Chasing Venus (36 page)

Annie’s hands flew to
her face.
 
“Oh.
 
My.
 
God.”

Frankie appeared
on-screen, his hair slicked back in a ponytail and his jowly face flushed.
 
He stood in front of his house with
reporters’ microphones jammed in his face.
 
“I had a confidential one-on-one with my client last night.
 
I can tell you she’s innocent of these
crimes.
 
I think the police are on
some kind of witch hunt.
 
I urge
people to buy Ms. Rowell’s books before they’re banned by the establishment.”

Reid and Annie both
laughed.
 
Annie cheered.
 
“Thank you, Frankie!”

The video shifted to a
large outdoor gathering in an urban public square.
 
“Is that San Francisco?” Reid asked.

Again the reporter’s
voice.
 
“Echoing
Morsie’s
assertions that Annette Rowell is innocent, the fugitive’s mother and
stepfather, Cynthia and Arlie Rowell, organized a protest this morning in San
Francisco’s Civic Center, charging federal and local law enforcement with
harassing their daughter.”

The video switched to a
shot of Annie’s mother, wielding a bullhorn and wearing a yellow tee shirt with
the words
Free Annie now!
emblazoned
in red and black.
 
“Thousands
of
 
innocent people are being
brutalized by the corrupt military/industrial complex.
 
And my daughter is one of them.
 
She is not guilty of anything and still
she is being hounded.
 
No to police
violence and incompetence! Yes to justice!
 
Free Annie now!
 
Free Annie
now!”

The crowd took up the
chant.
 
Annie watched several
hundred strangers shout her name.
 
There was her stepdad next to her mother, his fist pumping the air with
every syllable.
 
And behind Arlie,
equally energized, was her writing student Kevin
Zeering
.

“Kevin.
 
Wow.”
 
How odd was that, Kevin
Zeering
at a rally in her support?
 
Then again, it wasn’t odd at all.
 
He was a major fan, bordering on
obsessive.
 
She hadn’t thought about
him all week, since the last class she’d taught eight days before.
 
It felt like a lifetime.

“Who’s Kevin?”
 
Reid moved from the couch’s arm to sit
beside her on the cushions.

“Kevin’s that clean-cut
guy behind my mother.”

The video cut to a
still black-and-white photograph of Maggie Boswell at a book signing, over
which the reporter spoke.
 
“The San
Francisco protestors aren’t the only people who believe in Rowell’s innocence.
 
So does the bereaved husband of victim
Maggie Boswell.”

A bespectacled Charles
Waring
stood in front of the expansive Santa Barbara home
he had shared with his wife.
 
“Police are clearly bungling the investigation.
 
I know Annette Rowell and don’t believe
for a second she committed these murders.”

Annie knew that Charles
had written the same thing on the Annette Rowell Facebook page, where she
posted news about her books and interacted with fans.
 
He was one of thousands voicing support
for her.

The blonde reporter reappeared
on a studio set.
 
“Those opinions
aside, investigators remain focused on Annette Rowell and say they’re following
several leads to capture her.
 
One
source tells me that with this new information pinpointing her recent location,
they’re confident they’ll catch her soon.”

Reid picked up the
remote and jabbed the power button.
 
The screen faded to black.
 
Annie felt his eyes on her face.
 
“You okay?” he asked.

A two-word question to
which the only truthful answer was a diatribe.
 
Well,
my heart’s breaking again, this time thanks to you.
 
I don’t know when I’ll see my mom next,
if ever.
 
And now that the cops know
I was in LA last night, I won’t be too hard to catch and put behind bars.
 
After which will follow my trial for
serial murder.
 
So she settled
for a two-word lie.
 
“I’m fine.”

“Was it hard to see
your folks?
 
I think it’s great what
they’re doing, by the way.
 
I don’t
always agree with this kind of protest but I do this time.”

“I thought they’d
probably do something like this.
 
I
doubt it’ll help, though.”

He was silent for a
while, then cleared his throat.
 
“Annie, there’s something we need to discuss.”

She rose and moved a
distance away, shaking her head.
 
“We’ve had enough of that, don’t you think?
 
Believe me, you don’t need to hammer
home your point any more than you already have.”

“What I’m trying to
tell you is that I have to go.
 
It
was okay for me to stay here during the day but now I have to get back to
LA.
 
I have to go to work tomorrow.
 
I have to make it look as if
everything’s normal, as if nothing’s changed.
 
Especially since they found the rental
car.”

“When are you
leaving?”
 
She asked, though she
knew.

“I should get going
pretty soon.”

“What does this mean
for me?”
 
She glanced around the
cabin, with its thin doors and flimsy locks and nothing-ever-happens-here
window bolts.
 
The nonexistent
security was all well and good with Reid there, but it was quite a different
matter with him gone.

He rubbed his
forehead.
 
“We may need to move you
again.”
 
He paused, then, “I should
go over all this again with Sheila.”

“Are you worried she’ll
rat me out to the feds?”

“No.
 
But I do need to make sure that no one
in her family is coming up here.
 
I
imagine we’re safe given that tomorrow’s Monday but I still want to talk to her
about it.”

That sounded
plausible.
 
And also like a half
truth.

“You and I have to be
very careful how we communicate,” he went on.
 
“Now that the rental car’s been found,
I’ll bet Simpson’s put me under surveillance.
 
