The phone rang.
“Hello.”
Verdi’s Requiem blared at him again.
8
Y OU ’ RE NEVER HOME ,” a thickly accented, gravelly voice said.
Coltrane’s skin tingled. “What? Who is this?”
“The judge.”
“Mitch?” Jennifer was alarmed by the look on Coltrane’s face. “What’s the matter?”
“Now listen to me, you sick bastard,” Coltrane said into the phone. “Quit calling me and—”
“There’ll come a time when you’ll wish with all your heart that the only thing I had done was phone you.” The voice sounded like pebbles being rattled in a cardboard cup. “Jennifer is correct about saying her prayers more often.”
Coltrane’s scalp prickled. “How did you know she said—”
“The day of wrath will dissolve the world in ashes when I appear and all things are scattered.”
Coltrane’s entire body felt as if an electrical current had surged through him. He spun to stare at the living room, his alarmed expression making Jennifer and Daniel more startled. “You’ve got a microphone in here?”
The voice chuckled, its crustiness reminding Coltrane of a boot stomping dried mud. “Oh, I’ve got much more than that in your apartment. Go up to your bedroom. I’ve left you some souvenirs.”
The connection was broken.
9
C OLTRANE FELT SUSPENDED BETWEEN HEARTBEATS . Abruptly he dropped the phone and raced toward the stairs in the kitchen.
“Mitch, what’s the matter? Who was that?” Jennifer’s urgent questions overlapped with Daniel’s, their footsteps pounding on the stairs behind him.
He reached the upper corridor and ran past the door to his darkroom, then the door to the bathroom, at once slowing, afraid of what he would find in his bedroom. When he looked cautiously in, what greeted him made him feel as if a hand was pressed against his chest and was shoving him backward.
The bedroom was arranged in a parody of the display he had set up for Jennifer and Daniel downstairs in the living room. Photographs were everywhere, on the floor, the bureau, the bedside tables, the bed itself. Eight-by-tens, the same dimension as the photographs from Packard’s view camera. But even at a distance, Coltrane could tell that these photographs were too grainy to have been taken with a view camera. They were blowups from a 35-mm negative. What they depicted, though, made up for their lack of detail.
Jennifer and Daniel crowded behind him.
“What’s going on?” Daniel asked. “Who was that on the phone?”
Coltrane didn’t answer. Muscles compacting, he entered, stepping between photographs, staring down, then all around.
“This is insane,” Jennifer said.
Image after image showed Coltrane setting up the view camera, taking photographs of the houses in Packard’s series or of the people and places he had encountered as he followed Packard’s route. There was even a photograph of him and Jennifer saying good-bye to Diane in the rhododendron-lined driveway of her parents’ estate. Another showed Coltrane at the trailer court in Glendale as he photographed the young black woman pushing the boy in the swing. Wherever he had gone in the last two weeks, someone had been following him, taking his picture.
“When we said good-bye to Diane, I didn’t notice anybody on the street taking pictures of us,” Jennifer said.
“With a telephoto lens, the camera could have been a block away.”
He turned toward the bed, toward images of a backhoe dropping jumbled bones into a rock pulverizer while a bandy-legged, barrel-chested, beefy-faced man watched, his huge hands braced on his hips, his drooping mustache raised in a smile of satisfaction.
“These are the photos I saw in Newsweek,” Daniel said.
“No,” Coltrane said. “You never saw these photos. This set was never published.” Fearing he might throw up, he took a tentative step toward a dismaying object braced against the bed’s headboard—all the photographs seemed to be arranged to draw attention to that spot. “They couldn’t have been published. The negatives were in a camera I lost on a cliff while I was trying to escape from . . . This camera. Someone found it and developed the negatives.”
He stared again at the photographs of the barrel-chested man watching with delight as the rock pulverizer spewed out chunks of bones. The freshly healed wound in his side throbbed.
“Dragan Ilkovic,” Coltrane said.
