resisting him with a fury and a purpose the likes of which she had never shown before.

She was very quiet in there.

Asleep?

No, he decided. She was too scared to sleep. She was probably sitting up in bed with the pistol in her hands.

He pictured her hiding in there like a mouse seeking refuge from a prowling cat, and he felt strong, powerful, like an elemental force. Hatred boiled blackly within him. He wanted her to squirm and shake with fear as she had made him do for so many years. An almost overpowering urge to scream at her took hold of him; he wanted to shout her name--Katherine, Katherine--and fling curses at her. He kept control of himself only with an effort that brought sweat to his face and tears to his eyes.

He got to his feet and stood silently in the darkness, considering his options. He could throw himself against the door, break through it, and push the obstacle out of the way, but that would surely be suicidal. He wouldn't get through the fortifications fast enough to surprise her. She would have plenty of time to line up the sights of the gun and put half a dozen bullets into him. The only other thing he could do was wait for her to come out. If he stayed in the hallway and didn't make a sound all night, the uneventful hours might wear the edges off her watchfulness. By morning, she might get the idea that she was safe and that he wasn't ever coming back. When she walked out of there, he could seize her and force her back to the bed before she knew what was happening.

Frye crossed the corridor in two steps and sat on the floor with his back against the wall.

In a few minutes, he began to hear rustling sounds in the dark, soft scurrying noises.

Imagination, he told himself. That familiar fear.

But then he felt something creeping up his leg, under his trousers.

It's not really there, he told himself.

Something slithered under one sleeve and started up his arm, something awful but unidentifiable. And something ran across his shoulder and up his neck, onto his face, something small and deadly. It went for his mouth. He pressed his lips together. It went for his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut. It went for his nostrils, and he brushed frantically at his face, but he couldn't find it, couldn't knock it off. No!

He switched on the penlight. He was the only living creature in the hallway. There was nothing moving under his trousers. Nothing under his sleeves. Nothing on his face.

He shuddered.

He left the penlight on.

***

At nine o'clock Thursday morning, Hilary was awakened by the telephone. There was an extension in the guest room. The bell switch accidentally had been turned all the way up to maximum volume, probably by someone from the housecleaning service that she employed. The strident ringing broke into Hilary's sleep and made her sit up with a start.

The caller was Wally Topelis. While having breakfast, he had seen the morning paper's account of the assault and attempted rape. He was shocked and concerned.

Before she would tell him any more than the newspaper had done, she made him read the article to her. She was relieved to hear that it was short, just a small picture and a few column inches on the sixth page. It was based entirely on the meager information that she and Lieutenant Clemenza had given the reporters last night. There was no mention of Bruno Frye--or of Detective Frank Howard's conviction that she was a liar. The press had come and gone with perfect timing, just missing the kind of juicy angle that would have put the story at least a few pages closer to page one.

She told Wally all of it, and he was outraged. "That stupid goddamned cop! If he'd made any effort at all to find out about you, what kind of person you are, he'd have known you couldn't possibly make up a story like that. Look, kid, I'll take care of this. Don't worry. I'll get some action for you."

"How?"

"I'll call some people."

"Who?"

"How about the chief of police for starters?"

"Oh, sure."

"Hey, he owes me," Wally said. "For the past five years in a row, who was it that organized the annual police benefit show? Who was it that got some of the biggest Hollywood stars to appear for nothing? Who was it got singers and comedians and actors and magicians all free for the police fund?"

"You?"

"Damn right it was me."

"But what can he do?"

"He can reopen the case."

"When one of his detectives swears it was a hoax?"

"His detective is brain-damaged."

"I have a hunch this Frank Howard might have a very good record," she said.

"Then the way they rate their people is a disgrace. Their standards are either very low or all screwed up."

"You might have a pretty hard time convincing the chief of that."

"I can be very persuasive, my lamb."

"But even if he owes you a favor, how can he reopen the case without new evidence? He may be the chief, but he has to follow the rules, too."

"Look, he can at least talk to the sheriff up there in Napa County."

"And Sheriff Laurenski will give the chief the same story he was putting out last night. He'll say Frye was at home baking cookies or something."

