The Shadow Hunter

by Michael Prescott

  “Okay.” All standard, so far.

  “Unfortunately, he didn’t go away, as we hoped. Instead, he started writing longer, more in-depth letters, the kind of thing you would send to an intimate friend. They got pretty intense. He sent gifts too.”

  “What sort of gifts?”

  “Jewelry, mostly. Cheap costume stuff. Once he gave her some scented candles, because he’d read that she practices aromatherapy.”

  “What’s his history? Any violence?”

  “No.”

  “Ever institutionalized?”

  “No.”

  “Arrests? Police encounters?”

  “Can’t rule out a run-in with the law, but there’s no record of any formal charges against him.”

  Abby nodded. Early in life, stalkers learned how to hate, but unlike common criminals, they learned self-restraint also. They held their hatred in check. Few of the dangerous ones, the ones with the mind-set of an assassin, got in trouble with the police. They were too cold and careful for that. They bided their time.

  “He stopped writing three weeks ago,” Travis said, “but he still calls her.”

  “He’s got her number…” She’d meant it to be a question, but she wasn’t really surprised.

  Travis nodded. “Home and business, even though they’re unlisted. At first we weren’t screening her calls, so he actually got through to her. She made the mistake of trying to talk to him. Of course, this only aggravated the situation.”

  “Sure. Contact is what he wants.”

  “I explained that to her. And I had her install a second unlisted line at home and screen all calls that came in over the first line with an answering machine, but it didn’t work. Somehow he guessed she had a new line and got that number too.”

  “Persistent little creep.”

  “And clever.” Travis turned onto Westwood Boulevard, heading north. “Kris asked him how he got hold of her address, and he told her. He searched the Internet for her husband’s name—Howard Barwood—and found the California Coastal Commission agenda for April of 1999. They post the minutes of all their meetings on the web. One of the topics discussed in April was a request by Howard Barwood of Malibu to attach a guest cottage to the garage. His address was reported in the application summary.”

  Abby sighed. No information was private any longer. “Was the application approved?”

  “Sure was. In fact, that guest cottage has come in handy. We set up our on-site command post there.”

  “How often does Hickle call?”

  “Six times a day, on average.”

  “Has he tried to make physical contact?”

  “Repeatedly. We’re lucky in one way. Kris lives in Malibu Reserve. She moved there for additional security a few years ago, a normal precaution for someone in her position. The Reserve is a pretty tight ship. Hickle has never gotten past the guards at the entrance. Same story at work. KPTI is fenced and gated, and the guards have seen Hickle’s photo.”

  “He’s attempted entry at both her home and the studio? How many attempts in all?”

  “More than two dozen.”

  “Escalating frequency?”

  “Yes.”

  “Bad.”

  At Wilshire Boulevard, Travis turned east. The wide, busy street was colonnaded on both sides by high-rise condominium buildings and a few office towers. Abby lived midway along the corridor.

  “You mentioned that Kris Barwood still supports you,” Abby said as her building approached. “How did she feel right after the Corbal incident?”

  “Scared, upset. Even though she had been with TPS for years, she nearly left us. Howard was ready to tear up the contract, but Kris had the final say. I talked her out of it.”

  “And now she’s your biggest cheerleader. That must have been one hell of a pep talk.”

  “Let’s say I can be persuasive when I have to be.”

  The Mercedes pulled into the curved driveway in the forecourt of Abby’s condominium tower, the Wilshire Royal.

  “Want to come up?” Abby asked, keeping her tone casual.

  Travis hesitated. “I’d better say no. I’ve got a lot on my plate today.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’ve got my work cut out for me too.” She was good at concealing disappointment.

  They got out of the car, and Travis unloaded the carry-on bag from the trunk. He opened his briefcase and removed a thick sheaf of papers in a manila envelope. “Your copy of the case file.”

  “Bedtime reading,” Abby said. She stuffed it into her suitcase. “Thanks for the ride, Paul. And—thanks for giving me another chance.”

  “I’ve never blamed you, Abby. Never.”

