23

ON THE PILLARED STEPS OF THE REST HOME, Coltrane sank and put his head between his knees. It took him several deep breaths before his swirling sensation passed and his stomach became still. From the bay, a salt-laden breeze drifted over him, cooling the sweat on his brow.

Finally he was able to peer up at Jennifer. “You’re the one who took all the psychology courses.”

“It’s called being a sexual predator,” Jennifer said. “In women, it’s very rare.”

“But how did…”

“Heredity or environment. Take your pick.”

“Or both. In other words, who knows,” Coltrane said.

“My abnormal-psych prof said that emotional illness can be inherited.” Jennifer eased down next to him, crossing her arms over the knees of her gray slacks. “We don’t know anything about Rebecca’s mother, but she and her daughter and her granddaughter are all beautiful women so obsessed with their beauty, so self-conscious and uncomfortable about it, that they feel self-worth only when men fight over them.”

“Or they were all abused as children and they’re so ambivalent about men, so bitter, that they want to punish men for finding them attractive,” Coltrane said.

“Which takes us from heredity to environment. We don’t know how that pathetic woman in there was raised. It could be Winston Case was a monster. But from what she said about the way Tash or Melinda or whatever you want to call her was raised, it’s clear that even as a child, Tash felt jealous about all the men her mother had around her. She needed attention, but since she couldn’t get it from her mother, she got it from her mother’s boyfriends. The trouble is, she may have gotten more attention than she bargained for. If Tash was molested, I’m not surprised that she feels so angry at men now that she’s grown up. On the one hand, she feels compelled to tempt them. On the other hand, she needs to punish them for wanting her. Having sex with her is unforgivable.”

Coltrane felt his cheeks turn warm.

“I have a terrible feeling you’re next on her list of get-evens,” Jennifer said. “But even if you hadn’t had sex with her, you know she was lying about the negatives and Duncan Reynolds. You see through her act, and that puts you in a position to make trouble for her. If she’s true to form, she’ll protect herself by finding a way to get rid of you.”

“Just as she got rid of Duncan and her former boyfriends. That’s what she’s doing with Walt. She’s setting him up to use him against me.”

“We have to warn him.”

24

“MR. COLTRANE, this is Eliot Blaine,” a concerned voice said from the speaker on Coltrane’s car phone. As soon as he and Jennifer had gotten back to the Los Angeles airport, he had called his home to find out if he had any messages on his answering machine. A series of hang-up calls had troubled him, reminding him of Ilkovic, making him wonder if it was Walt. Then Blaine said, “I’m the attorney for Randolph Packard’s estate. I don’t know if you’ve heard this from another source. If not, forgive me for being the messenger of bad news. I know you spent time with Randolph’s assistant, Duncan Reynolds. He confided to me that he was fond of his chats with you. I’m… There’s no easy way to say this. You’ll be as dismayed as I was to learn that Duncan’s body was found at his home last evening. Apparently, he’d been dead for several days. The police seem to think he committed… It’s more appropriate if we discuss this in person. Please call me at my office. About a week ago, Duncan came to me with a strange request. I respected his privacy and didn’t question him about it, but it now seems obvious that he was taking care of personal matters before… I have a package he wanted me to give you in the event of his death.”

25

“AN AUDIOCASSETTE?” Coltrane looked puzzled at the object he removed from the envelope.

Seated in a soft-looking brown leather chair behind a large glass desk, Blaine slid a signed letter in Coltrane’s direction, his manicured fingernails glistening. “At the time, I thought it was a strange request, but in my profession, strange requests aren’t unusual. Duncan’s instructions to me were that you should listen to the tape in my presence. When you telephoned to say you were coming, I instructed my secretary to rearrange my schedule so that we could do so now.”

“Thank you.”

“I always made time for Duncan. He was more than a business associate.”

“Yes, I thought of him as a friend, too.”

Blaine was in his fifties, of medium height and weight, with cautious eyes. His hair was perfectly trimmed, his suit expensively tailored, his shoes so shiny that they looked as if they had just come out of their box.

He stood and put the cassette into a player on a stack of stereo components next to law books. As a soft hiss came from speakers at each end of the shelf, he returned to his chair, interlocked his fingers on his desk, and hardened his patrician jaw in concentration.

The hiss on the tape continued. Something made a hollow thumping noise, as if a microphone was being moved. The clinking of what sounded like ice cubes in a glass was followed by the gulp of a large mouthful of liquid being swallowed.

“This message is for Mitch Coltrane,” Duncan’s slurred voice said. “If you’re listening to this tape, you know I’m dead.” Another strained breath. “What an odd thing to hear myself say.”

More clinking of ice cubes. More liquid being swallowed. Duncan didn’t speak again for what seemed like fifteen seconds.

His breathing was forced. “I thought about running, but that would only make her decide I’m a greater liability than I suspect she already thinks I am. Besides, I can’t stand to be away from her. What she lets me do to her… A man of my years, with my ordinary looks, with my physical limitations. I never dreamed I could know such… To be indulged by… Maybe she doesn’t think I’m a liability. Maybe I don’t have a reason to be afraid. Maybe things will go on as they are, and she’ll continue to let me…”

“What on earth is he talking about?” Blaine asked.

Coltrane held up a hand for Blaine to be silent.

“If only you hadn’t taken those photographs of me,” Duncan said. “You weren’t supposed to get to the South Coast Plaza. Melinda told Carl that you’d be at the first stop, at the Beverly Center, photographing the crowd, trying to find the stalker. She had Carl worked up to the point where she knew he’d use force to discourage you from seeing her again. We were certain that you’d be sufficiently disabled not to go on to the other stores. When the photographs I took of her at the South Coast Plaza arrived at her house in the mail, our assumption was that you’d realize how close you had come to getting an image of the stalker. You’d have become more determined. That would have made Carl more determined. Eventually…”

A labored breath. “But damn you, you had to keep going, and now, if you’re still alive, you’ve figured out that she destroyed the photographs you took of me and that I’m the only one who had access to your house to steal the negatives. But that still leaves you and me. For the first time, someone knows my connection to her. How will she destroy that evidence?”

A bump led to unnerving silence, not even a hiss, as if the tape machine had been turned off. The tape’s hiss resumed.

“I thought I heard her,” Duncan said. “I keep expecting her footsteps to come down the hall. She’ll smile and put her arms around me and tell me who she’s going to be next and the next game she’s going to play. But when she makes me a drink, will she put something in it? Or will she get me more drunk than usual and take me out to the dock for a moonlight stroll and push me underwater – the way she did to that kid who managed to follow her from Sacramento to Arcata?”