The most dangerous part was what came next. Going in, she would be most vulnerable. She had no idea what sort of greeting she might expect inside.
Hickle aligned the rifle’s muzzle with the hole in the glass, keeping the barrel inside to muffle the shot. Carefully he sighted the balcony, the glass door, the curtains.
He would wait for her to open those curtains. It shouldn’t take long.
When she stood in plain view, large in the scope, he would depress the trigger—gently, gently—and one-twentieth of a second later, there would be no more Abby in the world.
Abby went in fast, throwing open the door and pivoting inside, then ducking into a crouch so any shots aimed at her head would go high.
No shots. She closed the door but didn’t touch the wall switch near the frame. Her living room was in darkness; trusting the Royal’s security, she never bothered with putting her lights on timers. She was glad it was dark. If Hickle was hiding and she was exposed, light was her enemy.
In her purse she carried a mini-flashlight with a surprisingly bright beam. She found it by feel and held it in her left hand, well away from her body, before turning it on. If the light drew fire, she wanted the shots aimed away from her vital organs.
She swept the light over the living room, picking out the familiar shapes of her sofa and armchair, her stuffed animals, her stereo equipment and TV. Nothing had been moved or damaged, as far as she could tell.
Into the kitchen, then down the short hall to the bedroom. She shone the flashlight into closets and behind doors, into the shower stall in the bathroom, and under the bed. She returned to the living room and checked behind the couch and the chair.
Hickle was not here. He had never been here.
She ought to be glad about that. Not having a psychopath in one’s home was ordinarily cause for celebration. But she knew something was wrong. She stood in the dark, her flashlight angled low, the gun still drawn and ready, and pondered the situation. Hickle hadn’t staked out the garage entryway or the garage itself, and he hadn’t gained access to her condo and waited for her return.
So where was he?
She tried to put herself into his mind. He was angry and desperate. He had the shotgun and was itching to use it. His fantasy of squeezing the trigger and blasting Kris into hell had been unfulfilled. He wanted a second chance.
But the shotgun had not been his first choice of weapon, had it? He’d bought the rifle first. Fitted it with a scope and a laser targeting system. Last night when she’d entered his apartment to debug the place, she hadn’t seen the rifle in his closet. He must have taken it with the shotgun. He must still have it.
The shotgun was good only at close range, but the rifle was made for longer distances. For marksmanship. With the scope and the laser, it was a sniper’s gun.
Sniper…
Her gaze moved to the curtains over the balcony door.
48
Hickle was losing his patience. If it had been Abby’s car he’d seen, she should have arrived in her apartment by now. But no lights had come on inside, and the curtains had not opened.
“Come on, you bitch,” he muttered, blinking away a bead of sweat that trickled into his left eye. “Show yourself. I only need one shot, Abby. One shot.”
Abby considered the curtains. If she had not suspected that Hickle was in the neighborhood, what would she have done upon entering her condo? When she and Hickle shared Chinese food the other night, what was the first action she had taken?
She had opened the windows to let in some air.
She understood then, not in words but with a pair of bodily sensations—the prickling of the short hairs at her nape, the sudden tightening of her abdominal muscles.
She pictured herself parting the curtains, sliding open the glass door. For a few seconds she would be framed in the doorway. Visible from outside. From a vantage point across the street. And across the street was an unfinished, unoccupied commercial building—a perfect hiding place for a man on the run.
Abby switched off the flashlight and approached the glass door. Kneeling to make a smaller target, she drew the curtains an inch apart. She stared past the railing of the balcony at the black, looming mass of the office tower. She waited, her gaze fixed on the row of windows opposite her own.
Some time passed, maybe a minute, maybe five or ten. She didn’t move, barely breathed.
When a dim red light flickered in one of the windows, she knew what it was. Hickle, restless, testing the laser sighting system.
“You’re so sly,” Abby breathed, “but so am I.”
She saw the beam alight on the balcony railing, then jerk a few inches higher, pressing a faint dot of light against the glass door a yard to her left. The dot crawled toward her. Carefully she closed the curtains and let the red dot slide over the fabric, some of its glow bleeding through to stamp a pale tattoo on her face.
