Joshua smiled sadly at him. "It wasn't supposed to work out like this, was it?"
"No," Tim said. "I suppose not."
The key fit a Schlage single-cylinder knob lock. There was no dead bolt, but Tim didn't mind, since the door was solid-core with a steel frame.
The square of the room had a single large window that overlooked a fire-escape platform, bright red and yellow Japanese signs, and a busy street. Aside from a few worn patches, the carpet was in surprisingly good shape, and the alcove kitchen came equipped with a narrow refrigerator and chipped green tile. All in all, the place was bare and a touch depressing, but clean. Tim hung his four shirts in the closet and dropped his bag on the floor. He removed his Sig from the back of his pants and placed it on the kitchen counter, then pulled a small tool kit from his bag.
With a few twists of a Phillips-head screwdriver, he removed the entire doorknob. He drew out the Schlage cylinder from its housing and replaced it with a Medeco--another item he'd scrounged up at Kay's salvage yard. Because of their six tumblers and the uneven spacing, angled cuts, and altered depth of the keys, Medecos were Tim's locks of choice. Virtually impossible to pick. The new cylinder came with only a single key, which Tim slipped into his pocket.
Next he connected his PowerBook to the Nokia and accessed the Internet through his home account. He'd leave the apartment's phone jack dormant, thereby avoiding any records linked to a landline and an address. He was not surprised to see that his password no longer worked at the Department of Justice Web site, but he wouldn't have used the site extensively anyway, as he knew that all traffic was closely monitored and recorded. Instead he ran Rayner's name through a Google search and came up with a smattering of articles and promotional Web sites for Rayner's books and research.
In clicking around he discovered that Rayner had grown up in Los Angeles, gone to college at Princeton, and received his Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA. He'd been involved in a number of progressive experiments, for which he'd been widely praised and criticized. In one of them, a group dynamics study he'd run with students at UCLA over spring break in 1978, he'd separated his subjects into hostages and captors. The pseudo captors had grown so identified with their roles that they'd begun abusing the hostages, both emotionally and physically, and the study had been called off amid a storm of controversy.
Rayner's son, Spenser, was murdered in 1986, his body dumped off Highway 5. The FBI, monitoring a truck-stop pay phone as part of a mob sting, inadvertently recorded a panicked trucker, Willie McCabe, describing the murder to his brother in the course of seeking advice on whether he should turn himself in. The wiretap warrant, of course, did not extend to McCabe, so his incriminating comments were deemed inadmissible in court.
It occurred to Tim that Rayner had strong secondary motivations for not now focusing his vigilante energies on McCabe--having his son's killer on the loose elevated his cause and gave it a sales hook. Plus, Rayner, and his connection with McCabe, was too public. He'd be a leading suspect in the event of foul play.
After McCabe's case was dismissed, Rayner had begun to focus on the legal aspects of social psychology. One journalist went so far as to refer to him as a constitutional expert. Rayner and his wife, like an alarming majority of couples who lose a child, split within the first year after their son's death. Tim couldn't deny the sense of distress provoked by the possibility of his and Dray's bolstering the divorce statistic further.
Rayner had really come into his own after his son's death, publishing his first bestseller--a social-psychology study packaged as a self-help book. Tim found a review in Psychology Today bemoaning the fact that Rayner's books had grown thinner and more anecdotal each time out. It certainly hadn't hurt his sales. Another article stated that Rayner had become less involved with his teaching, though it did not make clear whether that had been his decision or the university's. He was now an adjunct professor who taught two occasional yet wildly popular undergraduate courses.
Tim logged on to the Boston Globe Web site next and ran a check on Franklin Dumone. He was not surprised to find that in his thirty-one years on the job, Dumone had been an extremely capable detective, then sergeant. Because of the arrest record of the Major Crimes Unit under his tenure, Dumone had grown to become something of a local legend. He'd retired after he'd arrived home one evening to find his wife beaten and strangled. Her alleged killer had been someone who'd just gotten out of a fifteen-year stint in the pen; Dumone had been his original arresting officer, catching up to him with a still-alive five-year-old girl in the trunk of his car. The killer's prison sentence, like so many others, had merely provided time for notions of revenge to evolve.
