by Thomas Perry
She glanced over the marble counter into the kitchen and saw nothing different there either. Nobody had cooked or made a snack or even brewed coffee. Each sight that Elle verified was as it should be failed to persuade her that everything really was as it should be.
She couldn’t keep putting off the bedroom. She walked the rest of the way through the living room to the short hall that led to the bathroom—nothing there—and finally the bedroom.
Peter was lying on the floor facing away from the doorway as though he had been shot as he stepped into the bedroom and fallen dead. The bloody mess at the back of his head showed that the entry wound must be in his forehead. His legs were crossed at the ankle, which she had heard was a sign that he had been standing when he’d died. There was something about the shape and balance of the human body that made it turn a little when it collapsed.
The sight of Peter made her remember the efficient aim-and-fire of the killer’s sound-suppressed pistol in Kavanagh’s bedroom—pop-pop-pop. The suppressor had choked the report not to a hiss or a whisper, just to a quieter pop. She looked down again. It was hard to look at him. He had been so handsome, such a healthy young guy. Now the sight of him was awful.
This time the killer must have been waiting in the apartment for Sharon and Peter to arrive. When Peter had walked in, the killer must have shot him instantly. But what about Sharon? Where was she?
Elle stood still in the doorway, looking past Peter. Why wasn’t Sharon’s body here with Peter’s? As she considered the question, she allowed herself to nurse a faint hope. Could Sharon have unlocked her apartment door and let Peter in, and then paused there to close and relock it? Could she have crossed the living room after Peter, followed him toward the bedroom, heard him shot, then turned and run?
The killer would have had to be in the bedroom slightly to the left of the door, or Peter would have seen him. Maybe the killer had heard the door open and close and expected only Sharon to come in. When the one who came in was Peter, not a thin and pretty young woman but a tall, athletic man, the killer might have been surprised. It took most people a second or two to overcome surprise. Could Sharon have dashed out the door and escaped? If she had seen her boyfriend shot, she would run. Even Elle would have run. It was a reflex.
Corrective facts lodged in Elle’s mind and blocked her hopes. If Sharon had escaped she would have called the police, and they’d be here. If she had escaped she would have called Elle. She had not done either.
Elle stepped past Peter carefully, to stay out of the pool of blood that had seeped from his wound onto the floor. She saw that the closet door was half open. She stepped to it and found Sharon lying on the floor with a dress clutched to her, as though she had grabbed it and pulled it to her before the shot had entered her forehead.
Her face held the expression Elle had seen when Sharon was confused or puzzled. Maybe she had been wondering how she had come to be killed over something she didn’t understand by a person she had never seen before.
Elle knelt down and felt tears filling her eyes. She knew she couldn’t touch the body and that even her tears might contain DNA, so she wiped them away on her sleeve.
She whispered, “I’m so sorry, Sharon.”
She stood and looked around her. The bed was still made. The room still looked pristine except for the closet and the wall above the doorway, where the bullet through Peter’s head had thrown a red mist. She stepped past Peter into the living room.
This had to be the same shooter who had killed the three people in Beverly Hills. She had to get the police here as quickly as possible, so they could find out who he was. She looked around for a phone, but then stopped. She remembered the envelope she had left for Sharon. That couldn’t stay here, because it had her fingerprints, and she had licked the flap. She looked on Sharon’s desk where she had left it, but it wasn’t there. She found the torn envelope in the wastebasket, so she picked it up and put it into her pocket. She was glad Sharon had found the money before she had died.
Then it occurred to her that the ten hundred-dollar bills had her prints on them too. She spotted Sharon’s purse on the couch near the kitchen. She looked inside. Elle took Sharon’s phone, because it held her name, number, and address in its contact list. Then she found the ten hundred-dollar bills and stuffed them into her pocket too.
She went back to the bedroom doorway. She said aloud, “I wish—” She had been about to say, “That it was me and not you,” but that was just not true. Even dead, Sharon would know that it was crap. Elle was always talking about how much she loved life, and she meant it. Elle said, “That I had never gotten you into this. I wish you were both alive and happy. I promise that I’ll do what I can.”
She moved across the living room to the door and then stopped. She had no way of knowing exactly how this had happened, but she was fairly sure that the only connection between the first three murder victims and Sharon and Peter was herself. And the most likely reason the killer would have come here was to kill her.
It occurred to her that if the killer had come because she had been staying here and instead killed the two people who saw him, he must know that neither was Elle. It was likely that he could have gone outside and been waiting to see if Elle arrived, and here she was.
She remembered that when she had come into the building it had been through the back way, which the killer may not even know was possible. If he was still here he’d be watching the front door. She left the apartment, went down the hall, and slipped out the way she had come in. She circled the dumpster to pass behind it, stood on it to go over the back fence, and then began to run. As she ran, she used Sharon’s phone to call the police.
“Emergency. What is your emergency?”
She said, “I just found two people murdered at 91375 Wilshire Boulevard, Apartment Six. Both shot to death. Send some cops quick.”