"Then the sheriff's an incompetent fool who took the word of someone on Frye's household staff. Or he's a liar. Or maybe he's even in on this with Frye somehow."

"You go to the chief with that theory," she said, "and he'll have both of us tested for paranoid schizophrenia."

"If I can't squeeze some action out of the cops," Wally said, "then I'll hire a good PI team."

"Private investigators?"

"I know just the agency. They're good. Considerably better than most cops. They'll pry open Frye's life and find all the little secrets in it. They'll come up with the kind of evidence that'll get the case reopened."

"Isn't that expensive?"

"I'll split the cost with you," he said.

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes."

"That's generous of you, but--"

"It's not generous of me at all. You're an extremely valuable property, my lamb. I own a percentage of you, so anything I pay to a PI team is just insurance. I only want to protect my interests."

"That's baloney, and you know it," she said. "You are generous, Wally. But don't hire anyone just yet. The other detective that I told you about, Lieutenant Clemenza, said he'd stop around later this afternoon to see if I remembered anything more. He still sort of believes me, but he's confused because Laurenski shot a big hole in my story. I think Clemenza would use just about any excuse he could find to get the case reopened. Let's wait until I've seen him. Then if the situation still looks bleak, we'll hire your PI."

"Well ... all right," Wally said reluctantly. "But in the meantime, I'm going to tell them to send a man over to your place for protection."

"Wally, I don't need a bodyguard."

"Like hell you don't."

"I was perfectly safe all night, and I--"

"Listen, kid, I'm sending someone over. That's final. There won't be any arguing with Uncle Wally. If you won't let them inside, he'll just stand by your front door like a palace guard."

"Really, I--"

"Sooner or later," Wally said gently, "you're going to have to face the fact that you can't get through life alone, entirely on your own steam. No one does. No one, kid. Now and then everyone has to accept a little help. You should have called me last night."

"I didn't want to disturb you."

"For God's sake, you wouldn't have disturbed me! I'm your friend. In fact, you disturbed me a whole lot more by not disturbing me last night. Kid, it's all right to be strong and independent and self-reliant. But when you carry it too far, when you isolate yourself like this, it's a slap in the face to everybody who cares about you. Now, will you let the guard in when he arrives?"

She sighed. "Okay."

"Good. He'll be there within an hour. And you'll call me as soon as you've talked to Clemenza?"

"I will."

"Promise."

"I promise."

"Did you sleep last night?"

"Surprisingly, yes."

"If you didn't get enough sleep," he said, "take a nap this afternoon."

Hilary laughed. "You'd make a wonderful Jewish mother."

"Maybe I'll bring over a big pot of chicken soup this evening. Good-bye, dear."

"Good-bye, Wally. Thanks for calling."

When she hung up the receiver, she glanced at the highboy that stood in front of the door. After the uneventful night, the barricade looked foolish. Wally was right: the best way to handle this was to hire around-the-clock bodyguards and then put a first-rate team of private investigators on Frye's trail. Her original plan for dealing with the problem was ludicrous. She simply could not board up the windows and play Battle of the Alamo with Frye.

She got out of bed, put on her silk robe, and went to the highboy. She took the drawers out and put them aside. When the tall chest was light enough to be moved, she dragged it away from the door, back to the indentation in the carpet that marked where it had rested until last night. She replaced the drawers.

She went to the nightstand, picked up the knife, and smiled ruefully as she realized how naive she had been. Hand-to-hand combat with Bruno Frye? Knife-fighting with a maniac? How could she have thought that she would have any chance whatsoever in such an uneven contest? Frye was many times stronger than she was. She had been fortunate last night when she had managed to get away from him. Luckily, she'd had the pistol. But if she tried fencing with him, he would cut her to ribbons.

Intending to return the knife to the kitchen, wanting to be dressed for the day by the time the bodyguard arrived, she went to the bedroom door, unlocked it, opened it, stepped into the hallway, and screamed as Bruno Frye grabbed her and slammed her up against the wall. The back of her head hit the plaster with a sharp crack, and she struggled to remain above a wave of darkness that washed in behind her eyes. He clutched her throat with his right hand, pinned her in place. With his left hand, he tore open the front of her robe and squeezed her bare breasts, leering at her, calling her a bitch and a slut.

