The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  She woke at nine in the morning and felt fear grip her as soon as her eyes opened. She lay still for a few minutes, listening for sounds that might have wakened her. After a time she convinced herself that there were none. The three people who had been searching for a small blond woman had made a lucky guess at a good place to search, but they had not found Elle. They had been looking for a gray car but had not found her gray car, because it hadn’t been in the Pity’s lot. The fact that she had missed them only by chance and good timing made her anxious. She kept telling herself that close calls didn’t matter, but they did.

  She made herself breakfast and it gave her time to think about what she had learned last night. The three people who had been searching for her were not exactly unexpected.

  The three were almost certainly connected with some law enforcement agency, probably the LAPD. Most likely they had been launched on their search by her foolish visit to the Kavanagh house and her escape from the unmarked black police car afterward. Now she had to stay away from the three people and hope that they didn’t find anyone to tell them who the woman they described was. She couldn’t be confident about that.

  Part of the problem with being a criminal was that eventually all of your normal friendships would dwindle until the only people you knew were also criminals. Criminals tended to be people who were selfish, greedy, and untrustworthy. That meant that few of them were above ratting out a friend to a police agency. They did it in exchange for getting minor charges dropped or major charges diminished. They even did it so the friend would be locked up and they could rob his apartment or seduce his girlfriend.

  She had no satisfactory explanation for the two cars that had followed her from Las Vegas. Or really, she had several plausible explanations, with no reason to choose one over another. Maybe they had worked for Steinholm in Las Vegas. Maybe they were just freelance thieves who knew that anyone who left Stubbs’s warehouse was carrying either valuables or cash. They might or might not have been connected with Stubbs’s trucking company. They might even have been Los Angeles police doing unofficial surveillance across a state line because they thought she might know something they didn’t about the triple murder.

  Today Elle would just stay out of sight and try to avoid searchers by being in places that criminals and police had no reason to visit and seldom did. The L.A. County Museum of Art was within easy walking distance. She liked all museums, but particularly art museums. They were great institutions that welcomed everybody. They said to the public, “This is good for you, but you’ll like it anyway, and you’ll go home with most of the money you started with.”

  She loved the Wilshire area and soon began the walk from Sharon’s. She crossed the park surrounding the Page Museum, which was full of the animal corpses from the redundantly named La Brea Tar Pits. They were not pits, really, until the paleontologists dug them out. They were more like wells. The lawn in the park was a treacherous place to walk, because now and then black tar would bubble up from underground and threaten a person’s shoes.

  The biggest pit was an oily pond right in front of the museum, and it had been decorated with a melodramatic sculpture of a mother mammoth caught in the tar reaching back with her trunk toward her horrified baby mammoth on the shore. It was a heartrending scene and a peculiar thing to install for the edification of the city’s children, in Elle’s opinion. The only motive she could discern was to assure kids that even though their lives were shit, life on this spot had never been any better, so they had no right to whine.

  She made it to the front of the giant LACMA complex, took the shortcut beside the water feature that looked like a canal, and then went to the main building entrance. She spent ten minutes looking at brochures, paying for her ticket, and going to the ladies’ room, but actually she was studying the people who entered after her to be sure none of them was a threat. Then she began to move through the galleries.

  When she had come in she had paid for a ticket to a special exhibit of the works of Degas. She almost regretted having bought it and put it off for a few hours while she ranged the permanent collection. She didn’t really like going to big exhibitions. The artist’s name was always the attraction, which brought in hordes of people who felt they had to voice an observation about each painting, drawing, or sculpture, even if the comment was just “Dancers” or “Horses.” She studied a view of the stage of l’Opéra from the front of the orchestra pit. Dark silhouetted heads and instruments crossed the foreground in front of the glowing stage. A woman and her companion edged up beside Elle, and the first woman said, “This one seems to be more about the band.” True enough.

  Elle walked back to Sharon’s apartment at five. There was no sign of anyone watching the building, but she was very aware of the fact that a thousand people could be watching it from the thousand windows of the tall office buildings along Wilshire Boulevard. Each of them could be aiming at her a camera that was connected to a computer and be sending her image to a thousand colleagues. There could be a million people watching her walk along the sidewalk on this bright summer afternoon. It could just as easily be a billion.

  9

  Elle stepped to the front of Sharon’s building, used Sharon’s key to get into the lobby, and walked to the apartment door. Elle’s profession made her habitually reluctant to make noises, and she realized as she approached that she was walking like a burglar, but she didn’t feel like correcting it.

  She came in, walked from room to room, and saw that Sharon had not returned. The bed was still as neat as a bunk in a military barracks, and the coffeepot had timed out, turned itself off, and gone to room temperature.

  Elle was almost glad to beat Sharon to the apartment. Sharon didn’t need to know that Elle had slept in her bed and taken the liberties she had—using her expensive bubble bath and her nail polish, for instance. She stepped out of the dress she was wearing and put on the jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes she’d left in her bag. The bag reminded her that she’d left most of her money and her gun in the apartment. The money was placed in several envelopes from Sharon’s best stationery and hidden behind Sharon’s television set in the wall rack. The gun and its magazines were duct-taped to the wall in the closet above the doorway, so a person had to step into the closet, turn around, and look up to find them.