I’ll bet he’s already checked my
cell-phone records.”

“Then he would know you
got a call from a pay phone in Hollywood last night.
 
From a street corner near Frankie’s
house.”

“And he knows when you
were at Frankie’s house.
 
Not long
before the call was placed.”

“He’ll have put two and
two together.”
 
Or one and one
.

Reid rose from the
couch and motioned her to the computer.
 
“I got an idea how we can communicate.”
 
He sat down and punched a few keys, his
eyes on the screen.
 
“This
computer’s a castoff from
Crimewatch
.
 
I let Sheila give it to her folks to use
up here and I set it up.
 
Okay, now
write this down.”

A few minutes later she
was newly impressed with Reid’s cunning.
 
“That’s a good idea.
 
I can’t
imagine anybody figuring it out.”

“Someone will
eventually.
 
But it’ll work for a
while.
 
Annie?”
 
He turned to face her.
 
“We will nail whoever is behind all
this.”

When?
 
How?

“You’ll be fine here,”
he went on.
 
“There’s plenty of
food.
 
There’s nobody to bother
you.
 
You’ll rest, you’ll think,
you’ll come up with something.
 
Or I
will.”

He rose and pulled his
wallet from his jeans pocket.
 
“Let
me give you some cash.”
 
He handed
her a wad of bills, which she accepted.
 
This was no time for false pride.
 
Then he stilled, apparently fresh out of practicalities and pep talk.

Annie felt the two of
them caught in that awkward moment before parting.
 
She dreaded his departure yet wanted to
get it over with.
 
Her feet began to
move toward the cabin’s front door.
 
He followed.

With his hand on the
knob, their eyes met.
 
She read
regret in his gaze, and reluctance.
 
She’d been pleased all day, and a little surprised, that he hadn’t
left.
 
Especially after the argument
they’d had.
 
Maybe he didn’t want to
leave her now, either; he simply had to.
 
But it came down to the same thing in the end.

“We’re close to finding
the killer, Annie.
 
I believe that.”

She couldn’t make
herself respond.
 
She balled her
fingers into fists to keep from trembling again.

“In a few hours,” he
went on, “go online and look for a message from me.”

She nodded.

He hesitated, then
jerked the door open and walked out.
 
She wanted to believe he was abrupt because he feared that if he didn’t
leave her then, he wouldn’t leave her at all.

The rays of the sun
were slanting low in the sky.
 
It
was nearing the end of a pretty May day.
 
Annie stood at the window and watched Reid’s truck make a U-turn on the
cabin’s graveled lot, then disappear down the lane that led to the main road.

*

A few hours later,
after an uneventful drive to LA, Reid arrived home.
 
How much had changed in the last 24
hours, and how little.
 
Saturday
night he’d been worried as hell, pacing the floor because he hadn’t heard from
Annie and didn’t know where she’d disappeared to.
 
Sunday night he knew where she was but
worried still.
 
It was a quandary he
couldn’t solve.
 
He couldn’t stand
her being alone but couldn’t be with her.

Except in one way.

He booted up his laptop
computer, logged on to the web, and made his way to the
Crimewatch
site.
 
There
was heavy traffic but there always was in the evening, the witching hours for
the show’s young, male demographic.
 
He clicked on the message boards and, as he had told Annie he would,
scanned for the thread that started just after the top of the hour.
 
As it happened, the discussion had to do
with the effectiveness of Amber Alerts, the emergency-response system designed
to help rescue children kidnapped by predators.

Reid’s fingers moved
rapidly over the keyboard as he typed his post.
 
He frequently weighed in on the message
boards, so no one familiar with them would find his presence odd.
 
If anything, his recent absence was more
notable.

RG here.
 
For what it’s
worth, I’m a big fan of the Amber Alert system.
 
Like Crimewatch, it asks the public for
tips to help apprehend criminals.
 
That’s why it’s effective.
 
I’ll grant you it’s not perfect but we haven’t yet devised a system to
handle the staggering pace of child abductions.

It was a simple post
but would do the trick of reassuring Annie that he was home and safe.
 
He leaned back, imagining her looking
for his post, reading it, realizing they were still tethered together, even if
only in cyberspace.

Though in truth, the
ties between them were much more than electronic.
 
And they were more than shared
experience and sex and a joint mission.
 
Despite what he had told her, despite all his own internal
protestations, he knew every time he left her and every time he saw her again
that she was deeply under his skin, inching toward his heart, so close to
grabbing it away.

She told him he had a
problem.
 
He knew that.
 
He also knew that if she was sick of it,
he had been for years.
 
He was sick
of his obsessive pursuit of Bigelow, sick of never catching him.
 
Sometimes he was sick of his memories of
Donna.
 
It could be tiresome living
with a saint, a vaunted status Donna had never held when she was alive.
 
But in death she’d been canonized, set
on a pedestal only the dearly departed could reach.
 
Yet none of that meant he could walk
away.

The doorbell rang.
 
He frowned.
 
Sheila, maybe?
 
Why wouldn’t she call first?
 
He walked to the front door, peered
through the peephole.

It was Simpson.

If he’d doubted he was
under surveillance before, he didn’t now.
 
Whoever was tailing him had no doubt called Simpson the moment Reid’s
truck appeared on the block.
 
Meaning
there was no way he could pretend he wasn’t home.