Coltrane stared.

“But the name he used wasn’t Duncan Reynolds. It was William Butler. He said he worked for the attorney. What’s going on? Why did he lie to me?”

“Maybe he didn’t want you to know his connection with Packard. Obviously, if you knew who he was, you’d have asked him all kinds of questions about why Packard included you in his will.”

“Questions he didn’t want to answer.”

“It’s a reasonable guess.”

“But why wouldn’t he have wanted to answer my questions?” Tash’s voice had become so strong with anxiety that an expensively dressed couple in the adjacent row frowned at her. She leaned close to Coltrane and lowered her voice. “Why is he doing this to me?”

“I told you I did a photo assignment for the LAPD Threat Management Unit,” Coltrane said.

“Yes.”

“It taught me a lot. People think that stalkers are either rejected husbands and boyfriends, or fans obsessed with celebrities and politicians. But there are other categories. I found out some stalkers have only a casual relationship with their victims. A checkout kid at a supermarket becomes obsessed with a beautiful woman who shops there. He stands close to her while she pays by check, and he gets a look at her name and address. He starts driving by her house. When that doesn’t satisfy him, he watches the house at night. Then that’s not enough, and he follows her. He phones the house, hoping to hear her voice. He sends her flowers and notes. He takes surreptitious photographs of her. He wants desperately to have a relationship with her, but he knows that’s impossible, and as his frustration mounts, he gets angry. Finally he decides to punish her for being too good for him, so he gets a can of gasoline or a knife or a gun and…”

Tash shuddered. “You’re suggesting Duncan Reynolds fits that profile?”

“I wouldn’t have believed it without the evidence. To tell you the truth, I kind of like him. He doesn’t seem the type,” Coltrane said. “But then, what is the type? When neighbors find out the man living next door to them just went to where he works and shot five people, they always say, ‘But he was so quiet. I never would have expected him to do anything like that.’ Who knows what anybody’s capable of?”

Tash shuddered again. “What you said about the knife is a little too vivid.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to upset you.” Coltrane touched her hand to reassure her. A crackle of static electricity jumped from her.

They both stared at where it had happened.

“Maybe what I’m really giving off is fear.” Tash reached for the telephone attached to the seat back in front of her.

“What are you doing?” Coltrane asked.

“I’m phoning Walt. Now that we finally know who’s been threatening me, the police can arrest him. They can make the bastard admit he’s been stalking me.”

“No. Stop,” Coltrane said.

“What’s wrong?”

“Walt can’t do anything without evidence. He’ll want to see the photographs.”

“Then we’ll show them to him.” A thought struck her. “Oh.”

“You see what I’m getting at? You’ll have to explain why you can’t show him the photographs. A vague excuse about taking a brief trip first is only going to puzzle him. If your evidence is so convincing, why are you waiting a couple of days to bring it to him?”

“I’ll seem like a flake.”

“Unless you tell him the whole story,” Coltrane said. “That you didn’t see the photographs until you were on a jet to Acapulco. But once he knows where you’re going, he’ll ask why.”

“And our quiet getaway becomes everybody’s business.” Tash exhaled in discouragement. “If Carl finds out, he might even come after us.”

“Right.”

Her hand unsteady, Tash returned the phone to the seat back. “Duncan Reynolds doesn’t know where I am, either. For now, there are just the two of us.”

“You’re sure you weren’t followed to the airport?”

“I used a taxi. I told the driver to drop me off at United. Once inside, I hurried over to Delta. What was anyone following me going to do? He couldn’t just abandon his car in all that traffic at the departure doors. His car would be towed away while he was trying to find me in the terminal.”

“Is everything all right?”

Coltrane and Tash looked up in surprise at a female flight attendant.

“We just realized we had some business we forgot to take care of before we left,” Coltrane said. “I guess there’s no good time to take a vacation.”

“Well, the movie we’re showing is a comedy. Maybe it’ll help get you in a holiday mood.”

“I certainly hope so.”

2

IF THEY HADN’T BEEN SO PREOCCUPIED, the rest of the three-and-a-half-hour flight would have been a pleasure. The service was first-class, especially the Mexican lunch of sea bass with tomato sauce, olives, and sweet and hot peppers. The scenery was spectacular. Glancing out his window, Coltrane saw the blue of the Gulf of California, with the rugged coastal cliffs of Baja California on the right. Then Baja ended in a series of dramatic rock formations, and the Pacific Ocean was spread out before him, breathtaking, as the jet continued along its southeast route far down Mexico’s coast toward Acapulco.

When Cortés’s soldiers had discovered the area in 1521, it was obvious that the deep C-shaped bay would make one of the finest harbors in the world, an article in Delta’s seat-pocket magazine said. For hundreds of years, it had been a major trading depot, but not until the 1920s had the sleepy village with its pristine beaches and impressive mountainous background become prized as a recreation area. Rich vacationers from Mexico City were soon followed by the powerful and famous from other countries. B. Traven, Malcolm Lowry, and Sherwood Anderson had been there, as had Tennessee Williams, whose The Night of the Iguana was set there. But from its zenith in the fifties and sixties, Acapulco’s popularity had declined due to overbuilding and overpopulation. Only in the late eighties had the authorities made a major effort to refurbish the resort and return it to its former glory.

To get a good view, Tash and Coltrane had to leave their seats and shift over to the left windows as the pilot announced his descent past the city.

“I wasn’t prepared for how big it is.” Coltrane stared in wonder.

“The magazine article mentioned that more than a million people live down there,” Tash said.

“Yeah, and I bet very few of them can afford to stay in those hotels.”

Hundreds of them, huge and brilliant in the sun, rimmed the semicircular harbor or perched on tropical slopes beyond it. Coltrane took a mental photograph of the impressionistic display below him, the green of myriad palm trees blending with copper cliffs, coral roofs, golden sand, and the azure bay. Cruise ships waited near the mouth of the harbor while excursion boats streamed toward docks, passing speedboats, sailboats, and yachts.

“But it didn’t look like this in 1934,” Coltrane said. “There wasn’t a telephone until two years later. Land could be bought for three cents an acre. Only three thousand people lived down there. As hard to get to as it was, this would have been Eden’s outpost.”

“And Packard’s Eden, Espalda del Gato, was even smaller,” Tash said. “I wonder how Rebecca Chance reacted when Packard took her there.”