by Dean Koontz
Her open purse hung on her shoulder. Jane fished out four hundred-dollar bills but didn’t yet offer them. “A thousand bucks each. Two hundred now. Two hundred more when you show up at the job site. Six hundred when the work is done.”
“What work?”
ZZ couldn’t resist. “She’s paying us to do her, man.”
As Guns looked pained, Jane said, “I don’t buy fireworks that explode while still in the package.”
To his companion, Guns said, “Be nice to the lady.” Of Jane, he asked, “What work?”
“I’m a process server,” she lied. “Either of you know what that is?”
Trying to recover some of his dignity, ZZ said, “You slam people with subpoenas, so they gotta show up in court.”
Favoring him with a sweet smile, she said, “There’s someone home between those ears, after all.”
She told them what she needed to be done and where she needed it. “This creep I have to serve has been slippery. I don’t know to the minute when he’ll show up, so the hardest part of what you have to do is hang out for maybe half an hour. I figure you have hanging out down to a science.”
She offered two hundred in each hand, and ZZ snatched his.
Hesitating, Guns said, “A thousand bucks for almost nothing.”
“It’s a hundred-million-dollar lawsuit,” Jane lied. “A couple thousand bucks is a petty expense.”
“This guy you’re serving…is he Mob or something?”
“I’m a hardass,” she said. “You have to be in my business. But I’m not a total shit. I wouldn’t make a couple kids targets for the Mob. The guy is a dweeb accountant, a megapussy, a money manager with sticky fingers, that’s all.”
Guns met her eyes through that entire speech and took the money, certain that he could read her.
Perhaps the two wouldn’t show up, would take the cash and skip, but the chances of that were slim. She could read Guns as well as he thought he could read her. She’d known she had him when she snarked ZZ with the line about fireworks that explode in their package. Like most teenagers in this time and place, Guns had an excess of self-esteem coddled into him, yet felt the need to prove himself to the world. And of course he was a victim of his hormones, a horndog. Although he had no chance with her, he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t show her that he could follow through, because skipping out would be the equivalent of exploding prematurely.
They dropped their skateboards and powered themselves along the sidewalk with their left feet, ZZ following Guns, doing ollies when they came to a place where the pavement had been cracked and lifted by a tree root. They were airborne, the boards seemingly glued to their feet, graceful in flight, and they came back to the concrete with a clatter, losing not a scintilla of their balance.
She watched them until they turned out of sight at a corner, and then she walked by a different route to the job site where she would meet them.
35
* * *
After Luther Tillman had showered and shaved, as he was putting on his uniform, Rebecca stepped into the bedroom to say that a Mr. Booth Hendrickson, of the United States Department of Justice, was waiting for him downstairs in his study. This was the man who, according to Rob Stassen, had pulled the Bureau agents out of Cora’s house before their work was finished.
Regardless of what information he might have about them, Luther tried not to judge people before he’d met them eye to eye, and then he gave them time to prove themselves. But when he walked into his study and Hendrickson rose from a leather armchair to greet him, he had an almost immediate sense that this was not a man to be trusted.
“Sheriff Tillman,” the visitor said, his handshake firmer than necessary and held a beat too long, “please accept my condolences for the loss of so many friends and neighbors. This is a terrible business. We’re living in distressing times.”
Although Hendrickson wore a custom-tailored black suit that might have cost a month’s salary for a county sheriff, it could not entirely disguise that this tall man was raw-boned and awkwardly put together. He strove for elegance, but his stance and gestures and facial expressions seemed practiced, as if he’d schooled himself in grace and courtliness before a mirror.
“Teacher of the Year,” Hendrickson said, “a record of good works, no one with a bad word to say about her—and yet this horror. I may be wrong, but I think it was Shakespeare who wrote, ‘Oh, what may man within him hide, though angel on the outward side.’ ”
“I’m sure it must have been Shakespeare if you say it was,” Luther replied. “In Cora Gundersun’s case, whatever mental illness seized her at the end, she was for many years the closest thing to an angel we’ll see on this side of death.”
“Yes, of course she was, she must have been, given the high esteem in which everyone held her before yesterday. Whether it might have been a brain tumor or a psychiatric disorder, the woman was the victim of it, surely, and not wholly at fault. I would be the last to throw a stone in such a case.”
Hendrickson’s face was long and hawkish, his salt-and-pepper hair worn long and styled back in a mane, perhaps to accentuate how high the brow that loomed above his predatory eyes.
“Please have a seat,” Luther said. Rather than take the second armchair close to his visitor’s, he went around behind the desk, preferring distance.
Hendrickson settled in the leather chair again, straightened the crease in his left pant leg between lap and knee, adjusted his jacket, and looked up with a solemn, slightly theatrical expression. “We have a sad, hard day ahead of us, Sheriff.”
As Luther pulled his office chair closer to the desk, he saw lying on the blotter before him a few pages of typescript fastened with a paper clip. “What’s this?”
“A governor and congressman tragically cut down,” Hendrickson said. “The people need reassurance.”
“There were forty-four others killed as well.”
