by Thomas Perry
Elle heard more heavy footsteps coming up the hall toward the ladies’ locker room where she was hiding. She put her phone in her pocket and prepared to slip into the locker again, but they were approching too fast. She heard the squeak of the door opening, and the footsteps coming in. She realized she couldn’t get inside the locker in time. She dropped to the floor and slid under the bench beside the lockers where she had been sitting. She was just short enough so the top of her head and the soles of her sneakers barely touched the two solid supports of the bench.
She heard two men walk past her toward the toilet stalls. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be in here. This is the ladies’ locker room.”
“I don’t think they’ll be needing it. They’re all tied up at the moment. And I’m not using that men’s room. Too many guys have been in there taking a piss with the lights out.”
Elle heard the two men urinate into the two toilets and then flush. The sound of the flushing worried her, because it was loud enough so she couldn’t hear their footsteps as they passed her bench, but in a moment she heard the water running at the sinks and then paper towels being torn off a roll. The door squeaked shut and then flapped once. Elle listened to the silence for a count of a hundred in case they hadn’t both left or there were more men coming in. Then she turned on her phone and went to her recording site.
“It wasn’t a party. It was just the two women and Nicholas Kavanagh looking at paintings that he’d brought home from work and hung. If you’ll free my hands I’ll show you the recording.”
“Sit tight where you are. Vic will do what you tell him.”
Ed sighed. “Okay. Turn the laptop toward Mr. Caine and wake up the screen.” There was a pause. “Now bring up the folder ‘Kavanagh,’ comma, ‘house.’ Click on the final file in the folder.”
Elle looked at her phone screen again to verify that the file was what she thought—the company’s recording of the conversation, sex à trois, and murder. She concentrated on the faces of the three men in the office. She assumed that they would be consumed with interest in what they were seeing. But Ed, like Elle, had seen this a couple of times, so he was primarily interested in watching the face of Mr. Caine, who must have been evaluating the evidence to decide whether Ed was an asset or a liability. The young man Mike squinted at the screen as though he thought he might be hallucinating, then got the idea. At the moment, he seemed to be seeing Nick Kavanagh as the luckiest man in the world. That would change shortly, she thought.
Caine was unreadable to her. He was clearly Ed’s boss, the decision maker, and he and his men had come here from the Virginia office in an unfriendly mood. He glanced at the screen a couple of times but had no interest in the proceedings. He was just waiting for the recording to end. From the sounds she could hear, the sex part was reaching its peak, but Caine looked impatient. Elle decided that she would never understand men if she lived to be a thousand. They all seemed obsessed with sex, but when there was business going on, they weren’t interested.
Finally she heard the shooter arrive. Nick Kavanagh said, “Uh,” in surprise. Anne said, “How did you know we were here?” and Valerie said, “Don’t.”
Caine said to Mike, “Stop it. Now go back.” He pointed. “Who’s that guy—the shooter? Is that you?”
Ed said, “It’s not even a guy. It’s Shar. You know, the tall blond girl you guys have tied up in the kitchen.”
“Did you tell her to kill them?”
“She recommended it, and I said yes. We realized those three had done all they were going to do for us without cheating us or—”
“Yeah, I get it,” Caine interrupted. “Why does she shoot that well?”
“It’s just her thing. She practices a lot. Maybe she figures that she’s got to be better at that because she can’t fight like a man. But she’s an odd person. Sometimes I think she does these things because she wants to impress me, and sometimes I think what she wants is my job. For now, I guess it doesn’t matter.”
Caine had stopped listening. “So you killed them before they could turn on you and—I don’t know—tell the cops or get caught.”
“That’s right,” said Ed. He was beginning to feel optimistic. “I figured it was my duty to you to be cautious. The three artists they’d gotten into the museum for themselves were rising in value. The three they’d done for us were now part of the permanent collection too. So without the women we would be okay. If our paintings went up only a little, we’d make a profit. But we couldn’t trust the two women anymore. They had lost their fear.”
“What do you mean?”
“Maybe they’d never had any fear. They were born with a huge head start. They were beautiful and educated and smart. They had married rich men. Their experience for their whole lives was probably that even when everybody got caught, they would be the ones who got let off, because they weren’t the kind of people who do bad things, so they must have been victims. They knew that the game with the paintings wasn’t illegal, so if they got caught nothing much would happen to them. If we got caught, we had committed some crimes. So we decided to quit while we were a little bit ahead.”
Mr. Caine said, “I’ve listened to your story. What else do you want to tell me or show me?”
“It also occurred to me that since they hadn’t sold their twenty-five paintings, and almost certainly hadn’t told anybody about them except Kavanagh and Semple, there was a great chance we could get our hands on them. I mean, the purchase prices were small enough so they could easily have handled the transactions without telling their husbands about them. And how could they have told them? All these arrangements with other men would have been too obvious.”
“I can tell by looking at you that there are problems you’re still worried about. Tell me now what they are.”
