by Dean Koontz
The victim had gray hair. Maybe a teacher. Or just someone passing by at the wrong time.
Not long ago, ninety percent of homicides were committed by people who knew their victims. Now as many as thirty percent involved people who didn’t know each other. Once a crime of intimacy, homicide was becoming as random as death by lightning.
She arrived at the library in Woodland Hills without another disturbing incident. She was grateful for uneventful moments.
At a workstation in the computer alcove, she googled William Sterling Overton. She took her time. The people looking for her would not have included the lawyer on a red-flag list of names, words, phrases, and websites that might identify her use of library Internet access. She had first learned of his creepy connection to “Shenneck’s playpen”—therefore to Shenneck—because Jimmy Bob had used his criminal expertise against his clients as well as for them, but those in conspiracy with Shenneck would be unaware of that.
Within half an hour, she had all she needed. In fifteen minutes, she also got the basics on Dr. Emily Rossman, the L.A. forensic pathologist whose autopsy report she had found pertinent.
Last of all, she googled Dougal Trahern, a name she had finally remembered this morning, after it had teased at the back of her mind since Monday in San Diego. Interesting.
During her time in the library, a change had come over the morning. The ocean, far off and unseen in the south, had spawned a towering fog, which now was driven inland by an onshore flow. The sky beyond the Santa Monica Mountains loomed white. The distant heights of rock-shot earth and chaparral were dissolving from view as if the mist were a universal solvent. Easing through those mountain passes, the fog might never reach here, but it pushed before it a cooling breeze that had a faint metallic scent she couldn’t identify.
For no reason she could define, as she breathed in that thin astringent odor and stared south at the dead-white sky, she wondered if things were all right at Gavin and Jessica’s place, if the German shepherds remained alert to trouble, if Travis was still safe.
16
* * *
ACCORDING TO HIGHLY LAUDATORY magazine profiles in Vanity Fair and GQ, the house in Beverly Hills was only one of five residences owned by William Overton. The attorney had a Manhattan apartment, another in Dallas. A golf-course home in Rancho Mirage. A penthouse in a glittering San Francisco high-rise.
The Beverly Hills home was his primary residence. Jane could have used the city directory to get an address; but a photo of the house in a newspaper article had revealed the street number.
Google Earth had provided a satellite look at the property. Street View gave her a 360-degree scan of the entire block.
She arrived at 2:30 in the afternoon with a plan.
After learning about Overton from Chloe, Jane had read a magazine piece in which it was said that a Friday lunch at Alla Moda—Italian for fashionable—was sacred to him, his favorite meal of the week, that he ate with the chef, who was his co-owner, and that the two-hour lunch marked the start of his weekend.
She was banking on him holding to his habits.
The Moderne-style two-story house with step-back details at the front door and roofline had been featured in a Los Angeles Times piece. This bachelor’s pad was “only” seven thousand square feet in an area where houses were often fifteen thousand or even larger.
Given the size of the house and Overton’s reputation as a Don Juan, she doubted he needed or wanted live-in help. A full-time maid could keep the place clean. In all likelihood, she was expected to be gone for the week when the master of the house came home from his sacred lunch, which might be between three-thirty and five o’clock.
After parking around the corner, Jane walked back to the place, carrying a large purse. She followed a walkway of limestone pavers and rang the bell. When no one answered, she rang again, and again.
Staked in a nearby flowerbed, a foot-square sign with red-and-black lettering announced:
PROTECTED BY
VIGILANT EAGLE, INC.
IMMEDIATE ARMED RESPONSE.
Most home-security companies used the same central station, to which all breaches of premises were first reported. Depending on its protocols, the central station summoned the police if it deemed the signal not to be a false alarm.
A company that dispatched its own licensed-to-carry officers, who were likely to be there well before the cops, was an expensive alternative and daunting to would-be burglars.
As Google had revealed, Overton’s house was screened from the adjacent properties by privacy walls against which had been planted a series of Ficus nitida—trees with dense foliage, trained into tall hedges. The neighbors could not see Jane at the front door. Nor could they see her as she walked around the side of the house to the big backyard, which was screened from view on all three sides.
Lined with blue-glass tiles, the sparkling lap pool was about a hundred feet long. The nearer end shaped into a spa to sit eight.
An enormous patio paved with limestone. An outdoor kitchen at one end. Enough teak chairs and lounges, fitted with blue cushions, to seat at least twenty people. A second-story deck with more teak furniture shaded half the lower space.
The house was a miniature resort. Manicured shrubs and flowers. Ultramodern statuary that resembled nothing, just shapes. Sleek and tasteful. The Beautiful People would feel at home here when invited, and a few might even be beautiful on the inside, too.
According to gossip sites, Overton was currently between main squeezes. If the gossipers could be believed, no heiress, model, supermodel, or actress lived with him.
Because Jane had no way to get inside until Overton arrived and deactivated the alarm, she settled into a chair toward the corner of the house that adjoined the garage.
Earlier, at the library, using a police passcode to the DMV records in Sacramento, she learned that two vehicles were registered to Overton at the Beverly Hills address—a white Bentley, a red Ferrari—and one to his law firm, a black Tesla. If he was driving the electric vehicle, she might not be alerted to his arrival until the garage door began to rumble upward.
