Fair Warning (Jack McEvoy #3)(13)

But that is where the luck came in. Within an hour of sending my private message, Regina contacted me and said she was in town to make arrangements to take her daughter home. She said she was staying at a hotel called the London West Hollywood and expected to leave Los Angeles the next morning, Tina’s body in the cargo hold of the jet. She invited me to come to the hotel to talk about Tina.

I couldn’t make an invitation like that wait, especially when I knew that Mattson and Sakai might take it upon themselves to warn Regina about me. I told her I would be in the lobby of the hotel in an hour. I told Myron where I was going and headed off in the Jeep, taking Coldwater Canyon south over the Santa Monica Mountains and down into Beverly Hills. I then went east on Sunset Boulevard toward the Sunset Strip. The London West Hollywood was located right in the middle of it.

Regina Portrero was a small woman in her mid-sixties, which indicated she had Tina early in her life. I could see the resemblance most in the same dark brown eyes and hair. She met me in the lobby of the hotel, which was just a half block south of Sunset on San Vicente. It was her daughter’s neighborhood. She had lived just a few blocks away.

We sat in an alcove that was probably meant for people waiting for their rooms to be ready. But there was no one there at the moment and we had privacy. I took out my notebook and put it on my thigh so I could write notes and be as inconspicuous about it as possible.

“What is your interest in Tina?” she asked.

Regina’s first question threw me because she had not asked it during the initial communication. Now she wanted to know what I was doing and I knew that if I answered it fully and honestly it would probably end the interview before it got started.

“Well, first of all, I am very sorry for your loss,” I said. “I can’t imagine what you are going through and I hate so much to be an intruder. But what the police on this case told me makes it different and makes what happened to Tina something that the public should possibly know about.”

“I don’t understand. Are you talking about what happened to her neck?”

“Oh, no.”

I was mortified that my clumsy answer to her first question had conjured in her mind the horrible manner in which her daughter had been killed. In many ways I would have preferred a backhand across the face, the diamond of an engagement ring raking across my skin and leaving another scar.

“Uh … ,” I stammered. “What I meant was … the police, they told me that she might have been the victim of cyberstalking, and so far, as far as I know, there is no evidence that the two are connected but …”

“They didn’t tell me that,” Regina said. “They said they didn’t have any leads.”

“Well, I don’t want to speak for them and maybe they don’t want to tell you anything until they’re sure. But I understand that she told friends—like Lisa Hill—that she felt she was being stalked. And to be honest, that is what is of interest to me. That is a consumer thing—it’s about privacy—and if there is a … problem then that’s what I’m going to write about.”

“How was she stalked? This is all news to me.”

I knew I was in trouble here. I was telling her things she didn’t know, so the first thing she was going to do after I left was call Mattson about it. Then Mattson would learn that I was still actively pursuing the case, and Regina would in turn learn that my reporter’s interest in Tina and her death was compromised by my having known her briefly but intimately. This meant that this was the one and only time I would get to talk to Tina’s mother. She would be turned against me in the same way Lisa Hill had been.

“I don’t know exactly how she was stalked,” I said. “That is only what the police said. I talked to her friend Lisa and she said Tina apparently met a man in a bar but that it felt like he was there waiting for her or something. That it wasn’t a random encounter.”

“I told her to stay out of the bars,” Regina said. “But she couldn’t keep away—even after the arrests and rehab.”

It was an incongruous response. I was talking about her daughter being stalked and she fixated on her daughter’s drug and alcohol issues.

“I am not saying one thing had anything to do with the other,” I said. “I don’t think the police know yet either. But I know she had arrests and had been to rehab. Is that what you mean about her going to bars?”

“She was always going out, meeting strangers … ,” Regina said. “All the way back to high school. Her father told her it could end this way—he warned her—but she didn’t listen. She didn’t seem to care. She was boy crazy from the start.”

Regina seemed to stare off into the distance when she spoke. Boy crazy seemed like an innocent term but, clearly, she was seeing a memory of her daughter as a young woman. An unpleasant memory in which there was upset and rancor.

“Was Tina ever married?” I asked.

“No, never,” Regina said. “She said she never wanted to be tied down by one man. My husband used to joke that she saved him a bundle by never getting married. But she was our only child and I always wished I had gotten to plan her wedding. It never happened. She was always looking for something she felt no man she met could provide… . What that was, I never knew.”

I remembered the post I had seen on Tina’s social media.