“What is your name?”
Elle switched off the phone, took the battery and the SIM card out, and then smashed the circuitry against the next lamppost. When she reached her car on Sixth Street she got in and drove off. At the corner near the Page Museum she turned and came east along Wilshire to see if there was anyone in a parked car watching the entrance to Sharon’s building. She saw no one watching and no pedestrians near enough to be suspects.
She was only a block past the building when a black-and-white police car sped up Wilshire to the front of Sharon’s building and stopped with its lights revolving and blinking. She kept going until Robertson and then turned north toward the Valley.
That night at six o’clock the local news channels announced the murder of Sharon Estleman and Peter Rowen in Sharon’s apartment. Elle already had her phone plugged in to charge in preparation for the call she planned. She had always liked Sharon’s parents, so she wanted to be one of the first to speak to them.
She was on the phone with them for about an hour. Most of the time Sharon’s father was on another phone line talking to other people: police, friends and relatives, Mount Sinai Cemetery, the medical examiner’s office. He had always been that kind of father. He was used to being in charge and he believed that things got done because he was willing to arrange them or do them himself. But when they were both on the line with Elle, she told them how much she loved and respected their daughter.
She praised her for her wit, good nature, loyalty, and kindness. Then, as one of the last favors she could do for Sharon, she praised her for qualities that she hadn’t possessed but that her parents had wanted her to have—her ambition and tireless work ethic, her religious devotion, and her wise practicality.
The Estlemans had known Elle since she was in junior high school with Sharon, but they had never known her family or suspected that she was a thief. Sharon had periodically given them false updates on what Elle was doing. For years she had told them Elle was a student at UCLA. After that Sharon had said Elle worked for a digital company that did programming for the government. That way Elle was protected by the Estlemans’ lack o
f interest in computers and their respect for government secrecy.
Mr. Estleman said the police were going to free Sharon’s body for burial only after a couple of days of intense forensic examination and an autopsy. He told her he’d call her when he knew when it would be.
Late that night Elle drove down the hill from the hotel to the Ralphs grocery store on Ventura and bought snacks and drinks, and then stayed in her room until she received the call from Mr. Estleman.
Elle had never done much mourning before. She had always thought she would have cried for her parents when they died, but by the time she had heard such people had ever existed, she had already lived five or six years. She had accepted that some people had no parents and that she was one of them. She also knew that living meant accepting conditions as they were. By the time her grandmother died she had already heard her referring to her own death as imminent for years, so Elle had gotten used to the idea before it happened.
But Sharon had been important to her. Elle had met her in junior high, but she didn’t remember when they had begun to think of each other as friends rather than rivals or enemies. She had heard people say they were like sisters, but that meant nothing to Elle because she’d never had a sister.
Now Sharon had been killed because Elle had foolishly and selfishly guessed it would be safer for her if she slept at Sharon’s place for a couple of nights before they left on their trip. She hadn’t spent enough time thinking about whether her staying with Sharon was safe for Sharon. It hadn’t been.
She had done the unthinkable—got her best friend murdered. Each time the thought came back it made her lose control again and lie on the bed sobbing for a while. This had been happening to her at intervals since she had found the bodies. Her guilt and sadness made her feel worthless and ashamed.
She allowed the attacks of crying to last until she left the hotel for the funeral, and then she stopped them. She was determined after that to exert her self-control every minute when another human being could see her, until this was over.
The funeral was at Mount Sinai, the large Jewish cemetery on the hillside overlooking the 134 Freeway and the City of Burbank beyond. Elle drove her rented black Audi to the gateway kiosk and then to the parking lot beside the mortuary chapel. Before she turned off her engine she scanned the gaggle of people moving toward the chapel. She saw several motorcycle officers who had escorted another funeral procession and now were a distance up the ascending access road chatting while they watched everyone coming or going.
They were traffic cops, not the kind of cop who might be watching for her, but they were all armed and could probably be trusted to protect people.
Up the hill there were two other funerals coming to their conclusions. The graveside part was the end, she knew. There were other family groups, most of them two or three people, visible at various places on the hill visiting graves.
The size of the crowd going into the chapel for Sharon’s memorial service made Elle feel relieved. She was aware that having a well-attended funeral was worth exactly nothing, but she wanted Sharon’s family to be comforted. She turned off her engine and got out.
On the way into the chapel, Elle stopped, hugged and kissed the Estlemans, and then slipped inside to search for another family. She spotted the Corbetts. They had lived in another of the big houses on Elle’s street in South Pasadena when Elle and Sharon were growing up. Linda Corbett had been their age and had been one of a large group of neighborhood kids who knew one another and played together. The Corbetts had been the only faction as big as the Stowells. They were Mormons transplanted from Utah, and they were eight children strong, including four sisters who were small and blond.
Elle went up to Linda, and they hugged and exchanged air-kisses. She was introduced to Linda’s husband, then moved along the line and kissed the other Corbett girls, meeting their husbands but ignoring their married names, which she never expected to remember. Then she moved back to where she’d started and asked Linda, “Is this seat taken?” then sat down. She had picked the Corbetts because she looked like a Corbett, and blending in would make her safer for the next two hours.
