Chasing Venus (19 page)

He watched Annie
swallow.
 
“I figured as much.”

“Simpson called me this
morning looking for you.”

Her green eyes
widened.
 
“While I was in the
truck?
 
What did you tell him?”

“Nothing.
 
Not a damn thing.”

She let out a small
breath.
 
Beneath her blood-encrusted
tee shirt, he watched her chest rise and fall as she processed how close she’d
come to getting arrested for murder.
 
And how thanks to him, she had not.

He kept talking.
 
“But you want more than that from me, don’t
you?”
 
Why did he want to hear her
say it?
 
He knew what she
wanted.
 
If he was honest with
himself, he wanted the same thing.
 
The killer caught; the innocents spared; justice done.
 
Maybe this time he could make all that
happen.

“If I’m going to clear
my name,” she said, “I’ve got to find the real killer.”

“And that’s where I
come in, I take it.
 
I should just
forget that I’ve spent the last five years making
Crimewatch
a fugitive-hunting machine.
 
I should just throw all that down a rat
hole for a woman I’ve known a matter of weeks.
 
A woman who right now is probably the
number one most wanted fugitive in the nation.”

“I’m wrongly
accused.
 
But I can’t prove that on
my own.
 
I can’t do any of this on
my own.”

“Somehow, lady, that
sounds like a real admission coming from you.”

She didn’t deny
it.
 
She simply gazed into his eyes
as if looking for proof that he’d stay the course, continue lying for her.
 
In fact, do much more than lie: deep-six
his life’s work and harbor a wanted fugitive.

They stared at each
other.
 
Moments passed.
 
He realized she must be able to read him
like a book when she spoke again.
 
“Thank you.”

He held up his hands to
forestall her.
 
“I haven’t agreed to
anything.”

She ignored that.
 
“I know I’m putting you in a terrible
position.
 
I know you’re supposed to
turn me in.
 
I know I’m asking a
lot.”

 
“You’re asking the impossible.
 
I’m supposed to shelter you and defy the
entire law-enforcement establishment to find a serial killer.”

“Catch him, too.”
 
She smiled.
 
“But don’t worry.
 
I’ll help.”

Damn.
 
She’d found it in herself to smile,
after the night she’d had, the hell she’d been through, with the long road
ahead of her that could easily end behind bars.
 
Hell, it could end in an executioner’s
chair.
 
Still she smiled.
 
And the anger leeched out of him like
pus from a wound.

He bent to retrieve the
towel she’d dropped on the floor.
 
“Why don’t you go shower.
 
When you’re done I’ll make you a sandwich.”

“Make it a big
one.”
 
She turned toward the
bathroom.
 
“I’m starved.”

It was Thursday
evening, getting on to dusk, two days after Reid had brought Annie into his
home.
 
She sat cross-legged on his
bed, tortoiseshell eyeglasses perched on her nose and a legal pad on her lap.
 
Its yellow pages were filled with
scrawled blue ink, the painstaking grunt work of trying to brainstorm the
identity of a killer.
 
Some of the
pages had been torn out and crumpled into balls, and tossed not only on the bed
but in all four corners of the room, Annie’s carpeted suburban prison.

This was her hideout at
least until the next night.
 
Reid
taped
Crimewatch
on Fridays and he
had to go to work every day as usual, as if nothing in his life had changed, as
if no brunette fugitives were skulking around his bedroom.
 
Annie spent the long hours alone
wracking her brain, so far to no avail.

Their plan was to move
her over the weekend; it wasn’t clear where.
 
She would continue to lie low while Reid
kept tabs on the FBI investigation.
 
She desperately hoped, for both her sake and Reid’s, that either her
brainstorming or
Crimewatch
’s tip
line would yield a breakthrough before Simpson pinpointed her location.

Annie raised her head
when she heard the sound she hated to admit she waited for: the garage door
opening.
 
Reid was home from work.

She threw her glasses
aside and attempted to plump the pillow that for hours had been supporting her
back.
 
She barely had time to get to
her feet and set the bedspread to rights before Reid loomed in the doorway,
leather jacket off and legs striding toward the tallest bureau, where she knew
from two nights’ experience that he’d toss his keys and empty his right jeans
pocket of change.

“How was your day?” she
asked.

“Not bad.”
 
He switched on the lamp—which she
wasn’t allowed to turn on prior to his return as it would signal that somebody
was in the house—and cocked his chin toward the legal pad abandoned on
the rumpled bed.
 
“Come up with
anything?”

“A bunch of names, a
bunch of theories, but nothing that gets me anywhere.”

“Don’t worry.
 
We’ll figure out who’s behind all this.”

His eyes drifted down
her body and back again.
 
She
stilled.
 
As had become her habit in
the last 48 hours, given how little clothing she had at her disposal, she was wearing
one of Reid’s shirts.
 
Plaid and
flannel and size extra large, the shirt billowed around her body and hung
nearly to her knees.
 
Yet it left
her feeling strangely exposed.
 
Particularly under his perusal.

A couple of dogs yelped
in the yard next door, shattering the moment.
 
Reid raked a hand through his closely
cropped blond hair and snapped back into businesslike mode.
 
“Okay.
 
So.
 
What do you want to eat tonight?
 
Chinese?
 
Thai?”

“Thai sounds fabulous.”

“I’ll go get the
takeout menu.”
 
He walked out,
taking her dirty breakfast bowl and lunch plate with him.
 