“Yes, and that makes it all the worse—that they felt safe in the presence of a governor and congressman, as well they should have done, with so much security, and yet they weren’t safe at all. With worldwide terrorism on the rise, the people need to feel that their leaders are on the issue hard and steady.”
“Cora Gundersun was not a terrorist,” Luther said.
“Indeed, she wasn’t. No responsible person would dare claim that Ms. Gundersun acted as a jihadist. That would be an ignorant assertion on the face of it. But there will be rumors. Always, always. The social media are acrawl with paranoids. Besides, there are factions in this country for whom every tragedy of this kind is seen as an opportunity to demagogue.”
The man from Justice seemed to be presenting himself as a New England patrician, from some family groomed through the generations for selfless public service. However, there was about him an air of humbler origins assiduously concealed, the air of a status seeker so pleased with his adaptation to the standards of a higher class that he could not help but preen a little.
Luther’s dislike rapidly soured to a more astringent emotion. He tapped the pages of typescript before him and said again, “What’s this?”
“There will be a news conference this morning and then a series of meetings with individual reporters. In these painful cases, it’s a policy of the Department of Justice to ensure that local, state, and federal authorities speak with one voice, so that the people will have greater peace of mind.”
Luther didn’t like the way Hendrickson said the people, and said it repeatedly, as if he referred to benighted children or a wrack of hoi polloi.
Scanning the pages before him, Luther said, “This can’t be what I think it is. Have you given me some statement I’m expected to read at the news conference?”
“It’s eloquently composed. A man who has written speeches for the attorney general, for the vice president, has given you some of the best lines of the day. You’ll make a national impression.”
Anger expressed could not be recalled, and Luther remained calm. “I’m s
orry, but I can’t stand at a microphone and read this. My department hasn’t even been involved in this investigation.”
Perhaps because the armchair put him an inch or two below the sheriff in the office chair, Booth Hendrickson rose to his feet and stepped to the window. He stood looking out for a moment, waiting for his silence to elicit the sheriff’s reconsideration. When that did not happen, he turned to his host once more, as a prosecutor might turn with barely contained contempt to the accused in some old British movie in which the judge was played by Charles Laughton. “If you simply can’t find in yourself a spirit of cooperation, Sheriff Tillman, then I am afraid there will not be a place for you at the news conference.”
“Yes, all right. Then there will be no place for me.”
“I sincerely hope you don’t intend to hold a press briefing of your own.”
“I’ve no reason to do so, Mr. Hendrickson. I know little and have been told nothing. I’m not prone to making a damn fool of myself, at least not with full awareness that I’m doing so.”
Hendrickson came to the desk and retrieved the typescript. His fingers were pale and smooth, his nails meticulously manicured. “I wish you felt differently, but I assume we’ve reached a compromise that satisfies us both.”
“We’ve reached a mutual understanding,” Luther corrected as he rose from his desk chair. “Let me show you out, Mr. Hendrickson.”
At the front door, as Hendrickson stepped onto the porch, he turned and met Luther’s eyes. “Sheriff, I’m certain that from one program or another, perhaps from half a dozen, your department receives federal grants on which it depends.”
“And we are grateful every day,” Luther said. He smiled, as if challenging the man from Justice to smile back at him.
Grim-faced, like some unconventional scarecrow wired up from staves and straw inside his fancy suit, Hendrickson turned away and crossed the porch and descended the steps, bound not for a cornfield and a contest with shrieking birds, but to a press conference where corn of another kind would be shoveled out to the credulous.
“One question,” Luther said.
The man paused, turned his head.
“Has the county fire marshal identified the accelerant that was used to torch Cora Gundersun’s house?”
“Gasoline. Just a large quantity of gasoline.”
“That’s what the fire marshal says?”
“That’s what he will say at the press conference.”
“That was quite a fire, very intense,” Luther said.
“Yes,” Hendrickson said. “Yes, it was.”
36
* * *
The four-story low-rise in Beverly Hills—owned and occupied by the law firm Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto—was actually six stories if you counted the two levels of subterranean parking. The garage could be entered only from the alley behind the building. And as the single lane allowed just one-way traffic, Jane Hawk knew from which direction Randall Larkin would be coming.
She would have preferred to take him in his house. Using the library computer to background him the previous day, however, she had learned that he was married to his second wife, Diamanta, and that, according to a laudatory Los Angeles Magazine article about this so-called “power couple,” they lived in a twelve-thousand-square-foot home, had three live-in staff, and adored their two Dobies. A wife, three servants, and two Doberman pinschers made home invasion a nonstarter.
According to the same magazine piece, Larkin was an early riser, proud of the fact that before six o’clock each morning, he had completed an hour-long workout in his home gym. No later than seven, he was at his desk in his Beverly Hills office. He enjoyed reciting a motto of his own imagined cleverness: The early bird doesn’t just get the worm; he gets the worm’s entire family.
Guns and ZZ were waiting for her where the alleyway met the main street, about two-thirds of a block from the Woodbine offices. The building in front of which they’d taken up position was occupied by a restaurant that didn’t serve breakfast, so they were not likely to be hassled for loitering. She gave each kid another two hundred dollars, trusting her judgment enough to leave them to their own devices while she made her way along the wide alley.
