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  "No. No, that's right."

  "So what am I supposed to do?"

  "Fall in love with someone else."

  "I told you I wasn't in love with her! Don't you get it?"

  She finally did get it. It had just taken a few minutes to see it. Mike was right. Mike was telling the truth. Part of the truth, anyway.

  "You were falling in love with her. And you were unhappy and afraid of what it would lead to."

  He'd turned on the couch to see her, something imploring and flagrantly juvenile in his face now. He stood, wobbly.

  "I never once touched her with that in mind. I shook her hand. I hugged her when I left that night."

  Strange how her heart felt then, like it had been wrapped in an iron blanket and dropped off the edge of a ship. She walked and over faced him.

  "But what, Mike? You never, you never and you never. But what? What's the last sentence?"

  "I never did anything toward her like that. I behaved just like you do."

  "But."

  "But I enjoyed her company."

  "Enjoyed it."

  "I enjoyed it a lot. I... I craved it. What she looked like and how she moved and how she talked and what she said. What she smelled like. I wanted to be there. In the same room with her. She made me feel like doing all the things I wanted to do with you. But I had those feelings completely, one hundred percent under control."

  "Did you, Mike?"

  "Absolutely. And you're a fool if you don't believe that."

  "You kill her?"

  He tilted heavily around the couch, stumbled, caught her arm and threw her across the room. She knocked into the wall but kept her balance, hands thwacking backward against the pine.

  "Yeah," he said. "I bought a silencer. I had dinner with her then iced her. Arrest me."

  She glanced again toward the telephone table and he saw her do it.

  "You know I'm kidding," he said. "Right?"

  "I'll think about it. I'm going to go now."

  His voice was rising now, panic and shame and who knew what else.

  "Merci, I'm really awful damned sorry for what I just did. That isn't me. You know that isn't me. You know, right? You know?"

  "I know. Stay where you are."

  She stared at him as she walked across the room to the front door.

  Mike stayed, planted where he was, like he was surprised, like he just now realized what he'd done. There were big tears running down his red face and his mouth was turned down like a Greek mask.

  "I'm so fucking sorry, Merci. I love you so much. Don't go. Don't you go away, too.”

  She trotted to the car because to run was to admit fear. She got the keys in one hand and rode the butt of her H&K with the other. She looked into the backseat before getting in. Then she hit the door lock and started up the big V-8. She saw Mike appear in the doorway, then a fan of dirt falling in the rearview as the Impala dug its rear tires and roared off the lot.

  She stopped at a market in Orange to get a sandwich and the day's papers. Her hands were still trembling as she slid the quarters in machines. Her heart was beating fast and flighty inside and it felt like it wasn't in gear. A bad taste in her mouth. A bum asked her for money and she wanted to pistol-whip him.

  She called headquarters for Zamorra, she had to talk to him, but he was still at the hospital.

  She got back in the car, drove to the far corner of a near-empty parking lot and cried. She gave herself exactly one minute, shed her tears, then tamped them down with a deep, shuddering breath.

  Sneaking bastard, she thought. He doesn't have the balls to kill anybody.

  And now she had a murder confession from him. A drunken, sarcastic one, but a murder confession just the same. You could use something like that to obtain a warrant for search. You could use something like that as evidence in a court of law.

  Or you could just assume it was spoken in anger, meant to convey its opposite.

  She knew he hadn't killed Aubrey Whittaker, though he'd probably done just about everything else to her.

  Merci got out of the car, walked around it a few times, got back ii. She dug out her appointment book and checked the rest of the day. In spite of the fact that her lover had probably betrayed her with a prostitute, then confessed the murder to her, she did have some good things to look forward to.

  Such as a two o'clock appointment to see psychiatrist Dr. Sid Botts—whose name she'd triangulated from Aubrey Whitt address book, the calendar and a little common sense—the second last person to see Aubrey Whittaker alive.

