by Dean Koontz
If the hulk hadn’t seen Robert Branwick lying dead beyond the kitchen table when he first charged into the kitchen, he had found him by now. Unless he was stupid, he’d realize that the shotgun assault had been impetuous, to say the least, and that he needed to be gone from the premises at something like the speed of light.
Sure enough, the garage door on the east end of the house rolled up, and a black Cadillac Escalade cruised out.
Jane glassed the Caddy as it arrived at the foot of the sloped driveway, where a streetlamp revealed the shotgun cowboy behind the wheel. She expected him to turn downhill, toward the flats. He might have been worried about encountering police answering a report of gunfire, because he turned uphill.
She put aside the binoculars and slid low, until her eyes were just above the sill of the side window.
When the Escalade passed, the blonde in the passenger seat was blowing her nose in a Kleenex, probably groggy and dealing with the effects of chloroform. Most likely she entirely escaped the shotgun blasts, which had been aimed high while she was flat on the floor.
Jane waited until the Caddy was out of sight before she started the Ford and switched on the headlights and drove uphill. She heard distant sirens, but in the rearview mirror, she didn’t see any rotating beacons scattering cherry light into the night below.
10
* * *
NATHAN SILVERMAN was at the computer in his home office when the report came in from Los Angeles at 9:10.
A career in law enforcement ensured an appreciation for the strangeness of life and for the unpredictability of human beings. The majority of criminals were as predictable as the sunrise, in part due to their lack of imagination. But often enough, the most innocent-seeming, gentle people were capable of stunning outrages that no one could have seen coming.
Likewise, in moments of crisis, average men and women, though not conditioned for combat, displayed courage equal to the legendary acts of valor on all the battlefields of history. This better aspect of humanity kept Silverman from sliding into an incurable cynicism.
He expected Jane to be valiant, to act always with courage and honor. As yet, he had no evidence that she had done otherwise. But the events at the Santa Monica hotel were beyond merely troublesome. Why had she claimed to be conducting surveillance in a Bureau sting when she was on leave? Who was the woman on roller skates, and what had been in those two briefcases?
Accompanying the brief report were photos, stop-motion video images from the hotel-lobby security cameras. The quality wasn’t great—but good enough for him to identify Jane Hawk, even though she had cut and dyed her hair.
Mystified, Silverman emailed the SAC in the Los Angeles field office, requesting any pertinent video from other hotel cameras. In addition, if the park across the street was equipped with security video or if there were traffic cams in the area, he needed to know if they had captured the activity that had led to the skater fleeing across Ocean Avenue, as described by the doorman-valet.
The downpour that had begun at dinner continued unrelenting, although it was less threatening now than solemn, like the massed drums and the horses’ hooves of a funeral cortege.
Silverman called up the clearest photo of Jane. He framed her face and enlarged it to full screen. Clarity diminished, but he used a program that repeatedly doubled the pixels until her face resolved in detail. You could read determination in the set of her mouth, her clenched jaw. You might read anxiety as well. Maybe the third thing that he saw was imagined, inspired by the affection and admiration he felt for her, but he thought he saw desperation, the haunted look of someone who was hunted and heard the baying hounds drawing near.
11
* * *
DRIVING FROM SHERMAN OAKS to the motel in Tarzana, Jane went over every move she’d made at the Branwick house.
She had worn gloves. No prints.
There had been an alarm system, a keypad by the door. But no obvious security cameras. Just the basic door and window alerts.
The five rounds she had fired would be recovered by the CSI team. As soon as convenient, she would need to break down the pistol and dispose of the pieces, but not until she obtained a replacement.
At the Tarzana motel again, she got ice and a can of Coke from the vending-machine alcove.
In her room, the door locked for the night, she retrieved a maintenance kit from a suitcase and addressed the .45. Considering how few rounds she fired in the past three days, the weapon didn’t require cleaning, but considering what one bullet had done to the son of Richard and Berniece Branwick, Jane felt a need to clean it.
