She had to talk to Huckleby. She wondered if he would think she was crazy, all the work she had done on this. He was going to want to know why and the answer she had was really no answer at all, just a truth she was beginning to discover:
That obsession, once begun, did not end easily. That losing it felt a lot like losing love.
* * *
The police station, tucked in a back road behind the post office, was a 1960s building, all metal and sand-colored brick. Its gray tile floors were spotless, and the walls had recently been painted white. She felt oddly betrayed by its cleanliness. Somehow she had expected the grit she had seen portrayed on TV.
When she asked for Huckleby, the woman at the desk— statuesque, her uniform accenting rather than hiding her figure— nodded toward the only man sitting in a sea of desks. Patricia wasn't sure how she missed him, except that she hadn't expected this place to be this way, and somehow hadn't expected him to look so lost and all alone, bathed in the fog-gray light filtering in from the cross-hatched windows.
The smell, she noted as she walked toward him, was strong: burned coffee and stale sweat, the kind of smell that a person never got used to. It wasn't until she was standing over him that he looked up, and from the movement of his lips, she guessed he had been planning to make a comment to someone else when he edited himself for her.
"I didn't expect to see you again," he said, and kicked a green metal desk chair in her direction. She sat gingerly on it, half expecting it to squeal as her folding chair did when her brother sat on it.
His comment was strange given the size of the town they lived in. They would see each other from time to time, probably had already and just hadn't known it, until now.
She licked her lips. "I did some digging."
"Oh?" He was giving her his full attention. The file before him was closed and pushed aside, his hands threaded on the desk like a man patiently waiting to hear something he didn't already know.
"The name Ansara is unusual," she said, knowing that this was an inane way to start. "There was a movie star in the late sixties and early seventies named Michael Ansara. He looked something like Tom."
"Yeah," Huckleby said, his tone dry. "I can't decide if Tom's favorite movie was
Sometimes a Great Notion
or that awful television remake of
Dracula
."
In spite of herself, she smiled. She ducked her head so that he wouldn't see how amused she was. This was serious, after all.
"But I did even more digging. I found out about his record."
His eyebrows went up. "You're good," he said. "Care to share with me how you did that?"
She had thought this through before she came, and now she told him the story she had planned: It was the entire truth minus the driver's license records. Even though anyone could get DMV records simply by writing to the division, she felt almost criminal using them, even more criminal for storing them. Still, if he asked, she would tell him. She only hoped he wouldn't ask.
He didn't, but he was leaning forward now, looking at her with a mixture of puzzlement and respect.
"I would have left it at that," she said, "except I got to wondering, what would a man like that be doing in Seavy Village for so long?"
"Staying clean?" Huckleby said. Clearly he'd thought of that too.
"Maybe," she said. "But when he did spinning class, he outlined bike routes, something we could imagine while our feet were hopelessly circling." She took a piece of paper out of her battered purse. "Here are the places he mentioned, and the way he mentioned them. Cascade Head was the one he focused on, but I always thought that was because it was so high. But he could have used the Van Duzer Corridor for the same thing, or maybe something in the Cascades, and he didn't. He just kept coming back to this one, over and over, like his mind was stuck."
Huckleby glanced at the paper. "You're quite specific. How do you remember what he said?"
She flushed. "I was in his class for a long time. It got boring after a while. You did anything you could to concentrate. I focused on his words. He repeated himself a lot."
He tapped the paper against his hand. "Nice work," he said. "I knew you'd remember something if you tried hard enough."
"Is it important?" she asked.
"Important?" He kept a grip on the paper while he reached for the phone. "It's the missing piece."
* * *
She didn't hear anything for three days. Every time she thought of calling the station, she made herself do something else. The danger with obsession, the Web site told her, was that once one went away, another sometimes arose in its place. Too many, and a person needed therapy. A single one, and perhaps the person needed more to do with her life.
More than computers, exercise, and solitary meals. More than ducking her head to avoid conversations every time she went to the gym.
She joined the aerobics class and made a point, that night, of learning everyone's name. She told her brother that she thought his expansion a bad idea at this stage in their business, and he was so pleased that she used the word "their" that he didn't even try to argue with her. He asked her what she thought the business needed, and she told him all the things she had never said. To her surprise, he made a list and walked out of her office, studying it, ready, he said, to make changes.
On the third day, the local 5:15 newscast announced that a suspect was being held in the murder of Tom Ansara. A man, with a name Patricia didn't recognize, an out-of-towner, as the announcer called him with obvious relief, who had business with Ansara that predated his arrival in Seavy Village.
She was surprised she hadn't heard from Huckleby. She would have thought that, as a courtesy, he would have told her first.
And then she wondered where that assumption came from. She had provided a small bit of information in an ongoing investigation.
He owed her nothing. She owed him nothing. And that's where things would always stand.
* * *
The details came out bit by bit, not in the local paper, which saw itself as a promoter of tourism on the coast and as such tried to cover up the seamier stuff, but in the
Oregonian
, which followed the entire case with an interest unusual in their non-Portland coverage.
