after they’d passed her that the car was a blue Jaguar.
There was an empty spot in front of the yellow house, and the car swept into it, parked, shut off the lights.
It was dark again, and Anna exhaled. She looked at her watch and saw the time, just after midnight. She’d fallen asleep and hadn’t known it. Petrović’s restaurant must have closed, and he was home for the night.
She watched him get out of his car, phone to his face as usual, and head up under the decorative woodwork of the front porch to the front door. Lights came on in the front hall, then the parlor.
Anna switched on her ignition as another car came down the street, the headlights shining into her eyes. She waited for this car to pass her before pulling out, but instead it pulled parallel to a parked car behind her and stopped. Double-parked.
The driver-side door opened, and a man with silvery hair in a gray topcoat got out, slammed the door to his dark SUV. Anna knew cars. It was a Cadillac Escalade.
Who was this?
An FBI man tailing Petrović?
A friend or colleague paying a call at midnight?
The man in gray walked to Petrović’s house and climbed the stairs. The door opened. Anna saw the dark hulk of Petrović stand back so that the man in gray could go in. The front door closed again.
Anna shut off the ignition, took a swig from her water bottle, and put it back on the seat. She would wait until the man in gray left the house. She’d promised Joe not to chase Petrović, but technically, following his associate wasn’t chasing him.
The more they knew about Petrović, the better.
And she didn’t have to wait long.
About five minutes after going inside the yellow house, the man in gray came out, got into his car, started it up, and drove up from behind her at a slow speed, coming alongside her and then stopping. Right next to her.
The man in the car waited for her to turn her face to him, and then made the universal signal for rolling down the car window.
She didn’t do it. Anna was actually paralyzed. She pictured a gun pointed at her. She imagined ducking to the floor of the car. She saw herself bolting out of her car on the sidewalk side and just running, running, running, bullets coming at her as she ran.
Anna heard the man yelling through his open window.
“You need help?”
She shook her head no. And reached for the key, turned her engine on. There was room to pull out and drive past him. Barely. She turned the wheel, and as she rolled out into her lane, she looked toward the driver of the Escalade.
He was smiling at her. It was the kind of smile she’d seen before in the darkest days of her hell on earth. The smile was an expression of power.
He was letting her know how confident he was of his power to hurt her.
The tires of Anna’s Kia grabbed asphalt, and the car squealed as it shot off and up the street. As Anna reached the intersection of Fell and Broderick, she checked her rear-view mirror.
The Caddy wasn’t following her. But if he looked for her, he would recognize her car. She parked blocks away from her front door and stuck to the shadows as she made her way home.
CHAPTER 47
Nancy Koebel, the housekeeper from the Big Four Motel, had taken off to parts unknown after finding Carly Myers’s dead body.
Not only had she discovered the body, but because of her presence around the motel on the days surrounding the murder, she might also have information about Carly’s killer. So Conklin and I were surprised and very glad to see Koebel when she came through the entrance to Homicide on Tuesday morning and asked for me.
We escorted her into Interview 2 and asked her if she needed anything. She declined and told us that she couldn’t stay long.
Nancy Koebel was young, between eighteen and twenty-two, and thin, with choppy brown hair and dark circles under her eyes. She explained that she had come to San Francisco from Canada almost three months ago with her boyfriend, Roger Lewis.
“It was supposed to be a vacation,” she told us. “But we weren’t getting along. I said some things. Roger said some things. Then he ditched me. I had very little cash, no car, a used-up credit card, and my visitor’s visa was about to expire. I lived with my parents