The mortuary provided a rabbi in residence to preside over the service so it moved along smoothly, but the Estlemans had brought the rabbi and cantor from their own temple, so the funeral was personal and warm, with stories about Sharon as a child, a student, a bat mitzvah, and a young woman.
During the service Elle occasionally looked to see if anyone new had come in, but she saw no one who worried her. She kept feeling the urge to communicate with Sharon in some way, but as she sat there she realized that this was what death meant. Nobody could do it. There was no Sharon now.
When the plain wooden coffin was wheeled out by the pallbearers, Elle paused with the Corbetts and exchanged platitudes for a few minutes so she could prolong her time of anonymity and distance from the center of things. Then she put on her oversize sunglasses and went to her rental car while the hearse was conveying Sharon’s body up the hill to the grave.
Elle drove up the long paved driveway in the line with the rest of the cars, parked when they did, and walked the rest of the way. At the grave the rabbi spoke and then said more prayers in Hebrew. After Sharon’s body was lowered into the grave, people lined up and waited their turns to lift the shovel and put their measure of dirt in to cover the coffin. Years ago, Sharon had told her this was done at Jewish funerals and that burying the body was the last favor the living could do for the dead.
When Elle’s turn came, she speared the shovel into the mound of dirt, lifted it, and spun it over to release a full load of dirt onto the center of the casket. She handed the shovel to a middle-aged man in line behind her and walked off, following the others to the side road where they had all been directed to park. Los Angeles was full of small black cars, so as she walked she looked at each car to find her Audi. When she thought she had the right one she squeezed the electronic fob on her key to unlock the door, got in, and started it.
She leaned to the right and looked at her reflection in the rearview mirror to be sure her eye makeup hadn’t run, and saw that a man in a dark suit was opening her car door beside her.
Instantly she slipped the car into reverse, stepped on the gas, and made the rear edge of the door ram the man over onto the pavement. As she threw the car into drive, he scrambled to get up and push something into the open doorway, but Elle grabbed the handle and yanked the door, aided by the forward momentum of the car. The door closed on his hand, and whatever he was holding dropped, hit the door’s rocker panel, and fell outward to the pavement. Her car lurched ahead a dozen feet before she hit the brakes and it stopped.
In the mirror Elle could see that the object was a pistol. She threw the car into reverse again and backed up as fast as she could, trying to run over the man or the gun before he could get to it and pick it up. She was moving fast, so instead of trying to snatch the gun, he dived onto the grassy hillside as she flashed past him.
She stopped her reverse motion, but she saw that he was still close enough to get to the gun before she could in high heels. The steep slope also meant she couldn’t drive up over the curb and hit him. She caught more movement in the corner of her eye and saw a large black vehicle high on the hillside. Men were hurrying to climb into it and drive down to where she was.
She stomped on the gas pedal, drove to the end of the cemetery road, and turned onto the main drive. She sped downhill past the entrance kiosk, turned left onto Forest Lawn Drive, and headed west. The black vehicle turned up the side road to pick the man up and lost any chance of catching her.
In a few minutes she was accelerating up another hill to the hotel above Universal Studios. She reached the level space in front of the hotel, where she gave the rental car to the valet parking attendants and watched it disappear underground. While they took possession of the car, she stared down the long incline to the entrance at Lankershim Boulevard and across the street to the overpass that led to Ventura Boulevard
. There were no pursuers and no big black vehicles. She forced her breathing to become calmer and quieter and felt her heartbeat slow down.
She wasn’t quite sure what had just happened to her. She had expected that police detectives would be at Sharon’s funeral to see who else was there, but she had not expected them to be interested in her. And that wasn’t the way police officers arrested someone in a car. They liked to surround a car with a couple of theirs so it couldn’t move, have one cop approach the driver’s-side door, and have another stand at least ten feet behind the car on the right side in the driver’s blind spot. She’d never heard of a cop just stepping up to a car, flinging the driver’s-side door open without speaking, and sticking a gun inside.
She walked into the hotel and kept going, calming herself as she pretended to explore the building. The man she had just escaped was very likely Sharon’s killer. He hadn’t been trying to arrest her. He’d seemed to be trying to kill her.
When she returned to the room she had rented she saw that the maid had already cleaned it. She had left a tip on the counter just in case that happened, so she took it as a sign that she was beginning to return to her usual level of alertness. She had to do something that would calm her down and give her a chance to think.
She put on her running shoes and shorts and went down to the gym. It was late enough now so that most of the traveling businesspeople would be out making money. The evening exercisers were still hours away. When she got there the room was empty. She did some push-ups, then spent a few minutes each on a stationary bike, an elliptical trainer, and a treadmill. She exercised with weights for a few minutes, then did pull-ups on a bar, keeping her eyes on the window to the hallway. As a rule, women were not good at pull-ups, so she didn’t want to be noticed doing her twenty.