He must have been listening when she talked to Wally, must have heard that the police had taken away her pistol, for he had absolutely no fear of her. She hadn't mentioned the knife to Wally, and Frye was not prepared for it. She rammed the four-inch blade into his flat hard-muscled belly. For a few seconds, he seemed unaware of it; he slid his hand down from her breasts, tried to thrust a couple of fingers into her vagina. As she jerked the knife out of him, he was stricken by pain. His eyes went wide, and he let out a high-pitched yelp. Hilary stuck the blade into him again, piercing him high and toward the side this time, just under the ribs. His face was suddenly as white and greasy looking as lard. He howled, let go of her, stumbled backwards until he collided with the other wall and knocked an oil painting to the floor.

A violent spasmodic shiver of revulsion snapped through Hilary as she realized what she had done. But she did not drop the knife, and she was fully prepared to stab him again if he attacked her.

Bruno Frye looked down at himself in astonishment. The blade had sunk deep. A thin stream of blood oozed from him, rapidly staining his sweater and pants.

Hilary did not wait for his expression of amazement to metamorphose into agony and anger. She turned and hurried into the guest room, threw the door shut and locked it. For half a minute she listened to Frye's soft groans and curses and clumsy movements, wondering if he had sufficient strength left to smash through the door. She thought she heard him lumbering down the hall toward the stairs, but she couldn't be sure. She ran to the telephone. With bloodless and palsied hands, she picked up the receiver and dialed the operator. She asked for the police.

***

The bitch! The rotten bitch!

Frye slipped one hand under the yellow sweater and gripped the lower of the two wounds, the gut puncture, for that was the one doing the most bleeding. He squeezed the lips of the cut together as best he could, trying to stop the life from flowing out of him. He felt the warm blood soaking through the stitching of the gloves, onto his fingers.

He was suffering very little pain. A dull burning in his stomach. An electric tingle along his left side. A mild rhythmic twinge timed to his heartbeat. That was the extent of it.

Nevertheless, he knew that he had been badly hurt and was getting worse by the second. He was pathetically weak. His great strength had gushed out of him suddenly and completely.

Holding his belly with one hand, clutching the bannister with the other, he descended to the first floor on steps as treacherous as those in a carnival funhouse; they seemed to tip and pitch and roll. By the time he reached the bottom, he was streaming sweat.

Outside, the sun stung his eyes. It was brighter than he had ever seen it, a monstrous sun that filled the sky and beat mercilessly upon him. He felt as if it were shining through his eyes and starting tiny fires on the surface of his brain.

Bending over his wounds, cursing, he shuffled south along the sidewalk until he came to the smoke-gray van. He pulled himself up into the driver's seat, drew the door shut as if it weighed ten thousand pounds.

He drove with one hand to Wilshire Boulevard, turned right, went to Sepulveda, made a left, looking for a public telephone that offered a lot of privacy. Every bump in the road was like a blow to his solar plexus. At times, the automobiles around him appeared to stretch and flex and balloon, as if they were constructed of a magical elastic metal, and he had to concentrate to force them back into more familiar shapes.

Blood continued to trickle out of him no matter how tightly he pressed on the wound. The burning in his stomach grew worse. The rhythmic twinge became a sharp pinch. But the catastrophic pain that he knew was coming had not yet arrived.

He drove an interminable distance on Sepulveda before he finally located a pay phone that suited his needs. It was in a back corner of a supermarket parking lot, eighty or a hundred yards from the store.

He parked the van at an angle, screening the phone from everyone at the market and from motorists passing on Sepulveda. It was not a booth, just one of those plastic windscreens that were supposed to provide excellent sound-proofing but which had no effect at all on background noise; but at least it appeared to be in service, and it was private enough. A high cement block fence rose behind it, separating the supermarket property from the fringes of a housing tract. On the right, a cluster of shrubs and two small palms shielded the phone from the side street leading off Sepulveda. No one was likely to see him well enough to realize he was hurt; he didn't want anyone nosing around.