While she worked on the Heckler & Koch, she allowed herself to think about Jimmy Bob, how it went down with him, the inevitability of it once he’d thrown his pen in her face and lifted the chair to swing it and called out to the hulk to kill her.
During her career, she’d participated in ten investigations of mass and serial murders. Eight resolutions. Five cases wrapped with arrests involving no violence. In the sixth, another agent on the team took down a guy who killed little boys. The seventh was J. J. Crutchfield, collector of eyes, whom Jane shot in the leg. In the eighth case, she’d been in a tight place on a lonely farm—another agent dead—stalked by two sociopathic rapists and kill buddies; she killed both. No regrets. No guilt. Yet she couldn’t repress memories of how even evil men cried out to God or their mothers and wept like children when hollow-point rounds gouged away chunks of them.
Robert Branwick was her third kill, a creep, a criminal driven by greed and a taste for power. Yet he was also a human being with a past, raised by loving parents who regarded him with affection, grateful for the gift of their early retirement, because they had no clue how he really made his money. If he was physically repulsive, he couldn’t help that, and if he compensated with the ludicrous pretension of being a well-laid Casanova, he was not the only man to have an exaggerated sense of his appeal to women. Killing in self-defense wasn’t murder. Jane had no remorse about dropping the hacker, but to hold fast to her humanity, she must recognize his.
Investigative police work and soldiering were different worlds. In war, you often killed at such a distance that you never saw the faces of those who wished you dead and your country in ruins, and if in close combat you glimpsed their faces, you knew nothing of them.
To investigate a man, study him, and then be able to kill him, even to save the lives of innocents or in self-defense, required a stalwart sense of duty…and ensured moments of doubt. She didn’t doubt the rightness of what she’d done, but she sometimes doubted that she fully understood why she had the capacity to do it.
Robert Branwick had been raised by law-abiding people. Jane’s father was a wife murderer. Did nature or nurture matter more?
Whenever she allowed herself to brood about it, she believed there were two reasons that she had forsaken a career in music for one in law enforcement: as a rejection of her famous father and as atonement for her childhood cowardice in the weeks and months after her mother’s murder had been passed off as a suicide.
But if by nature she was more an heir of Cain than of Abel, it was also necessary to consider that she might have chosen her career as a way of legitimizing the violence of which she was capable.
The few times she raised this subject with Nick, he had said, Yeah, life is complicated, but if it wasn’t complicated, it would be a roller coaster on a flat track. Wouldn’t be a ride worth taking. And, yeah, we never fully know ourselves, but that means we’re mysterious enough to interest one another. And if we fully knew ourselves in this world, what reason would we have to still be here?
Finished cleaning the pistol, she put away the maintenance kit. She took five cartridges from her stash of ammunition and pressed them into the half-empty magazine.
She mixed Coke and vodka over ice.
She sat in bed. Switched on the TV.
Breaking news. Two crazies in a Miami restaurant had chopped people with a machete and stabbed with knives. Wounded five, killed three. They
would have killed more if they hadn’t been dropped hard by a diner who was an armed off-duty policeman.
Jane surfed the channels, searching for an old black-and-white movie made in an age of innocence. Preferably a musical with a corny love story and a touch of comedy, not in the least ironic or hip. She couldn’t find one.
Off with the TV, on with the bedside clock-radio.
She located a station risking oldies from the ’50s, though few people alive remembered that decade anymore. It was something called “The Presley and Platters Hour.” The Platters were just rolling into the opening bars of “Twilight Time,” which was all right with her.
She put a pillow on her lap. She smoothed out the crumpled page from the notepad on which Jimmy Bob had written at her direction, and she placed it on the pillow.
As she sipped the Coke and vodka, Jane studied the names on the paper. Aspasia, a brothel named after the mistress of a statesman of ancient Athens. William Sterling Overton, kick-ass tort attorney.
