Dark Pursuit

The argument boiled over. D. and Kaitlan shot points back and forth, back and forth. Margaret didn’t say much—Kaitlan covered it all.

D. pounded his cane. “Unless you come up with some other bright idea, I’m through talking about this!”

“But I don’t want to end up on TV!” Kaitlan burst. “Everybody will be looking at me, my privacy gone.”

D. growled. “Don’t be a fool, Kaitlan. You lost your privacy the minute you found that body on your bed. What do you think—Craig’s going to be arrested and tried in secret?”

That did it. Kaitlan was beaten down. Margaret could see the fight drain from her limbs. Besides, D. was right—they had no other plan.

Feet on the couch, Kaitlan pulled her knees up and buried her face.

D. looked utterly spent. He slumped in his chair, piercing the floor with an angry stare. Soon it smoothed to hollow-eyed blankness.

Margaret hadn’t liked the plan then. Now in the light of day it seemed nothing short of insane. A frail elderly man facing down a killer one third his age?

She had to talk D. out of it.

Throwing back the covers she slid from bed.

She showered and dressed by rote, her mind on the list of arguments to abort the plan. Too much could go wrong. They had no fallback. All three of them could get killed. The more she envisioned Craig Barlow here, in this house, the more her muscles tied in knots. By the time her makeup and hair were done, she vowed to go to the police herself rather than let D. carry out his harebrained idea.

Except she had no absolute proof yesterday’s murder ever happened. What if they believed the photos had been staged—all for publicity for a has-been writer?

The news.

Margaret slapped down her brush and trotted over to turn on the television, weak hope floundering in her chest. If by some miracle the victim at least had been found …

She punched the remote to Channel Seven, where Good Morning America would cut away at intervals to a minute or two of local news.

Commercials.

Margaret massaged her neck and waited. Come on, give me something.

The familiar face of local anchor Matt Hagerty appeared. He clipped through stories of an Oakland attorney indicted for trying to bribe a judge, a string of home burglaries in San Francisco’s Marina District. Traffic conditions on local freeways. “And now,” he nodded, “back to Good Morning America.”

Margaret’s shoulders fell.

Punching off the TV, she strode to her desk in the far corner of her room. It was less likely the papers would carry anything about the murder this quickly, but she’d look anyway. She turned on her computer, idling with impatience as it booted. She clicked to the San Jose Mercury News website and scanned its headlines.

Nothing.

Margaret returned to Google and searched for “Gayner homicide victim”—the same words she’d run yesterday for D.

No breaking stories. Only those of the last two victims.

She typed in “Gayner missing woman.” Her heart leapt at the returned hits, but again none of them linked to current news.

Who was this woman, that no one had even reported her missing?

Margaret made a face at the computer. This was useless.

As she exited the bedroom she left the computer running.

In the kitchen she made coffee and choked down some toast. The house screamed the silence of a tomb. Darell had instructed her to wake him at nine.

Margaret prowled the kitchen, coffee in hand, unease a leaden block in her chest. How to convince Darell to change his mind? When the man decided something his feet set in concrete.

And even if she did convince him—what then? They’d be back where they started, with Kaitlan trapped here, helpless.

Toting her coffee cup, Margaret returned to the computer. She refreshed the San Jose Mercury page for updates. Nothing new.

She stared out the window into thick fog. The backyard lay obliterated.

Maybe she should go back to perusing D.’s old novels. Yesterday she only read the opening chapters of the first ten. How driven she’d been. But that strong urge had been swept aside amid the events of last night.

Perhaps within one of the books lay an idea not to help Darell catch Craig Barlow after all, but to talk him out of trying.

As Margaret considered that possibility, the urge returned.

She pushed back from the computer. Eight-twenty. She had forty minutes—enough time to scan through the openings of ten or so novels.

In the kitchen Margaret refilled her coffee mug. With purpose she headed to the library and planted herself before the bookcase holding D.’s first editions. An empty space spoke of the novel she’d been reading last night.

Margaret fetched the book from the desk where it lay and returned it to its place on the shelf. She stared at the next novel, D.’s eleventh. Out of Time.

Appropriate title.

Breathing a prayer, she slipped it off the shelf.

forty-five