He slid across the seat to the passenger's side and got out that door. When he looked down at the thick red muck oozing between the fingers that were clamped over the worse wound, he felt dizzy, and he looked quickly away. He only had to take three steps to reach the phone, but each of them seemed like a mile.

He could not remember his telephone credit card number, which had been as familiar to him as his birthdate, so he called collect to Napa Valley.

The operator rang it six times.

"Hello?"

"I have a collect call for anyone from Bruno Frye. Will you accept the charges?"

"Go ahead, operator."

There was a soft click as she went off the line.

"I'm hurt real bad. I think ... I'm dying," Frye told the man in Napa County.

"Oh, Jesus, no. No!"

"I'll have to ... call an ambulance," Frye said. "And they ... everyone will know the truth."

They spoke for a minute, both of them frightened and confused.

Suddenly, Frye felt something loosen inside him. Like a spring popping. And a bag of water bursting. He screamed in pain.

The man in Napa County cried out in sympathy, as if he felt the same pain.

"Got to ... get an ambulance," Frye said.

He hung up.

Blood had run all the way down his pants to his shoes, and now it was dribbling onto the pavement.

He lifted the receiver off the hook and put it down on the metal shelf beside the phone box. He picked up a dime from the same shelf, on which he had put his pocket change, but his fingers weren't working properly; he dropped it and looked down stupidly as it rolled across the macadam. Found another dime. Held this one as tightly as he could. He lifted the dime as if it were a lead disc as big as an automobile tire, finally put it in the proper slot. He tried to dial 0. He didn't even have enough energy to perform that small chore. His muscle-packed arms, his big shoulders, his gigantic chest, his powerful back, his hard rippled belly, and his massive thighs all failed him. He couldn't make the call, and he couldn't even stand up any longer. He fell, rolled over once, and lay face-down on the macadam.

He couldn't move.

He couldn't see. He was blind.

It was a very black darkness.

He was scared.

He tried to tell himself that he would come back from the dead as Katherine had done. I'll come back and get her, he thought. I'll come back. But he really didn't believe it.

As he lay there getting increasingly light-headed, he had a surprisingly lucid moment when he wondered if he had been all wrong about Katherine coming back from the dead. Had it been his imagination? Had he just been killing women who resembled her? Innocent women? Was he mad?

A new explosion of pain blew those thoughts away and forced him to consider the smothering darkness in which he lay.

He felt things moving on him.

Things crawling on him.

Things crawling on his arms and legs.

Things crawling on his face.

He tried to scream. Couldn't.

He heard the whispers.

No!

His bowels loosened.

The whispers swelled into a raging sibilant chorus and, like a great dark river, swept him away.

***

Thursday morning, Tony Clemenza and Frank Howard located Jilly Jenkins, an old friend of Bobby "Angel" Valdez. Jilly had seen the baby-faced rapist and killer in July, but not since. At that time, Bobby had just quit a job at Vee Vee Gee Laundry on Olympic Boulevard. That was all Jilly knew.

Vee Vee Gee was a large one-story stucco building dating from the early fifties, when an entire Los Angeles school of benighted architects first thought of crossing ersatz Spanish texture and form with utilitarian factory design. Tony had never been able to understand how even the most insensitive architect could see beauty in such a grotesque crossbreed. The orange-red tile roof was studded with dozens of firebrick chimneys and corrugated metal vents; steam rose from about half of those outlets. The windows were framed with heavy timbers, dark and rustic, as if this were the casa of some great and rich terrateniente; but the ugly factory-window glass was webbed with wire. There were loading docks where the verandas should have been. The walls were straight, the corners sharp, the overall shape boxlike--quite the opposite of the graceful arches and rounded edges of genuine Spanish construction. The place was like an aging whore wearing more refined clothes than was her custom, trying desperately to pass for a lady.

"Why did they do it?" Tony asked as he got out of the unmarked police sedan and closed the door.

"Do what?" Frank asked.

"Why did they put up so many of these offensive places? What was the point of it?"

Frank blinked. "What's so offensive?"

"It doesn't bother you?"

"It's a laundry. Don't we need laundries?"