  Elle gathered everything she had brought with her, washed the dishes, took the sheets off Sharon’s bed and washed them, dried them, and put them back on the bed. She wrote “hostess gift” on one of Sharon’s envelopes and left a thousand dollars in it. Sharon was a very good friend, but she was also a person who went through a lot of money quickly and saw cash as a token of sincerity. The extra money might even help remind her about the trip.

  Elle considered calling Sharon’s cell number again, but since Sharon had obviously chosen to stay the night and day at Peter’s, calling would have seemed unnecessarily intrusive.

  She left the keys with the envelope on Sharon’s desk, picked up her big shoulder bag, locked the door, and set off. She walked a mile or so before she stopped at the hotel across from the Beverly Center and stepped in front of the door to take a cab. She got a ride to her neighborhood in Van Nuys.

  She had decided that this trip was a necessary precaution. She had been out of touch with most of her friends for a few days and had not yet even talked to Sharon for a day. She didn’t want anybody stopping by and leaving a note stuck in her door, or to acquire a pileup of mail that wouldn’t fit in the slot, or to risk any other problem. When she was working she had often seen the results of leaving a house alone for too long. She had even broken into one and found that the hardwood floors had all been destroyed because of a pipe leaking inside a wall for the duration of someone’s vacation.

  She approached her house from the back, used her neighbor’s stepladder to climb over the fence because she didn’t feel like doing it the hard way, and then went to her own back door. When she opened it she saw a long blond hair on the floor, definitely one of hers. She stood o
n a chair to look and be sure it was the one she had propped above the door. She climbed down and listened. She had been gone for about two days, and in that time someone had broken into her house. She didn’t feel outraged or violated the way a lot of burglary victims did. To her it wasn’t personal, and she had learned from childhood that it was unwise to allow oneself to get attached to belongings or to invest emotion in them.

  She went to the doors where she had spread a thin film of baby powder and examined the spots. There were footprints. They were large—male for sure. She took pictures of them to preserve the sole pattern so she could go to shoe stores and find out the brand and style if she needed to. They had relatively deep treads, but not the kind that basketball sneakers had. They were less dramatic, and they had a heel. They seemed likely to belong to some kind of hiking shoe.

  It was time to assess the damage. Her new laptop computer was gone. It wasn’t a big loss, since she had stolen it too, but it was a disappointment. She hadn’t even used it yet. The one she had been using was hidden in the trunk of her car under the floor. Any amount of hacking or reconstruction on either computer would yield only the passwords and personal life of its rightful owner, someone she didn’t know. Elle had always been too wary to communicate with anyone via computer. All an expert could find were records of her online searches, which would look blameless and lead nowhere.

  The rifle, the shotgun, and the Glock pistol were gone. That alarmed her for a moment. She had an impulse to report their theft, but she reminded herself that they’d already been reported when she’d stolen them the first time. Her iPad, her Kindle, and the cheap jewelry she owned had all been taken. The television set was gone.

  She checked the hiding places where she had left the thumb drives containing the recordings from the triple murder. They were still where she had left them.

  She decided that the burglary had just been what she deserved. It didn’t seem to be threatening, and she was certain that the intruder hadn’t been from the police. The police cheated sometimes, illegally entering a house to see what was inside that wasn’t supposed to be there and then leaving to get a warrant to search for those exact items, but the wrong things were missing. The police wouldn’t take things of value. They wanted only something incriminating, and the last thing they wanted was to take it away.

  Elle and Sharon weren’t ready to leave town yet, but the time had come for Elle to move out of her house for a while. She decided that to move out without seeming to was the best way. She picked enough outfits that she loved to nearly fill one suitcase and left the rest hanging in her bedroom closet. She took all the financial papers she had in the house. The pink slip of her car was hidden inside the car. The deed and mortgage papers for the house and the information about her bank accounts in different names were all in her safe-deposit boxes. She had to use a different bank for each of her accounts, not because she liked having money spread thin all over town, but because she could hardly have two names at the same bank. Keeping these things sorted was all part of being a thief. But she was determined to remove anything valuable or incriminating from the house.

  Hours later, when she had finished her housecleaning, the place looked much neater than it had since she’d bought it. Getting out prompted a great deal of dusting and polishing to get rid of fingerprints, hair, and DNA and a number of large black plastic garbage bags for the things that she wanted removed. There was little of any monetary value left in the house besides the structure itself.

  Elle loaded the garbage bags and the single suitcase containing the few remaining valuables into the gray car, locked the house, and drove around for the early morning hours depositing the garbage in dumpsters. She stopped at a big pharmacy and bought a disposable phone. She stopped at the post office where the lobby was open all the time, filled out a yellow card to have her mail held, and put it into the slot. Then she used her old phone to call the Los Angeles Times and have her newspaper canceled.

