20

Joe felt a growing tension as he stepped inside the guesthouse, not sure whether he had already caused Justine Poole to leave, losing his exclusive story. His departure had been intentionally casual and indifferent to keep the relationship friendly rather than romantic. As soon as he had learned who she was, he had known her interest in him was only an act to make him want to keep her around, and he wanted to take the pressure off. The fact that she was trying to make herself safe from whoever had killed Benjamin Spengler was hard to resent. He hoped he hadn’t been too indifferent.

All she undoubtedly wanted was for him not to find her annoying or troublesome enough to throw her out. At least for the moment, that suited him too. Had he made a mistake? He heard the noise of his hair dryer coming from the bathroom. He was relieved. She was still here.

He set the food bags on the counter to be sure she would smell them and then see them when she came out. He walked deeper into the house to the doorway of his bedroom and saw her clothes laid out on his bed. He stopped there. In a moment he heard the hairdryer stop and she came to the door of the bathroom wrapped in a beach towel tucked under her arms and retreated back in. She called out, “Is that you?”

He started back up the short hall. “Yes.”

“Are you alone?”

“Yes.”

She stuck her head out. “Sorry. I didn’t think you’d be back so soon.”

He smiled. That had been masterful. She seemed convincingly unconcerned that he had been gone and pretended not to have noticed it had been over three hours. “It’s fine. Make yourself comfortable.”

“I left my clothes in your room.”

“Do you want me to bring them to you?”

“No,” she said. “I’ll go in there. Okay?”

“Be my guest.” He sat on the couch at the far end of the living room and watched her come out, her hair longer and straighter than he remembered it, then go into his bedroom and shut the door.

About ten minutes later she came out to the living room. “What’s that smell?”

“Dinner.”

“Ooh,” she said. “That was so sweet, Joe. I didn’t really feel like going out. I went for a swim in your pool, and it got me all relaxed and tired.”

“Really? You had a bathing suit with you?”

“You didn’t look in my purse while I was out of the room?”

“I didn’t look in your purse at any time.”

“There wasn’t one,” she said. “I went skinny-dipping. You said your landlord was away, and I saw you leave, so I knew I was alone.” She pushed back a tress of her hair. “It was so nice.” She watched him to see if her words, the clothes he’d seen on his bed, and the carefully choreographed glimpse of her wrapped in his towel had produced the desired effect. After a few seconds she was sure it had. Men, even sophisticated men, were so easy that she was sure part of his mind was thinking about her right now, forming images that were making him wish that he had been here.

She knew that any interest he might have had in her had probably been crowded out of his mind by the wish to write about her, but keeping up the fake flirtation allowed her to stay here and maintain control of the situation without telling him anything that she might not want published. It was as though they were both in a play about two people who weren’t them, but were a bit like them.

She looked at the big bags on the kitchen counter with the Chinese ideograms. “Mister Fong,” she said. “That’s a great place. No wonder it smells so good. Should I put it in the refrigerator for later?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “It’s already after six, which is early for dinner, but we never had lunch. And refrigerating it can kind of thicken the sauce and diminish the flavors.” He thought about the tease she had been perpetrating and added, “Besides, we may want to turn in early anyway.”

She kept her expression unreadable. “I’m hungry. I’ll sign on to any excuse.”

They carried the food bags to the table and went back for serving spoons and plates. Without asking her he opened a bottle of Malbec and filled two wine glasses.

She didn’t react, simply opened white cartons and spooned food out onto their plates. “I love Mister Fong,” she said. “I actually heard that there are rich families from Taipei who plan their flights to be sure they can eat there before they fly home.”

“I’ll bet that’s at his original restaurant in Monterey Park. It’s supposed to be less Americanized.”

She squinted. “I don’t know. This is pretty darned good.”

“I’m glad I guessed right,” he said. He took a sip of wine and went back to eating. He was trying to remind her that her glass was there when she wanted it.

After a minute she did the same. She had in that time decided the wine was useful. She could let it relax her even more and nod off before he began to get too friendly. She could stay the night, extend her period of invisibility for eight or ten more hours, and not have to deal with the hopes her teasing might have aroused.

After dinner she insisted on clearing the table, storing the large stock of extra food in plastic containers and refrigerating them, recycling the packaging, and washing the dishes, to which she added his breakfast dishes.

They both sipped their wine as this was going on, and she noticed that he had half-filled her glass, but replaced the cork and didn’t pour again. She decided that he had learned from experience that this was the amount that a 130-pound woman with a full stomach would take to be pleasantly relaxed, but not impaired. She had an unpleasant thought and scrutinized his face. No, he wasn’t somebody who would ever put something in a woman’s drink. The thought had only come because everything in her life seemed to have been ruined and obliterated in two days, and being drugged would be the next shock in the worsening series.

