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“Whoa, whoa! This is the biggest deal about nothing I’ve ever heard. Her arms were full! I opened her car door to help her!”
“Tell it to your lawyer,” I snapped. I had one hand on Twilly’s arm, my cell phone in my other, and was about to call for backup.
“Wait a minute,” he said. “Is Yuki claiming that I’m harassing her? Because that’s crap. I admit I provoked her a little, applied a little pressure just to get her going. I’m a journalist. We do that. Look. If I made a mistake, I’m sorry. Can we talk? Please?”
I’d checked Twilly out, and his record was clean. I had a moment of free fall as my anger evaporated. A stern warning would have been appropriate. Now that I’d cuffed him — that media flap Cindy had warned Yuki about?
It was going to go down.
I could already see Twilly spinning this “bust” to Larry King, Tucker Carlson, Access Hollywood. It would be bad news for Yuki, bad for me, but it would be stupendous publicity for Twilly.
“Sergeant?”
I had to hit rewind. I had to try.
“You want to avoid a court appearance, Mr. Twilly? Leave Yuki Castellano alone. Don’t sit behind her in court. Don’t tail her in supermarkets. Don’t enter her car or premises, and we’ll put this incident aside.
“Yuki files another complaint? I’m taking you in. Are we clear?”
“Totally,” he said. “Crystal.”
“Good.”
I unlocked the cuffs and started to leave.
“Wait!” Twilly said. He stepped into the other room, with its aqua-striped wallpaper and canopied bed. He snatched a pen and pad from the bowlegged writing desk and said, “I want to make sure I got this right.”
He scribbled notes, then recited my speech back to me, verbatim.
“That was really excellent stuff you just said, Sergeant. Who do you think should play you in the movie?”
He was screwing with me.
I left Twilly’s suite feeling as though I’d been smacked in the face with a shit pie — and I’d done it to myself. Damn it to hell. Maybe I’d jammed myself up, and maybe I was wrong to cuff him, but it didn’t mean that Jason Twilly wasn’t crazy.
And it didn’t mean he wasn’t dangerous.
Chapter 82
JOE AND I had a takeout dinner from Le Soleil and were in bed by ten. My eyes flew open at exactly 3:04, the digits projected on the ceiling keeping track of the time as my sickening night thoughts churned.
An image of Twilly’s sneer had awakened me, but his face dissolved, and in its place I saw the burned and twisted corpses on Claire’s table. And I remembered the dulled eyes of a young girl who’d been orphaned by a nameless teenage boy who might now be lying awake in his bed, planning another horror show.
How many more people would die before we found him?
Or would he beat us at this sick game?
I thought of the fire that had consumed my home, my possessions, my sense of security. And I thought about Joe, how much I loved Joe. I’d wanted him to move to San Francisco so that we could make a life together — and we were doing it through thick and thin. Why couldn’t I take him up on that big Italian wedding he’d proposed and maybe start a family?
I would be thirty-nine in a few months.
What was I waiting for?
I listened to Joe’s breathing, and in a while my rapid nightmare heart thuds slowed and I started drifting off. I turned away from Joe, gripped a pillow in my arms — and the mattress shifted as Joe turned toward me. He enfolded me in his arms, tucked his knees up behind mine.
“Bad dream?” he asked me.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I forget the dream, but when I woke up, I thought about a lot of dead people.”