"Is anybody in your family an architect?"

"Architect? No," Frank said. "Why'd you ask?"

"I just wondered."

"You know, sometimes you don't make a whole hell of a lot of sense."

"So I've been told," Tony said.

In the business office at the front of the building, when they asked to see the owner, Vincent Garamalkis, they were given worse than a cool reception. The secretary was downright hostile. The Vee Vee Gee Laundry had paid four fines in four years for employing undocumented aliens. The secretary was certain that Tony and Frank were agents with the Immigration and Naturalization Service. She thawed a bit when she saw their LAPD identification, but she was still not cooperative until Tony convinced her that they hadn't even a smidgen of interest in the nationalities of the people working at Vee Vee Gee. At last, reluctantly, she admitted that Mr. Garamalkis was on the premises. She was about to take them to him when the phone rang, so she gave them hasty directions and asked them to find him on their own.

The enormous main room of the laundry smelled of soap and bleach and steam. It was a damp place, hot and noisy. Industrial washing machines thumped, buzzed, sloshed. Huge driers whirred and rumbled monotonously. The clacking and hissing of automatic folders put Tony's teeth on edge. Most of the workers unloading the laundry carts, and the husky men feeding the machines, and the women tagging linens at a double row of long tables were speaking to one another in loud and rapid Spanish. As Tony and Frank walked from one end of the room to the other, some of the noise abated, for the workers stopped talking and eyed them suspiciously.

Vincent Garamalkis was at a battered desk at the end of the big room. The desk was on a three-foot-high platform that made it possible for the boss to watch over his employees. Garamalkis got up and walked to the edge of the platform when he saw them coming. He was a short stocky man, balding, with hard features and a pair of gentle hazel eyes that didn't match the rest of his face. He stood with his hands on his hips, as if he were defying them to step onto his level.

"Police," Frank said, flashing ID.

"Yeah," Garamalkis said.

"Not Immigration," Tony assured him.

"Why should I be worried about Immigration?" Garamalkis asked defensively.

"Your secretary was," Frank said.

Garamalkis scowled down at them. "I'm clean. I hire nobody but U.S. citizens or documented aliens."

"Oh, sure," Frank said sarcastically. "And bears don't shit in the woods any more."

"Look," Tony said, "we really don't care about where your workers come from."

"So what do you want?"

"We'd like to ask a few questions."

"About what?"

"This man," Frank said, passing up the three mug shots of Bobby Valdez.

Garamalkis glanced at them. "What about him?"

"You know him?" Frank asked.

"Why?"

"We'd like to find him."

"What for?"

"He's a fugitive."

"What'd he do?"

"Listen," Frank said, fed up with the stocky man's sullen responses, "I can make this hard or easy for you. We can do it here or downtown. And if you want to play Mr. Hardass, we can bring the Immigration and Naturalization Service into it. We don't really give a good goddamned whether or not you hire a bunch of Mexes, but if we can't get cooperation from you, we'll see that you get busted every which way but loose. You got me? You hear it?"

Tony said, "Mr. Garamalkis, my father was an emigrant from Italy. He came to this country with his papers in order, and eventually he became a citizen. But one time he had some trouble with agents from the Immigration Service. It was just a mistake in their records, a paperwork foul-up. But they hounded him for more than five weeks. They called him at work and paid surprise visits to our apartment at odd hours. They demanded records and documentation, but when Papa provided those things, they called them forgeries. There were threats. Lots of threats. They even served deportation papers on him before it was all straightened out. He had to hire a lawyer he couldn't afford, and my mother was hysterical most of the time until it was settled. So you see, I don't have any love for the Immigration Service. I wouldn't go one step out of my way to help them pin a rap on you. Not one damn step, Mr. Garamalkis."