The coastal fog hadn’t reached Beverly Hills. The day remained warm. The light, refreshing breeze came scented with jasmine.
Jane waited. Waiting could be more stressful than action, even when the action involved a pumped and pitiless giant with a shotgun.
At 3:30, from her large handbag she extracted the LockAid lock-release gun and put it on her lap.
She slipped her hands into the black-silk gloves with the decorative silver stitching.
Twenty minutes later, the quiet of discreet wealth gave way to the growl of money loudly celebrated in the twelve-stroke engine of an Italian racing legend. Out toward the front of the house, tires lipped a thin squeal off blacktop as the Ferrari executed a turn too sharp, too fast from the street into the driveway.
Lock-release gun in one hand, purse in the other, Jane sprang off the patio chair. She stepped to the kitchen door, put the purse down, and inserted the LockAid’s thin pick into the keyway. She wanted to get the noise of the automatic pick out of the way before Overton entered the house.
As the garage door rumbled up, a shrill continuous warning tone sounded throughout the residence. Depending on how the alarm system might be programmed, Overton had one minute—at most two—to enter a disarming code in the keypad mounted on the wall beside the interior door that connected the garage and the house. If he didn’t enter the code, or if he entered a second disarming code that signified he was under duress, Vigilant Eagle would have armed guards and maybe a dog en route, with the local police in their wake.
By the time the Ferrari drove into the garage and the throaty engine choked off, all the pin tumblers in the lock were cleared, and the knob turned freely.
Jane picked up her handbag, dropped the LockAid into it, and stepped into the house. With the alarm shrilling throughout the residence, she closed and locked the door.
The muffled clatter of guid
e wheels following their tracks issued from the adjacent garage as the sectional door descended.
She hurried across the spacious kitchen, through a swinging door, into the ground-floor hallway. Doors to the left and right.
Dining room on the left. No.
On the right, a home gym full of circuit-training machines. Three walls featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors. Nowhere to hide that he wouldn’t see her reflection the moment he opened the door. No.
Above the alarm came the digital tones of the disarming code as Overton entered numbers in the garage keypad.
A half bath. No. It might be his first stop.
A soft ka-chunk. the door closing between the garage and house.
A step-in closet. Housekeeping supplies, a vacuum cleaner. Yes. She eased the door shut, put down the handbag, drew her pistol, and waited in darkness.
17
* * *
IN COURT, HE IS MR. OVERTON, and elsewhere he is usually Bill or William, but among his closest friends—and in his own mind—he is Sterling.
This week has brought him a legal triumph: the settlement of a class-action case that will further enrich him, make the law firm that bears his name more greatly feared than it already is, and even to some extent benefit his clients. His leisurely lunch with Andre has been as usual satisfying both as to the cuisine and the company. For a culinary master who insists on the purity of all ingredients, Andre has a deliciously impure sense of humor.
In the kitchen, Sterling goes to the Crestron panel by the back door, which controls all the house systems. He calls up the security screen. He doesn’t intend to spend part of the afternoon outside, so he presses the key labeled H, which activates the perimeter sensors at doors and windows, but not the interior motion detectors.
The recorded voice of the system robotically declares, “Armed to home.”
Sterling is in a festive mood. He calls up the through-house music system and from his playlist selects SALSA. The irresistible beat reverberates through the house, and Sterling moves with the music as he goes to the refrigerator and gets a bottle of Perrier.
He prefers instrumentals to other forms of music, because no matter how good the songwriter, half the lyrics will inevitably be sentimental bullshit that annoys him. He does, however, include tunes that are sung in languages he doesn’t speak, because he can’t be irritated by words he doesn’t understand.
Carrying the Perrier, he pushes through the swinging door and sings a duet with the Spanish-language vocalist as he makes his way along the downstairs hall. He has learned the lyrics phonetically and mimics them with no idea of what he’s saying.
Climbing the stairs with something like a samba step, Sterling is amused to think that the judges before whom he has appeared would be amazed to see this playful side of him, as would the defendants’ attorneys he has eviscerated with trial strategies as razor-edged as filleting knives. He is a merciless tiger in the courtroom, as he is also with the women who submit to him, the only difference being that the women like his toughness and the defense attorneys do not.
His fourteen-hundred-square-foot bedroom suite is a Moderne masterpiece, inspired by the residence once owned by the Mexican actress Dolores del Río, a classic built in 1929 and still standing at the end of a Santa Monica Canyon cul-de-sac. Since childhood, he has been fascinated by Hollywood. He would have been an actor, a leading man, if he hadn’t been drawn to the law. He is enchanted by the power of the law and by the infinite ways that the system can be manipulated to achieve any desired end.
In his large walk-in closet, he changes into a red-accented blue polo shirt by Gucci and blue pants by Officine Générale, barefoot in his private world. Later, he will shower and spend a long, intense evening at Aspasia, doing what he does best.
As he steps out of the closet, softly singing salsa, it seems that Aspasia has come to him. He is face-to-face with the most remarkable-looking girl, hair aniline black and eyes so hot-blue they look as if they could boil water as efficiently as gas flames.
