The Shadow Hunter

by Michael Prescott

  24

  The production meeting for the six o’clock news broke up shortly after 5 P.M. Kris left in a rush, stuffing her yellow legal pad into her carrying case, and boarded the elevator with Amanda Gilbert. The two of them rode to ground level together.

  “Another day, another nightmare,” Amanda observed.

  Kris smiled. “At least no more pint-size pachyderms came into the world at the last minute.”

  “Still a madhouse. Looks like we won’t have time for that heart-to-heart we talked about.”

  Kris was surprised Amanda even remembered their conversation. Surprised—and touched. She had never imagined Amanda as the type to worry about feelings and personal crises. “Maybe after the show,” Kris offered, just to have something to say.

  Amanda shook her head. “No can do. I’ve got a…an engagement.”

  “A date? Is that what you started to say?”

  Amanda looked away, embarrassed. This was Kris’s second surprise. She had never imagined that Amanda could be capable of embarrassment on any topic.

  “You do have a date, don’t you? You, the workaholic?” Kris gave her a playful punch on the arm. “Who is he?”

  “I’d rather not talk about it.”

  “You’ll talk. This is big stuff. I want to hear all the details.”

  The elevator doors opened. Amanda got out first, in a hurry to leave. “Can’t oblige you now. I’ve got a show to get on the air.”

  “Tomorrow, then.” Kris stopped her at the door to the newsroom. “You tell me the secrets of your love life, and I’ll tell you mine, okay?” She shrugged. “Who knows, maybe we have more in common than we know.”

  Amanda pushed open the door. “Stranger things have happened.”

  “Is it a deal?”

  “Sure. Deal. Now I’ve gotta run.” She vanished through the doorway,

  Kris headed down the hall to her office, smiling. Her marriage was falling apart, but her executive producer had found a boyfriend. Maybe there was a cosmic balance to the universe, as her New Age friends said.

  Her office was a large sun-streaked room cluttered with award certificates and statuettes, mementos from other stations where she’d worked, and framed snapshots of herself and Howard in happier times. Ellen, her personal assistant, was typing at her desktop computer. She glanced up when Kris entered. “Hey, boss lady.”

  “Hey. Stopped by to pick up my outfit.”

  “Linda dropped it off an hour ago.” Ellen nodded toward the door to Kris’s dressing room, adjacent to the office. “It’s a new one, very snazzy.”

  Kris found her outfit hanging in the closet. It was a periwinkle blue suit with a cream-colored blouse, a good choice. That particular shade of blue always looked good on camera. Having been in the business for years, Kris knew what worked and what didn’t. Solid colors were good; patterns, especially small, complicated patterns, were bad. Off-white tones were good; solid whites were bad.

  She changed into the suit, checked herself out in the fulllength mirror, and decided she looked quite elegant except for her flat-soled sneakers. Since she was always behind a desk while on the air, no viewer would ever see her footwear.

  To complement her outfit, she selected a pair of earrings and a pearl necklace—costume baubles, large and ridiculously ostentatious. Small items of jewelry were distracting on camera; outsized items photographed better. With the jewelry stowed in a plastic bag for later use, she headed out of the office, then paused in the doorway. “How many calls?” she asked.

  “Got a stack of message slips, but nothing urgent—”

  “No, I mean voicemails…from him.”

  “Oh. Actually, none.”

  “No calls?”

  “Not today.” Ellen shrugged. “Maybe he’s losing interest.”

  “I should live so long.”

  Kris proceeded to the makeup room down the hall. It was strange that Hickle hadn’t called. Ordinarily, by this time of day he would have left a couple of messages on her voicemail and one or two others with the switchboard. She should have been relieved by his silence. Instead she found it unsettling.

  Julia, her makeup artist, and Edward, her hairstylist, were waiting by the barber’s chair with impatient expressions. Edward went first. On Mondays he gave her a complete styling. For the rest of the week, a touch-up was all that was required. He did the job quickly, trimming and fluffing and spraying. “Done,” he pronounced. “Though, you know, with a shorter ’do—”

  “I’m not cutting my hair short.”

