Even if he is taking his sweet time, Luke’s still confident there’s not a chance he’ll strike here or anywhere else inside the airport. The minute he stepped off that shuttle, he gave up all hope of an abduction.
So what is he doing?
They arrive at the entrance to another security checkpoint.
Pemberton slows. So does everyone else around him. They’re pausing to debate whether or not this is the checkpoint for their gate. Digging in their bags and purses for their photo IDs. Using the little crowd as cover, Pemberton slips into the nearest restroom. Luke pauses, looking for some way to look busy without having to commit to any of the actual rituals of travel.
He walks past the bathroom, then out the nearest exit. There’s a wall of glass that allows him to see the bathroom entrance when he doubles back. Once inside again, he walks up to the spot where travelers are showing their IDs to the TSA agent, looks up at the nearest bank of arrival and departure screens. Then he looks back and forth between the screens and his burner phone as if he’s comparing what he sees on each.
After ten minutes of this, and no sign of Pemberton, he needs a new charade. There’s no Starbucks, no magazine stands, no stores of any kind this side of security, so it won’t be easy. And there’s still a good chance the guy’s about to fall into the security line and board a long flight. Maybe he checked in online. But why get off the shuttle at a stop so far from his gate? Why walk two and a half terminals first?
He almost misses the man who emerges from the bathroom. And that’s the idea, apparently. It’s Pemberton, but the fisherman’s hat and cream-colored outfit is gone. Now he’s in black running pants, a black baseball cap, and a black windbreaker with white stripes on the arms. He’s also added a pair of thick-framed glasses, and he’s moving at a different speed. Not rushed but clipped. He changed not only outfits but also demeanors; Strolling Leisure Traveler has been replaced by Just Landed and Have an Appointment First Thing in the Morning Traveler.
Luke follows him down the escalator to the arrivals level.
If he changes cars again, I’m gonna grind my teeth to dust, he thinks.
Pemberton heads to the nearest taxi line. Luke allows some space to develop between them, then joins the line himself. Is Pemberton actually going to get in a cab? At this point Luke wouldn’t be surprised if the guy whipped out a saxophone and began playing tunes for change.
The burner phone buzzes in his pocket.
It’s Charley. Update?
Luke types, Walked two terminals. Never checked in. Changed outfits in a restroom. Now he’s in the taxi line.
Charley answers, He’s going home.
How do you know?
There’s only four people between Pemberton and the head of the line now. What should he do once Pemberton gets inside a cab and leaves the curb? In this day and age, if you tell a cabdriver to follow another cab, he probably calls the cops on you.
No e-mails from airlines or travel agencies on his computer. And he’s scheduled for surgery tomorrow at 11:00 a.m. He’s going home. Trust me. Come back.
Bailey, he thinks. Someday soon he’ll get used to the fact his brother can see into almost every corner of the world.
You sure? he types. I don’t want all this to be for nothing.
It wasn’t, she answers. We found his next abduction site.
“So all of this was just to plant the getaway car?” Luke asks.
After taking the shuttle back to the parking lot and planting the tracker on the Camry, he and Charley are sitting in his parked Jeep. He wants to be more relaxed than he is, but the fact that Pemberton’s slipped off into the night has left him with a weight in the pit of his stomach. He’s not as convinced as Charley is that the guy went back to Newport Beach.
He’s angled the rearview mirror so he can see part of the Camry’s roof.
“Just?” she asks. “It’s probably the most important part of his plan. Look at it this way, a parking lot like this, same-day entry and exit’s going to be suspicious, and it’ll be the first thing they look for on the cameras once they figure out the abduction happened here. This way, the car stays here for several days like the rest of them, and when he rolls through the exit, presumably with his victim in the trunk, it looks like he’s coming home after a trip.”
“With you in the trunk, you mean. Presumably awake, since twenty milligrams of Xanax has no effect on you.”
“Yep.”