The Detroit Free Press's Web archives housed only a few articles involving the Masterson twins, most of them fluff pieces on twins or siblings in law enforcement. They'd been top-notch dicks and solid operators within their specialty units but had maintained a fairly low media profile until their sister's rigor mortis-ed body had been found pressed into the sand beneath the Santa Monica Pier. She'd moved to L.A. just a few weeks previous. In interviews Robert and Mitchell were quite outspoken about their belief that the Santa Monica police had handled the investigation incompetently. When her accused killer's case was dismissed after evidence was tainted by sloppy chain of custody, their responses grew even more vitriolic. The fuel behind their antagonism toward L.A., which they'd expressed so vehemently at Rayner's, was glaringly evident.
Another burst of newspaper articles followed several months later, when they won a $2 million settlement against a tabloid for going to press with illegally obtained--and gruesome--crime-scene photos.
Tim called trusted contacts at six different government agencies and had them each run a member of the Commission. The background checks came back clean--no wants, no warrants, no past felony charges, no one currently under investigation. He was amused to find that Ananberg had been arrested during high school on a marijuana-possession charge. Because of his technological prowess, the Stork had been accepted into the FBI despite his failure to meet physical qualifications. Deteriorating health had forced him into an early retirement eight years ago, at the age of thirty-six. A buddy at the IRS told Tim that Rayner had paid seven figures in federal taxes each year for the past decade.
No one, aside from Tim, was currently married--that would leave matters less complicated. Dumone, the Stork, and the twins had no current addresses, which didn't surprise Tim. Like him, they'd dug themselves in somewhere, safe and protected, before embarking on a project like the Commission.
At a discount furniture store up the street, Tim purchased a mattress and a flimsy dresser and desk. The store owner's son helped him unload the items from the delivery truck and get them upstairs. The kid moved gingerly, clearly having strained his shoulder on a recent delivery, so Tim tipped him handsomely. Then he bought a few more essentials, like sheets, pots, and a nineteen-inch Zenith TV, and unpacked what little he'd brought.
Flipping through the L.A. Times obits, he found a Caucasian male, thirty-six, who'd just died of pancreatic cancer. Tom Altman. That was a name Tim could live with. He cross-indexed the name with a phone-book he borrowed from Joshua, and found a West L.A. address. On his way over he stopped at a Home Depot and bought some heavy-duty gloves and a long-sleeved rain slicker. Dumpster diving could be a messy affair.
His concerns proved unnecessary, however. The house was empty, and the trash cans, hidden behind a gate in the side yard, weren't too filthy. He found a stack of medical bills under a used coffee filter, Altman's Blue Cross subscriber number--the same as his Social Security number--featured prominently on each form. As Tim had fortuitously hit the cans just after the midmonth billing cycle, further digging revealed a utilities bill, a phone bill, and a few canceled checks, all of them presentable. On his way to Bank of L.A., he stopped at the post office and retrieved a change-of-address form, useless in its own right, but official-looking when filled out and presented atop a stack of other documents.
The woman at the bank was pleasant enough when he explained he'd misplaced his driver's license. His Social Security number and current bills sufficed, and, feeling grateful that Altman had been considerate enough to leave behind a solid credit rating, he left with paperwork confirming his new checking and savings accounts and a rush-processed ATM card that doubled as a Visa.
These he took with him on a pleasant late-morning drive to Parker, Arizona, a grenade toss from the border, where he presented his information and explained to the peevish DMV clerk that he'd misplaced his California license but had been looking into getting an Arizona one anyway, as he summered in Phoenix. He spent the four-hour drive back marveling at the massive emptiness composing the majority of California and thinking how the sun-cracked barrens were a pretty damn good metaphor for what his insides felt like since Bear had showed up on his doorstep eleven days earlier.