  “All I’m pointing out, Kris dear, is that after a certain age, long hair becomes unfashionable.”

  “I haven’t reached that age.” She picked up his scissors and clicked them menacingly. “Tell me that I have, and I’ll cut you shorter—and I don’t mean your hair.”

  Edward quailed. “I entirely see your point.” He departed in haste.

  Then it was makeup time. Kris sat patiently, reviewing script changes, as Julia applied a thick coat of Shiseido foundation to every exposed inch of her skin, even the insides of her ears. The blush followed. It seemed that the reworking of her face became more elaborate every month. Soon she would do the news from behind an inch-thick mask of cosmetics, looking as stylized as a geisha. No one would recognize her. She could change her name, move to another city, continue doing the news—and Hickle would never find her.

  She tried to smile at this fantasy, but there was nothing funny about Hickle. He hadn’t called her at work. Strange…

  “Julia.”

  “Mmm hmmm.”

  “Bring the phone over here, would you? I need to make a call.”

  Julia obeyed, sulking; like any artist, she resented interruptions. Kris called her home number. When the machine answered, she asked one of the TPS agents to pick up.

  “This is Pfeiffer,” one of them said.

  “Hi, it’s me. I wanted to know what the tally is. You know, his phone calls to the house.”

  “It’s zero, ma’am.”

  “Zero?”

  “He hasn’t made a peep.”

  “He hasn’t called my work number either. Does that strike you as peculiar?”

  “You can never tell with these guys. Tomorrow he could call twenty times.”

  “I suppose you’re right. Okay, thank you.” She switched off. Julia asked what that was all about. “My stalker seems to have varied his routine,” Kris said.

  “Is that bad?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  Julia applied the last cosmetic touches. “You know, I used to think it would be cool to be famous,” she said. “Now I have to wonder.”

  “It has its ups and downs.”

  Even after her makeup was complete and Julia was gone, Kris remained seated in the chair, thinking about Hickle and his unnatural silence.

  “Kris.” The floor manager was at the door. “Ten minutes.”

  “Thanks.” She hadn’t realized airtime was so near.

  She almost left the room, then changed her mind. She picked up the phone and called Travis.

  Her fear might be groundless, but it didn’t feel that way.

  25

  Abby passed an hour watching the bungalow in silence. After six o’clock the sky began to darken. By six thirty a sunset flamed over the rooftops. She thought about leaving. She should get back to Hollywood and see if Hickle was home, but as long as Kris was at KPTI, there was no immediate danger. She decided to wait a little longer.

  To use her time more productively she fished her microrecorder out of her purse and dictated notes. She reported her visit to Travis’s house, tactfully leaving out the steamy stuff but including everything else, then her unlawful entry to the bungalow and what she’d learned. If she died, she would at least leave an up-to-date record of her activities.

  In the hot tub she’d come close to cashing it in, and if things had gone a little differently when she was escaping from Hickle’s apartment last night, he might have unloaded his shotgun on her at point-bl
ank range. She had cheated her own mortality twice already. Third time’s the charm? she wondered ruefully, and then headlights flared in her rearview mirror.

  She sank lower in her seat and watched a black Lexus roll by. As it eased past her car, she glimpsed the driver’s profile, lit by the glow of the dashboard. It was Howard. No surprise.

  The Lexus pulled into the bungalow’s driveway, and Howard got out to lift the garage door, then parked in the garage. He entered the house via the front door. Lights came on a moment later, but the curtains remained shut.

  Abby had seen all she needed to see, but she lingered, curious about Amanda Gilbert, who was sure to show up before long.

  At seven fifteen a white BMW parked at the curb a few doors down. The woman who hurried to the house was slim, almost bony, and quite young. She started to unlock the bungalow’s front door with her own key, and then the door opened from inside and Howard ushered her in.

