“Which is where I come in,” Nolan said. “Walt and I went to the Police Academy together. For a time, he was with the LAPD Robbery Division, but eventually he moved up here.”
“For the peace and quiet,” Walt said, as if peace and quiet were not what he had found.
“He asked for me,” Nolan said, “and we discussed the obvious problem, which is that, strictly speaking, this ardent admirer hadn’t broken the law.”
Coltrane cocked his head in confusion.
“The problem is that, in addition to a pattern of harassment, there has to be an element of threat,” Nolan said. “To you or me, it might be common sense that someone who pesters a woman night and day with professions of love is trying to intimidate her. But the district attorney’s office might not see it that way. They might worry that a jury will figure this guy is more a nuisance than a threat. I once had a case where a stalker sent chocolates to a woman all the time, boxes and boxes. Phoned her constantly. Wrote hundreds of letters. She felt threatened and wanted him stopped. A restraining order didn’t do any good. So I arrested him, and the case actually went to trial. But the jury couldn’t decide if he was guilty of anything. This happened around Valentine’s Day. One woman on the jury later said she thought sending all those chocolates was ‘quaint.’ Honest to God. Anyway, after the hung jury, the guy showed up at the woman’s house one night and shot her in the head. Said he got tired of waiting for her to marry him. Said if he couldn’t have her, nobody would. How’s that for true love?”
“But in this case, we got lucky,” Lyle said.
“If you want to call a threat lucky,” Walt added. “The ardent admirer sent our complainant a funeral wreath with a ribbon across it that read, ‘Till death do us part.’ That’s not the most explicit threat I ever heard of, but the ten-pound heart that came with the wreath certainly was. It turned out to be a bull’s. It had an arrow through it, and a note attached to the arrow. ‘Be mine. You’re wounding my heart. Don’t make me wound yours.’ Tender, don’t you think?”
“And enough to make a jury put him away,” Coltrane said.
“Maybe not for long. But hey, the complainant would breathe easier for a while at least. Hell, maybe this jerk would use the time to reconsider how he shows affection.”
“You don’t have any idea who he is?”
“No, and neither does the complainant. The obvious temptation is to suspect he’s someone she knows. But that’s not always the way these things work. He might be someone she met five years ago and doesn’t remember. Maybe he’s a clerk at the bank she uses. Sometimes it takes only one look for a creep like this to get fixated on someone. We do know he orders the flowers by sending a letter of instructions along with cash to various flower shops. The wreath and the bull’s heart were delivered by a parcel service. The return address on the packages was bogus. While the phone was still working, the guy frequently left his voice on the complainant’s answering machine, but she doesn’t recognize it.”
“The best tactic we could think of,” Walt said, “was to try to entrap him.”
Lyle explained further. “Before the complainant had her phone disconnected, we told her to tell this guy when he called that it was time to put up or shut up, that she’d be waiting for him here this afternoon. She made certain he understood how angry she was with him and that she wanted to see him face-to-face to guarantee he got the point that she wanted nothing at all to do with him.”
“It was an ultimatum we hoped he couldn’t refuse,” Nolan said. “Especially because, when the phone was disconnected yesterday, the creep had no way to get in touch with her to try to renegotiate the terms of the meeting.”
“Then we sent for the cavalry,” Walt said. “Lyle and I are officially on duty. These other guys are friends helping out.”
“On New Year’s Day. I’m impressed,” Coltrane said. “Friends wouldn’t normally give up New Year’s Day to-”
“The complainant’s generous,” one of the other men said.
The rest of the group looked at the man as if he had said too much.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Walt said. “When we’re off duty, she hires us to be her protection. One or the other of us goes into L.A. with her.”
“Speaking of…” One of the state troopers glanced around nervously. “Where is Tash?”
The group tensed.
“Jesus.” Walt snapped to attention. “What happened to her? The last time I saw her, she was coming out of the water and we were chasing-”
6
“I NEEDED TO GET INTO SOMETHING DRY,” a voice said from above, on Coltrane’s right.
He turned toward a stairway, seeing a bare foot appear on the landing. The voice was full-throated, making Coltrane think of similar-voiced actresses in films from the thirties and forties. In his memory, they were always in a sparkling evening gown, standing next to a piano in a nightclub, exchanging repartee with a handsome hero in a white dinner jacket.
But the woman who descended the white carpeting on the stairway wasn’t wearing an evening gown. She wore a cotton sweatsuit, the raspberry color of which enhanced her tan face, dark eyes, and even darker hair. Although the exercise suit was oversized, a dramatic opposite to the tight wet suit she had worn a little while ago, her present outfit was nonetheless almost as revealing. The loose seat suggested the trim firmness of the hips it concealed. The similarly loose top moved up and down in the front and suggested that the woman had not put on a bra.
Everyone watched as she reached the bottom. Coltrane had the sense that the men liked to see her bare feet touch the plush carpeting, but his own attention was directed toward her face: the broad forehead, high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, slender nose, curved lips, angular chin, and narrow jaw that were the elements of classical beauty and that Rebecca Chance had been blessed with. But a catalog of her features couldn’t communicate the animation of those features. Even in a sweatsuit, this woman had come down the stairs with the same fluid ease that Rebecca Chance had shown descending a staircase, wearing a sarong in Jamaica Wind. Her hair, still wet from having been in the ocean, was pushed back, clinging to her head, the way Rebecca Chance had pushed it back as she waded out of a river in The Trailblazer. That pose coming out of the river had been the same as the pose in Randolph Packard’s photographs of Rebecca Chance stepping out of the ocean, the same pose that this woman had assumed as she came out of the ocean onto the rocks not long ago.
Coltrane’s mind was aswirl.
“Hello.” She approached Coltrane, her gaze locked intimately on his as she held out her hand. “I’m Tash Adler, and I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.”
Coltrane felt a spark when their hands touched. Only static electricity from the carpet, he told himself. And yet…
“I hope you aren’t hurt.”
“No, I’m fine.” Coltrane suddenly felt foolish holding the blanket around him. “A little cold is all.” He eased the blanket off him. “Nothing serious.” He repressed another shiver, his wet clothes clinging to him. “Tash?”
“It’s short for Natasha. You should get into something dry before you catch pneumonia.” The concern in her voice made him feel that at that particular moment he was the most important person in the world to her. “But where am I going to find dry clothes for you? I don’t think you’ll fit into one of my bathrobes.”