After a moment the light winked out.
Hickle was now sure he had been wrong about the car. It must have belonged to some maid or some teenage kid—anybody but Abby. She had not come home yet.
But she would. Soon.
He simply had to wait. He would not give up. This time he would not fail.
Abby left the condo, locking the door. As she rode the elevator, she took a quick inventory of the contents of her purse. Gun, spare ammo in a speedloader, microrecorder, mini-flash, cell phone.
On the ground floor, she bypassed the lobby and ducked into the small gym, empty on a Saturday night. The gym’s rear door opened on the street behind the Royal, which Hickle couldn’t see from his firing site. She headed down a side street, intending to cross Wilshire a few blocks away and circle around to the tower.
As she walked, she fished the phone out of her purse and, after a moment’s hesitation, speed-dialed the second number in the unit’s memory.
Ringing at the other end. Two rings, three, and the click of a pickup.
“Hello?” Travis said. She had reached him at home.
“Paul, I’ve located Hickle. He’s in Westwood. He’s—well, he’s stalking me. Nice turn of events, huh?”
“Abby, slow down—”
“No time to slow down. I’ve found him, Paul, I’ve found him…and now I’m going to need your help.”
49
Travis arrived in Westwood fifteen minutes after Abby’s call and saw her standing, purse in hand, on a back street behind the office tower. The building loomed over her, sixteen floors of unfinished commercial space, untenanted except for one very temporary occupant.
He couldn’t decide whether to be angry or pleased. True, he had expected Hickle to take care of this job. Travis’s instructions had been explicit, and even an amateur ought to have been able to fire a laser-sighted rifle accurately at a distance of a hundred feet. Something had gone wrong, though in their brief phone conversation Abby hadn’t revealed any details. Still, she was alive when she ought to be dead, and this fact disturbed him.
On the other hand, things hadn’t worked out so badly, had they? He had been given the opportunity to take care of matters personally. He expected to enjoy it.
Travis parked his Mercedes down the street, then patted himself to be sure neither of the handguns he was carrying had printed against his jacket. In his shoulder holster was a Beretta 9mm, the gun issued to most TPS personnel. If Abby noticed the Beretta, it was no big deal; under the circumstances she would expect him to be armed. The second gun was the one he couldn’t let her see.
Tucked inside his waistband near his spine, hidden by the jacket’s flap, was the Colt .45 from Howard Barwood’s bungalow.
He got out of the car, closing the door quietly, and approached Abby at a brisk walk. “Where is he?” he asked, keeping his voice soft, as if he had no idea that Hickle was on the tenth floor of the tower, well out of earshot.
Abby glanced at the building. “Up there.”
“You sure?”
“I saw him sighting me with the laser beam on his rifle. He’s st
aking out my condo, planning to make like a sniper.”
“How could he—” Travis knew it was a mistake to play dumb. “Of course. Barwood’s in real estate. And he knows your last name. He passed along your home address.”
“Looks that way.”
“You said you actually saw the laser? Then Hickle must have seen you.”
“No, I kept my place dark and peeked through the curtains. I don’t think he’s fled yet.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?”
“And tell them what? That I think a strange man is aiming a laser beam at me from the building across the street? They’d send out the men in white coats with the butterfly nets.”
“You could’ve told them it’s Raymond Hickle.”
“Sure. How many reports about Hickle do you suppose they’ve received since this story hit the airwaves? My bet is, he’s been spotted everywhere from Oxnard to La Jolla.” She looked at him, her face upturned in a streetlight’s glow, her expression hard. “The only way I could convince them to take me seriously is if I explain my involvement in the case. And that’s more than I want them to know.”
“They’ll know it anyway, once Hickle is in custody and starts to talk.”
“But maybe they’ll be inclined to go easy on me, overlook some of the various felonies I’ve committed over the past few days—if I’m the one who brings him in.”
