The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  She was almost back at Kavanagh’s house when she saw the first black Tahoe. It was moving south from Sunset, and it came fast. Elle saw it race into the first intersection, where three other cars were being hesitant about who should go first. The Tahoe settled it, not even slowing down as it sped through. About three seconds later she saw another black Tahoe, flashing past on a parallel street.

  Now she was positive. She could swear to it. This wasn’t just some “security company” that had put the cameras in the Kavanagh house. It was the same one that had been searching for her, the one that had cleared out Tim Marshall’s apartment, and the one that had killed the two young burglars.

  She swung back up to Sunset, turned right to get to Crescent Heights, made the turn to the left, and headed up into Laurel Canyon. She drove to the Valley, went to Burbank Airport, and turned in the Honda CR-V. There was no reason to think that the small SUV had been noticed, photographed, or associated with her, but it might have been. She rented a silver Acura to replace it and then drove south toward LAX. The car had a little more power and it handled well, so she was satisfied for the moment.

  On the way, she stopped at a giant office supply store and bought the next set of supplies: a stack of computer discs, a few thumb drives, a printer, and a ream of paper. Then she returned to her hotel room and went to work on the security company.

  She had not seen anything connected with the company that had a logo or a name on it. The black Tahoes, the black suits the employees wore, the equipment, and the building were all plain and anonymous. She turned on her computer, signed on to the site set up to receive the signals from her pinhole cameras, and began to speed through the surveillance footage. Hours and hours of it showed nothing but people sitting at desks through the night shift. Finally she happened to see the plump woman in the uniform walk past a desk, appear to hear something, pick up a phone, and speak into it.

  Elle stopped the recording, backed it up, and played it at normal speed. She heard the phone on the desk ring. She watched the woman pick it up and say, “Nemesis. How can we help you?”

  Elle stopped it and went back. She turned up the sound to be sure she’d heard it correctly. The phone rang. The woman picked it up and said, “Nemesis. How can we help you?”

  Elle let the recording run. At least she’d established that. The company had a name, and now she knew it. She settled into a routine to find out more.

  Elle left her room only once a day when the maid came to clean it. She took with her the laptop computer and discs in the computer carrying case. She would lock the case in a locker and spend two hours in the hotel gym and the pool and the restaurant. Then she would go back upstairs to work.

  Over the days she learned more about Nemesis. There were thirty-seven employees. Ten were clerical and administrative, like the ones she’d watched on the night shift, and twenty-six were listed on the board in the hall as three shifts on patrol duty. The last one was not listed as anything, so he must be the boss, Edward Ransom.

  She made an effort to study the online presence of Nemesis. The company had been in existence for ten years in Los Angeles and had a history in Virginia before that. The website seemed to imply that the Virginia office was still in business, but when she tried to use the internet to come up with an address, she found none. There was also no current telephone listing. There was a paragraph about the services that the Virginia-based Nemesis offered, which said the firm was available for “overseas posting” and provided “expanded mobility for executives” and “protection of assets and personnel wherever they are needed.”

  She suspected that the office in Virginia was defunct. It claimed to act as an employment service for bodyguards and mercenaries who had U.S. or NATO experience. Elle was aware that there had been a number of companies like that during the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but she’d heard little about them in recent years. Maybe the demand had dried up.

  She created more and more files on the company. She lifted multiple photographs of every person who came in range of her hidden cameras and made a personnel file for each. She listened for names on the sound recordings and enlarged images to read any print—such as the name scrawled on a notebook or gym bag. The best source was the whiteboard duty roster that was updated each shift.

  She began with the roster for the night shift on the night when she had broken in. Hernandez had to be the woman who was in the radio room acting as dispatcher. She was the only Hispanic employee that night. That left Littvak as the old white man and Daly as the younger black man. Whenever she saw a person on her recordings reaching for a telephone it was worth going back and turning up the sound. Sometimes the person who answered the phone said, “Nemesis, this is …” and then his name. Sometimes after he hung up he would say, “That was Walters,” or mention some other name.

  Soon Elle was able to fill in blanks through a process of elimination. If the name “Miller” was on the whiteboard for the day shift, she could figure out who Miller was because she knew the other employees’ names. Two names listed for “Car 3” were probably the two who left together or came in to punch out together.

  Within a week she had files containing the names, a few photographs, and fragmentary information about all thirty-seven employees. She had their work schedules for that week, and she was able to use independent online sources to find addresses and other personal information. She liked the day shifts because there were more people coming and going and talking—both chatting and reporting things to each other.

  After a few more days she knew a great deal about the company and its office operations and all the people in the building. She kept monitoring what went on, but she was more skillful now at judging when she should be listening closely and when she could do other things. Now it took only an hour or so to go through a day’s recordings.

  She began to devote more and more time to studying the information she had acquired about the triple murder, the victims, and their families. She had assumed from the start that what had caused the three murders was off-limits sex. Somebody’s husband found out she cheated and was jealous enough to kill her, then interrupted her in the act and killed all three. The theory fitted the visible facts, the timing, and the way human beings acted. But that worked only for a while.