  And a three-thirty with Newport Maranatha Church Christian Singles leader Reverend Lance Spartas, one of the two johns who'd come up positive on the federal firearms check. He owned a Smith ,45-caliber automatic, purchased ninety days ago.

  And a five o'clock with Bob del Viggio, builder of housing tracts, political donor, client of Aubrey Whittaker.

  Plus a turkey-on-rye still untouched on the seat.

  Get it together, woman.

  She called the hospital but Zamorra had just left.

  Aubrey Whittaker's murder made it to the front page of the local section in the Times, Register and Journal. So far, none of the reporters had found out anything she hadn't. All three described Aubrey as a "professional escort." Nobody mentioned Epicure Services.

  She folded up the papers and tossed them in the backseat and looked out the windshield to the blackening sky.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Botts was a round, disheveled man with a wispy Freudian goatee rosy cheeks. His reading glasses hung from a cord around his neck. His white shirt looked neither clean nor pressed, and his corduroy jacket was drawn tight around the stomach but rose unsatisfied from his shoulders. His handshake was warm. Merci felt an impulse to find the nearest couch, plop down, spill it all about Mike McNally

  The building was in Santa Ana, the other end of town from headquarters. Merci stepped from the receptionist-free waiting room in the consultation room: a couch and armchair, a desk with a banker's lamp on it, four shelves filled with books, two more lamps and two windows with blinds drawn against the dark day.

  "I read the paper today," he said. "I was very saddened. Even though you had told me about her when you called."

  "Thanks for meeting."

  Botts sat behind his desk and Merci chose the couch. He watched her take out the blue notebook. "Like I said on the phone, I can't betray Aubrey's privacy here. I can only talk in very general terms about her. But if I can help you find who did it, then I'm willing. It seems the humane thing to do."

  "I'll level with you, Doctor. Aubrey Whittaker was a prostitute. I assume you know that."

  "Yes."

  "We don't have a suspect yet. I've got a copy of her little book, plenty of names and dates. Too many. Just the existence of that book could provide motive for murder. I need to narrow down, zero in."

  "What do you want to know?"

  "If she was seeing someone. Someone outside the trade."

  Botts cleared his throat, then spoke gently. "Yes, she was. She never told me his name or occupation. But she'd met someone recently—approximately one month ago—and she seemed to have hopes for a relationship with him. She was rather . . . excited about him. She said they met at church. I don't know which one. She was always attending new ones, hoping to find one she really liked. That was Aubrey, in microcosm, very much looking for something she could be happy with. Trying different things, like the wigs she wore. All of them blond, interestingly."

  Merci couldn't decide if this was interesting or not. She made a note: all blond for Botts, but closet had other colors.

  "What was wrong with the other churches?"

  "Too shallow. Too personal. Too prying. Too social and not religious enough. Aubrey wanted a God that was fair, but stern. She wanted to be punished, then saved. She thought she deserved both."

  Merci considered the contradictions in Aubrey Whittaker: sell the body and search the soul; God of forgiveness and God of wrath.

&n
bsp; "What else, about the church guy?"

  Botts leaned onto his elbows. His jacket rode higher. "Tall. Strong. Handsome. Polite. Honest. Unmarried. She said he was unlike any man she'd ever met."

  "Where does he live?"

  "She never said."

  "A member of the church?"

  "That is very possible."

  Merci thought. "Was she in love with him?"

  "I think so, yes."

  "Was she afraid for her life?"

  "No. I do not believe she thought she was in any kind of mortal danger."

  "How did you diagnose her?"

  Botts cleared his throat again. "Depression."

  "What did you prescribe?"

  "Nothing. We talked about medications, the plusses and minuses. She chose not to take that course."

  "Was that the right decision?"

  "I believe so. After our first hour, I told her she had very deep unresolved emotions toward her father. She laughed at the obviousness of this. I did not. I won't go into that history with you. But I will say there was good reason for her feelings. She was obviously not psychotic or delusional. I sensed in her tendencies toward grandeur and perhaps paranoia, tendencies toward depression. She was self-flagellating, self-critical. It was clear to me that large areas of feeling were left unexpressed and unexamined. Anger, specifically. She had closed off things, in self-protection. But, in my opinion, for her age, she was seeing, self-aware and mentally vigorous. I didn't think she needed medication. She needed meditation. Time to think things through. And a new job, preferably in a different part of the world. Anywhere but here or in Oregon, which was where she grew up. Portland."