She wondered about beautiful girls who were totally submissive, who were incapable of disobedience, who would satisfy even the most extreme desires, whose permanent silence was assured. She remembered the video of laboratory mice moving in regimented cadres.
Her thoughts were colder than the ice in her drink glass.
David James Michael, the billionaire, would be hard to get at.
Bertold Shenneck might be more vulnerable but still difficult.
In the morning, she would research William Sterling Overton. At the moment, he seemed to be an easier target.
She hoped the attorney could be persuaded to reveal to her the location of Shenneck’s playpen, Aspasia. She hoped he wouldn’t do something stupid and leave her no choice but to kill him.
Although she had not yet researched him and though he was no less a human being than she was, Jane suspected that, if she were forced to kill him, she would have no reason for remorse.
12
* * *
AT NINE O’CLOCK Friday morning, in her office in Springfield Town Center, Gladys Chang used a booster pillow on her chair, to bring her into a correct relationship with her desk.
Nathan Silverman sat in one of the two client chairs, smiling too much for an FBI agent making serious inquiries. He knew he was smiling excessively, but he couldn’t maintain a solemn expression because he delighted in looking at the woman and listening to her.
Mrs. Chang, thirtysomething, a second-generation Chinese American, was a stylish dresser and a petite dynamo—maybe all of five feet if she were to take off her high-heel shoes—with delicate features and jet-black hair and a musical voice. She insisted on being called Glad. Silverman was greatly charmed by her, and though his appreciation didn’t have an erotic edge—well, not much—he felt vaguely guilty because he was in fact a happily married man.
“Oh,” Mrs. Chang said, “Mrs. Hawk’s house, a whirlwind sale, zip-zoom-zap, listed and sold the same day to a developer who builds on spec. Very sad deal. I took longer to decide which hummingbird feeder to buy for my patio. Do you like hummingbirds, Nathan?”
“Yes,” he said. “They’re quite pretty, aren’t they?”
“Wonderful! Those iridescent feathers! And so industrious. Of the many species, in Virginia we see mostly the ruby-throated. Did you know the ruby-throated migrates from South America and flies nonstop for five hundred miles across the Gulf of Mexico?”
“Five hundred miles nonstop. That’s remarkable.”
“They build nests from plant down and spiderwebs. Spiderwebs!” She put one hand to her breast, as if the thought of building with something as delicate as spiderwebs took her breath away. “And they decorate the nests with lichen. Decorate! How sweet is that?”
“That’s delightful. Mrs. Chang—” She held up a hand to correct him. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Glad. A moment ago, Glad, you said…‘very sad deal.’ If Jane’s house sold so quickly, isn’t that good?”
“Not at her price. Crazy low. It pained me. She didn’t care as much about price as about how quick I could move it, and the poor girl wouldn’t listen to reason.”
“Maybe she couldn’t bear living there…after what happened to her husband.”
Mrs. Chang made a fist of her right hand and rapped it three times over her heart. “How terrible. I knew him a little. I sold the house to them. He was such a nice man. I knew about the suicide, of course. I know everything in neighborhoods where I sell houses. But she lived there two months after it happened, before she came to me. May I tell you something, Nathan, and you won’t think I’m bragging? I am very good at reading people. I’m not gifted with many talents, but I have that one. And I am sincerely sure it wasn’t grief that made her sell the house fast. It was fear.”
“Jane isn’t someone who scares,” he said. “Not easily, anyway.”
“Fraidy-cats don’t become FBI. Of course. But she wasn’t afraid for herself. She was scared for her sweet hummingbird, her little boy. What a darling little boy! She kept him close, didn’t want to let him out of her sight.”
“She told you she was afraid for him?”
“No. She didn’t have to. It was as plain as the print on a billboard. Anybody she didn’t know approached the boy, Mrs. Hawk tensed up. Once or twice, I thought she might draw her gun.”