The stocky man looked down at Tony for a moment, then shook his head and sighed. "Don't they burn you up? I mean, a year or two ago, when all those Iranian students were making trouble right here in L.A., overturning cars and trying to set houses on fire, did the damn Immigration Service even consider booting their asses out of the country? Hell, no! The agents were too busy harassing my workers. These people I employ don't burn down other people's houses. They don't overturn cars and throw rocks at policemen. They're good hardworking people. They only want to make a living. The kind of living they can't make south of the border. You know why Immigration spends all its time chasing them? I'll tell you. I've got it figured out. It's because these Mexicans don't fight back. They're not political or religious fanatics like a lot of these Iranians. They aren't crazy or dangerous. It's a whole hell of a lot safer and easier for Immigration to come after these people 'cause they generally just go along quietly. Ahh, the whole damned system's a disgrace."

"I can understand your point of view," Tony said. "So if you'd just take a look at these mug shots--"

But Garamalkis was not ready to answer their questions. He still had a few things to get off his chest. Interrupting Tony, he said, "Four years ago, I got fined the first time. The usual things. Some of my Mexican employees didn't have green cards. Some others were working on expired cards. After I settled up in court, I decided to play it straight from then on. I made up my mind to hire only Mexicans with valid work cards. And if I couldn't find enough of those, I was going to hire U.S. citizens. You know what? I was stupid. I was really stupid to think I could stay in business that way. See, I can only afford to pay minimum wage to most of these workers. Even then, I'm stretching myself thin. The problem is Americans won't work for minimum wage. If you're a citizen, you can get more from welfare for not working than you can make at a job that pays minimum wage. And the welfare's tax-free. So I just about went crazy for about two months, trying to find workers, trying to keep the laundry going out on schedule. I nearly had a heart attack. See, my customers are places like hotels, motels, restaurants, barber shops ... and they all need to get their stuff back fast and on a dependable schedule. If I hadn't started hiring Mexicans again, I'd have gone out of business."

Frank didn't want to hear any more. He was about to say something sharp, but Tony put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently, urging him to be patient.

"Look," Garamalkis said, "I can understand not giving illegal aliens welfare and free medical care and like that. But I can't see the sense in deporting them when they're only doing jobs that no one else wants to do. It's ridiculous. It's a disgrace." He sighed again, looked at the mug shots of Bobby Valdez that he was holding, and said, "Yeah, I know this guy."

"We heard he used to work here."

"That's right."

"When?"

"Beginning of the summer, I think. May. Part of June."

"After he skipped out on his parole officer," Frank said to Tony.

"I don't know anything about that," Garamalkis said.

"What name did he give you?" Tony asked.

"Juan."

"Last name?"

"I don't remember. He was only here six weeks or so. But it'll still be in the files."

Garamalkis stepped down from the platform and led them back across the big room, through the steam and the smell of detergent and the suspicious glances of the employees. In the front office he asked the secretary to check the files, and she found the right pay record in a minute. Bobby had used the name Juan Mazquezza. He had given an address on La Brea Avenue.

"Did he really live at this apartment?" Frank asked.

Garamalkis shrugged. "It wasn't the sort of important job that required a background credit check."

"Did he say why he was quitting?"

"No."

"Did he tell you where he was going?"

"I'm not his mother."

"I mean, did he mention another job?"

"No. He just cut out."

"If we don't find Mazquezza at this address," Tony said, "we'd like to come back and talk to your employees. Maybe one of them got to know him. Maybe somebody here's still friends with him."

"You can come back if you want," Garamalkis said. "But you'll have some trouble talking to my people."

"Why's that?"

Grinning, he said, "A lot of them don't speak English."

Tony grinned back at him and said, "Yo leo, escribo y hablo español."

"Ah," Garamalkis said, impressed.

The secretary made a copy of the pay record for them, and Tony thanked Garamalkis for his cooperation.

In the car, as Frank pulled into traffic and headed toward La Brea Avenue, he said, "I've got to hand it to you."

Tony said, "What's that?"

"You got more out of him quicker than I could have."

Tony was surprised by the compliment. For the first time in their three-month association, Frank had admitted that his partner's techniques were effective.

"I wish I had a little bit of your style," Frank said. "Not all of it, you understand. I still think my way's best most of the time. But now and then we run across someone who'd never open up to me in a million years, but he'd pour out his guts to you in about a minute flat. Yeah, I wish I had a little of your smoothness."

"You can do it."

"Not me. No way."

"Of course, you can."

"You've got a way with people," Frank said. "I don't."