“Well, at that point there was a little bit of trouble. The morning after the killing, a young woman came into the house and stole a recording of the afternoon that Nick Kavanagh had made. I don’t know why he did that. I don’t think he imagined he would be making a sex tape, because he couldn’t have known in advance that they were going to seduce him to tie him into a new scheme. It’s possible he just ran the camera whenever he was going to talk about art. He was a salesman, and that kind of practice might be useful. Or he could have left it going by accident, after he took pictures of the new paintings. The camera was in plain sight. The girl just showed up the next morning, broke in, and found everything.”
“Why? What was she?”
“A burglar.”
“Shit. Why didn’t Shar kill her too?”
“The girl wasn’t around until hours later, when Shar was long gone.”
“Did you hunt her down?”
“We’ve made an effort. Shar found out the friend’s house where she was staying, but only the friend and some guy were there, so Shar had to kill them and leave. And every night Shar and Escobedo and Flanders went out looking for her. I think she knew we were looking for her.”
“Did she leave town?”
“No. We hired a guy, a freelance pro we had used once or twice. He was good at finding people, and especially women. He found her at a big, nice hotel in the Valley. He was a really good-looking guy, and he managed to talk to her and then take her out. He was going to take her to Santa Barbara, kill her quietly, and dump her in the ocean.”
“So? Did he?”
“The next day they found his body in the Santa Barbara harbor between two boats. He had a lot of stab wounds.”
“Jesus,” said Mr. Caine.
Ed watched while Caine stared at him. He seemed to be getting more and more uncomfortable. Finally he said, “I’ve told you everything I can think of.”
“Have you? You bought a bunch of paintings with Nemesis money, which is mostly my money. How many again?”
“Thirty.” He brightened, but his voice was hollow. “I can show them to you. They’re in a storage place. And we found the twenty-five paintings the women bought. They were locked in
the strong room at Kavanagh’s gallery. Now those are in our storage place too. You have to feel good about that. We paid nothing for them.”
“You know what I would have felt better about?”
“What?”
“If you had called me and come to Virginia and told me you were doing this. And you would have brought photographs of the paintings and a key to the storage place. That would have shown me that you at least thought this was a good use of my money and that you weren’t just robbing me to set yourself up to get rich.”
“Oh my god,” said Ed. “It never occurred to me that this would look that way to anybody, much less you.”
“Too bad,” said Mr. Caine.
“I’ll give you those things right now. You’ll see the paintings and have a key to the storage unit.”
Mr. Caine said, “Okay, Vic. You can cut him loose in a minute, but first let me state the conditions. Ed, if you make an aggressive move, you’ll die. And I’ll have my guys go through this building and shoot everybody else in the head.”
“Of course,” said Ed. “I’d never try anything like that.”
“And you will get rid of this witness, this burglar girl. You’ll find her and kill her, not make an effort to kill her.”
“Yes. I’ll be sure,” Ed said. “I’ve just had a lot to do. After the first three and the burglar’s friend and her date, we had to get rid of Jeffrey Semple too. We made it look like he’d hanged himself because Anne Mannon had died.”
“I don’t want to listen to any more excuses about anything.”
“No more, I promise.”
“All right. Cut him loose, Vic. We’re going to this storage place.”
29
Elle turned off her phone and put it in her pocket. The crisis that had made the Virginia squad turn the lights out and overpower everybody was ending quickly, and she would have to get out before the lights came on again. If they caught her here she was dead.
She was sure Shar and Hernandez, the only two people likely to come into the women’s locker room, were once again tied to chairs in the kitchen under the eye of the man with the automatic weapon, but they wouldn’t be there forever.
All the regular Nemesis employees in this building were in different rooms, disarmed and probably manacled with plastic ties and duct tape. There would be at least one man from the Virginia contingent at each doorway with a short-barreled automatic weapon to keep them under control.
She went to the door of the ladies’ room. She checked and saw that for the moment all the men with machine pistols were out of the hallway, still watching the people they had captured and disarmed.
The very slight light streaming into the hall from the double doors at the far end was enough for her to make her way to the kitchen door. She slowly leaned her head into the room and surveyed the scene. The guard looked a lot like the man Vic who had been in the office with Caine and Ed—broad shoulders, thick neck, big arms. He was sitting at his own table watching the two women with his gun resting on the tabletop. The women were back in their chairs, facing away from him. All of these men seemed to be former soldiers. They knew how to keep a prisoner from doing anything to reverse an advantage or escape.
Elle knew she would not have much time to do what came next, so she didn’t hesitate. She stepped in through the doorway and along the wall to her left, knowing her feet had to make no noise whatsoever. If the man heard anything he would turn to see what it was. When she reached the counter she dropped to the floor, opened the first cabinet door, crawled inside, and then very slowly pulled the cabinet door shut behind her.
Moving the few feet she had just traveled in perfect silence was an enormous accomplishment, and now the fear and relief settled on her at once and made her light-headed and terrified in retrospect. If the guard or the women had simply heard a faint sound or felt a displacement of air, she would already be dead.
She was invisible for the moment, and she felt reluctant to move again, afraid to make a noise or bump something in the dark.
