Chasing Venus (16 page)

“After he was what?”

She swallowed.
 
“Stabbed.”

“Are you telling me he
was murdered?”

The tears welled again,
this time spilled over.
 
Still she
kept her face straight ahead.
 
“Yes.
 
Last night.”

“And how did you find
me?”

“Your business card, remember?
 
You gave it to me.”

Yes, he had.
 
In what now seemed like another life,
when he hadn’t harbored doubts about this woman.
 
And her innocence in what had apparently
become an even longer list of serial killings.

Behind him, a horn
honked.
 
He leaned out his open
driver’s-side door to see Sheila’s white Jetta poised at the top of the
ramp.
 
Great.
 
Exactly what he needed.
 
She opened her window and called
out.
 
“Doesn’t the key-card thing
work?”

“I’ve been having a
little trouble with it,” he lied, then turned back around.
 
“Get down,” he muttered to Annie, but
she’d already inserted herself into the
footwell
,
contorting her body into an impressively tight ball of flesh and bone.
 
She looked up at him with those big
green eyes that had caused his heart to skip in recent weeks, but for entirely
different reasons than it had this morning.
 
“I’ll try again,” he called back to
Sheila, then made a big show of
finally!
when the door to the subterranean garage rose as usual.

He waited to advance
the truck so that his rear bumper would be just inside when the door began to
slide down again.
 
He wanted Sheila
to have to use her own key card to drive through.
 
It would buy him a few extra seconds, to
do what he didn’t know.

Once in the garage, he
pointed his truck toward his reserved space.
 
“You stay in the truck,” he said.
 
He kept facing straight ahead, as if he
weren’t addressing the bloody female fugitive crouching in his
footwell
.

Because that’s what she
was now, if this tale she was telling was true.
 
Annie Rowell was a fugitive, the very
ilk of person he lived his life to apprehend.
 
And no doubt if her name wasn’t on some
Most Wanted lists already, it would be by noon.

“I’m not going
anywhere,” she said.

“What do you want from
me?”

She didn’t have a ready
answer for that one.
 
He nosed his
truck into his space and cut the engine, noting that by now Sheila was inside
the garage as well and maneuvering into her spot against the opposite wall.

Annie’s voice, very
low, rose to his ears.
 
“Didn’t you tell
me the other day that you believe I’m innocent of these murders?”

“That was before you
accosted me at dawn smeared with the blood of the latest victim.”

She was silent.
 
He pulled the key from the ignition,
keenly aware that Sheila had exited her car and was heading in his
direction.
 
He glanced at
Annie.
 
Her eyes seemed even more
huge than usual.
 
And more pleading
than he’d ever seen them.
 
Something
in him tightened but he forced himself to ignore it.

“Don’t give me that
wounded look shit,” he told her.
 
“And stay in the goddamn truck until I come back.
 
I have no idea when that’ll be,” and he
got out just as Sheila arrived at his rear bumper.
 
He leaned back against the truck’s
chassis and motioned for her to walk past, as if he were politely ceding the
right of way and not blocking her view of the interior of his vehicle.

She gave him an injured
look.
 
“You might have driven faster
and let me in behind you.”

“Good morning to you,
too.”
 
He fell into step beside her,
his relief building with every yard they moved closer to the elevator
bank.
 
“You’re in early.”

“We’ve got to get the
Geppardo
piece in the can, remember?”

He’d forgotten all
about it.
 
That meant it’d be hours
before he could get back to the truck.

Although, come to think
of it, he had no need for speed.
 
He
had no idea what the hell he was going to do.

Sheila pushed the UP
button.
 
“Are you having trouble
with the truck or something?”

“Oh,” he waved his hand
dismissively, “the clutch has been a little funky lately.
 
I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about.”

“I could have Rajiv
look at it.”
 
The elevator doors
opened and they stepped inside.
 
Her
demeanor changed, took on its usual helpfulness.
 
“He’s coming down from Ventura
today.
 
I could ask him to stop by
here.”

Her brother Rajiv, the
mechanic.
 
Who was good at what he
did but couldn’t solve Reid’s current problem unless he could make female
fugitives disappear as efficiently as he did inexplicable knocking noises in
the radiator.

“Nah, thanks anyway,
but I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
 
The elevator
doors opened on to the first-floor lobby.
 
At this hour the reception desk was unattended and the sign-in book lay
open to a fresh unmarked page.
 
Its
blankness surprised Reid.
 
Somehow,
at just quarter past seven in the morning, he already felt like he’d had a long
day.

Annie couldn’t stop
trembling.
 
She thought probably
she’d been trembling all night, from the moment she’d found Michael’s
body.
 
She squeezed her eyes shut
but couldn’t escape the image.
 
It
was seared into her memory bank.
 
She knew it would stay with her forever.

She crammed herself
deeper into the
footwell
of Reid’s truck, as if she
were a wolf seeking the safety of a den.
 
The night had been hell on wheels, literally.
 
Back at Michael’s house she’d pulled
Reid’s business card from her wallet, where thank God she’d stowed it days
before, then forced herself to drive at precisely the speed limit north to Los
Angeles.
 
She knew the city, since
she and Philip had lived there for part of their marriage, but still, in her
panicked state, had to
zig
and
zag
her way to the
Crimewatch
address.
 
