Michael Prescott: Deadly Pursuit

“I know. I received the fax. But Drury wants to keep it out of the media for now. If the prints don’t come through, we’ll probably have to release it. Until then, the policy is to indicate no hint of any progress,

nothing to make him cut and run. Have to go, my other line’s buzzing. I expect to be back in Phoenix tomorrow, first thing in the A.M.”

“Stay healthy.”

Lovejoy sneezed. “Easy for you to say.”

Each night Tamara caught a few hours of troubled sleep in her hotel room. When bad dreams woke her-dreams of a man with a honey-smooth voice and a vial of poison in his pocket-she would stand on the balcony, gazing at the downtown skyline under a canopy of stars.

There had been no stars above the Oakland slums where she was raised. No men with poison either-at least not Mister Twister’s kind of poison. Other varieties were easy enough to come by. She saw friends try some and get hooked, saw conscientious students become burnouts and bums. Every day meant running a gauntlet of proffered drugs. It took a heroic effort just to stay clean.

Her looks didn’t help. The other girls envied her, called her Miss America and Charlie’s Angel; but Tamara passed many angry hours wishing she had been born plain. Her face and figure made her an irresistible object of seduction for every strutting gangbanger, every pimp or aspiring pimp plying fantasies of a modeling career, and every one of her mother’s boyfriends-men who could barely wait for Doreen Moore to leave the room before hitting on her daughter.

At night, through the cellophane-thin bedroom wall, she would hear her mom and her current paramour shaking the mattress springs and grunting; and she would wonder if the man was thinking of sweet little Tamara as he did it, if it was her breasts he imagined himself kissing, her legs that were spread for him in invitation. Even the thought of it would leave her dizzy with nausea.

She survived, though. Fought off the pushers and pimps and priapic older men, graduated as class valedictorian, attended U.C. Irvine on a full scholarship, and ended up somehow at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, learning to be a G-man or a G-woman or whatever the hell she was.

Tamara sighed. The dry, balmy night air brushed her cheeks and reminded her of how far she’d come from Oakland. No chill morning fog creeping in off the bay to carpet the littered streets in a shimmering ground cover, not here. This was the desert, an environment alien to her, a Martian waste of leafless plants and chalk-dry riverbeds, flat and arid and brutally hot. Not her sort of place, but there were some who loved it.

Had Ronni Tyler been one of them? Had she awakened at night to study the stars, or risen before dawn to watch the pink glow of sunrise brighten the encircling mountains?

Ronni’s roommate, interviewed by the police and FBI on the day of her return from Santa Fe, had said something funny about her friend. “Ronni-cripes, she was just a small-town girl at heart, but she didn’t know it. She kept looking for something more, something bigger, better, than what she had. That was the thing with her. There always had to be something better… somewhere.”

Tamara had known the same need. Huddled under her blankets in her mom’s apartment in the projects, listening to the rattle and squeak of the bed next door, she had made herself believe that there was something better somewhere. That there had to be.

She had found it, too. An exciting life, a job that challenged and satisfied.

But Ronni Tyler hadn’t made it that far. Now she never would.

Alone on the balcony, unseen in the dark, Tamara cried a little, in memory of a woman she had never met, in mourning for a stranger.

She cried, and the thirsty air licked the dampness from her cheeks.

“Collins just called,” Lovejoy reported as Moore walked into their borrowed office on the morning of the fourth day. They were encamped in a hastily furnished storage room in the FBI’s Phoenix field office. Photos of the President and the Director gazed down on them, one smiling, the other stern.

She tossed her purse on the chipped Formica desk top and tried her best to be calm. “Search over?”

“As of approximately an hour ago.”

“Results?”

“Thirteen hits.” Lovejoy consulted his scrawled notes. “Four are women. Of the nine men, six would seem to be disqualified because of age, race, or body build. In all probability, the bartender’s description rules them out.”

“The remaining three?” She heard the excitement in her voice, straining against the short leash of her self-control.

“Michael Benjamin Garrett, resident of Scottsdale, one arrest for reckless driving.”

She shook her head. “Unlikely, since he’s a local. Our man travels.”

“Noted. Paul Thomas Squire, Chicago, two arrests on battery charges.”

“Interesting.”

Could it be him? Could Paul Thomas Squire be Mister Twister? Could the nightmare have ended at last?

“They were bar fights,” Lovejoy said slowly. “He would appear to be a brawler.”

Her brief enthusiasm failed. “That’s not how I see our guy. Not how Behavioral Science profiled him, either. He’s slick, polished, not some bruiser spoiling for a fight.”

“I’m inclined to agree. Still, we’ll have Chicago check him out.”

“Sure.” Moore had already dismissed Squire from her mind. “Who’s last?”

“John Edward Dance. L.A. No violent crimes on his rap sheet, just three arrests for fraud.”

“What kind of fraud?”

“Telemarketing, some kind of home-equity con, and a bank-examiner scam. He did time for the last one. Beat the rap on the other two. He-”

Moore shut her eyes, drew a sharp breath, felt the sudden violent trembling of her body.

“That’s him,” she whispered.

“Do you think so?” Lovejoy frowned at his notes. “I don’t know. There’s no sexual assault, no indication of homicidal tendencies.”

He was missing the point. Good Lord, how could he be so close to it and not see?

“Peter, the man is a con artist.” She rushed the words out, impatient to give form to her thoughts. “Don’t you get it? He’s a smooth talker. A manipulator. A Don Juan. The kind of guy who’d be good at picking up women in bars.”

“A lady-killer,” Lovejoy said thoughtfully. “Perhaps… literally.”

“No perhaps. No doubt about it.” Moore paced the narrow office, tremors shaking her thin shoulders. “He cons women the same way he cons the marks in his bunco games. Charm and phony self-confidence. A pose that a girl like Ronni Tyler would fall for. He sells himself. He’s good at it. That’s how he gets people to empty their bank accounts for him. And it’s how he gets beautiful blonds to take him home.”

“You’re awfully certain about this.”

“Damn straight I am.” She heard herself laughing, a wild, ecstatic sound. “Come on, Peter! Get pumped, will you? Mister Twister is history. We got him. We nailed the son of a bitch!”

The morning sun splashed wide bands of orange light across Wilshire Boulevard, fifteen stories below Jack Dance’s feet.

Standing at the corner windows of his high-rise apartment, he surveyed the glittering tide of traffic flowing past Westwood Village toward the on-ramp of the 405. Beyond the distant marquees of the Bruin and Village theaters rose the Santa Monica Mountains, pasted on the sky like billows of frozen smoke, purple and gently rounded.

Jack loved Los Angeles. Yes, loved it, despite the grit and ugliness now visible nearly everywhere, despite the muttering legions of shopping-cart people who’d turned the city into a vast open-air mental ward, despite the gang graffiti on alley walls and the taggers’ slogans defacing every other billboard, despite the traffic snarls and freeway closures and unpatched potholes pockmarking the streets. Hell, despite everything.