“What did you say?” Daniel asked.
Fire seemed to shoot through Coltrane’s nervous system. “We have to hurry. Jennifer, grab all these photos. Daniel, get the ones downstairs. Now! It isn’t safe in here! We have to get out!”
10
T HE CRIMSON RAYS OF SUNSET haloed six sweat-slicked men playing basketball. They dodged, ducked, and pivoted with amazingly deft precision, throwing, leaping, dunking, matching one another’s points. Four of the men were black. All were approximately Coltrane’s age—mid-thirties. They played with such concentration and enthusiasm that the past and the future didn’t matter, only now and only the game.
Coltrane watched from concrete bleachers on the street side of one of the many basketball courts at Muscle Beach in Venice. Behind him, bicyclists and roller skaters floated by. Ahead, the sunset-tinted ocean silhouetted the players. It was like watching expressionistic dancers on a stage. A moment later, the sun slipped a degree too low, shadows deepened, and the players faced one another, bending forward, hands on their knees, chests heaving as the ball rebounded off the backboard, missed the hoop, and bounced among them.
“Can’t hit a hoop I can’t see.”
“Never mind the hoop. I can’t see the ball.”
“Hey, you can’t quit now. We’re only two points from beating you.”
“Next time, bro. It’s your turn to buy the beers.”
“It’s always my turn.”
As the group headed past a palm tree toward the walkway, one of the black men said, “Go on without me. There’s a guy over here I have to talk to.”
“See you next week.”
Joking with one another, comparing shots, the group avoided two skateboarders and headed toward a café along the walkway.
Coltrane stood from the empty bleachers and approached.
The black man reached into a gym bag, pulled out a towel, and dried the sweat on his face.
“Greg.”
“Mitch.”
They shook hands.
Coltrane was six feet tall. The man he had come to see was two inches taller. They were both about the same weight—two hundred pounds. Coltrane’s hair was curly and sand-colored, long enough in back that it hung to his collar. In contrast, the man he spoke to had wiry dark hair cut close to his scalp. Both had strong, attractive features, but the black man’s were broader and gave the impression of having been carved from ebony, whereas Coltrane’s seemed chipped from granite.
“Just happened to be passing by?” Greg looped the towel around his neck and tugged his sweatshirt from his chest.
A cool December breeze gusted off the ocean and made Coltrane shiver. “Don’t I wish. I phoned your house. Your wife told me where you’d be.”
“I get the feeling you didn’t drop by to catch up on old times.”
“Afraid not.” Coltrane held up a box. “Got something I want you to look at.”
Greg frowned at the box, redirected his attention toward Coltrane, and sighed. “Come on up to the house. Lois will be glad to see you again. You can stay for supper.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Oh?”
“The kind of trouble I’ve got, you don’t know what I might bring with me to your house.”
11
G REG ’ S LAST NAME WAS B ASS . He was a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. Coltrane had met him two years earlier when the L.A. Times Sunday Magazine had asked him to do a photo essay on the police department’s Threat Management Unit, the only law-enforcement squad in the United States devoted
exclusively to stalkers. What had attracted the L.A. Times was that, because of the clandestine nature of their harassment, stalkers were sometimes described as “invisible criminals.” The idea was that a photographer as inventive and accomplished as Coltrane could perhaps make some stalkers very visible.
Coltrane’s liaison at the Threat Management Unit had turned out to be Greg, and over the course of the assignment, they had developed a friendship, Coltrane earning Greg’s respect by being of considerable help to one of the many terrified women the Threat Management Unit was trying to protect. By lying in the bushes outside the woman’s home several nights in a row, Coltrane had managed to capture a picture of the woman’s heretofore-unknown harasser—a man she had dated twice five years earlier—as he dumped gasoline on the woman’s lawn at three in the morning. The stalker had gone to prison for eighteen months. Since then, Coltrane had helped Greg on three other cases.