“Why not just fight him off here in the parking lot? Why let him take you all the way back to Temecula?”
“Remember the plan?”
“Overpower him; restrain him. Leave him right next to the evidence of his crimes.”
“Yep. I can’t do that here. Best I can do is scare the shit out of him.”
“Or kill him.”
“Which I’m not interested in doing,” she says sharply.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“I didn’t say you did. This is about stopping him. This is about making sure it’s me he pulls out of this lot and not someone else, not someone who doesn’t have my . . . abilities.”
He remembers a little speech she made the other night about how she wanted to stare into Pemberton’s eyes and enjoy the fear there when the man realizes she’s the end of him, but no sense bringing that up now.
But is there any way to point out to her that, yes, there is an easier way to do this? She could overpower him here in the lot. They could call the cops. Once the cops realized they had an attempted abduction on their hands, they’d haul him in, have cause to search his houses.
You didn’t agree to stop Pemberton, he tells himself. You agreed to help her do whatever she wanted, so here you are, hotshot. Enjoy the ride.
“I don’t know,” he finally says, surprised to hear he’s kept his thoughts from shaking his tone. “You really think this parking lot is where he’s going to strike next?”
“Well, what else was he doing tonight?”
“Setting up his escape plan if he’s about to get caught. I don’t know. It just seems crowded here.”
“Look around. It’s one of the biggest and the cheapest lots. Almost every other light’s burned out, and I haven’t seen a single security patrol since you left. Just a bunch of exhausted people, most of them smelling like cheap airline booze, stumbling off that shuttle bus every time it pulls up and walking to their cars in the dark. This is why he drove clear across SoCal tonight, Luke. It’s why he switched cars, walked half of LAX, changed outfits. Because this is his next abduction site.”
“Maybe. Why go to the terminal at all?”
“Shuttle stop’s got a camera on it. Look.” He follows the direction of her finger; she’s right. “If he pulls in and never boards the shuttle, that looks suspicious. If he hails a taxi close to the airport but not at the airport, that’s also suspicious, and something a cabdriver might remember later. If he goes straight to the taxi line without changing clothes, he’ll stand out when they review the footage. I’m telling you, Luke, tonight we saw firsthand why this guy doesn’t end up on cameras unless he wants to. Everything he’s done is about blending into crowds. Going with the flow. Not popping out later when some cop has to watch thirty-some-odd hours of surveillance footage. And he has to do all this because of his face. It’s distinctive and weird. The nose doesn’t match the rest of it. It’s the kind of thing a lone cabdriver late at night might remember later, especially if the pickup place is odd. But in a crowd, in a cap and glasses, he just blends in.”
“So he ends up on camera. They just don’t notice him when they review the footage.”
“Exactly.”
Neither of them says anything for a while.
“He’s smart. He’s resourceful. He has money and means, which gives him time to plan. And he’s figured out a way to get his message across to the public without escalating his crimes. In other words, he is the worst-case scenario when it comes to a serial killer.”
“And it looks like we’re about to get
him,” he says.
Maybe it isn’t the first time he’s seen her smile since they were reunited, but it certainly feels that way.
Their burner phones both buzz at the time.
It’s Bailey.
Finally found something in his computer that might help.
39
He’s on the move.
When Luke’s text message arrives, she starts in the direction of the nearest escalator. Friday night at LAX, just after 9:30 p.m. Traffic oozes through the airport’s U-shaped departures level like a mudflow. The worst of it’s outside Tom Bradley International. There, hordes of passengers are arriving to check in early for their overnight flights to Asia, some pushing carts loaded with enough luggage to provide a family of four with a fresh change of clothes for a month. For the past few minutes she’s been weaving through the crowd outside, taking cues from Pemberton’s stroll through nearby terminals several nights before. Trying not to stand out on security cameras in case she has to make another visit tomorrow night.
Now she moves with more determination.