Then she heard the office door open in the hallway. The voice of Mr. Caine called out, “At ease, everyone. This has been a successful drill. Los Angeles people, stay right where you are. Do not turn on any circuit breakers or lights, or leave the spot where you are. Someone will be around to release you. Wait for them.”
Right away Elle heard heavy booted footsteps coming along the hall from the office doorway. As the footsteps reached the communications room she heard other boots come out and follow, and then the man in the kitchen got up and joined the group as it moved along the straight corridor; then came more boots.
She could tell from the sounds that the final two pairs of feet were shuffling; probably these two men were walking backward to be sure none of the former captives came out of their rooms. Then the double glass doors opened and seemed to stay open for quite a few seconds, before everyone was out and she heard them swing closed again.
Hernandez said, “I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“I was scared for a minute because I thought they were the FBI or the police,” said Shar. “Once I knew they were guys from the Virginia office, that went away. They might have been mad at the boss, but they had no reason to hurt us.”
Elle heard some tearing noises and realized it was Shar pulling the duct tape off her wrists and then her ankles.
“What’s the matter with you?” said Hernandez. “What are you doing? They said not to do anything or turn on lights.”
“I’m not turning on any lights. I’m going back to the locker room.”
Elle heard her footsteps move off to the hallway and turn toward the locker room. She waited for Hernandez to follow, and after a few seconds she did. Elle began to crawl along under the counter. She made it past the sinks and drainpipes to the place where she had opened the wall from the outside. She pushed the sheet of plywood aside and then the corrugated metal, and slithered out behind the plain metal sheet she had placed over the outside wall.
Once she was out of the building she lay still, breathing the cooler night air. After a short wait she saw the three big, dark SUVs pull away from the lot across the street. She waited for their taillights to disappear down the highway before she got to her feet, put the white-painted sheet back against the outer wall, and began to walk.
After about a hundred feet of controlled walking she passed the next building, so she knew she was out of the field of vision of the cameras on the Nemesis building. The adrenaline that had been rising in her for the past hour seemed to release itself and course through her bloodstream. She broke into a run.
Shar reached the locker room and stepped inside. She found her second locker from memory in the dark, opened it, and took out her purse, then her spare burner phone, which she turned on. Now she could see well enough to take out some street clothes and a towel. With the power turned off, it had gotten hot and stuffy in the building. She glanced in the direction of the shower.
The lights were still off, but the dim light of her phone screen let her find her way. She took off her black work clothes and stepped into the shower.
She hadn’t told Hernandez, but she was feeling good. Ed had lived through the visit from Caine. That meant the scheme to sell the paintings was still on. Ed and Shar and McNulty and Flanders and Escobedo were going to be millionaires. Probably Hernandez wouldn’t get rich just for sitting at a radio console every night, but she would get the raise she had been hoping for.
Shar had an odd feeling that something was different. What was it? Her wad of gum was gone. She had put it there a year or more ago to cover the mysterious hole she had found. It had looked like a peephole from Ed’s office. Of course she didn’t need the gum now. The whole building was dark except for the little light her phone screen threw.
She grasped the handles and turned on the water, then adjusted the temperature and stepped under the stream. The water felt wonderful, pouring down and washing the sweat off her skin—sweat from the lack of air-conditioni
ng, sweat from the fear that she had told Hernandez she hadn’t felt. She turned her whole body around to look up into the spray.
Shar thought about the peephole and about Hernandez. Maybe Hernandez was right. If you learned you were being watched, the smartest thing to do might be to pretend you didn’t know. The smart thing might be to give Ed a peek at what could be available if he was nicer to her. If she gave him something to think about, it was possible that in time she would get twice as rich.
As Shar showered, the water collecting in the basin of the molded plastic shower floor pooled deeper. It made her feet feel clean. It rose to her ankle bones and then closer to the rim of the shower floor.
Shar didn’t notice the white extension cord that ran from the smoke detector on the ceiling beside the shower to the pinhole camera cord near the floor. When the water was ankle-deep it reached the spot where the camera cord’s two prongs were only partially pushed into the extension cord socket to draw power. There were bright sparks and a loud buzzing sound as a new circuit completed itself. Shar’s muscles tightened spasmodically and stayed clenched, because the new circuit ran through her body, paralyzing and heating her muscles until it killed her.
Two miles from the airport the three black SUVs pulled over at the side of a street. The first one separated from the others and drove around a block to the entrance of a storage building, pulled in, and parked. At this point the vehicle appeared on the storage facility’s surveillance cameras. A man went inside the building to the office. After a few seconds of discussion with the night guard, the man came back out.
He and his two companions entered the building and took the elevator to the third level. They went to the large storage space that the man had rented about a year earlier. They took a number of flat objects of different sizes—all tightly wrapped in thick paper jackets—and put them into the elevator and then took them outside to load into the SUV. Then the SUV pulled out just in time for the second SUV to take its place. Each of the three SUVs was loaded with wrapped paintings and then drove off. The man who had rented the storage space a year earlier, paying for three years in advance, didn’t emerge from the building.