  “And if TPS goes under, will you still feel that way?”

  “It’s not going under. Things will turn around soon.”

  “Sure. I know.”

  She started to turn away, and then he took her by the shoulders and kissed her—a strong, heady kiss, but too brief. When he pulled away, he was frowning. “You know, I may have given you the wrong impression.”

  She was momentarily confused. Then she realized he was talking about the case, not their relationship. “How so?”

  “I’ve stressed the most ominous aspects of Hickle’s behavior, but there’s another side to it. He’s a reliable employee with no police record, no history of mental illness, no known violent tendencies. He’s never issued a clear threat against Kris. I know none of these things are predictive, but when you put them all together, he starts to look less like a crazed killer and more like a harmless eccentric.”

  “Maybe that’s all he is.”

  “I just don’t want you going into this with your mind made up.”

  “I won’t. I have to get to know him. He’ll tell me who he really is and what his intentions are. Risk assessment, that’s my game. Gather the data, and analyze.”

  “You make it sound almost prosaic.”

  She smiled, but it was a sad smile, burdened with wisdom. “It is—when nothing goes wrong.”

  4

  At 3:15 Hickle parked on a side street near the entrance to the Channel Eight studios. From this vantage point he had a clear view of the security gate.

  In the backseat of his car lay his duffel bag. He hauled the bag into the front compartment, then unzipped it and removed a twelve-gauge shotgun, fully loaded.

  He rested the gun in his lap. The long steel barrel was cool to the touch. He liked running his fingers over it, feeling its smoothness. Sometimes he fantasized about sliding the barrel into Kris Barwood’s mouth, feeding her the tube of the gun, watching her eyes above the gleam of metal. Then one pull of the trigger, and no more eyes, no more mouth, no more Kris.

  Blammo.

  He felt a stir of arousal in his groin. The feeling was nothing new to him. He had been passionate about Kris Barwood since the day he first saw her. From that time on, she had been with him constantly, at least in his thoughts. At bedtime he would conjure her in his arms, and the smell of her hair and skin would lull him to sleep. Throughout the day, while at work or doing chores, he would invent conversations with her, magical dialogues in which he was always witty and buoyant, and she sparkled with laughter at his jokes. For many months he had been married to her. She waited for him in his apartment. She shared dinner with him. She looked deep into his eyes.

  But in the past few weeks his fantasy had died, exposed as the delusion it had always been. He had maintained the dream as long as he could, until at last reality had broken it into pieces.

  She did not love him.

  She didn’t want to talk to him or read his letters or accept his gifts. He had sent her jewelry with the polite request that she wear it on the air. She never had. He had called her countless times, and on the rare occasions when he’d gotten through, she had been hostile and uncommunicative.

  It was so unfair. He deserved her love. No one could have done more for her than he had. Hadn’t he dedicated his life to her? Hadn’t he built a shrine for her in his heart? He h
ad spent countless hours hunting down the smallest fragments of information in magazine profiles and newspaper clippings, learning her biography, memorizing every detail of her life.

  He knew that her parents had sent her to swim camp at age nine after installing a pool in the backyard of their Minneapolis home. He knew she had been the high school prom queen. She’d attended the University of Minnesota, majoring in journalism, and after graduation she’d secured her first full-time job, an entry-level position at a radio station in Duluth. The next year she’d gotten her first break, a TV reporting job in Fort Wayne, Indiana. He had tracked down a Fort Wayne shop specializing in local memorabilia and had purchased, for thirty-five dollars, a glossy photo of Kris bearing the inscription Thanks for your support. Keep watching!

  He knew that from Fort Wayne, which ranked 102 among the 210 television markets in the United States, she had gone to Columbia, South Carolina, the number eighty-seven market, and from there to Albuquerque, number fifty-two, and then on to Cincinnati, number thirty. In 1987 she had come to LA. Soon afterward KPTI had started to win accolades and viewers. He knew—everybody knew—that Kris was the reason. There was nobody else worth watching on Channel Eight, or on any of the other channels, for that matter. There was only Kris. As KPTI racked up Golden Mike Awards and higher ratings, her salary rose. Her first million-dollar contract—1992. Two million for three years—1997. And now her new deal, the richest yet, the richest in the history of LA news broadcasting. “The Six Million Dollar Woman,” the Los Angeles Times had called her in the headline of a feature story.

