Overfall sw-1

by David Dun

  “I’ll worry about the moral and ethical quagmire after we rescue my brother.”

  “Uh-huh. My clients tend to look at it that way.”

  Next Sam showed her the bunk rooms. For the women there were twenty bunks, dressing rooms, four tiled baths, and color. The room was cocoa with white trim, art and photos on the walls, dressers with wooden name placards, a wooden bookcase with some books and more photos.

  “Now for the men.”

  Although the color was the same and the baths were similarly tiled but with boy blue, there was no art or photographs; metal lockers stood in place of solid hardwood dressers, benches instead of chairs. It was much smaller, and the eight bunks were crammed together.

  “Maybe you should ask the girls to fix up the boys’ place,” Anna said.

  “Yeah. Maybe.”

  “Inside you’re saying ‘Go to hell.’ ”

  “It’s a place to sleep. When you’re awake enough to enjoy the scenery, you’re supposed to be outworking or on your way home.”

  “I knew it.”

  “And what were you talking to my mother about?”

  “I’m way too sleepy and I’m going to go try one of the pretty bunks in the girls’ room.”

  “This smells like revenge.”

  “You can handle it.”

  They walked down the hall to the larger dorm. Anna stepped inside and turned around.

  Sam gave her a peck on the cheek.

  “Not truly an inspirational kiss. But nice nevertheless.”

  Sam turned to leave, anxious to get back to work. And somehow he didn’t like what had just happened to him. Turning, he walked back to her. As if she were expecting it, his lips met hers and their tongues explored their passion, which he found considerable.

  “I shouldn’t be doing that,” he said. “But the only thing that seemed worse was not doing it.”

  “Sam?”

  “Yeah?” He stopped as he turned to leave.

  “Now that I’ve seen where you work, I want to see where you live.”

  Early in the morning Anna rose and found Sam sleepy-eyed and hunching over a cup of coffee in front of a computer screen. There was a certain oddity in this sculpted gym rat staring wide-eyed at dull narratives and mind-numbing details about lists of people that probably had nothing to do with anything that mattered. Sam was a jock in geek land, she thought. The entire main portion of the office was a myriad of computer screens, server lines, and phone lines, information coming in from France, Lebanon, and other faraway places, all supposedly relating in some manner either to her brother or to the men who seemingly had controlled him.

  “Come to my place for brunch,” she said, watching him as he pointed and clicked.

  “Okay,” he said. “I’m going to get a few winks in the boys’ room.”

  “I’ll take a cab. And I’ll see you at eleven,” she said.

  She had decided to remain in her Los Angeles home for the duration of the hunt for Jason. Like many other houses in Hollywood Hills, it was large and white and stucco with a red-tiled roof, something of a standard formula for the area. Individuality in the architecture of such mansions lay in shapes, corners, windows, what was round and what was square.

  This house had two stories and about four thousand feet per story, with a third-floor lookout turret in which she occasionally read. The view from the tower was of brown hills and other white adobe red-tile-roofed homes. The turret had a bar that she seldom used because she drank only wine and the occasional Tom Collins. The house had a screening room, a library, a family room, a gathering room, and a living room. Most of the time she lived her life in the family room-kitchen area.

  After arriving home she slept again. At 10:30 she awoke and looked at the luminescent red numbers on the clock atop the TV cabinet. Startled, she sat upright trying to think about homemade granola and what she would wear and what Sam would think.

  She walked to the kitchen and crawled up on a stool overlooking the granite kitchen bar. She noticed that the pattern in the granite sort of shimmied, and hoped it wasn’t some weird neurological problem.

  On the counter was an article about Steven Spielberg and the history of his moviemaking career including his youthful efforts at filmmaking. The man’s passion for the craft appeared relentless. Next to the article was Atonement, a novel that began with Briony’s passion for her play. Because she was just a child, Briony’s passion was unmetered by doubt. Anna could connect both with Spielberg and Briony.

  Anna’s mother, being a Catholic, taught her that the chief end of man was to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. For Anna that seemed a distant way to define her life and not quite close enough to the pavement. Life for Anna was founded on a first truth. It was at once a revelation and a premise. The chief end of man was to make responsible use of his freedom.

  In Anna’s mind people had the best chance of squeezing the most out of their choices if they focused their attention on just a very few simple things. Sometimes only one or two.

  Such focused attention on a single detail of life was what Anna called passion and it was the bedrock of her being. Great lives could be formed around many kinds of passion: a passion for God, or the expression of man’s woes and triumphs as in art or theater. It could be growing roses in the backyard or being a good steward of some treasure.

  If she had a steely spine, as some said, it was only her passion for a single simple thing. She wanted to use her lips, her body, and her mind to tell great stories. There were, of course, obstacles, and steel spines were good for overcoming them.

  Now it was occurring to her that one passion might not be enough. Perhaps a second could be fit into the stuff of her life and she might use her freedom to cultivate this second passion as well, but as yet it had not been made simple. That was a prerequisite. She knew that a part of finding her second passion was in turning around Jason’s life and the damage she had done. She was deeply suspicious that this second passion might also be related to getting to know the right man.