She followed him to the couch and sat close while he used the remote control to turn on the big television set that dominated the wall. He set it to the Channel 9 local news, which was the one that showed an eight o’clock report. He said, “I write about current issues, and I like to get an early hint of what’s up every night, in case something happens that makes one of my analyses stupid.”

“Checking sounds like a good idea,” she said. “If it is stupid, do you leave town or wear a disguise for a week?”

“If I can, I correct it. If I can’t, I kill it.”

And then the news came on. There was the anchor couple—a woman, Darla Stevens, and her partner, Sean Kepler. “Demonstrations today at City Hall and at the home of the young woman who shot the two alleged home invasion robbers, right after this.” Joe Alston waited through a couple of commercials, but saw that Justine was beginning to get agitated. He stood up, said, “Excuse me,” and walked to the bathroom before the report began.

He urinated, washed his hands, combed his hair, turned on his electric toothbrush and brushed his teeth, then decided he had killed all the time he could there, came out and went into his bedroom to straighten the bedspread, and listened to the voices. He wondered if the report would scare her off, but he had felt it was necessary to be sure she knew what had been going on. He went back out and saw that she was still there, transfixed. For the first time she seemed unaware of him.

He waited for a few more seconds and then said, “It’s obviously been a slow news day. Unless you’re interested in this local stuff, I can find a movie.”

She managed a smile. “Good idea.”

He switched the television set from cable to streaming, found the category “Romantic Comedies,” and framed one that had a picture of two actors whose faces were familiar. “Have you seen this one?”

She said, “I don’t think so, but have you ever seen one where they didn’t hate each other but end up together anyway? I don’t see anything better, though. We may as well try it.”

He clicked the remote control on it. He had anticipated that Justine Poole might not necessarily be a fan of romantic comedies, but it was likely that the woman she was playing—Anna—would be. He had done the fair and responsible thing, and let Justine Poole see the report of what was happening in her case without revealing that he knew anything. Whatever she did next was up to her.

What she did was watch almost all of the movie and then pretend to fall asleep and listen to the happy ending, which was actually more realistic and sophisticated than usual, and therefore not entirely unpleasant. He gently shook her as though to wake her up. “Come on,” he said. “You know where the bedroom is. Go there and sleep.”

“What about you?”

“The main house has seven bedroom suites. I’ll be over there.”

She stood up. “Wow. I’m sorry to be such a bore. That movie hypnotized me. Were they still together at the end?”

“More like together again at last,” he said. “I guess the studio probably tested it both ways and the audience didn’t like the one where she turns on him, stabs him to death, and eats his liver.”

“The wisdom of crowds,” she said. “Are you sure you want to sleep in the main house? I can easily sleep out here on the couch.”

“No. It’s really not a problem. Good night.” He picked his keys up from the desk and locked the front door, then went out the side door and locked that behind him.

Justine stood there for a few seconds, moved closer to the big window, and watched him walk to the big house and disappear inside. A few seconds later she saw the light go on over what was probably the staircase. After a few more seconds she saw a light go on in an upper window.

She went into Joe’s bedroom and undressed, then lay down. The bed had been made this morning, but the sheets had not been changed. She didn’t care. She had what she’d needed so badly, a place to stay hidden for a whole night and give the killer a chance to make mistakes and get caught by the police. She hoped the rest and good food would also make her stronger and more clearheaded, but the main thing was being alive.

As she drifted toward the emptiness of sleep, she realized she was smelling Joe’s scent, his skin, and she caught herself being drawn into thinking about him. What if circumstances had been different? She had studied him for most of a long day. He was a smart, decent man who had at first decided to be helpful to her without feeling entitled to anything, in spite of the fact that she’d been lying to him. After he had noticed she was delaying her departure, sometime before noon, he had not acted worse. Now she regretted having taken the naked swim in the pool. She had done it partly as a way of manipulating him into being less indifferent, and partly just to get back at him for snubbing her, pretending she hadn’t noticed the sneaky keyhole cameras in the yard and making him see who he had just rejected.

What if things had been different, and she hadn’t been in fear for her life when they’d met? Would she be here, sleeping in his bed alone? She brushed away the thought. If she hadn’t been desperate and running, they never would have met, because she would never have approached him.

She felt anxiety about the people who had been picketing her condo building. She had been concentrating on the man who had been hired to kill her. It had not been wasted effort, because studying his picture and recognizing him a couple of times had kept her alive, but the news report about the demonstration had given her ideas that might help her find out who had ordered Ben’s killing and hers. The two lawyers had been pretty effective, so they were probably expensive. Who was paying them to defend the robbers who were in jail? Had anybody begun the process of bailing them out? Where had the Mercedes the robbers had been driving come from? Was it stolen? If so, who had stolen it from whom, and how had it gotten to these young robbers?