Even though she hasn’t been anywhere near a plane since they got to the airport hours before, she’s dressed like Luke’s idea of a weary college student: a loose-fitting canvas jacket from a thrift store, a baggy green blouse from T.J. Maxx. The blue jeans she wears are from her own wardrobe, but the Velcro tennis shoes are brand-new, bought for the occasion, easy to take on and off at a security checkpoint she’s never going to pass through. The backpack was new once, but it’s also from a thrift store, handpicked because its straps are tattered and it smells of cigarette smoke. The carry-on she pulls is cheap and plain, bought used from one of those stores near the airport that sells off unclaimed luggage, and she’s divided a passel of her own clothes and toiletries between it and the tobacco-infused backpack.
Once she reaches the arrivals level, she starts for the nearest shuttle stop. She’s memorized the location of each one.
An hour and a half before, at the Westin LAX, Pemberton finished up a talk on how platelet-rich infusions can provide contours during facial surgery. Even though his next conference event isn’t until Sunday at 3:00 p.m.—he’s listed as a “special guest” at the closing night cocktail party—he reserved a room for both nights with a guaranteed late checkout Sunday evening.
Bailey discovered all this in the doctor’s in-box. Initially he’d searched for e-mails from airlines and travel agencies. When he came up short, he moved on to hotel chains; that’s when he found the hotel reservation and registration info for the SoCal Regional Medical Suppliers Conference. As Luke put it, 8:00 p.m. Friday to 2:00 p.m. Sunday is the red zone; the time when the conditions for the doctor to slip off and make his abduction are ideal. Winnow those down to nighttime hours, when arrivals and departures are steady, and they’ve got a nice, tight window to work in.
And now, according to one of the guys Marty’s stationed around the Westin, the doctor’s on the move.
Which exit did he take? Charley types back.
Point A. It was Luke’s code name for the main entrance.
Earlier that day, she and Luke met Marty and two guys he introduced as his best dudes at a gas station fifteen minutes from the hotel: Trev Rucker, a wiry former marine sniper who seemed to have no use for blinking, and whose new and starchy-looking long-sleeved shirt hid ornate tattoos, and Dave Brasher, a towering, bald-headed wall of muscle who’d apparently learned a mix of patience and perceptiveness doing things Marty didn’t want to mention aside from the fact that they’d earned him a stint in Lompoc. Both men had what Marty called long-term sobriety, and both seemed willing to do anything Marty told them to. Charley cared more about the latter.
The departure of Brasher and Rucker from Temecula has left a crew of three at the surveillance point above the vineyard; one of whom rotates down to the RV at Pala Casino for a five-hour nap before returning to relieve the next in line.
Here at the airport, Brasher’s on Point A, the Westin entrance; Rucker’s on Point B, the hotel’s service entrance connecting to a sidewalk that travels most of the way to the long-term parking lot; and Marty’s at Point C, halfway between the hotel and long-term lot.
Luke’s at Ground Zero, casing the lot on foot, keeping eyes on the brown Camry. As soon as the shuttle she’s about to board gets within striking distance, she’ll text him, and he’ll head back to his Jeep, which is parked inside the lot, and monitor the feed from her contact lenses.
But for now the shuttle is taking its sweet time to show up.
Marty says definitely headed for the lot, comes Luke’s text. All three guys tailing.
Tell them not to get too close.
They know.
Tell them anyway.
K.
She waits, bouncing on her heels, running through everything she doesn’t know.
What’s the Camry’s fate once the abduction’s done? Bailey’s figured out the plates are registered to a woman who died of a stroke at the age of eighty-one last year in Santa Clarita, a woman with no evident connection to Pemberton aside from the license plate. Will Pemberton ditch the car, torch it? Has he used a different car each time? If so, how’s he planning to get back to the hotel for the cocktail reception if he’s got no wheels and his car’s still at the Westin? What a relief it was to have him back in his Cadillac for the drive up from Newport Beach that afternoon. Once again they could follow from a safe distance and use the tracker as a guide. Luke had placed a fresh one under the bumper just before dawn.