  Abby got out of her car and took a stroll, partly to stretch her legs and restore the circulation to her tush, but mainly to check out the BMW. She noted the license plate number and, resting on the dashboard, a parking permit for KPTI stamped with the words March and Employee. Amanda Gilbert worked at Channel Eight. She was one of Kris’s colleagues, and if her car was any indication, she didn’t occupy an entry-level position.

  Driving out of the neighborhood, heading toward Hollywood, Abby activated her cell phone. She obtained the number of KPTI’s switchboard from Information, then called the station. “I have some correspondence for Amanda Gilbert,” she said when the receptionist answered. “May I have her exact title, please?”

  “Executive Producer,” she was told.

  “News Division?”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Thanks very much.” Abby ended the call.

  So Amanda was Kris’s executive producer. All of a sudden Abby found her dislike of Howard Barwood rising to uncomfortably high levels. She supposed the identity of his illicit paramour shouldn’t have made any difference to her assessment of him. Yet it did, because intuitively she knew that it turned him on to be balling Kris’s boss, that in doing so he obtained a sense of power and control over his wife that no call girl or receptionist could have provided.

  She pulled into a mini-mall and found a pay phone. Her next call was too sensitive to entrust to a cellular transmission. She dialed Travis’s office, expecting him to be working late. He answered the phone personally; his assistant had gone home.

  “The bungalow is Howard’s love nest,” she reported, keeping her voice low to be sure she wasn’t overheard. “He meets his girlfriend there.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Does it matter? If not, let’s leave her name out of it. What’s important is that Howard owns the bungalow, which means he owns Trendline, which almost certainly means he’s funneling assets overseas without Kris’s knowledge.”

  “Which means he has a motive for getting Kris out of the way.”

  “True. Marriage has become inconvenient for him. He seems ready for a fresh start. I doubt he’s capable of arranging Kris’s murder on his own, but when Hickle came along, he may have seen an opportunity.” Abby blew out a tired breath. “You remember how concerned he was about my safety, asking if I had backup or if I was on my own? I thought he was being chivalrous or sexist, depending on how you look at it. But maybe not. Maybe he wanted to assess my vulnerability so he could attack me.”

  “He may have had the opportunity. The guest cottage logs show that he left Malibu at six o’clock on Wednesday evening and didn’t return until shortly after midnight—later than usual.”

  “I was in the hot tub around ten o’clock, ten thirty.”

  “It fits. When he failed to finish you off personally, he may have decided to rat you out to Hickle and have him handle it.”

  “Was he out last night? The phone call reached Hickle around eight thirty.”

  “Howard was out from six thirty to eleven.”

  “Okay, then he might have spent the first part of the evening at the bungalow. After that, he called Hickle, using his Western Regional phone because he didn’t know if Hickle’s phone was tapped, and he figured it would be harder to link the cell phone to him. Speaking of which—”

  Travis cut in. “We’re still trying to nail down a connection between Western Regional and Trendline. Nothing so far, but I’ve got two of my computer jocks burning up their high-speed modems. They’re pros. They can nose out anybody’s secrets.”

  Even mine? Abby wondered, but what she said was “How about Hickle? Any escalation in his attempts to contact Kris?”

  “Just the opposite. A total shutdown. No phone calls to her home or office all day. Kris is worried.”

  “She should be. You’d better tighten her security.”

  “I will. Where are you now?”

  “Heading back to Hollywood. Don’t try to stop me.”

  “I wouldn’t dare.” She heard him sigh. “Good luck, Abby. And watch yourself, all right?”

  “Always do,” she said.

  The lights in Hickle’s apartment were on when she reached the Gainford Arms, and his Volkswagen was in its assigned space, at the opposite end of the parking lot from her own. She was glad he was home. At least he wasn’t in Malibu, lying in ambush outside the Barwoods’ house.

  She rode the elevator to the fourth floor. As she was fumbling with the key to her door, Hickle emerged from his apartment next door. “There you are,” he said.