She felt sorry for the families of the two men she had shot. To have a child who was pulling armed robberies was terrible. To have him killed at it was pure horror. She felt something worse than regret that the attempted robbery had ever happened. They had lost their boys—babies they had borne and loved and raised, and she had lost everything—Ben Spengler, her job, and more—her place in the world. She had the realization that she had never fully understood what she had been doing all this time. If a person’s profession was to carry a gun to protect people from violence, how could something like this not happen sometime?

She had spent the night of the shooting in the police station answering questions. The first night after that she had slept in Ben Spengler’s office while Ben had been murdered. The second night was in the hotel by the airport, and that made this one, borrowing a stranger’s bed, the third. And then she realized that she had lost her train of thought some time ago and was too exhausted to sort through the threads again. She slept.

Joe Alston slid the false wall panel to the side and unlocked the door to James Peter Turpin’s combination office and panic room in the architectural center of the big house. The hidden room had no windows, of course, and even the entry panel was off a large, sparsely furnished second-floor common room that could be fully surveyed by an intruder from the doorway on the upstairs landing and dismissed. It seemed designed to accommodate groups, possibly cocktail parties or even dancing. The last owner of the house had been a music executive who had needed a safe place because he had tax, drug, and hatred problems, so this innovation had probably been his.

Joe went inside the office, closed the door, and turned on the large surveillance monitor with the remote control on the desk. He looked at each of the twenty sections for a few seconds and satisfied himself that nobody was lurking on the property at the moment, then ran the recording in reverse until the time was three P.M. and restarted it.

He ran the recording in fast forward until he saw movement, then ran it at normal speed. There she was, coming out of his guesthouse carrying his bath towel. She stopped on the pool deck, looked around her in every direction, looked back a second time at a few things he could not see on the screen, and then stepped out of her clothes and walked down the steps into the pool until she was completely immersed. She came up, the water streaming from her hair, and began to swim.

She was a strong, graceful swimmer with a good, correct freestyle stroke. When she reached the end of the pool she completed a quick flip turn, pushed off the wall, and remained submerged while she swam breaststroke back to the wall beside the steps and pushed off to swim backstroke for a length. She swam easily and unhurriedly for about twenty minutes, smoothed her hair with her fingers, then sat on the steps for a few minutes. She ducked herself under again for a few seconds and then stood, went up the steps, and lay on the nearest chaise longue while the sun dried her skin.

She was very pretty—beautiful was the only appropriate word in spite of how liberally people bestowed it—much more attractive than he had allowed himself to admit, because it had seemed to him to be a distraction, and therefore a probable source of manipulation and clouded judgments. He had already taken a much more leisurely view of her swimming session than would have been necessary to identify what had been going on. He ran the file back to the moment before she had stepped out of the house, erased all of it up to the present, and then turned to the security camera focused on the desk and said, “Hi, James. I just came in to see if there had been a prowler poking around in the yard while I was gone today, and I accidentally erased part of this afternoon’s security recording. It was all birds and squirrels, so if you see this, don’t worry.” He shut off the monitor, turned off the light, and stepped out. He relocked the door, slid the panel over it, walked down the hall toward the guest rooms, and thought about Justine.

She had been overconfident, probably because security was part of her profession. She might have assumed she would see any security cameras, which would have normally been mounted along the eaves of the house. She hadn’t known about the previous owner before James, who’d had twelve keyhole cameras mounted in places like false drainpipes and circuit boxes and even woven into a coaxial cable on the guesthouse.

Joe stopped at the door to the first guest room. He remembered that James had told him once that when he’d moved in, the old owner had left some of his belongings in addition to the fixtures and wiring. James had not said what they had been, but now Joe wondered if at least one of them might have been a gun. Maybe he should go back inside the office and open the safe to see. James had shown him where the combination was hidden, but he had never had any reason to use it.

The old owner had apparently exhibited that familiar combination of paranoia and malice that made it unlikely that he hadn’t had guns somewhere. It didn’t matter where they had been; if James had them, they would be locked in the safe and had probably not been touched since then. But now Justine was here and she was in real danger. Joe decided against the guns. He had seen no indication that anyone knew she was here, and getting caught with an unregistered pistol that might easily have been used in some old crime was not going to make her safer.

As Joe pulled back the covers of the bed, he had a difficult time forgetting what he had seen on the recording. Sleep would be welcome, maybe to blur the bright, sunlit clarity of the memory image, at least.