In the week since the Camry stash, while Charley and Luke were changing motels to avoid suspicion and Marty was rotating out the guys on his watch crew with actual jobs they had to show up for back in Altamira, Bailey’s tried to fill in the holes in what they know of the doctor’s plan by searching the man’s web history. But he hasn’t turned up anything useful. Charley was hoping he’d find searches for shuttle routes or bus services between potential dump sites for the Camry and the Westin, but as Bailey put it, the guy’s as good at cleaning out his cache as he is at switching cars and abducting women.
That doesn’t mean he hasn’t done the research, though.
But why should she care? If everything goes to plan, Pemberton won’t make it back to the Westin.
Luke texts, Stupid question but you took it, right?
Right when his talk ended. Yeah.
K. How many left?
Six. But I’m sure they’ll give me more if I keep working.
They’re reading these right now. Aren’t they?
Yep. Hi . . . whoever the hell you are.
A few seconds later: Eyes on him. He’s headed for the Camry.
The shuttle’s stuck in traffic two baggage claim entrances away.
Doc’s at the Camry. Pulled some stuff from trunk, got in car. Think it was a jacket. Something else. Just heard from Marty and crew. All lot foot exits covered.
Great, but that asshole’s not leaving that lot on foot, she thinks.
The bus pulls up. The door opens with a hiss. She smiles at the driver as she boards, but he ignores her; already looking for an opening in traffic he can pull in to.
The shuttle’s mostly empty.
They start forward, two more stops before they’re free of the terminal and bound for the long-term lot, and the traffic’s getting thinner the farther they get from the international terminal.
Bus showed up, Luke says.
Not mine. Just got on. Still in terminal.
I know.
Several seats away, a woman frees her pug from its carrier. The dog scans the bus, eyes glassy from whatever drug kept it docile at thirty thousand feet. The question from the man across the aisle about when the dog ate last is too familiar to be chitchat from a stranger; he’s her husband or boyfriend. A few rows up, a mother argues cheerfully with her two young sons about whether or not Xbox is on the agenda when they get home. Apparently the boys didn’t get a lot of rest on the flight from Chicago.
She’s the only single woman on
the bus.
But another bus has just pulled into the lot. And she’s not on it.
He’s on the move, Luke writes. Added a jacket and a baseball cap.
Where he’s going?
Lurking. Checking out ppl coming off shuttle.
Can you see the passengers?
Some.
Women alone?
One.
Then a few seconds later:
He’s going for her.
She feels dread tinged with a disappointment that feels noxiously selfish.
They knew this might happen. They’ve discussed what to do. No way can they stand back and let him abduct another woman. Luke will have to intervene; he’s got his service revolver just in case. He’ll wait till the woman’s in the trunk, draw the gun. Then they’ll have Pemberton on something real; something other than a creepy snatch and grab or attempted assault. It’s not the way they want him, and it’s probably not the show Graydon wants to see. But they’ll stop another murder, and another mask, and maybe that will make this all worth it.
Until it’s time to look for another bad man.
He walked right past her.
Details? she types.
Didn’t come up behind her. Walked toward her. Watching her. She said hi. Very cheerful. He said hi back. That was it. Now he’s headed back to the Camry.
Size?
Tiny. And her car’s in the middle of the lot. Close to his. Sara Pratt, 5’ 6”. Kelley Sumter, 5’ 2”. Why not take her?
Her shuttle lurches toward the second and final terminal stop.
Nobody else gets on.
In terms of arrivals, this is in the in-between zone.
Right now most of the airport’s traffic is international check-ins. In another hour, baggage claim in all the terminals will get swamped with people arriving from points east, folks who took advantage of the time change to enjoy another full day at their destinations before catching the last flight west.
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