  He had devoted every minute, hour, day, week, month of his life to Kris Barwood, née Kris Andersen, born Kristina Ingrid Andersen at Meeker County Memorial Hospital in Litchfield, Minnesota—yes, he even knew the hospital, which was recorded on the copy of her birth certificate he had obtained through the mail for a nominal fee.

  She liked skiing (Redbook, July 1999) and pasta (Los Angeles Magazine, March 1998) and chocolate (extemporaneous on-air remarks, 6:00 News, December 21, 1997 broadcast). She had attended the premiere of Toy Story and had enjoyed the movie (Entertainment Weekly, November 25, 1995).

  He had committed himself to her. He had given his life to Kris Barwood. For a long time he had sustained his hopes that somehow they would be together. Yes, of course she had a husband, Howard Barwood, whom she’d met at a Brentwood fund-raising event for cerebral palsy. Howard Barwood, who had made more than twenty million dollars in Westside real estate by buying old houses on choice lots, tearing them down, and putting up mansions worth three times the original price. All these details had been revealed in an interview with Mr. Barwood in the April 1996 issue of Success magazine.

  But Howard Barwood was not the man for her. He was merely an accident in her life. Hickle was her destiny.

  She should have been able to see this. He had explained it often enough in letters and phone messages. But she refused to be reasonable, refused to treat him with any courtesy or decency whatsoever. She had rebuffed him. She had been rude. She—

  Wait.

  Down the street came a long gray car. A Lincoln Town Car? Yes.

  Kris’s car.

  It eased forward to the studio gate and stopped, engine idling.

  Hickle lifted the gun. His finger fondled the trigger.

  Could he kill her at this distance? He wasn’t sure. The spray of shot would fan out wide. It would certainly shatter the side windows, but he couldn’t be sure of hitting her. She would take cover, and the driver would squeal into reverse and spirit her away…

  The gate lifted. The car pulled through. Hickle watched it go.

  He’d never had any intention of shooting her. Not here. When the time came, as soon it would, he would choose the right place for the ambush. He would make no mistakes.

  The Lincoln cruised to the far end of the parking lot, finding Kris Barwood’s reserved space near the rear door of Studio A.

  Hickle reached into the duffel bag and produced a pair of binoculars. He watched the car through the lenses. The driver got out first. He opened the side door for Kris, who emerged into the sunlight, tall and blond. She was wearing a blue pantsuit, but he knew she would change into another outfit before airtime.

  Then someone else climbed out of the sedan’s rear compartment. A man. Hickle focused on his face and identified him as Howard Barwood.

  He had never seen Howard Barwood in person before. On previous occasions Kris had not been accompanied by her husband when she went to work. Hickle was surprised the man was here today.

  He studied Howard, a silver-haired, grinning, thick-necked fool who had won a woman he could not possibly deserve.

  Hickle felt a band of tension tighten across his chest. Briefly his hand went to the shotgun again, but the distance was much too great, of course.

  Anyway, Howard might have Kris now, but he would not have her for long.

  Hickle contented himself with this thought as he watched the bodyguard lead the Barwoods toward the studio door. At the door Howard stopped to say something to Kris, then leaned forward, clasping her by the waist, and kissed her.

  Kissed her.

  “You fucker,” Hickle whispered, his voice hoarse with outrage. “Don’t you do that. Don’t you even touch her. Don’t you dare.”

  The kiss lasted only a moment. Then the door opened, and the Barwoods went inside. The door swung shut behind them.

  Hickle kept the binoculars fixed on the door for a long time. He was not seeing the door. He was not seeing anything at all except the memory of that kiss.

  He had watched Kris on TV for months, taping her shows, playing back the tapes frame by frame and freezing on her varied expressions. He had collected images of her from magazines and newspapers. He had watched her jog on the beach and had caught glimpses of her in the windows of her home.