  Nothing she had learned after the first few days seemed to fit that theory. The husbands must have learned from the police what had been happening at Kavanagh’s house. There was no reason to think either one knew about any affairs while his wife was still alive. Nobody had left or been kicked out of the house. There had been no divorce suit filed, and neither husband seemed to have been comforted by any female friends who were suspiciously prompt to arrive. And usually when there was a murder because of jealousy, the crime was over. The killing of the unfaithful one wasn’t the beginning of a crime wave. But this time it had been the first of a series of related crimes.

  Sharon and Peter were killed in Sharon’s apartment, just a short walk from LACMA. And Tim Marshall had done his best to strangle Elle on the beach in Santa Barbara. The man who had killed the three at Kavanagh’s house had certainly been the one to kill Sharon and Peter. The only reason he would have bothered was that he thought Elle was staying in Sharon’s apartment. And the only reason he could have known that, or that Sharon was her best friend, was that the three people from Nemesis—the blond woman and her two partners—had gone to Elle’s haunts asking questions about her. And they were the same three who went to clean out Tim Marshall’s apartment in Riverside. Elle now had files on the three: Charlene “Shar” Bonner, Michael Flanders, and Miguel Escobedo. But why had Nemesis been interested in killing anybody?

  Elle had never conducted a murder investigation before. She didn’t know how much evidence she needed to collect. It would have to be enough to convince some homicide detectives that she knew what she was talking about. After them there would be an assistant district attorney, usually a person who would not charge anyone with murder until
he was persuaded that there was no chance whatsoever that he could lose the case and mar his record.

  Elle would have to give him enough to convince a jury of twelve that there was no reasonable doubt that the suspect had done a killing. If she counted all the events she’d need to account for, it seemed to be an awful lot of evidence. She had seen documentaries on television in which the defense attorney would say something like, “Why not a stranger looking for an easy score? Maybe a burglar? How did you eliminate that possibility before you made up your mind that my client had done it?”

  She didn’t know how all the questions could be answered or how all the standards could be met. So she kept collecting information, tirelessly and methodically. Her files on the Nemesis people were growing steadily because she kept everything, including their profiles on dating sites, with heights, weights, and supposed romantic histories.

  The pictures she had taken of the papers in Valerie Teason’s files had now been transferred to her laptop and to discs, and she had read her way through half of them at least. She’d done the same with Santo Teason’s notebook and begun to correlate Valerie’s civic committee meetings with the appointments and production meetings and script readings Santo had jotted down. She had searched the financial information she could glean from the papers she had photographed in Tim Marshall’s apartment for some kind of coherence, some sense of how his services had been solicited and paid for. She couldn’t assume that anything was irrelevant, so she kept it all.

  She was particularly attentive when she found anything that illuminated anyone’s connection with Nemesis. She had already seen that Nick Kavanagh’s security service was Nemesis and tested the theory by watching the black Tahoes converge on his house after her last visit. She had seen and recorded two Nemesis teams capturing and killing the two burglars at the Teason house. When she had explored the Mannon house, she had needed to leave because an armed, black-suited watchman had arrived to check the place with a flashlight. Now that she had seen her recordings and made still shots of all the Nemesis employees, she knew that the man had been Randolph McNulty Jr., aged forty-three. She had a file on him. She was now sure that all three victims were clients of Nemesis.

  What else had the three victims had in common? In the prelude to the group murder, Kavanagh had said they were all in the same social set and that the two women were the ones whom anyone would have chosen to take to bed. The women seemed to agree with both assertions, so that settled it. But what did that mean?

  A “set” was a vague term to Elle. Probably it meant people whose kids went to the Bremmer School, people who were members of the philharmonic or at least season ticket holders and donors. They supported the Museum of Contemporary Art and probably the Huntington Gardens. The Norton Simon, the Broad, and the Getty museums had been founded on very rich men’s fortunes, so Elle didn’t know if people donated to them or not. But the set was that kind of people. She knew she had to try to identify a few of them.

  She studied the directory of the Bremmer School families, since both the Mannons and the Teasons had enrolled their kids there. She looked at other documents for repetitions. She scanned donor lists from the organizations Valerie Teason supported and guest lists for receptions and parties. It wasn’t surprising that one of the repeated names was Nicholas Kavanagh. Valerie had seating charts for the Hollywood Bowl season ticket holders, and Elle looked at the names in the same section, the front quarter of the stadium taken up by box seats, and then the identical seats on the opposite side of the bowl, and the ones just ahead of the Teasons and the Mannons. She had almost forgotten that she’d come across a drawer in the Mannon house that contained invitations to social events. She had photographed a number of them, and now she added those names.

  When she had finished, she had a list of twenty-eight surnames that had been mentioned repeatedly with the Teasons and Mannons in social contexts and cultural contexts. Most of the names belonged to couples. After a bit of sorting and crossing off duplicate mentions of women who used maiden or professional names as well as married names, Elle had a sense of the social set. She spent a few minutes creating a file of social contacts. As she filled in addresses, she had a moment of regret that she couldn’t jog by a few of the houses some morning looking for a way in.

