The Perfect Suspect (32 page)

Ryan turned, slipped the gun from her belt and swung back. Ericka Frasier had stood up. She began peddling backward, eyes wide with terror, mouth a perfect O of surprise. She threw out both hands, as if flesh and bones could deflect the bullet that sent her crashing backward against the window, then folding onto the floor.

The addresses were hard to spot, hidden behind the low-hanging branches of the old trees that sprawled over the front yards and the wide, sloping porches. Finally Catherine made out the black numbers next to one of the front doors. The address the doorman had given her had to be that of the three-story, redbrick Victorian next door. She managed to jam the convertible into a small vacant slot at the curb and hurried up the buckled sidewalk. Somebody sat out on the screened porch, bent over a computer. Catherine rapped at the door that jumped against her hand, and a girl, tall with dark hair pulled into a ponytail, in cut-off jeans and a yellow tee shirt, turned halfway around and looked out. Catherine dug her fingers into the leather of her bag and tried to steady her breathing. “Kim?” she called.

The girl got up, plodded barefoot across the porch and opened the door.

“I'm Catherine McLeod from the
Journal
,” Catherine said.

“Yeah? What do you want?” Catherine felt her heart sink. The voice was not Kim's.

“I'm here to see Kim,” she said.

“Well, you missed her.” The girl scratched at what looked like a mosquito bite on her neck. “I'll tell her you stopped by.”

“Kim's in serious trouble,” Catherine said. “Are you a friend?”

The girl stared at her a long moment, then kicked the screened door open. “Come in,” she said. Then she walked over and dropped back onto her chair and motioned Catherine toward a slatted wood porch swing. “You can call me Misty,” she said. “What kind of trouble?”

Catherine told her that a murderer had targeted Kim; that she was trying to help her. “It's not safe for her now,” she said. “Can you tell me where she is?”

“She didn't say anything to me.” The girl shrugged, as if this were a fantasy on TV, not to be taken seriously. “Sometimes the guys we go with—” She stopped, a worried look on her face, as if she had gone too far. “Look, I don't know how much you know.”

“I'm not here about what Kim does,” Catherine said.

The girl shrugged. “Well, sometimes it can get a little rough, but not so much working for the agency. At least the johns are screened; they're pretty decent. Still, you never know what can happen. She never said anything about any trouble. We always have each other's backs. She would have told me.”

Catherine tried again “This isn't about a john,” she said. But it was, she was thinking. David Mathews had been a john. “Kim is scared. She's on the run for her life. She witnessed a murder.”

The girl sat perfectly still for a long moment, then she jumped up, as if she'd been hit by an electric prod. “I knew it!” she said. “I knew something was wrong. She shows up here, says she needs the keys to the BMW.” She shrugged. “We keep each other's cars when we have to stay with a client. I gave her the keys, asked if she wanted some lemonade, but she said she had to get going, like she was driving off to meet some big client she didn't want me to know about. One of my johns, is what I thought, and I was upset, 'cause we don't keep things from each other. We made a pact. Johns don't come between friends. I'm thinking, ‘What's up with you, girl?'”

“Where did she go?” Catherine said.

“She said she had to take care of some business.”

“If she was getting ready to leave town, what kind of business would she take care of?”

The girl shrugged. “I know what I'd do. I'd get the cash and stuff I've hidden away. Yeah, I'd get that for sure. I mean, how far you gonna go with no money?”

“Where would she hide it?”

“At her condo,” Misty said. “Where else? She has a special hiding place, burglarproof, she told me.”

Then she gave Catherine the address of Kim's condo.

31

The condominium complex was a series of yellow-sided, two-story buildings that spilled out the tenants by 8:00 a.m., Monday through Friday, and that was a good thing. No one around to tell Detective Beckman when she had arrived and left. The parking lot was empty. Her own space was at the far end of the building, but Kim slid to a stop close to the stairway, slammed out and ran up to the second floor, her footsteps echoing around the hollow stairwell. She had her key out of her bag before she reached her door, and in a second, she was inside. Five minutes was all she needed. She ran into the bedroom, dragged an old fake leather bag off the closet shelf and flopped it onto the bed. Then she began dragging clothes and shoes out of the closet and stuffing them inside the bag. The Louis Vuitton was in the trunk of the BMW packed with the evening gowns and expensive lotions and moisturizers and perfumes from that other life. What a laugh. This was her life; Kim Nobody Gregory from the dusty, one-stoplight nowhere towns of Arizona and Nevada and New Mexico, wherever Mama had wanted to go.

For the first time in her life, Kim would go where she belonged. The thought surprised her. She had always intended to get as far away as possible from the bare, western towns and never look back. Keep going on and going on, Mama always said. She was thinking that Mama said a lot of stupid things Kim had spent most of her life trying to forget. But when it came down to it, they were her towns, her kind of people, spare, unpretentious and hardworking, not expecting anything. No favors or paybacks, no cozying up to people they hated, no dinners in five-star restaurants with the best wine cellars, no showing off all the time in the hope of gaining some advantage. Kim knelt on the bag and struggled with the zipper a moment. Finally, she opened the top, flung a pair of jeans onto the floor and started over.