  She was conscious all the time that chores like this were much easier when there was another person to help, but she didn’t want to call anyone she knew. The ones still wide-awake at night were sure to be doing something more rewarding than this—financially, emotionally, sexually, or all three at once—and they would want the favor returned some night when it was least convenient. She was also sure that what she was doing was best kept to herself. The less that was known, by the fewest people possible, the safer she would be. She knew that it was time to get rid of her dark gray Volvo. She drove to the hill above the Universal Studios lot and the hotel at the top.

  When she had checked into the hotel, she went up to her room and considered her next move. The gray car was valet-parked out of sight in the cavernous hotel garage. The police routinely cruised around at night checking hotels for cars that came up on their license plate scanners as wanted for some reason, but she was pretty sure they didn’t do it often at hotels like this one. And now that she was registered, until noon a couple of days from now she would be just a name on a credit card.

  Before she went to sleep she looked up the Blue Book value of her gray car online and posted the car for sale, cash only, for about $300 less than the fair rate. She was pleased to see that the discount brought the price just below $10,000. She was going into this liquidation patiently. She was not going to get rid of Elle Stowell or her false names Elizabeth Walker and Katherine Ashton. She was just going to stop inhabiting them for a while. She couldn’t kill herself off and then expect to sell a car and buy plane tickets. Too many people stubbornly insisted on dealing with the living.

  10

  When she woke and turned on her phone, she found there were three potential buyers for her car already. She called and made a date with the first one, who had the voice of an elderly man. She agreed to drive the car to his house to show it. She had already removed the contraband from her trunk with her valuables, and she had the pink slip in her purse.

  He lived in the western part of the San Fernando Valley, so the trip took about a half hour, with an extra twenty-minute stop to have the car washed. When she arrived she saw that his voice had given an accurate sense of his age. He was in his mid- to late sixties, with thick, wavy white hair that she judged must have served him well with the ladies over a lifetime. She handed him the keys and let him drive the car around in his section of the Valley for a while. He returned the car to his house, checked the oil, squeezed a couple of hoses, and ran his hand along a couple of the belts. She followed his eyes to figure out what else he was seeing under the hood but didn’t succeed. He shut it and walked around the car, looking closely at the finish.

  Finally he said, “It was a good model, and it’s been driven with enough care to keep from bumping things. You changed the oil and filters when you were supposed to. The mileage is reasonable. Ninety-nine hundred, right?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  “All right. If we drive to my bank to pick up the cash, I can pay you and drop you off at your house.”

  “As long as you’re not planning to rob the bank, it’s a deal.”

  “Not today,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  They drove a few blocks to his bank and she waited in the car until he returned with a big manila envelope. He counted out the money on the car console, she signed the pink slip and the bill of sale, and then they drove to a neighborhood in Sherman Oaks that wasn’t near her house but that she liked because it was shaded by jacaranda trees that shed purple petals on the streets and sidewalks. She shook his hand, got out of the car, and watched him drive away.

  She knew he would wash, vacuum, and wax his new car even though she had just paid to have that done. He was that kind of man, and he was from a generation that did things that way. He would be ashamed to show the car to his friends and family until he had done his best with it. That would remove the small number of remaining atoms attributable to Elle Stowell, and that made her feel more confident.

  The car had given her good service, but she was glad t
o be rid of it because it linked her to several recent unpleasant episodes. She was striving to keep her anxiety at bay while she waited for the danger to go away, and the best way to conquer her fear was to take any precaution she could that would make her hard to identify and hard to find once she and Sharon left town.

  When her car was safely gone, Elle sent text messages to the two other bidders to let them know the car was sold. Then she summoned a Lyft car to take her to Burbank Airport. There she rented a new Audi, one of several small black cars in the rental lot that seemed identical except for the logos on their noses, trunks, and hubcaps—Audi, BMW, Volkswagen. Elle drove the car over the hill and down Fairfax to park on Sixth Street and then walked to Sharon’s apartment.

  This time she entered the building by the back door, rushing to hold it open while a harried-looking woman with a strand of hair in her eyes stepped out to take a pair of trash bags to the dumpster. When she was out, Elle slipped in and let the door close behind her.

  Elle walked down the hallway toward Sharon’s apartment. She fitted the right bump key into Sharon’s door lock, turned it as far as she could, bumped her shoulder into the door, felt the pins jump, turned the key, and entered.

  The horrible image of the bedroom in Nick Kavanagh’s house filled her mind. She nearly gagged. It was the smell of bodies—of death. “Not Sharon,” she whispered. “Please not Sharon.” She wanted to run, but she forced herself to walk across the small entryway into the living room.

  The apartment looked as it had after Elle had straightened up while she was waiting for Sharon to get ready to leave for the Pity two nights ago. Elle had picked everything up, pushed each piece of furniture into its proper place in the configuration, straightened the pile of fashion magazines on the table so the edges were all even. The framed posters and prints on the walls were level.