  She noticed a few that she thought she remembered from the meetings of the museum directors’ group, so she went back to Valerie Teason’s LACMA files. She was right. There were a few who had turned up on the list of people who had attended meetings.

  There was also a set of two sheets in the file that had apparently been misfiled. They didn’t seem to be related to the minutes of the meetings. She caught the name Nicholas Kavanagh along the top, but it was printed like the stationery of a business. Because it was an image, not a physical document, she couldn’t feel the paper, which looked stiff and thick. It occurred to her that she was probably at fault for mixing these sheets with the meeting minutes. She had simply been snatching up files and papers and clicking her phone’s camera over and over. But this was intriguing to her.

  The sheets had a list of paintings the Kavanagh Gallery had obtained and transferred on a commission. There were thirteen paintings obtained and held for Valerie Teason, and there appeared to be twelve for Anne Mannon. Each painting had the name of an artist, a title, and a date. Elle cut and pasted the list into the file where she kept the connections between Kavanagh and the two female friends. He had bought paintings for their collections. They were customers.

  23

  Why had Elle never seen all of these paintings? She should have noticed so many paintings if they had been up in either of the two women’s houses. Elle had worked mostly in the dark at Mannon’s, but she had visited the Teason house in daylight. Maybe the paintings hadn’t been delivered yet. It wouldn’t be crazy to postpone taking delivery on a painting until it was added to the family’s insurance policy. She looked at the prices on the invoice.

  The paintings weren’t very expensive, really, at least not one at a time. There were some that weren’t much more than the paintings that hung for sale in Los Angeles restaurants: $3,000; $2,800; $6,000. There were only a few that were above $10,000. The date on the invoice caught her eye. It was over two years old.

  She stared at the list of paintings and then looked up the names of the artists online. One was named Aaron Wilbertson. His biography said he was born in 1821 and died in 1906. A member of the Hudson River School, he had studied in Düsseldorf, where the style and methods of the Hudson River painters Bierstadt, Church, Hart, and Brown originated.

  Like Thomas Moran, Wilbertson moved west before the turn of the century and applied the Hudson River aesthetic to the dramatic scenery of the American West. He was famous for having moved northeastern rocks, rivers, and mountains into some western paintings to achieve pleasing effects. He was quoted as having said, “God had His joke with us when He hid Niagara Falls among the busy thoroughfares of men. And He made the forests of the civilized East thick and impassable, while leaving much of the West bereft of green and growing things.”

  The paintings Anne and Valerie had owned were Sunlight in the Sierra (1885), Desert Rhapsody (1889), Wind on Bristlecone (1891), The Willamette Valley (1880), On the Santa Fe (1891), Winter on Shasta (1887), Gateway to the Columbia (1888), and Mojave Spring (1890).

  The second painter Elle looked up was Albert Stolkos (b. 1898, d. 1976). He was referred to in the article as a significant abstract painter of the postwar period who was heavily influenced by a strict Japanese school of thought that eschewed any reference to real objects with three dimensions. His work was known for its jagged lines, which were often compared to colored electrocardiograms. He was a close friend to and considered an equal of the great Western abstractionists of his day.

  The paintings were Jazz Dream/Jetstream Nos. 8, 12, 15, and 22 (1962–3); Juicy (1964); De-Composition Nos. 18, 44, and 49 (1968); Awkward Sensation (1972); and Both Ways (1971).

  The third painter was a woma
n, Sarah Marie Prestmantle (b. 1881). The article said she was born to an upper-class English family that was connected on the male line to the gentry of Yorkshire and on the distaff side to several of the oldest families of France. She was sent at the age of twelve to a boarding school in Rouen, where she studied painting under a master named Valedon, who is not known in any other context. Sarah Prestmantle was obsessed with painting and produced a body of juvenile portraits of her classmates. When the paintings were discovered in a tower of the school, the headmistress and teachers declared them “scandalous” and burned them in a bonfire in the churchyard of the thirteenth-century chapel. Her expulsion from the school presaged her later disownment by her family and repudiation by their connections.

  Her fascination with the human form grew and flourished. Today she was seen as a forerunner of and an influence on the great art deco sculptors and designers Claire Colinet, Bruno Zach, and Ferdinand Preiss and was rumored to have been a model for some of the female figures in their work. Her paintings had the same lively poses, graceful forms, and frank realism. She was different from them chiefly in her emphasis on nude pairs and groups of both sexes.

  Her works on the purchase list were Epithalamium (1913), The Nymph’s Birthday Party (1915), The Bower of Bliss (1916), The Rites of Spring—Nijinsky (1913), Untitled Five Figures (1917), Pas de Deux (1919), and Eighteen Unbound Sketchbook Sheets for a Study After Aretino (1921).

  Elle started a new file and copied the invoice into it and then the descriptions of the various artists’ work and their histories. She promised herself that at some point she would do a serious search and get a look at photographs of the paintings themselves instead of reading descriptions. But for the moment it didn’t seem to be a priority. What she needed to know was something that would explain the motive for killing Kavanagh, Mannon, and Teason.