Nathan leaned forward in his chair. “You think she had a concealed weapon?”
“She’s FBI. Why wouldn’t she have a gun? I got a glimpse of it once. She was leaning over the desk. Her blazer was unbuttoned and it hung open, and I just happened to see the holster, the handle of the gun along her left side.”
Less to Mrs. Chang than to himself, Silverman said, “But who would want to harm Travis?”
The Realtor leaned over her desk and pointed at him, jabbed her forefinger at him. “There is the question for your FBI, Nathan. Your FBI should investigate just that very thing. What horrible kind of person would want to hurt that beautiful little hummingbird? You go find out. You go find that horrible person and lock him up.”
13
* * *
FRIDAY MORNING, in her motel room, Jane spent two hours with more autopsy reports. She found three cases in which the forensic pathologists trephined decedents’ skulls and examined their brains.
One of the three was in Chicago. The part of the report dealing with the dead man’s gray matter was heavily redacted. Fully half the words had been electronically blacked out.
Autopsy reports were public records. These electronic files were the original documents. If a court ordered files released to a petitioner, authorities could attempt redaction of copies within the limits of the law. But it wasn’t legal to tamper with originals.
In the second case, involving the autopsy of a woman in Dallas, examination of the brain was one of the numbered items on the table of contents. But that section of the report had gone missing.
The third decedent, Benedetta Jane Ashcroft, had died by her own hand in a hotel in Century City. The L.A. medical examiner’s attending forensic pathologist, Dr. Emily Jo Rossman, examined the brain and made extensive observations, some of which were reported in language too technical for Jane to fully understand.
Photos of the brain were referenced in the report. The file contained no such photos.
14
* * *
AT 9:15, ON HER WAY out for the day, Jane stopped in the motel office to pay cash for another night.
The clerk was a girl, nineteen or twenty. Chopped everywhichway black hair. Dangling silver-spider earrings. A badge pinned to her shirt identified her as CHLOE. Engrossed in something that she was doing on her smartphone, Chloe put it aside reluctantly.
On the screen, Jane saw a photo of the actor Trai Byers.
After paying, she said, “Do you have one of those celebrity-tracking apps? Star Spotter or Just Spotted, anything like that?”
“Cooler than that. There’s always something way cooler like about every six months.”
“Could you do me a favor? T
his famous guy I’m interested in—is he in L.A. right now or where?”
“Sure. Gimme his name.”
“William Sterling Overton.” She spelled the surname.
“What’s he star in?”
“He’s an attorney. But he’s been married to actresses and he dates supermodels, so I think he’ll be in the celebrity pool.”
After maybe ten seconds, Chloe said, “Yeah, he’s cute. But I gotta say, he’s kind of old for you.”
Chloe shared the screen, and Jane saw a man who resembled the actor Rob Lowe with a rougher edge.
Working the phone again, Chloe said, “He’s forty-four.”
“Ancient,” Jane said. “But cute. And rich.”
“Rich is best,” Chloe said. “Rich is forever young, huh? Yeah, he’s in town. He’s got a one o’clock lunch reservation at Alla Moda. That is a super-expensive joint.” She looked at Jane’s outfit. “You maybe want to change if you’re gonna try to slide up to him there.”
“I will,” Jane said. “You’re totally right.”
“More style, more hot,” Chloe advised.
15
* * *
ON HER WAY TO A LIBRARY in Woodland Hills, Jane passed a high school where six or eight police cars had gathered. Uniformed cops were arrayed on the public sidewalk, mostly in pairs, as if they expected something worse to happen than what had already occurred.
Scores of students milled about at the top of the school steps, watching the police.
Two handcuffed teenagers sat at the bottom of the steps, talking to each other, at the moment laughing.
Forty feet from the comedians, a dead man lay on the sidewalk. The scene was so fresh, no one had covered the body, although an officer was taking a blanket from the trunk of a patrol car.