by Thomas Perry
Elle took a few pictures of the written arrangements for the past few art exhibitions at each of the museums and the next few, so she could search them for information about the major players later. She added the minutes of the past few board meetings and moved on.
She felt she had not given enough thought to searching for the murder weapon. The things she had always found true of defensive weapons were not the same for murder weapons. Most smart killers got rid of them right away. Those who didn’t would not keep them where they slept or anyplace where the police might find them.
Elle had always preferred hiding objects that might get her convicted of a crime in places that were outside her dwelling but not hard to get to, so probably murderers did the same. She tended to keep such things in the trunk of the car parked in her yard. This protected them with a lock, gave her adequate space to disguise or hide them, and made them very easy to move in a hurry.
She was aware that lots of survivalists bought lengths of large-diameter polyvinyl chloride tubing, inserted assault rifles and full ammo magazines in them, capped them at both ends, and buried them in their yards. An arrangement like that could keep a gun fresh and new for the postapocalypse they longed for, even if it didn’t happen for a while. A pipe would hide a pistol and silencer even better, but it would be terribly inconvenient to keep burying and digging up a weapon for a series of murders.
She went to the garage and looked at the two cars. One was a Bentley and one a big Mercedes. She looked around in the garage for the keys, but there were none in any of the hiding places she would have chosen.
Then it occurred to her that there had been articles recently about criminals who had a device that would activate the key fobs of car keys remotely, while they were sitting on a counter in a house, and open the car doors. She had been interested because the device sounded like something she might want sometime if the reports turned out to be true. The articles had said the best way to avoid this scheme was to keep car keys in the refrigerator to insulate them from the signal.
She went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and found two sets of keys in an aluminum coffee thermos. She went to the door, unlocked the two cars, and popped their trunks. She searched both cars for special hiding places, suspicious contents, and guns. She found nothing, and the cars were not parked on top of any suspicious depressions in the concrete either. She returned the keys to their place in the refrigerator.
She climbed the stairs to the second floor and searched the female and male caretakers’ rooms, but found nothing suspicious. She discovered that the access hatch to the attic was in the ceiling of the male caretaker’s closet. It was reached by a ladder that was attached to one wall. It occurred to her that this might be the answer. The caretakers seemed to be so good at everything that maybe Teason hired one of them as the shooter.
Elle climbed up into the attic and used her flashlight to search. She walked to the end of the warm, cramped place, but found absolutely nothing except wiring and insulation. She climbed back down and closed the hatch.
The view of the yard outside the windows had gotten dim. She had now spent the whole day here, been in every room of the house, and probably found whatever she was going to find. There was no evidence to show that Santo Teason had done anything except marry a woman who cheated on him and also got herself killed. Elle prepared to leave, making sure as she went that everything was left as nearly as possible the way she had found it. She walked through the whole house again, looking closely at everything. She found she now had to use her flashlight to see.
She reached the kitchen, slithered out through the dog door, and slid the barrier back over it. The whole day had gone by, and it was dark outside. She moved quietly to the side of the house and began to make her way to the back fence, when she heard an engine. She sidestepped beyond the house to the back without stopping to look.
The headlights of the vehicle lit up the driveway and the garage door for a second and went out. The engine was still running, and she heard it coming up the driveway toward her. She retreated about sixty feet to hide behind the pool house and waited.
An older dark green tradesman’s van moved up the driveway, then made a slow turn around the garage to the rear and stopped there. The engine went silent. After a few seconds she heard two doors shut, and after a few more seconds two young men walked around the garage to the driveway. They both wore knit caps pulled down over the tops of their ears. She had always thought that was a stupid style for young men in Los Angeles. Except for a month on either side of Christmas, a person living here had less chance of getting chilled than of getting sliced up by a sushi chef. She watched them and noticed they were swiveling their heads around, looking to either side and over their shoulders far too often. Don’t tell me, she thought.
They both reached up and pulled the fronts of their knit caps down over their faces to reveal eye and mouth holes, which they tugged to fit over their features. Fucking burglars. She was enraged. She wasn’t sure she could have explained why, but she didn’t feel the need to fully understand it. She had virtually cleared Santo Teason of murder, and she had been extremely careful not to harm him or his innocent children with her visit. These two idiots would now smash their way in, break doors, and throw furniture around, looking for something valuable that she had carefully left undisturbed.
She remained hidden and waited until the two had made their way to the side door of the house, the big glass French door. One of them tried the knob, and the other took out a suction cup and a glass cutter. When he stuck the cup firmly to the glass beside the knob and scored the glass, she waited. When he rapped loudly on it to break it, she could wait no longer.
19
Elle ran at the wall around the rear of the house, jumped to bring her right foot about halfway up the six-foot surface, grasped the top, and let her momentum carry her up so her hips reached the top. She turned and rolled over the top of the wall and dropped to the other side.