  As she pondered Sam’s visit, her old impatience to help her brother returned. The phone rang.

  “I’m on my way.” It was Sam on his cell phone.

  “Great. You like granola?”

  “Yep.”

  “Have you learned anything?”

  “Hal hasn’t finished looking. I did learn something interesting, though. Tell you when I get there. Not on a cell phone.”

  “Well, hurry up, Sam.”

  Despite her anxiety over Jason, she felt a strong sense of anticipation that Sam was coming. She found herself looking in the mirror pondering her hair, and the complete lack of any makeup. She could wear a thick robe or a thin one, silken or soft and shapeless. She daubed Joy perfume and felt completely ridiculous, then began with her hair. After a few minutes she figured it was decent. Going to the “old and comfortable” section of the closet, she grabbed a Lands End terry-cloth robe.

  In her closet there were two full-length mirrors. She looked at herself and thought about Sam, his cool good looks, his easy confidence.

  “Damn,” she muttered, walking back to the bathroom, brushing her hair more vigorously and applying a little rouge before the doorbell rang. When she started getting a crush on a man it didn’t matter about Oscars, or the adoration of millions, it mattered only about the one.

  She trotted back to the closet, put the terry-cloth robe on a hook, and grabbed a Donna Karan robe instead. Blue with gold trim. Stylish but not steamy.

  “You nut,” she said aloud as she glanced in the mirror one last time.

  When she arrived at the entry she found Sam wearing a leather coat, a gray sport shirt, and black pants.

  “Hi,” he said, and kissed her cheek.

  There was only a brief, slightly disappointing hug. Something was on his mind. With other normally inscrutable men, a few actually, she could feel their mood when they walked past. It occurred to her that most such men had either been her lovers or were related to her.


  Suddenly she had a hunch about what-other than her brother’s disappearance, dead friends, and a wounded pilot-might be bothering Sam.

  “You’re worried about the kiss. That’s so touching.”

  “Touching?”

  “You’re afraid of hurting me.”

  There was just a ripple across Sam’s cool.

  “And you came all the way out here to talk about it.”

  Sam looked at her, saying nothing, knowing that there were many weak words and few that were strong. He could talk about his need for privacy and that would be nearly indistinguishable from whining. Reasoning would be obvious and trivial, for there would be no logic on this subject that hadn’t already occurred to her.

  So he watched her. As he did he noticed the brown amber of her eyes, and the way she half smiled but without the usual confidence. Normally there was a great evocative force to her personality, but she was not using it. Instead she seemed like an accomplished but vulnerable woman. Once again her hair was studied chaos with even more curly ringlets. There was a softness about her that made him want to crush her in his arms and whisper things. He could imagine that she would giggle softly in his ear and tease him with her fingers.

  Apparently on impulse she stepped forward and kissed him, tentatively at first, then a little harder. Sam responded, then stopped.

  “So?”

  “I suppose we should… I know I kissed you yesterday and it was good. And this was better. But I’m thinking that until we get this figured out…”

  She kissed him again, her tongue like a butterfly, her lips firm. He let his arms stay around her for a long moment, then released her.

  “That was just one for the road until you get it worked out,” she said.

  “You’re an amazing woman.”

  “And?”

  “We’ve got to put your brother first. This… kind of thing will slow us down.”

  “I see.”

  “What do you see?”

  “That must be the right thing-keeping our relationship professional. It’s just that…” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Well, of course I understand.” She gnawed on her lip. “I still expect you to accompany me to the studio party.” But she smiled when she said it so that he knew it was a tease and not a weight around his neck.

  “I have been thinking about it. Maybe I could take you. Maybe you could say I was like the friendly security man or something. But it’s still a bad idea.”

  “Shall I take that as a complete capitulation?” she joked.

  “And might we add the little detail that you will never consider talking about me? I mean other than the security-man story at the party.”

  She batted her eyes to tease him. “You are as safe with me as I am with you.” She kissed him on the cheek and ran her hand over his bicep. “So what were you going to tell me? Your tone suggested something important. You talk while I start on the granola.”

  Using a mixture of oats and almond and walnut fragments, she ladled on some canola oil and some honey, spread it on a pan, and popped it into the hot oven to bake.

  “You’ve been asking about my former love interest,” Sam said.

  “I’m busted. Peter is a statesman and a snitch. But this can’t be what you were going to tell me.”

  Sam paused and thought about how to approach it There was a tension in her body.

  “To understand about our latest discovery you need to understand about my former love interest. And the death of my son.”

  She had heard the tone of his voice change-her eyes showed it. She sat down. He joined her.

  “It was an assignment. Suzanne King-you know enough about her, I assume?” She nodded. “Suzanne had a stalker. He was coming onto her property and taking pictures. Even intimate pictures. My son and I set a trap at her house to catch him…”

  Twenty-seven

  A droplet of sweat hit the yellow pad, slightly fuzzing the blue line on which it landed. Sunlight through ten-foot windows was broiling Sam alive, and the flak jacket under his shirt exacerbated the effect.