  The first thing she noticed was that his right hand was positioned awkwardly behind his back, concealing something. Her mind inventoried the possibilities: shotgun, handgun, jar of battery acid.

  She still hadn’t unlocked her door—she was trapped in the hall, Hickle two feet away—and the .38 Smith in her purse was not instantly accessible.

  Hickle was smiling, but it was a tight, false smile. “I’ve been waiting for you,” he said.

  “Really?” She shifted her purse, placing two fingers on the clasp.

  “Yeah. I’ve got sort of a surprise.” He stepped forward, his right hand swinging into view.

  She saw what he’d been concealing, and it wasn’t acid or a gun or a weapon of any kind. It was a bulky paper sack emblazoned with “Shanghai Palace.”

  “Hope you haven’t eaten yet,” Hickle said. “I ordered Chinese.”

  26

  Abby kept smiling as she admitted Hickle to her apartment, and she emitted the appropriate exclamations of delight when he removed the food from the bag and filled the kitchen with its medley of aromas. “Sweet and sour pork,” he announced, “almond chicken, and—because I know you like veggie meals—broccoli with black mushrooms.”

  “Sounds great,” she said, still smiling, smiling. But she didn’t like this situation, didn’t like it at all. Hickle was a profoundly antisocial man, not the type to press for close friendship with anyone. He was too insecure, too scared of women, of people in general, to take the initiative so boldly unless he had a compelling, hidden motive.

  Maybe he was planning an attack in the privacy of her apartment. Or he might have doctored the food—the veggie dish, the one he’d bought for her. Might have put poison in it, or a sedative.

  One thing was certain. This was no casual get-together. It was a chess move, a tactic in a deadly serious contest of strategy, and she had a sense that it was perilously close to the endgame.

  “Still warm,” Hickle said, touching the sealed containers. “I hope it wasn’t presumptuous of me to order this stuff without asking you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “I just thought…well, I enjoyed our dinner last night.”

  “Me too.”

  “I guess I don’t get out as often as I should.”

  “I don’t know if dinner in my apartment exactly constitutes getting out.”

  “Is it a problem, eating in here? We could use my place if you want.”

  She thought about taking the opening he had offered, but if he
had trouble in mind, he could strike as easily in his place as in hers. “Mi casa es su casa,” she said. “Let me get the windows open, okay? It’s gotten stuffy.”

  She raised the windows in both rooms, checking to be sure her surveillance gear was safely concealed behind the closed door of the bedroom closet, then deposited her purse on the coffee table by the sofa. She hated to be separated from her gun, but it wouldn’t look natural to hold on to her purse while at home. Anyway, it was within close reach.

  “Now I’ll get out some plates”—she nudged him aside to reach the cabinet—“you set ’em up on the coffee table, and we’ll chow down.”

  “Sounds like a plan.” He seemed lighthearted, almost droll, which worried her because she knew it was an act.

  Rummaging in the cabinet, she became aware of her deficiencies as a hostess, at least in these temporary quarters. She lacked napkins, china, glassware, and metal utensils, as well as any beverages other than bottled water.

  “I’m afraid we’ll have to dine picnic style,” she told him. “Styrofoam plates, plastic cups and forks, paper towels as placemats and napkins. And if you want anything to drink besides water, you’ll have to grab it from your fridge. Sorry.”

  “Water’s fine with me.”

  “I’ll try a little of the pork and chicken if you don’t mind.” She spooned the meals onto the plates. “I’m not a strict vegetarian. And why don’t you take a little of the broccoli?” If he had tampered with the veggie portion, he might find a way to decline the offer.

  “That’ll be great,” Hickle answered calmly.

  Maybe the food was okay, then. She sat next to him on the sofa, balancing the picnic plate in her lap. For a few minutes there was nothing to say. Ordinarily Abby was a skilled mechanic when it came to fixing a stalled conversation. She knew how to lubricate the gears and recharge the battery and get things moving again. Tonight her mind seemed frozen. She knew why. She was not in control of this encounter. She was not the only one keeping secrets this time.