"You can learn it."

"Nah. It works out well enough the way it is. We've got the classic mean-cop-nice-cop routine, except we aren't playing at it. With us, it just sort of naturally works out that way."

"You're not a mean cop."

Frank didn't respond to that. As they stopped at a red light, he said, "There's something else I've got to say, and you probably won't like it."

"Try me," Tony said.

"It's about that woman last night."

"Hilary Thomas?"

"Yeah. You liked her, didn't you?"

"Well ... sure. She seemed nice enough."

"That's not what I mean. I mean, you liked her. You had the hots for her."

"Oh, no. She was good looking, but I didn't--"

"Don't play innocent with me. I saw the way you looked at her."

The traffic light changed.

They rode in silence for a block.

Finally, Tony said, "You're right. I don't get all hot and bothered by every pretty girl I see. You know that."

"Sometimes I think you're a eunuch."

"Hilary Thomas is ... different. And it's not just the way she looks. She's gorgeous, of course, but that's not all of it. I like the way she moves, the way she handles herself. I like to listen to her talk. Not just the sound of her voice. More than that. I like the way she expresses herself. I like the way she thinks."

"I like the way she looks," Frank said, "but the way she thinks leaves me cold."

"She wasn't lying," Tony said.

"You heard what the sheriff--"

"She might have been mixed up about exactly what happened to her, but she didn't create the whole story out of thin air. She probably saw someone who looked like Frye, and she--"

Frank interrupted. "Here's where I've got to say what you won't want to hear."

"I'm listening."

"No matter how hot she made you, that's no excuse for what you did to me last night."

Tony looked at him, confused. "What'd I do?"

"You're supposed to support your partner in a situation like that."

"I don't understand."

Frank's face was red. He didn't look at Tony. He kept his eyes on the street and said, "Several times last night, when I was questioning her, you took her side against mine."

"Frank, I didn't intend--"

"You tried to keep me from pursuing a line of questioning that I knew was important."

"I felt you were too harsh with her."

"Then you should have indicated your opinion a whole hell of a lot more subtly than you did. With your eyes. With a gesture, a touch. You handle it that way all the time. But with her, you came charging in like a white knight."

"She had been through a very trying ordeal and--"

"Bullshit," Frank said. "She hadn't been through any ordeal. She made it all up!"

"I still won't accept that."

"Because you're thinking with your balls instead of your head."

"Frank, that's not true. And it's not fair."

"If you thought I was being so damned rough, why didn't you take me aside and ask what I was after?"

"I did ask, for Christ's sake!" Tony said, getting angry in spite of himself. "I asked you about it just after you took the call from HQ, while she was still out on the lawn talking to the reporters. I wanted to know what you had, but you wouldn't tell me."

"I didn't think you'd listen." Frank said. "By that time, you were mooning over her like a lovesick boy."

"That's crap, and you know it. I'm as good a cop as you are. I don't let personal feelings screw up my work. But you know what? I think you do."

"Do what?"

"I think you do let personal feelings screw up your work sometimes," Tony said.

"What the hell are you talking about?"

"You have this habit of hiding information from me when you come up with something really good," Tony said. "And now that I think about it ... you only do it when there's a woman in the case, when it's some bit of information you can use to hurt her, something that'll break her down and make her cry. You hide it from me, and then you spring it on her by surprise, in the nastiest way possible."

"I always get what I'm after."

"But there's usually a nicer and easier way it could be gotten."

"Your way, I suppose."

"Just two minutes ago you admitted my way works."

Frank didn't say anything. He glowered at the cars ahead of them.

"You know, Frank, whatever your wife did to you through the divorce, no matter how much she hurt you, that's no reason to hate every woman you meet."

"I don't."

"Maybe not consciously. But subconsciously--"

"Don't give me any of that Freud shit."

"Okay. All right," Tony said. "But I'll swap accusation for accusation. You say I was unprofessional last night. And I say you were unprofessional. Stalemate."

Frank turned right on La Brea Avenue. They stopped at another traffic signal.

The light changed, and they inched forward through the thickening traffic.

Neither of them spoke for a couple of minutes.