  He pressed his eye to the camcorder that scanned the gardens, large veranda, and pool. The kidney-shaped Olympic-size swimming pool lay translucent blue-the South Seas hue created by tiny square ceramic tiles laid across its bottom.

  Suzanne, who rarely consented to wear less than one-piece bathing attire in her movies, swam in a thong bikini, doing a slow crawl with perfect form, just as her father, now deceased, had taught her. The August sun beat on her tawny arms and glistened her splashes. Sam found her as beautiful as any woman ever created by God or gazed upon by man.

  Sam’s son, Bud, moved along the terraced hillside among the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, myrica, sunflowers, japonica, and lilacs, looking for the same thing that now eluded Sam.

  Every inch of Sam remained totally alert. Three feet away was the door to the veranda, cracked open. He had been very clear with Suzanne that there was an element of danger. Personally he didn’t like using this seminude swim as bait. For some time he had felt that Suzanne’s stalker was mentally deteriorating. It was evident in the notes sent by this strange left-handed peekaboo artist. The laws of testosterone, buttressed by the shoe size of the print in the garden, dictated that it was a man fond of composing his notes with letters clipped from magazines.

  The intimate and candid pictures the stalker had taken of Suzanne, and thereafter shared with her and others on the Internet, were at once compelling in their beauty and composition and at the same time chilling. It was inconceivable that someone could get so close so frequently and remain undetected. There was no technology to be found, no miniature cameras or telescopic lenses, on the premises. Sam had been careful to search.

  Judging from the angle of the sun apparent in the photographs, the stalker made his daylight forays around 2:00 in the afternoon. One picture had been shot through the louvers ventilating the dressing room in the poolhouse complex-a striking nude. Sam had received a disturbed look from Suzanne when he jokingly complimented her. Sam was always serious, but seldom acted that way except at moments of peak vulnerability for his clients; when they wept he tended to ease up on the dry humor.

  In searching for the stalker they had considered gardeners, housekeepers-anyone with regular access. They had all checked out negative.

  At one end of the pool were small boulders and palms, at the other end marble statues of recent vintage amongst solid granite tables with blue and yellow parasols. To the far side of the pool, similar tables were placed under a massive pergola eighty feet long by fifteen wide and thick with vine-sprung leaves.

  Hills the color of wheat were set off by an occasional dark-barked green-leafed oak-except in places like this estate, where gardeners used irrigation and soil amendments to defy the earth and climate. This ten-million-dollar home had been constructed on a natural bench carefully groomed with brick-fronted terraces in the Hollywood Hills.

  Sam used his camera to scan the four-thousand-square-foot poolhouse annex, then swept up the hillside until he saw the boulders and palms on the far left. Monotonously he repeated the sweep, stopping every minute or so to look with his naked eye. It wasn’t enough to see the intruder; Sam had to capture his presence on film. That way the local police, who were at this point thoroughly buffaloed, could be convinced that they were looking for something more than one of Suzanne’s publicity stunts. Sam believed her. But even he was finding it taxing.

  Normally he would farm out this sort of chase-’em-down job to someone like Shohei, or with a little more training from Shohei, perhaps his son, Bud. Usually his contracts were far more sophisticated than catching a clever stalker. But this fellow had so successfully eluded authorities and private detectives that Suzanne had finally persuaded Sam to solve her problem, paying his rather extraordinary fees.

  More than anything else this stalker was patient, willing to wait weeks to get a single good photo. Last time, the final straw, he had photographed Suzanne painting her toenails in the bedroom. C
arefully reviewing all the photos and the dates when they were apparently taken, Sam concluded that the man had a penchant for sneaking around the day before a full-moon night. Everything about this case was utterly bizarre. Sam knew they were dealing with a badly twisted mind, and it worried him.

  He studied the buildings, the grounds, the pool, squinted, and did it again. Nothing.

  The stalker seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing when to arrive. Suzanne, wanting to end it, thought the swim in the scanty suit, the day before a full moon, would make marvelous bait if the stalker had any means of observing it.

  Sam had placed banks of infrared motion detectors and video cameras. Suzanne kept a dog, Grendel, making it seemingly impossible for a stranger to enter the grounds without triggering either a red blinking light on Sam’s control panel or a yapping dog alert.

  But there was something Sam hadn’t figured out and he knew it. This guy had an edge that nobody understood.

  Sam picked up the radio. “Bud, come back.” While he waited he made another sweep with the video.

  Sam had hoped Bud would be drawn to a slightly more intellectual calling, but it was not to be. Bud liked the most literal side of fighting bad guys and there was no dissuading him. Close all their lives, Bud and Sam were inseparable. They both loved the daredevil stuff in their spare time and more often than not did it together.

  Because he’d had longer to work at it, Sam was by most measures stronger than Bud, but at forty he was no longer faster. “Come back, Bud,” he spoke again into the microphone, slightly concerned. Nothing. Bud was normally back to him in three seconds. Maybe bad radio. Just then, Grendel the Doberman began an ugly bark in the dense garden behind the poolhouse.