Every morning, before leaving for work,
he made her meals and left them with her.
 
She ate at her leisure, which she had way too much of.

It was the craziest
thing.
 
Bizarre as the situation
was, bored as she got during the daytime hours, their makeshift arrangement was
oddly comfortable.
 
It was as if
they were playing house, weird wacky house where
Wifey
never left the master suite because if anybody spied her through a window,
they’d recognize her from the Most Wanted List and call 911.
 
So these four walls—eight if you
counted the master bathroom—had become her world.

She knew it intimately,
from every faint stain on the light blue carpet to every barely discernible
ripple in the white paint to every chip in the bathroom’s yellow and blue
tile.
 
She’d memorized every
signature on the Dodgers baseball that balanced on a well-worn glove holding
pride of place on top of the bureau.
 
She hadn’t allowed herself to survey the bureau drawers—though
she’d been tempted—but she’d discerned a thing or two from investigating
his medicine cabinet.
 
There were a
couple of barely used extra toothbrushes, which she took as evidence of women
past, those who’d been around long enough to stake a small claim but eventually
got washed into history.
 
Pharmaceuticals were few and far between but front and center was a half
empty box of condoms.
 
She noted,
separately, that Reid hadn’t offered her any happen-to-be-around women’s
clothes, either because he didn’t have any or because he grasped the indelicacy
of offering one woman’s things to another.

She’d learned by now
that the house was in Glendale, which she knew from her LA years to be north of
downtown near Pasadena.
 
The housing
stock was ranch suburban, not glitzy by any means.
 
Reid said he’d bought it when he was a
cop and clearly he hadn’t traded up when his Hollywood ship came in.
 
In the virtual ledger that Annie had
begun keeping, that earned him yet another point in the positive column.

She heard him turn on
the TV in the living room and tune it to the baseball game.
 
The prior night he’d put on a jazz
CD.
 
Next came the whirr of the
desktop computer in the living room booting up.
 
She knew that every night before he went
to bed he went on-line to check out the tips that came in to the
Crimewatch
website.
 
And now she could hear him clattering
around the kitchen, opening drawers and shutting them.
 
He returned perusing the neon-pink menu
from Banana House Thai Kitchen.

“I get
larb
every time.”
 
His eyes roamed the selections.
 
“And chicken satay.”

“Do you like
mussaman
curry?”

“Love it.”
 
He raised his head to regard her.
 
“How about
param
nuer
?”

“Perfect.”
 
She had no idea what that was.

“I’ll get you a
beer.”
 
Again, out he went.

He was adamant that he
exhibit no change in his habits.
 
That would be dangerous, he told her.
 
It would raise suspicions.
 
He wouldn’t order different dishes than
he had in the past, or more food than usual.
 
The prior night, already stir crazy,
she’d asked him to pull shut his living-room drapes so she could use that room,
too.
 
But no go.
 
The drapes were always open, he said,
he’d never once closed them.
 
So
that was that.

He was on the phone in
the kitchen now, ordering their takeout.
 
Making small talk with the clerk and arranging for delivery.
 
He’d done that the night before, too,
with pizza.
 
She’d stayed out of
sight in the bedroom—where else?—sipping her beer and remaining
quiet.
 
Remaining calm as well,
lulled by the nameless faith to which she’d recently converted that somehow
everything would work out.
 
Though
she was in the gravest danger of her life, she felt protected and sheltered as
she hadn’t for some time.
 
Years,
she realized.
 
Years.

Yet it was a false
cocoon and she knew it would shatter before long.
 
A jolt of nervousness coursed through
her, propelled her to pace the blue carpet of her universe.
 
Her troubles were only mounting while
she hid herself away.
 
For one thing
the rental car she’d abandoned in Hollywood was a ticking time bomb.
 
She was damn lucky the cops hadn’t found
it yet but they would before long.

Reid returned with two
chilled beer bottles.
 
He screwed
the cap off one and handed it to her, then dropped onto the carpet and leaned
back against the foot of the bed.
 
His
denimed
legs, feet now bare, seemed to
stretch out forever.
 
He wore a blue
dress shirt, open at the neck and with the sleeves rolled up to reveal muscular
forearms covered with light brown hair.
 
She watched his strong throat move as he threw back his head and took a
long swallow of his beer.
 
The
beginnings of a five o’clock shadow darkened his jaw.
 
He was the picture of the working man at
the end of his day, getting his reward, his labor done.

She joined him on the
floor and sipped from her own bottle, then forced herself to ask the question
she only half wanted answered.
 
“Is
the rental car still okay?”

“I haven’t heard
anything.”

“Are you still
convinced we shouldn’t move it?”

“We can’t risk it.
 
By now it might be under
surveillance.
 
Obviously you can’t
go near it and I can’t allow any traces of my own DNA to get inside.
 
Nor that of anybody linked to me.”

She was silent.
 
There was already a huge link between
the vehicle and Reid: its proximity to the
Crimewatch
studios.
 
Once it was found, chances
were excellent that Simpson would be all over Reid.
 
Simpson would be certain that Annie and
Reid had been in contact since Michael’s murder.
 
If Reid wasn’t under surveillance
already, surely then he would be.

Or … Annie shuddered as
the worst-case scenario played out in her imagination.
 
SWAT teams would descend on Reid’s house
without warning.
 
She would be
inside, alone and helpless.
 
They
would break down the door, swarm the interior, guns drawn …