The Teason house alarm was a silent one, but she knew it was going off, sending a signal to an alarm monitoring company. In a minute the company would have armed men on their way to the place while they used whatever on-site monitoring system they had installed. They would at least know exactly what opening had been breached and probably be deciding whether they should also call the police to respond to the alarm.
They would start by trying to make sure it was a break-in. There was a fine for calling the cops to a false alarm, and it escalated for subsequent false alarms. Some security companies had the ability to conduct a remote visual search using the house’s security cameras. It would let them see if an intruder was an armed robber or a raccoon. It could tell them if a sound of glass breaking had been caused by a clumsy thief or a minor seismic tremor.
She knew she should keep moving, get to her rented SUV, and go. But she was already clear of the house and behind an opaque wall. She was almost certainly safe for now, and she was curious to see what the security company would do. She told herself that by staying she was conducting an experiment that would tell her what her natural enemies, the security companies, would do when an alarm was tripped.
She didn’t have to wait long. A black SUV with its lights off appeared at the front of the house, swung into the driveway, sped up the long paved surface to the garage door, veered to the right at the last second, and stopped. It was now between the house and the garage. It was blocking the van from driving out from behind the garage and speeding down the driveway. The only place the van could go now was right into the pool.
Three men in black coverall uniforms jumped down from the SUV to the driveway. All of them wore utility belts with holstered pistols, pepper spray canisters, Tasers, and handcuffs. As they ran to check the perimeter of the house, Elle heard something else and turned to see it.
A second black SUV with no lights on sped up and stopped in front of the house. Three more occupants in black coveralls got out and ran toward the front door.
Their ge
ar and equipment seemed too serious and too uniform to belong to a security company. Maybe this was a special squad from the LAPD. The police used unmarked vehicles every day, but it seemed to Elle that every security company car she’d ever seen served as a billboard for advertising. It would always have the company name on its doors and trunk.
Elle moved along the wall a few feet and watched the team at the back of the house. A lead man used a key to unlock the kitchen door. He swung it open and the other two went in with guns drawn, one high and the other low.
She trotted along the outside of the wall beside the driveway until she was close to the side door where the two burglars had entered. The French door was open and she could see inside.
The three from the front and the three from the back had entered fast, and she watched as the two teams converged on the pair of burglars. All six had pistols drawn, and all had incredibly bright halogen flashlights shining on the two young burglars, so the light seemed to hit their heads from every direction at once. The burglars squinted, held their hands over their eyes, and tried in vain to turn their heads away from the glare.
The auras of the flashlights lit the room and confirmed what Elle had thought at first was a trick of her mind. The six security men all had silencers on the muzzles of their pistols. She sucked in a breath. This wasn’t what the under-trained and underpaid rent-a-cops hired by security companies carried. The last she’d heard, silencers weren’t even legal to own in California. Gun laws sometimes changed without her knowing it right away, but it was extremely unlikely that this change would have taken place in California.
She had been resisting the suspicion that had been growing as she watched. Not only did the silencers look the same as the one she had seen in the recording of the first murders, but the security company had the same model Tahoe SUVs as the team of people who had been searching for her in the bars.
The six black-suited team members had the two burglars lying on their bellies now, and next they were handcuffed and dragged out to the driveway. Two men held each burglar’s arms, and there was one man behind with his gun drawn. When they reached the first SUV they pushed the prisoners onto the floor in the back of the vehicle and closed the doors. A driver and two men got in after them, backed down the driveway to the street, still with headlights off, and drove away.
Two of the remaining three went to work securing the French door at the side of the house and probably resetting the alarm system. The third walked up the driveway and around the garage. He was carrying a set of keys in his hand. After a few seconds she heard the engine of the two burglars’ van start and watched the van backing around the garage to the driveway.
Elle ducked below the wall and moved away from the security men toward the back of the lot. She went over the back wall of the neighbor’s house and ran to her rented vehicle. She knew that the most sensible thing to do now was to drive to her next hotel and make herself invisible as long as she could while she studied the pictures she had taken in the house.
But she didn’t. The two SUVs seemed to her to have arrived too quickly. Maybe they had been following the van because it seemed likely that an old van prowling these streets didn’t belong to a resident and could be carrying burglars. But she couldn’t be sure that she had not unknowingly set off an alarm before they’d arrived. She could have been on a security monitor earlier or even all day. And the security teams’ arrival had occurred just after she’d left the house. Maybe they had only been standing by waiting to stop her, and she had inadvertently substituted the other two for herself.
Elle was almost certain she knew where the SUVs were based. She had seen a fleet of them the night when she had trailed the blond woman and her two companions from the bar. They had been parked in a row behind the plain building near the airport.
Elle wanted to get away from this, to place herself as far as possible from these people, but she had an irresistible need to know what was going to happen. The two burglars were almost certainly just a pair of young idiots who had read that a rich and famous person was going to be away from home for a few months and had imagined that they were ready for the job of robbing his house.