  Merci thought. In her notebook she wrote: Oregon to Botts, to Mike.

  "What was she like, Doctor? In lay terms?"

  He smiled. "Irreverent. Alert. Caustic at times. Self-deprecating. Self-critical. Quick to laugh, quick to castigate. She was very sentimental about certain things. Horses—although she'd only ridden a few times. Good men—even though she'd never met one, until this new fellow. It was apparent to me that she took great stock in an ideal world, one from which she felt excluded. She reserved her most punishing and negative feelings for men in general, and for herself."

  "What did Aubrey Whittaker think of herself?"

  Botts sighed. "Mostly she detested herself, Sergeant. At other times, there was pity."

  Merci thought about this. About the way a life can get bent a little and later the bend takes you around in circles. Like the steering linkage on your car. Trouble was, you got going fast enough and the bend would take you right off the road and into a truck. A truck with a silencer

  "She ever talk about her boss?"

  "Never."

  "Goren Moladan?"

  "No."

  "She was working outside the agency, from what I can tell. That can be fatal, in the wrong circumstances."

  "It seems today like everything can be. Driving on the freeway, answering the door."

  Merci often took statements like that as professional affronts, but she let this one go. "Dr. Botts, was she paying for these sessions herself?"

  "Yes."

  "Last question for now, Doctor. In the time you treated her, how many men did she have real hopes for? Like this last one, this guy she supposedly met at church?"

  Botts shook his head slowly, with visible sadness. "Just him."

  • • •

  Lance Spartas, assistant pastor of Newport Maranatha Church, had insisted on meeting Merci away from his work. She smelled a guilty conscience in this, easy enough when you find a guy's credit-card number in a prostitute's black book.

  He was tall, dark-haired and handsome, with a smile that looked like he had just been caught at something and knew you'd forgive him. Thirtyish. Sharp clothes, big watch, snappy haircut. A squirrel, she thought, the kind of guy she'd like to dunk in a toilet.

  They sat in the bar of a pricey little steak house on Coast Highway. A wall-to-wall aquarium behind the bar looked otherworldly to her: bright spirits easing through rock and bubbles. The bar was almost empty.

  "Thanks for meeting off-campus," said Spartas. He sounded anxious.

  "I understand."

  "I really didn't know her well. She only came to the chapel once that I know of. She came to my group, Christian Singles, after worship. This was, oh, six, eight weeks ago. I never saw her after that."

  Guilty conscience, Merci thought again: eager to help, eager to please, eager to lie.

  The barmaid came by and gave Spartas a smile. She called him Lance. He called her Sherry. He asked how she was and when she was going to come to worship with them.

  "Saturday nights are a killer," Sherry said, jamming a stack of bills into a plastic holder atop a round tray. She got a soft drink for Spartas, a cup of coffee for Merci, then swung into the lounge, tray up, and shoes squeaking.

  "Ever go to Aubrey's place?"

  "Well, no. I have no idea where she lived."

  "Ever see her off-campus?"

  He shook his head but said nothing, lips tightened around his straw. He glanced at her, then looked at the aquarium.

  "Did she come to church alone?"

  "Uh-huh. After worship she showed up at the Singles. We're the twenty to thirty age group. She introduced herself, said she was a marketing consultant based in Orange County, just moved from Fort Worth. Grew up there. Said she liked to ride—horses, you know, liked to skate, liked to visit galleries. She said she was twenty-three years old, but she looked younger to me. The paper said nineteen. I didn't she was that young. The part about being an escort surprised me."

  "Did it?"

  "Absolutely."