She is holding a spray bottle, as though she wishes him to sample a new men’s fragrance from Armani or Givenchy.
He is for an instant frozen by surprise. Then he startles backward a step, and he is surprised again when she sprays his lower face. Something sweet-tasting but with a faintly bleachy odor wraps him in sudden darkness.
18
* * *
STERLING DREAMS OF DROWNING, and at first he is relieved to wake up.
Salsa enlivens the moment, though he never goes to bed with such festive music playing. His vision is blurred, and a chemical taste makes him grimace, and for a moment he can’t determine whether he is standing or sitting, or lying down.
He blinks, blinks, and as his vision clears, some of the mist lifts from his mind as well, but only some of it. He is lying on his back on the bathroom floor, of all places, alongside his prized Deco-period antique bathtub.
When he attempts to move, he realizes that he is restrained. His wrists are bound one to the other with a heavy-duty plastic cable tie. A second tie loops from the first to a third, and the third is secured to one foot of the tub, which stands on balls gripped in the wicked claws of stylized lion paws.
His ankles are likewise shackled to each other and then, with more looped cable ties, to the stainless-steel drainpipe of the bathroom sink.
The basin of the sink is carved from exotic amber quartz and appears to be floating, although it is actually supported by inch-thick, cunningly hidden steel rods that fasten it to a red-steel beam inside the wall. The drainpipe and two stainless-steel water lines exquisitely describe parallel arcs from the bottom of the quartz bowl and disappear into the granite-clad wall. He has long been proud of the sink’s elegant, unconventional design.
As his mind clears a little further, he discovers that he is lying on his clothes but is not wearing them. His Gucci polo shirt has been cut off him. Likewise, his wonderfully comfortable Officine Générale pants have been scissored up each leg and through the waistband, the material splayed to each side of him; and the crotch panel has been cut away entirely.
That is twelve hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of top-of-the-line wardrobe. He would be incensed, except that in his current semidreamy state of mind, he takes satisfaction in knowing that he looks good in his Dolce & Gabbana gray briefs with black waistband, his package nicely displayed in the snug pouch.
Someone switches off the salsa music.
Sterling begins to come further to his senses when the girl enters from the bedroom. Her face is as lacking in expression as it is beautiful. She towers over him like some goddess. She drops to her knees at his side and places her left hand, in a kinky black glove, on his muscular chest. Slowly she slides her hand down to his abdomen. In spite of his restraints, he doesn’t feel imperiled. But then she displays the scissors in her left hand, works the blades—open, closed—still as blank-faced as a mannequin, her eyes such a bright blue, they seem illuminated from within. In a voice as flat as her expression, she says, “What else might be fun to cut off?”
Sterling is now wide awake.
19
* * *
OVERTON’S EYES were hemlock-green with the faintest purple striations. Jane had never seen a more poisonous stare.
The venom in his eyes was spiced with fear, however, and that was good. Narcissists were usually spineless cowards, but some of them were so extravagant in their self-regard that they believed themselves untouchable. Even in such a dire situation as this, the crazier ones could be incapable of imagining themselves dead.
She needed this attorney to imagine himself dead.
Which he might be.
Overton summoned his boldest courtroom bravado. “You’ve made a big mistake, and there’s damn little time to set things right.”
“Have I got the wrong man?” she asked.
“There are a thousand ways you’ve gotten the wrong man, girl.”
“Isn’t your name William Overton?”
“You k
now it is, and you know that’s not what I mean.”
“The William Overton whose closest friends call him Sterling?”
His eyes grew wide. “Who do you know that knows me?”
That fact had been disclosed in a magazine profile. How odd that those who loved the limelight could reveal personal details to curry favor with an interviewer and later forget what they had said.
“You hired a Dark Web hacking service. Maybe to steal some corporation’s trade secrets so you could threaten to blow up the business, get a pretrial settlement. Something like that, huh?”
He said nothing.
“You never met the hacker, never saw the sleaze you hired. He used the name Jimmy.”
“You’re talking nonsense. You’re operating on bad information.”
“While Jimmy hacked for you, he also hacked into you, taking one of your best-guarded secrets.”
In the courtroom, with his clothes on, not shackled, he would have maintained a deadpan stare. Under these circumstances, he found it rather more difficult to remain poker-faced.
All his secrets schooled like sharks through his mind, and there were no doubt so many that he had no hope of guessing which one had motivated her to violate the sanctity of his home.
“You want hush money? Is that all this is?”
“Hush money is such an ugly term. It implies extortion.”
“If you really have something on me, and you don’t, but if you did really have something, going at it this way is bug-shit crazy.”
She would not mention his close friend Bertold Shenneck or nano-machine brain implants. That secret was so big and dark, he would know he had no future anymore if it were exposed. He must continue to believe that he had hope, however thin it might be.
“Jimmy says you belong to some totally hot club.”
“Club? A few country clubs. It’s just smart business, making contacts. Hot isn’t the word for any of them. Unless you think golf and golf talk and white-jacketed waiters are totally the thing.”