  But he had never seen her with her husband. He had never seen him kiss her perfect mouth.

  He lowered the binoculars. His hands were shaking. It took him a moment to recognize that what he felt was rage.

  Kris belonged to him, whether or not she would acknowledge the fact. She was his, by destiny. She was his, not that other man’s. That man had no right to hold her. Had no right to meet her lips with his.

  Hickle shut his eyes, but it didn’t help. Now he saw the two of them in bed together, Mr. and Mrs. Barwood, Kris naked, Howard mounting her, the paired bodies shivering, Howard driving in deeper, rutting like an animal, and Kris liking it, liking what he did to her, asking for more—

  His eyes opened. He blinked at sunlight and blue sky. All of a sudden he knew he had to get the hell out of here. And he knew where to go, what to do.

  He started the car and drove away, avoiding the studio gate so the guard wouldn’t catch sight of his car. He hooked up with the Glendale Freeway and proceeded north to the Angeles National Forest. Near the town of La Cañada Flintridge there was a secluded section of the woods, which he had discovered during an aimless drive last year. A brook whispered through a sunlit glade at the end of a dirt road.

  He parked. When he got out of the car, he took the duffel with him.

  He marched a hundred yards into the woods, set down the bag, and removed a pair of sound-insulating earmuffs, which he slipped over his ears, and the shotgun and two boxes of shells.

  His first shot scared up a flurry of birds. After the second shot there was only stillness and the muffled echo of the shotgun’s report.

  The gun had a four-shell capacity. He emptied it and reloaded, then repeated the process. Deadfalls of timber and drifts of small stones were his targets. But really he had no targets. A shotgun was not a weapon to aim; it was a weapon to point. The wide spread of shot would wipe out anything in the direction of the blast.

  What he sought was not accuracy but familiarity with the weapon. He needed a feel for its range, power, recoil. It must be part of him, an extension of his arm and shoulder. When the time came to use the gun for real, he would get only one opportunity, an
d he couldn’t fail.

  5

  The Wilshire Royal was one of the more expensive buildings in Westwood, and Abby’s mortgage payments were insanely high, especially given how little time she actually spent at home. But the place offered two features she prized: luxury and security.

  Luxury was on display in the gushing fountain that ornamented the driveway, the gray marble expanse of the lobby floor, the excellent reproduction of Rodin’s Eve facing the elevator bank. Security was less obvious. The doorman who greeted her when she headed up the front walkway, toting her carry-on bag, didn’t look like a guard, but under his red blazer the bulge of a shoulder holster could be detected by a practiced eye. The two uniformed men at the mahogany sign-in desk wore their sidearms in plain view, but the array of closed-circuit video screens they monitored was hidden below the desktop.

  “Hey, Abby,” one of them said.

  She smiled. “Vince, Gerry, how’s it going?”

  “Slow day. Have a nice trip?” They thought she was a sales rep for a software firm, on the road a lot.

  “Productive.” She asked if there was a FedEx Same-Day package for her, and they found it behind the counter. She tucked the box under her arm. It was good to have the gun back. She always felt a little naked without it. “Thanks, guys,” she said with a smile and a wave. “See you.”

  The elevator that carried her to the tenth floor was equipped with a hidden TV camera. The control panel was rigged to set off a silent alarm at the front desk if the elevator was intentionally stopped between floors. There were cameras in the stairwells and in the underground garage, access to which was controlled by a passcard-operated steel gate. The gate, too, was monitored by a surveillance camera. All that was missing was a crocodile-infested moat. She might bring up the idea at the next meeting of the condo board.

  She wasn’t sure these precautions were necessary. By LA standards Westwood was a safe neighborhood. But she took enough chances in her work. She liked having a refuge to come home to.

  Her apartment was number 1015. She opened the door and stepped into her living room, which took up half the floor space in her unit’s thousand-square-foot plan. A faint mustiness hung in the air; the place had been closed up for a week. Otherwise, it was just as she’d left it.