There was no litter common to the alleys of other cities, no homeless people bedded down among their bags of soiled and ragged possessions, no soot-stained masonry, no walls emblazoned with gang signs or other graffiti, just clean dumpsters standing in measured order, their lids fully closed, no extreme odors issuing from them.
The large segmented roll-up door that provided access to the lawyers’ underground garage was clad with brushed stainless steel, in which her reflection, featureless and blurred, moved like a menacing revenant, her shorn spirit stalking her in some self-haunting that she could not escape. The penny-size glass lens of a microwave receiver, embedded in the upper-right corner of the frame, meant the door responded to a remote control.
Across the alley from that door lay a narrow serviceway, just wide enough to accommodate deliverymen and their hand trucks. Jane stepped into that pocket of shadows and consulted her wristwatch and hoped that Larkin would come for his worms as early as he bragged that he did.
An airliner arrowed the sky at high altitude, a sound avalanche of jet rumble sliding down the day. A police helicopter crossed at a few hundred feet, not searching for her, perhaps not for anyone in particular, merely on patrol, westward slanting light flaring off its advanced-glass cockpit. This early, the streets beyond the alley were lightly trafficked, and without the masking noise of rush hour, she heard three vehicles, each in its time, come along the alley, passing her from right to left, none preceded by the signal that Guns and ZZ would send to alert her that the car and driver fit the description she had given them.
While at the library computer, employing an FBI passcode, she had accessed registration files at the DMV and had learned that four cars were registered to Larkin at his Beverly Hills address. The least expensive, a Ford Explorer, was most likely provided for the use of the hired couple who managed the household. Guns and ZZ were on the lookout for one of the other three vehicles, and they had a description of the attorney.
When it seemed that the action should soon begin, she took from her handbag a six-ounce spray bottle purchased at a beauty-supply store. It was filled with the chloroform she had needed for the takedown of another guy the previous week. She had derived it from acetone by the reaction of chloride of lime, the former bought in an art-supply store, the latter purchased from a janitorial-supply warehouse. A motel bathroom had served as her laboratory. Now she held the spray bottle firmly in her left fist and the handbag in her right.
Under her pale-gray sport coat, she wore a sapphire-blue silk blouse. She undid the top two buttons to ensure that when she leaned forward, Larkin would for a crucial moment be bereft of common sense. Online, she had seen numerous photographs of him at social functions with his first wife and then his second. If he married them for the quality of their minds and their personalities, those were criteria two and three, because the depth of cleavage in both cases was too striking to have been a happy coincidence.
At the farther end of the alley, Guns and ZZ began hooting, cat-calling each other in a boisterous boyish fashion.
The throaty saber-toothed purr of a powerful engine echoed off the walls of the buildings.
When she heard the engine slow slightly and thought he might be cutting wide to angle toward the steel-clad door, she burst from the serviceway, into the alley, into the path of a black Mercedes S600, not as if she were fleeing someone, which might alarm him, but as if she were in a hurry to get to an important appointment.
With a brief shriek of brakes, the big car jolted to a hard stop, and Jane dropped her purse as if startled, conspiring to collide with the front fender. She pushed away from the sedan and reeled to the driver’s window, passing the spray bottle from left hand to right, below his line of sight. Leaning forward to look in at him, feigning surprise, she said loud e
nough to penetrate the glass and any music to which he might be listening, “My God, Randy Larkin. Is that you, Randy?”
He didn’t know her, certainly not as she looked now, and he didn’t know that the fugitive Jane Hawk had become aware of him by eavesdropping on his phone conversations with Lawrence Hannafin. He had no reason to suppose this accidental encounter might be in fact a bold assault. Beyond the window, as she peered in at him, his gaze traveled the silk-enfolded curves of her breasts, a sight that encouraged him to decide that, after all, he knew her but must be suffering a brief lapse of memory.
At the farther end of the alley, Guns and ZZ kicked the wooden chocks from under the wheels of a dumpster and rolled it away from the restaurant wall, turning it sidewise to block other traffic that might try to enter from the street.
With an electric hum, down came the driver’s window as Larkin managed to raise his stare from breasts to full blue lips, to the serpent nose ring with the ruby eye, to her eyes, which were of a singular shade of blue and which some men thought were her best feature. Her exotic appearance had sprung loose in him long-coiled adolescent fantasies, and as he said, “Are you all right, dear?” she raised the bottle of chloroform and pumped it with her thumb and doused his open mouth, his nose.
Larkin’s eyes rolled back and his head lolled to his right. He slumped forward and sideways in his seat.
His foot slipped off the brake pedal, and the Mercedes began to drift. Jane reached through the window, pulling the steering wheel hard to the right, staying with the car as it traveled a few feet and bumped against the stainless-steel garage door with too little energy to trigger the air bag.
She slipped the spray bottle into a jacket pocket and pulled open the driver’s door. The rattle of skateboard wheels on patched pavement confirmed that Guns and ZZ were living up to the terms of their agreement. As they approached, Jane opened one more blouse button and steeled herself for the trickiest part of this operation.