  When he looked at her, briefly, she saw the guilt brimming up into his eyes. He couldn't fool his own mother, she thought. She made of Aubrey Whittaker's third home state.

  "What did you think of her?"

  Spartas breathed deeply, stirring his drink. "She was a little aloof. Kind of arrogant. Like the Christian Singles were beneath her somehow. She seemed very sophisticated. She had a sharp tongue. Tall. Nice and face. Beautiful dark hair."

  Merci noted that Aubrey was a brunette for Spartas. "What did she want from the group?"

  Spartas nodded. "I wondered, too. What we all want, I guess Fellowship. Friendship. Maybe somebody to fall in love with. But I don’t know. She didn't seem particularly interested in our activities, in any our members. Of course, she was only with us once. Like she was shopping."

  "Then what, you called her?"

  She could feel him wince. He wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  "No."

  He looked at her.

  "Yeah. Yes."

  "You want to tell me about that?"

  "I wanted to know if she'd join us on a ski weekend up in Big Bear. She said no."

  "Then you asked to see her."

  The wince again, a psychic shudder she could feel but not quite see. "Yes."

  "And when she explained the deal, you whipped out your credit card."

  A big exhale from Spartas. He looked at her with a mixture of panic and shame.

  "Where did you go?"

  "Four Seasons."

  "October fifteenth, Monday night."

  "I guess."

  "Don't."

  "Yes, correct."

  "How much?"

  "A thousand for . . . her. The room was three-fifty. Wine and cheese another fifty."

  "How long were you with her?"

  He shook his head. It seemed to have retreated down between his shoulders. "Five minutes."

  When the barmaid strolled up and asked how they were doing Lance mustered the smile that said he'd been caught at something. The part about forgiving him was gone. "Everything's fine, Sherry. Thanks."

  Merci watched her head to the waitress station at the other end of the bar.

  "Was it a good five minutes?"

  "Come on," he said quietly. "Yeah, sure. It was fine."

  Merci sipped the coffee, felt the waves of dis
comfort rising outward from Lance Spartas.

  "You do it again?"

  "No. Just that. It was . . . well, what's it matter, but that was the first and only time with, you know, for money." He turned to her then, “This isn't getting back to the church, is it? That's my whole life, down the drain. The whole thing."

  "You lie to me and it will."

  "I've been one hundred percent honest with you."

  "Good."

  "All I've done is worry since the second you called."

  He wiped his forehead with the damp bar napkin, staring at the fish.

  "When she left the hotel that night, were you angry?"

  Spartas considered. He shook his head. "No. I wondered at what I’d just done. How it could have happened. Angry at myself, yeah. Not at her."

  "So that forty-five you bought three months ago never came to mind?"

  He turned to her again, thin lips parted, eyes wide. "It's under my bed. I swear to God. I'll show it to you if you want. It's still in the box. It's never been fired."

  Merci said nothing for a minute, let the accusation hover. Spartas squirmed on his stool.

  She leaned up close. "Maybe it didn't quite go like you said it did. Maybe it went an hour and five minutes and things just wouldn't line up for you. Maybe she made a crack about it. Maybe she did more that. A woman can hurt a guy that way. Maybe after what she did, she deserved to get iced. Maybe that made you so furious you followed her out, fourteen hundred bucks poorer, trailed the snotty nineteen-year-old home. Thought about it, went back a few weeks later and evened things out."

  "Swear to my God I didn't."

  "You kill her?"

  "No!"

  "Want to?"

  "No. Nothing like that. No."

  "What about the gun?"

  "I got it for home protection," he said. "There was an armed robbery down the street last summer. The guy who lived there scared them off with a gun. So I got one, too."

  Lance Spartas struck Merci as the kind of schmuck who'd shoot his neighbor or himself before he managed to clock a bad guy. The hapless citizen was as dangerous as a creep sometimes. Like a Sunday driver.

  "Then where were you Tuesday night?"

  Spartas smiled like a man just pardoned. "Christian Singles potluck, thank Goodness! I can prove that if I have to. Seven until midnight."