She’d found the building
around four in the morning, parked on a side street blocks away, and
then—like one of her characters who’d been on the run—performed
some creative artwork on the rental car license plates with a black magic
marker she’d had the presence of mind to lift from Michael’s kitchen.
 
2CPN316 became 2ORN846.
 
No one who looked closely would be
fooled but maybe the car would remain undetected just that much longer.

In those last darkest
hours before dawn, she’d scampered back to the
Crimewatch
building and hunkered down in a protected spot between a
bush and a fence that allowed her an unobstructed view of the garage
entry.
 
Then she simply waited for
Reid to appear.
 
She couldn’t be
sure that he would.
 
Maybe he was
traveling; clearly he did that a lot.
 
Maybe he was off; she didn’t know what his schedule was.
 
And if he didn’t show, she didn’t know
what she would do.

But he did show.
 
And he didn’t turn her in.

Not then, anyway.

Her ears pricked.
 
For what seemed like the millionth time,
she heard a vehicle whoosh down into the garage then make a sharp turn, its
tires squealing on the concrete.
 
She’d concluded that
Crimewatch
employees drove fast.
 
They liked
their music or talk radio blaring and they talked very loudly into their cell
phones.
 
And unfortunately every
single one of them tromped right past Reid’s truck, thanks to the fact that his
number-one employee status afforded him the prime parking spot nearest the
elevator bank.
      

The engine on the
latest vehicle cut off.
 
Seconds
later she heard a door slam and heels hit the concrete.
 
The footfalls neared and Annie
identified this as a woman, striding fast.
 
Annie kept her gaze averted as the woman passed, believing that humans
could feel eyes on them and instinctively sought the source of the stare.
 
It was a high-risk game she was playing,
she knew.
 
If anyone spied her,
they’d race upstairs to tell Reid he had a female vagrant in his vehicle.
 
Or worse, they’d recognize her as a
fugitive and stand there using their infernal cell phone to call the cops.
 
For all she knew, she’d been on the news
that morning, her face splashed on the screen with a
Serial Killer on the Lam! Call 911!
directive to the public.
 
And who would be more attuned to such a
bulletin than a
Crimewatch
employee?

Or maybe Reid himself
had already called his cop friends.
 
Maybe he’d called Simpson.
 
Maybe the building already was surrounded, so if she tried to make a
break for it, they’d catch her.
 
Maybe they had guns trained on the only egress from the garage.
 
Maybe it was taking so long because Reid
wanted to be sure to capture her “takedown,” as
Crimewatch
liked to call it, on tape.
 
No doubt she’d lead the next
broadcast.
 
She’d make Reid Gardner
even more of a crime-fighting star than he already was.

Maybe she’d been a fool
to come to Reid but what other realistic choice did she have?
 
She couldn’t simply return home; she’d
be arrested.
 
She couldn’t go to her
parents for the same reason.
 
And
with Michael gone, she had no friends who’d have any clue how to deal with such
a situation.
 
Nor did she believe
she could go it alone.
 
She knew she
lacked the street smarts to evade a major manhunt.

She’d never felt so
vulnerable.
 
When her marriage
ended, she vowed that never again would she allow herself to become
dependent.
 
And yet here she was,
desperately in need of help from a man she barely knew.
 
Her future rode on the beliefs he had
about her, the decisions he made about what he wanted to do.
 

Right or wrong, she’d
made her call.
 
And something in her
believed that she had been right to come to Reid.
 
He’d been angry, yes, but who could
blame him?
 
She’d shocked the hell
out of him with her blood-stained reappearance and revelation that Michael had
been murdered, nearly in her presence.
 
True, Reid might have let her hide in his vehicle because he intended to
turn her in.
 
But she had to hope
that wasn’t the case.
 
She had to
hope he still allowed for the possibility that she was innocent.
 
Innocent until proven guilty.
 
He seemed the sort of man who would
honor that principle.

Funny that now she
thought of him as principled.
 
He
had undergone that transformation in her mind.
 
It was partly that she couldn’t really
fault his behavior and partly that Michael had vouched for him, insofar as he
could.

The tragedy from his
past also cast his pursuit of dangerous criminals in a different light.
 
Maybe it wasn’t a game to him.
 
Maybe it wasn’t a kneejerk desire for
authority or even greater celebrity.
 
Maybe, for him, it really was an honorable pursuit.

She took a deep breath,
tried to slow her stampeding heart.
 
She could only hope that Reid Gardner was principled enough that he
would allow her to plead her case to him, and make no decisions until she had.

*

Reid kept flubbing his
lines.
 
He was in the recording
booth laying a voice track and making a hash of it.
 
That wasn’t typical for One-Take
Gardner.
 
Through the window-sized
rectangle of tempered glass opposite the microphone, he could see Sheila and
the male audio engineer in the adjacent editing bay exchange glances.
 
Sheila kept giving Reid appraising looks
as if she knew something was up.
 
With every tap of her pen against the console, every narrowing of her
brown eyes as she gazed in his direction, Reid’s agitation ratcheted up another
notch.

What the hell was he going to do about Annie?
 
And when the hell was he going to do it?

The engineer leaned
toward his mike and a second later his voice filled Reid’s headphones.
 
“Re-take from the third graph.
 
‘The M.O. of our next fugitive blah
blah
blah
.’”