Tom Ansara's real name was Andrew Thomas. He had arrests in several states for drug crimes, most of which were minor possession violations. But two states had more serious charges against him, one in an unlikely connection with a group of art thieves operating in Los Angeles. Ansara fled the area after some Mirós, Picassos, a Jackson Pollack, and an original Dali were stolen from a house in Brentwood. He came to Oregon, took a new name, and hid, careful to stay away from Seavy Village's minor drug trade, and managing, somehow, to break off his relations with women before things became too serious.
He hadn't had anything to do with the art heists, had merely stumbled on them in the course of his other shady dealings, and knew, somehow, who was involved. Police assumed he dated one of the thieves, hearing the plans for the Brentwood theft from her. But the heat on that was high, and someone threatened him. When he came to Oregon, he made notes of all he knew and buried them on Cascade Head.
He had mailed a letter to himself the day he died— obviously he had been worried; perhaps he had seen his killer, a man named Will Garetson. In the letter, Tom explained that he had hidden a box, and how far it was from Highway 101, and he gave a detailed description of the unusual tree and rock formation near the burial site. Unfortunately, he had left out what part of 101 he was talking about. When Patricia— "a private citizen" as the papers called her— had come forward, she had provided the missing piece of information: where exactly the box was. The police looked on Cascade Head at the correct distance from 101, found the distinctive tree and rock formation, and proceeded to dig.
They found the box, and in it, the names of the people involved in the heist, a tape recording with their voices on it planning that heist, and a list of the items that they had hoped to take. Also in the box was a note about the reasons Tom had hidden in Oregon: It wasn't because his conscience had finally gotten to him about the heist or because he had been discovered by the thieves. It was because, on the two jobs the thieves performed before his disappearance, they had killed security guards, and Tom was beginning to fear that killing for sport was becoming the reason behind the heists, not the theft itself.
So he vanished, and it took them a long time to trace him. He made two mistakes: He took a regular job, and he kept the old Social Security number. Eventually Garetson found him. In fact, the article said, the man who killed Tom had been the self-defense instructor at the gym a few weeks before Tom's death. Because instructors were rarely in the building at the same time, Tom hadn't seen him. Garetson had discovered Tom's routine, where he lived, and who he had offended in Seavy Village, and had apparently decided the best way to kill the man was to do it at the gym, where all the women he slept with would then become suspects.
It would have worked if it weren't for that letter, and Detective Huckleby, who felt there was something wrong with this case from the beginning.
Patricia read the articles with avid interest, worried when she learned how easy it had been for a killer to infiltrate her small town and target a man, calmer when she realized one of the reasons the man had been targeted was because of his own behavior.
It took a week for the
Oregonian
to print all the articles, but when it was done, and Garetson was in jail awaiting trial, she felt as if it was over. Or at least part of it. She could still remember the touch of Garetson's hands on her neck as he held her in place, using her to demonstrate to the rest of the self-defense class how to do the chokehold. When his arm had wrapped around her throat, she had thought how easy it would be for him to squeeze and how easy it would be for her to die.
Apparently, he had killed Tom with no struggle. She had been right. It had been easy, after all.
* * *
So she went back to her life, changed as it was. Her brother gave her more responsibility at the i.p. and she found a jogging partner, a woman whom she had spoken to a few times at the gym and felt an affinity for. They were developing a friendship composed of short conversations followed by a mile or more of gasping silence. She found that she liked talking with someone. She actually looked forward to it.
By the end of the second week, she made it through two days without thinking of Tom. Then Huckleby walked into her office. He leaned against the door, smiled at her, and let his blue eyes draw her in.
"Do you do lunch?" he asked.
"Only on every other Thursday," she said, and was surprised at the tartness of her own reply.
His smile widened into a grin. "I'm buying."
She went with him to the health-food restaurant next door. He ordered the only meal with beef in it— a shredded beef taco concoction made with cream cheese instead of sour cream— and she had their homemade tomato soup and fresh sourdough bread.
"You never followed up on the case," he said after the food was served.
"You didn't keep me informed."
He took a bite from the taco and half the cream cheese fell out. He set the food down. "I was a little busy."
"But you got him," she said.
"We got him. It's up to the L.A. cops to get the rest." He sounded relieved at that.
"More excitement than Seavy Village is used to," she said.
"More than we want," he replied. Then he put an elbow on the table and watched her. She had never had anyone watch her eat before.
"You know," he said, "in all the times we talked, you never did tell me how you felt about him."
"About Tom?" she asked, stalling. She put her soup spoon down and picked up the bread, shredding it.
"Yes."
She shrugged. "He was my spinning instructor."
"And?"
There was no harm in telling him now. No harm in saying anything. She felt herself flush. She had to look away. "And I hated him."
He let out a slow whistle, as if he hadn't expected it. "Because he was a drill sergeant?"
She shook her head. The soup was nearly gone. She had made a mess of the bread. There were crumbs on her side of the table. She stared at them instead of looking Huckleby in the eye.
"Because of how he looked at me, in the beginning. Like I offended him just by being in his presence."
To her surprise, Huckleby took her hand. She raised her head, saw him looking at her with empathy, not disgust. She wanted to look away, but couldn't.
"Do you know how many times you told me that fat people get treated differently?"
"They do," she said.
"You're no longer fat," he said.
"I always will be." With her free hand she tapped her chest. "Inside. I'll always remember how it feels. Like an alcoholic. I'll always be a fat person crammed into a skinny shell."