Nightfall found Tim sitting on the floor of his apartment with his back to the front door, watching the neon lights blink through the wide window and throw patterns on the ceiling. He attuned himself to a cacophony of new sensations--thin, susceptible walls, conversations in foreign tongues, the back-kitchen stench of day-old fowl. He missed his simple, well-tended house in Moorpark and, more glaringly, he missed his wife and daughter. His first night in this new place confirmed what he'd already known: that nothing would be the same. He'd fallen into a new life, like a second birth, like a death, and with it came a sensation of suspended numbness, of underwater drifting. In this small womb of a room, linked to the outside world by no record, no trail, no necessity to leave, he felt at last safe from whatever corrosiveness the outside world was brewing and preparing to hurl in his face. From here he felt strong enough to begin his counterassault.
He gazed at the three major items he'd purchased--mattress, desk, dresser. There was no comfort in their arrangement, no lessening of what they were, things-in-themselves, rectangular practicalities that sat on carpeting. He thought of the gentler touches a woman--even Dray with her tomboy sensibilities--could bring to a room. Some softening of the lines, some notion that a space was to be lived with, not merely in.
He thought of Ginny's head-thrown-back hysterics at the Rugrats, the sense of joyful--yes, joyful--anticipation he got when he could sneak off work early to pick her up at school, like a date, and how he'd sit in his car and watch her for a few appreciative moments before getting out and claiming her. Ginny painted the world with child excesses--openmouthed smiles, floor-shaking tantrums, vividly colored candy and clothing. He realized how gray and inert she'd left the world with her departure, and how he was all abstinence and temper-ance--he was all lesser shades.
He was unsure he could abide a world that weathered her absence so easily.
He blinked hard, and tears beaded his eyelashes. Loneliness crushed in on him.
He found himself holding his phone, found himself dialing his house.
Dray picked up on a half ring. "Hello? Hello?"
"It's me."
"I thought you would've checked in last night. Not today."
"I'm sorry. I haven't stopped moving."
"Where are you?"
"I got a little place downtown."
He heard the air go out of her. "Jesus," she said. "A place." The line hummed, then hummed some more.
He opened his mouth twice during the ensuing silence but could not figure out what needed to be said. Finally he asked, "Are you okay?"
"Not really. Are you?"
"Not really."
"Where do I get you if I need you?"
"This is my new cell-phone number. Memorize it. Don't give it to anyone: 323-471-1213. I'll have it on twenty-four/seven, Dray. I'm ten digits away."
He heard the receiver rustle against her cheek and wondered what expression she was wearing. He thought about the phone nuzzled in close to her face, then about him here in this cold apartment.
"I already talked to some of our friends," she said. "But we should tell Bear together. I thought we could have him over tomorrow. At the house. One o'clock?"
"Okay."
"Timothy? I, uh...I..."
"I know. I do, too."
She clicked off. He snapped the phone shut and pressed it to his mouth. He sat, dumbly inert, phone against his mouth for the better part of twenty minutes, trying to figure out if he was actually going to follow through with the preparations he'd been laying.
He rose and turned on the TV to cut his lonesomeness, and Melissa Yueh's familiar voice filled the room.
"--Jedediah Lane, the alleged fringe terrorist, was released today to much fanfare. He was standing trial on charges of releasing sarin nerve gas at the Census Bureau, a terrorist act which claimed eighty-six lives. The Census Bureau attack was the biggest act of terrorism on U.S. soil since 9/11, and the largest perpetrated by a U.S. citizen since Timothy McVeigh's 1995 assault on Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building. Despite the fact that his courtroom antics provoked the judge on several occasions, Lane was found not guilty by the jury. The prosecutor claimed that Lane benefited from having had much of the physical evidence against him suppressed. Lane's post-trial comments have unleashed a whirlwind of anger in the community."
The screen cut away to a shot of Lane being escorted through a crush of news reporters, ducking lenses and mikes. "I'm not saying I did it," he mumbled in a quiet, almost affable, voice. "But if I did, it was to assert the rights upon which this nation was founded."
Back to Yueh's expression of barely concealed disgust. "Tune in Wednesday at nine when, in a KCOM special event, I'll be interviewing this controversial figure live. Watch it as it happens.