She managed to close the bag, then went to the corner, got down on her hands and knees and ripped back the carpeting, a green shag probably older than she was that smelled of dog hair and cat pee, with pink stains of old nail polish here and there. She had pulled a triangle back two feet before she spotted the floorboard with the knothole. Working an index finger into the knothole, she struggled to lever the board upright. The board was stuck. God, probably another leak that had run down the inside wall and swollen the boards. She could smell the acrid odor of mold. The board began to give a little, and she managed to jerk it upright and lift out the metal box.

She carried the box over to the bed and opened it. The black bag with the pearl and diamond necklace from the vice president of some Florida company lay next to the bronze case with the diamond bracelet and ruby pendant from the oil guy with the sour smells of gasoline and aftershave. Beneath the jewelry was twelve thousand dollars, neatly stacked in one-hundred-dollar bills, rubber-banded together. The total savings for six years, a hundred clients—she had lost count—all blurred together, the well-trimmed hair and bulbous noses, the hearty laughs and big, hairy hands. The jewelry was worth another couple thousand. She'd find a high-class pawnshop in Phoenix, not one of those cheap places that tried to give you a few hundred bucks for diamonds.

She closed the lid and slipped the box into an empty shopping bag she had left next to the dresser. She yanked open the bottom drawer and rummaged among the underwear and blouses for the baggie. The plastic felt cool to her fingertips. Hardly enough white powder inside to bother with. Besides, she had been cutting back. She kicked the drawer shut, then opened it again. She took the baggie. Beckman couldn't find the cocaine. It would provide the perfect excuse: a drug addict, holding on to her stash, threatening a police officer. With what? A knife, maybe. All Beckman had to do was get a butcher knife from the kitchen and place it in Kim's hand—after she had killed her. She pulled out the baggie and stuffed it inside the shopping bag.

She would take I-25 south all the way into southern New Mexico, then turn west and drive for Arizona. It could take two days, but she wouldn't stop. She would keep going, keep going. She fixed the strap of her bag over her shoulder, then picked up the fake leather suitcase and the shopping bag. She'd get a job on a ranch looking after horses, out in the wide open desert with the big sky all around. She had always liked horses, and they liked her, at least during that time Mama took up with the seven-foot-tall rancher in Nevada. It would be a good life, working with horses. She would be free.

The soft thud of a car door shutting outside cut into her thoughts, and she realized that, behind her thoughts, like an annoying buzzing noise, had been the sounds of an engine. She froze. She couldn't remember whether she'd thrown the lock when she came through the front door. She had been so preoccupied with getting her things and getting out. So little time. Not even enough time to throw the lock. The truth cut into her like a knife: Ericka would give Beckman what she wanted; even if Ericka had gotten the message, she would still tell Beckman where the condo was. Ericka wouldn't forget that Kim had cheated her.

She forced herself to relax. Another tenant had probably come home early. People found a way to leave the office early on Friday afternoons. If she had ever landed an office job, she was sure she would have spent the days planning to get out. She took in a long breath and started down the narrow hall, the bags banging against the walls.

The blond woman in a blue blazer and tan slacks appeared at the end of the hallway. She was gripping a metallic colored gun, steadying her wrist with her other hand. Odd, Kim thought. She didn't look like the calm detective on TV, framed in the doorway of David's house. This was the disheveled woman with the wild, frantic look who had burst out of David's house and stood under the porch light, blinking into the darkness.

“Going somewhere?” Beckman said.

“I'm going home.” Kim heard the sound of her own voice floating ahead, disembodied. “You here to arrest me?” She knew it wasn't true. The last thing Detective Beckman wanted was Kim Gregory spilling her guts at police headquarters.

“Home? That's beautiful.” A piece of blond hair had fallen into Beckman's eye, and she tossed her head a couple of times as if she could throw it away. “Where might home be? Rathole on East Colfax? Pimp waiting for you? Gonna beat the crap outta you if you don't get over there?”

Kim clenched her jaws together and gripped the handles of the bags hard to stop the shaking that had started in her legs and crawled up into her shoulders. “I'm done with all that,” she said. “I'm leaving Denver, and I'll never come back, I promise. I don't care about anything that happened here; it's none of my business. I've never been one to poke my nose in other people's business. Live and let live is what my mama used to say.” She was afraid she might start crying, and she swallowed back the lump of moisture in her throat. She made herself go on: “I'll just be leaving now.”

She started moving forward, framing the whole picture: the gun that got bigger with every step, the white hands wrapped around the handle, the wild eyes and grimacing lips that parted over a row of white teeth. A deafening noise crashed over her. Then she was looking down on herself and trying to grasp this new reality of floating up to the ceiling and being down on the floor at the same time, a hot flame shooting through her, the noise still reverberating around her.

Catherine realized she had driven past the neighborhood on I-25 hundreds of times. She had never noticed the three-story yellow buildings that looked like the motel complex they had probably once been. The parking lot was empty. No sign of Kim's black BMW, but that didn't mean she hadn't left the car a block away hoping to fool Beckman into thinking she hadn't gone home. “I'd get the cash and stuff I've hidden away,” Kim's friend had said. How long would it take Kim to collect her stuff? Five minutes? She could have left already. Or never shown up. What was the stuff worth compared to her life?