They sat facing each other in the back booth of a tavern. Both of them sipped Budweiser, neither of them speaking, while Greg finished assessing the last photograph, thought about them, stacked them, and put them back into the box.
“So basically you’re telling me that this guy thinks it’s cool to tie people’s hands behind their back with baling wire, line them up facing a pit, and shoot them in the back of the head so they topple forward into the pit and nobody has to move the bodies to bury them. Sounds like he and Hitler would have been pals.”
“Except that Hitler was a Nazi. Ilkovic came out of the Communist system when Bosnia was part of Yugoslavia, so Stalin would probably be closer to his ideal.”
“Politics as an excuse for mass murder.” Greg shook his head.
“Ilkovic worked his way up through the Communist system, learned English, and was trained to be a diplomat. For a time, he was stationed at the Yugoslavian consulate in London. As thugs go, he’s very sophisticated. Not to mention calculating. As soon as the Soviet system collapsed, he went back to what is now Bosnia and took advantage of the civil war. He gained his power base by urging the Serbs not to just win the war but to exterminate the enemy. I suppose he figured that after the Serbs killed all the Muslims, he could get them to eradicate the other ethnic group in the region, the Croats. Then the Serbs would control all of Bosnia, and since he controlled the Serbs . . . Meanwhile, Bosnia became his private killing field.”
“I bet he loved every minute of it. Dragan Ilkovic. Quite a mouthful. And you’ve got this bastard after you because you took pictures that linked him to war crimes and ruined his chances of controlling Bosnia’s government.”
“It’s kind of hard to rule a country when you’re in prison because of crimes against humanity,” Coltrane said.
“Except he isn’t in prison,” Greg said. “He’s here in Los Angeles, looking to pay you back.”
12
A MBULANCE ATTENDANTS HURRIED TO PUSH A YOUNG MAN ON a gurney into the emergency ward. The young man had an oxygen mask over his face. His chest, which wasn’t moving, was covered with blood.
Coltrane got out of their way, then followed through electronically controlled glass doors that hissed shut behind him. Two nurses and a physician rushed to the young man on the gurney, guiding him into a cubicle, tugging a curtain shut, casting urgent shadows as other nurses and physicians worked on other patients in other cubicles and more patients huddled on benches along the walls.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Coltrane turned toward a weary-looking bespectacled woman who wore a green hospital top and held a clipboard.
“Are you hurt? Do you need . . .” Her voice dropped as she studied him and couldn’t see anything obviously wrong.
“I’m looking for Dr. Gibson.”
At that moment, Daniel—his red hair emphasized by the greens he wore—came out of a cubicle and walked quickly toward a counter in the middle of the area.
“There. I have to see him for a moment.”
“Sir, you’ll have to wait your turn. There are patients ahead of you who—”
“Daniel.”
Hearing his name, Daniel turned. “Mitch?” Frowning, he came over. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to you.”
Daniel’s frown deepened with puzzlement. “I just finished with a patient.” He cocked his head toward the approaching wail of an ambulance outside. “Typically busy Saturday night. This’ll have to be quick.”
Daniel guided him through a door and into a stairwell. The door banged shut, echoing.
“I won’t be home for the next couple of days. Maybe weeks,” Coltrane said. “I wanted you to know so you wouldn’t worry.”
“A photo shoot?” Daniel sounded hopeful.
“No, the guy who broke into my apartment while we were out this afternoon.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“I just got finished talking to a friend who’s with the LAPD antistalking unit. He says if this guy could plant a bug in my living room, what’s to stop him from planting a bomb? I’m not supposed to go home—not until this creep is caught.”
“But who knows how long . . . Where will you go?”
“I’m not sure. If I need to reach you, I’ll leave a message for you here at the hospital. The reason I didn’t leave a message this time, Daniel, is that my friend also had some advice for you. I wanted to give it to you in person.”
Daniel looked uneasy.
“I don’t think you should go back to your apartment,” Coltrane said. “This guy can as easily break into your place as mine. He might decide to pay you a visit and find out where I’ve gone.”
