Although Jane didn’t expect Petra Quist to return until almost midnight, she finished touring the house, stopped in the kitchen to leave an item from her tote, extinguished the last of the lights that she’d turned on, and by 11:10 was standing in the foyer, next to one of the windows that flanked the front door. At 11:15, far earlier than she had anticipated, a superstretch black Cadillac limo turned off the street and into the circular driveway.
Jane stepped back from the window and watched as the chauffeur came around the front of the vehicle. He opened a back door and offered a hand to help the passenger disembark.
In a short, sleeveless dress, wearing neither a coat nor a wrap in deference to the cool weather, Petra Quist emerged from the car. Although she appeared to be all long legs and slender arms, she came forth with none of the swanlike grace that could be seen in some of her Facebook photos, but instead like a marionette whose wooden joints were in need of some oil. When she turned from the driver and started up the portico steps, however, she repressed a girls’-night-out stagger and achieved that other kind of avian elegance common to cranes and storks, moving with a studied fluidity punctuated by fraction-of-a-second hesitations, as though her limbs might lock. It was evident that she expected the driver to be watching her with barely constrained desire.
Maybe the chauffeur was in fact riveted by her fashion-model legs and schoolgirl butt. More likely, he observed her with concern that she might fall upon the steps, bruising her face or splitting her perfect lips. In that case, he would be in deep trouble with the owner of the limousine company, who happened to be Simon Yegg, this girl’s “nuclear-powered love machine.”
Petra negotiated the steps with her chin high, as she might hold it when bringing a martini glass to her mouth.
Jane picked up her tote bag and backed away from the entrance, into the open doorway of the nearby study, which smelled of leather upholstery and cigars cuddled in a humidor. She set the tote aside.
From the sound of it, the party girl had difficulty inserting the key in the lock. Then the deadbolt clacked open and the alarm sounded as she stepped inside.
Closing the door, Petra said, “Anabel, follow me with light,” and the foyer chandelier brightened above her.
Sara Holdsteck had failed to mention that the computerized systems of the house responded to voice commands preceded by its customized identity—Anabel. Evidently this feature had been added since her ex-husband had forced her out. Interesting. And curious.
“Anabel, disarm security. Five, six, five, one, star.”
A disembodied female voice said, “Control is now disarmed.”
When Petra began to sing Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song” and started across the foyer, Jane stepped from the darkness of the study. Pistol held at her side, muzzle toward the floor, she said, “Petra Quist, formerly Eudora Mertz of Albany, Oregon.”
The party girl halted among the prismatic patterns cast on the marble floor by the immense crystal chandelier, likewise prismed herself, as though she might have been pieced together from glass. Wings of golden hair framing her face. A complexion as smooth as the petals of a cream-colored rose. Blue eyes so boldly striated that they gleamed like faceted jewels. In the short, custom-fitted dress that matched her eyes, with a Rockstud Rolling purse from Valentino slung over her shoulder, she stood with one leg before the other, as if frozen in mid-stride.
Jane said, “Voted most popular girl in the senior class. Main squeeze of Keith Buchanan, high-school football hero. Then you’re off to New York and modeling jobs. Three years later, it’s L.A. and commercials for national brands, occasionally an acting gig.”
If Petra was surprised or fearful, she didn’t show it. Her expression said, I’m dangerous and I’m too cool for your school, a look that was perpetually popular in the high-fashion magazines.
“Two years in L.A.,” Jane said, “then you’re in Nashville, playing guitar and singing in the starter clubs. Eighteen months later, you’re back here, just south of true La La Land, twenty-six years old and…doing what?”
Petra issued a sigh of impatience. “You’ve got no reason to be pissed at me. If Simon dumped you, chickee, save your ammo for him.”
“Maybe I will. But I want you out of the way when he comes home. You and I, we’re going down to the theater.”
“Screw that. I need a drink.”
Jane raised the pistol. She had fixed a sound suppressor to it, not because a shot was likely to be heard beyond the walls of the mansion, but because the average person found a pistol even more intimidating when it was fitted with a silencer, announcing that the bearer of the weapon was a professional and not to be resisted.
Either because an evening of drinking with the girls had rendered Petra incapable of discerning a threat or because even sober she would have more attitude than common sense, she said, “If you want to have a bitch contest, honey, you better go into training for a year. Then come back, and we’ll get it on.”
She turned away from Jane and sauntered toward the living room archway, moving as seductively as when she climbed the portico steps with the chauffeur watching. No doubt, from experience, she knew that some girls coveted her no less than did most men. Perhaps she hoped that Jane was one such whose desire would make her vulnerable.
As Petra stepped out of the foyer, lamps bloomed with light in the living room.
In other circumstances, with the clock ticking toward Simon’s arrival, Jane would have overpowered Petra the moment the woman disarmed the security system. She would have taken her by surprise with a spray bottle of chloroform, of which she had a supply that she’d derived from art-store acetone and janitorial bleaching powder. Because she hoped to pry certain information from this woman, however, she needed her to be clearheaded, or at least no more muddle-brained than an evening of club-hopping had already left her.
Trailing Petra across the living room, Jane said, “I’m not one of Simon’s girls, and this has nothing to do with you.”
“Oh, good. Then piss off, why don’t you?”
“But if you force me to it, I’ll hurt you.”
“So you’ll double-cap me? Two shots in the back of the head? Why should I care? I’d never know it happened.”
“You’re drunk.”
Petra Quist said, “I’m best when I’m drunk. Don’t think I’m not. You hear a slur in my voice? No, you don’t. Vodka clarifies. Peter Parker is bitten, so then he’s Spider-Man and all. Ice-cold Belvedere and an olive—that’s my spider bite.”
As Jane followed the woman through open double doors and into a hallway, a series of crystal ceiling fixtures brightened, a spectrum of primary colors burning bright along the sharp edges of the pendants.
“Don’t be stupid,” Jane said. “Don’t push me like this.”
“Kiss my ass. You probably even want to kiss it.”
In training at Quantico and during her busy years in the FBI, working cases involving Behavioral Analysis Units 3 and 4, which dealt mostly with mass murders and serial killings, Jane had known all kinds of hard cases, men and women, and ultimately cracked every one of them. But there was something different about Petra Quist, something new and disturbing. The woman’s restiveness under these circumstances was not entirely related to how much she had drunk, and dealing with her successfully might require understanding the deeper reason for her mulish—and reckless—stubbornness.
Still walking in front of Jane, Petra said, “Why don’t you grab my hair, throw me down, kick me in the teeth, bust me up? Are you all bullshit and no balls?”
The vast kitchen—maple cabinets, black granite countertops, stainless-steel appliances, designed to accommodate a caterer with a platoon of cooks and other staff—welcomed Petra with sudden light.