She knew that she was probably being foolish. If those two had caught her in the house they would certainly have robbed her and might very well have killed her—or tried to kill her. It occurred to her that she was still wearing the Rohrbaugh R9 pistol in the belly band, but she had no desire to use it and no idea what she should do if she did.
Elle pulled onto the San Diego Freeway off Sunset and began to act on her risky urge. She was racing the two SUVs to the place she believed they had come from. She was over the speed limit and still accelerating, but she calmed herself and settled on a few miles per hour above it, in the range that wouldn’t interest the police. She had an illegal gun on her and she had a great many incriminating pictures in the memory of her phone, and she couldn’t risk losing them. Getting pulled over and arrested now would be a catastrophe.
Elle drove toward the airport exits on the freeway and then went past, backtracking on the Imperial and Pacific Coast Highways and turning north up La Tijera to La Cienega. She saw a green van moving toward her on La Cienega. As she passed she saw the black-suited driver and was sure this was the van the burglars had parked at the Teason house. It flashed past, and she went on for a quarter mile, then coasted to a near stop without touching her brakes, switched off her headlights, and made a U-turn before she switched them on again to follow it. They must be turning the van and the prisoners in to the police.
The van turned eastward. Elle wondered if there was a special police station down here that held impounded vehicles. It seemed to her that it would have made the most sense to turn in the prisoners and their vehicle at the Beverly Hills police station. She supposed that the LAPD might be handling these things because it had much more extensive facilities.
They drove for about twenty minutes. She followed at the greatest distance she could manage and still see the van. She saw the van pull to the right, and when she got closer she could see that it had entered a dark, empty field, but the glow of its headlights showed that the field had once been covered with buildings, like a factory or warehouse complex. There were concrete foundation pads, now fringed with weeds, and a couple of strips of asphalt pavement that must have been on-site roads or driveways.
Elle drove past the place without slowing, going on until she saw a derelict brick building on the next lot, pulled in beyond it, and parked. She began to walk back toward the field where the van had stopped.
She had made her way about sixty yards before a new set of headlights appeared on the deserted road, coming her way. She knew she wouldn’t have time to run back, so she dropped to her belly and rolled downward into the ditch beside the road. The ditch was summer dry and choked with weeds, but it was deep enough to keep her hidden.
She lay there and waited as the headlights grew nearer and brighter. She was waiting with her face down for the vehicle to pass her so she could lift her head, but it never reached her. Instead it turned off the road onto the vacant lot and pulled up near the burglars’ van. Elle looked at it and saw that it was one of the two black SUVs. The three occupants got out, and she could see them in the glow that spilled from the headlights onto the ground ahead of them.
They all wore black coveralls and black baseball caps. Their torsos had a square look, and she recognized it as the look that cops had when they wore body armor.
Elle took out her telephone, shaded the screen with her cap, and pressed the icon for the camera and then the option for video. She kept the screen covered so the light from it wouldn’t cast a glow on her face and began recording what she could see. There was something odd going on. Had these security people been in league with the burglars and taken them here so their colleagues wouldn’t turn them over to the police?
The SUV’s motor was still running and the headlights were still on, shining on the weedy field and the concrete pads. She could see the d
ark figures in silhouette in front of the light. After about thirty seconds of talk, the three who had brought the black SUV opened the doors at the rear, leaned in, and dragged out the two burglars.
The security men lifted them to their feet, and Elle could see that their arms were immobile, still held behind them by handcuffs. What was happening?
One of the black-suited figures said something to the burglars and kicked one of them. The two began to run. Their wrists were still cuffed, but they were young and fast, and they had run from enemies at night before. They instantly separated, veering in both directions out of the cone of bright light thrown by the headlights, and became hard to see in the unlit places. Elle felt some hope. They were doing the right thing. A person running straight away from danger was almost as easy to hit as a stationary target. A person running off at an angle into the darkness was much harder to hit.
The black-suited figures raised their suppressed pistols and began to fire at them. The pistol reports were diminished but audible, and the muzzle flashes were reduced. The shooters didn’t seem to hit anything. Maybe they were just trying to give the burglars the scare of their lives and leave them here in cuffs. She’d heard from other thieves that some of the security people at big store chains just beat up the thieves they caught so they’d be afraid to steal again. Prosecution cost money and didn’t end losses.
But two of the black figures ran and jumped into the black SUV and then roared ahead. Elle kept filming with her phone’s screen covered, but she had to be careful now that the SUV was in motion. If the SUV driver decided to double back or circle one of the runners, a turn of the wheel could bring Elle into the white glare of the headlights.
The SUV accelerated across the field and turned to the left, and the driver hit the high beam lights. Even from where she was, Elle could see the burglar who had run in that direction. He had covered a surprising distance in the dark with his hands behind his back, but the SUV ate up his lead in a few seconds, then sped beyond him and circled to hem him in. It seemed to amuse the driver to roll along beside the struggling man, sidling closer and closer to him.