"In related news, construction continues on the memorial honoring victims of the Census Bureau attack. A one-hundred-foot metallic sculpture of a tree, the monument was designed by renowned African artist Nyaze Ghartey. Located on Monument Hill overlooking downtown Los Angeles, the tree will be lit at night, each branch representing a child who died, each leaf an adult victim."
An architect's sketch showed the tree looming large on the federal park, light emanating in the trunk's interior sending beams out through myriad holes in the metal hide. It was Christmas-tree hopeful. Very gaudy, very over-the-top, very L.A.
"Ghartey, who generated some controversy during the trial as an outspoken opponent of the death penalty, is the uncle of one of the seventeen child victims of the sarin nerve-gas attack, eight-year-old Damion LaTrell."
A school photo of a boy wearing overalls and a forced smile flashed on the screen.
Tim turned off the TV and grabbed his Sig from the kitchen counter. The door closing behind him sent a hollow echo down the hall.
He parked around the corner from Rayner's. The wrought-iron gates were more show than security; Tim slipped over them easily due to a vanity break to accommodate the dipping bough of a venerable oak. The front doors and windows were well secured, but the back door had only a simple wafer lock that he picked easily with a tension wrench and a half-diamond pick.
He prowled the downstairs, keeping his Sig tucked into his pants. Beside the stairs was an impressive conference room, complete with banker's lamps and leather chairs arrayed around an obnoxiously long table. A solemnly rendered oil of a boy roughly the age Spenser, Rayner's son, had been when he was killed, hung on the far wall. The portrait had an eerily posthumous affect, as if it had been done from a photo. A TV was suspended from the ceiling in the far corner of the room.
After getting the lay of the other first-floor rooms, Tim entered the library. He found the cherry box in the desk and claimed the .357 nestled within.
He headed upstairs.
Tim clicked on his Mag-Lite and shone the harsh beam on the two lumps beneath the covers of Rayner's bed. The Mag-Lite, which packed four D cells in its hefty metal shaft, provided one part illumination, three parts intimidation. Tim sat backward on a chair he'd moved silently from its place in front of the bathroom vanity, his feet on the plush velvet seat, his ass atop the back. His Sig and the .357 fla
red out from either side of his jeans like linebacker hip pads.
The larger form shifted and raised an arm to the light. Rayner's squinting face appeared when the expensive sheets slid down to his pajamaed chest. Confusion predictably turned to panic, then he was fumbling in his nightstand drawer and pointing a shaking revolver in Tim's direction.
Tim clicked off the flashlight. A silence. Rayner reached over and turned on the lamp, illuminating the nightstand telephone with a sleek accompanying recording device Tim had seen previously only in the homes of Secret Service acquaintances. Rayner's face, sweaty and tense, relaxed. "Jesus, you scared the hell out of me. I thought you'd call."
Tim's eyes went to the recording device by the phone, positioned to capture his acceptance call. If Tim ever got inconvenient, Rayner could edit the recording however he pleased and drop it in the wrong hands. Not-so-mutual assured destruction.
At Rayner's voice the bulge in the bed beside him wriggled up out of the sheets. Her face was sleepy and full, her dark hair lank and down across her eyes. Though Rayner's face was colored to the ears, she didn't look the least bit scared or embarrassed. A bit pleased, maybe, which didn't surprise Tim from what he knew of her. Rayner was still frozen with shock, gun clutched in both hands like an unruly garden hose.
"These are my conditions," Tim said. "Number one: I get uncomfortable--the least bit uncomfortable--and the deal is off. I walk. Number two: I have full operational control. If anyone on my team starts stretching their britches, I reserve the right to slap them back into place. Number three: Stop pointing that gun at my head." He waited for Rayner to comply, then continued. "Number four: My privacy is to be respected. As you can see, it doesn't feel so nice when the shoe's on the other foot. Number five: I've already taken the .357 you tempted me with the other night, and I'm keeping it. Number six: First meeting of the Commission will be in the conference room downstairs, tomorrow night at twenty hundred hours. Inform the others."
the Kill Clause (2003) Page 14