“But you haven’t told me where you’re going.”
“He doesn’t know that. Tell the hospital you need some time off. Take a lot of streets at random and watch for any headlights following you. When you’re sure you’re safe, get out of town. Maybe in a couple of days my friend will have caught him, and you can come back. But Daniel, listen to me. No matter how much you’re tempted, don’t stay with a friend.”
Daniel paled as he understood the implications.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” Coltrane said. “But I can’t tell you how sorry I am that I put you at risk.”
The stairwell door banged open. “Doctor, we need—”
“Yes.” Daniel hurried back to the din of the emergency ward. “Jennifer.” He looked back. “What about—”
“I’m on my way to warn her.”
13
W HEN THE HEADLIGHTS OF A CAR VEERED OFF B EVERLY G LEN Boulevard onto Knob Hill Drive, Coltrane watched from where his Blazer was parked among other cars in the darkness at the side of the road. In this secluded residential area of Sherman Oaks, there was almost no traffic at 10:00 P . M ., even on a Saturday. This was only the third set of lights in the past fifteen minutes. Identifying Jennifer’s BMW as it slowed on a curve and passed him, Coltrane redirected his attention toward the entrance to this street. One minute became two, then three. After five minutes, Coltrane decided that if Ilkovic had been following her, other headlights would certainly have appeared by now. Picking up his car phone, he pressed the numbers for Jennifer’s car phone, let it ring three times, and broke the connection, the signal to Jennifer that it was safe for her to keep descending into the valley and wait for him at the Sherman Oaks Recreation Center. He didn’t speak on the car phone because Greg had emphasized how easy it was for someone to use an audioscanner to overhear conversations on that type of phone.
The recreation center’s arc-lit parking lot was almost deserted as Coltrane pulled up next to Jennifer’s BMW. Her blond hair was suddenly visible, catching the glare of the security lights as she scrambled into his Blazer.
She hugged him tightly. “You’ve got me scared to death. What’s going on? Why the pay phone? Why did you ask me to meet you here?”
Coltrane had called her at home in Marina del Rey and told her to go to a specific phone booth near the docks, where he had gone earlier and noted the number. When she’d had enough time to
get there, he had called from another pay phone in the area, telling her the route he wanted her to drive.
“You think my phone’s tapped?”
“I assume mine is,” Coltrane said. “Hell, my apartment’s bugged, so why not my phone? Why not Daniel’s? Why not yours?” Coltrane summarized his conversation with Greg. “We’re away from our homes so much, getting in and bugging our phones wouldn’t be hard to do. It’s a logical thing for Ilkovic to try, to keep pressure on me by knowing everything I’m up to.”
Hating what he had to say next, Coltrane hesitated. “Greg says that Ilkovic might be tempted to use you to get at me.”
Jennifer looked at him sharply.
“He thinks you’re at risk. He says you ought to stay away from your condo for a while.”
“What?”
“He says we ought to keep away from each other. When Ilkovic can’t figure out where I’ve gone—”
“Where you’ve gone?”
“I’m going to disappear, Jennifer. When Ilkovic can’t figure out where, he’ll probably follow you, hoping that you’ll lead him to me. Or he might decide to do worse, to force you to tell him what you know, even if it isn’t anything. There isn’t a choice. You’ve got to disappear, too.”
Jennifer pressed her hands against her stomach. “I thought I was scared driving over here, but that’s nothing compared with what I’m feeling now. My God, there’s got to be a . . . Where do you plan to hide?”
Coltrane didn’t answer.
“I’m going with you,” Jennifer said.
“But you just heard me explain—”
“It makes more sense for both of us to disappear together. That way, we don’t have to worry if he’ll be following me. He won’t be able to use me to get at you. We’ll both be safe while your friend tries to catch him.”
“I’m not sure that . . .”
“Mitch, this isn’t about crowding you. It’s about survival.”
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