A minivan burred past, headlights sweeping the pavement. Neither of them spoke until was it gone. Then Travis said, “You want to capture him? Personally?”
“I was thinking more along the lines of us. As in you and me together. We go up into the building, and we find a way to make Hickle come along quietly.”
“We’re not vigilantes, Abby.”
“Speak for yourself. Besides, it’s a citizen’s arrest, that’s all. We get the jump on Hickle, disarm him, and drive him to the West LA police station.”
“Unless he gets the jump on us first.”
“It’s a risk, admittedly.” She puffed her cheeks and blew out a jet of breath. “Everything I’ve done in the past few days is a risk. So how about it? You with me?”
Travis made a show of indecision, though of course there was nothing to debate. On the drive over, he’d plotted gambits to get Abby inside the tower, where he could deliver the fatal shot with no risk of being heard by anyone but Hickle. Now she was volunteering to go in, even insisting on it. It was perfect.
“Oh, hell, I’m with you,” he said finally. “Of course I am.”
50
Kris was glad she lived at Malibu Reserve. The gated complex had not protected her from Hickle, but tonight it served the almost equally important function of keeping out the crush of reporters stationed beyond the fence.
As a reporter herself, she understood the desperation that drove her colleagues to camp out on the shoulder of Pacific Coast Highway, or dial her home number sixty times an hour until Courtney disconnected the phone, or buzz overhead in helicopters taking footage of her deck, or slip onto the beach and focus long lenses on her windows. She had done such things herself during the earlier stages of her career when she had delivered reports from the field.
She risked opening the vertical blind on her bedroom window far enough to see a slice of the moonlit beach and the pale, restless tide. She supposed she couldn’t complain too loudly about her present circumstances. She was, after all, alive. Her heart still pumped, and her face in the mirror had lost some of its haunted, harried strangeness. She had begun to feel almost like herself again. The strain of waiting for something to happen had finally been relieved. Now there were only the broken pieces of the aftermath that had to be picked up and put together.
She wondered where Howard was.
The police had confirmed what Abby had told her—he’d been hiding their joint assets in overseas accounts. The accounts had been opened in the Netherlands Antilles. It was possible Howard had made his way to the islands already. Of course, he need not go there. He could travel anywhere in the world and still be within reach of his money. Martin Greenfeld, Howard’s lawyer, had speculated that he might have headed south to Mexico, but Kris couldn’t picture her husband in a Third World country. He was too accustomed to the good life.
She doubted he’d ever planned an escape. He had fled out of sheer panic. He would be caught before long. Her husband had his areas of competence, but running from the law was not likely to be among them. Luckily for her, in conspiring with a stalker to have her killed, he had proven equally inept.
“To have me killed,” she whispered. It still didn’t seem real. An extramarital affair she could believe all too easily. But to plot her murder…to rendezvous with a man like Hickle, a lunatic, a fanatic…
Her husband, the overgrown child with his toy trains and radio-controlled model airplanes, was a killer. Or a would-be killer anyway, foiled only by Travis’s foresight.
“Kris?” That was Courtney, calling from downstairs.
Kris left the bedroom and leaned over the railing in the hallway to gaze down at the living room. “Yes?”
“They just talked to me over the intercom. The guys in the cottage.”
Travis’s men, still on post until Hickle was caught. “And?”
“They said Mr. Barwood’s come back.”
These words were so strange that Kris couldn’t absorb them. “Come back?” she echoed.
“He’s here with some police. They’re letting him in for a minute. I don’t know why.” The doorbell chimed. “That’s him.”
There was silence while Kris tried to sort this out. “Well, let him in,” she said finally.
Slowly she descended the stairs while Courtney opened the door for Howard and four other men. One was Martin Greenfeld, two others were uniformed patrol officers, and the fourth was a man in a business suit who must be a detective.
At the foot of the stairs Kris stopped, staring at her husband from across the room. She saw fear in his face and something more, something that might have been a desperate, faltering effort at courage. He was not handcuffed, she noticed. They had granted him that much dignity. “Howard,” she said.
“Hello, Kris.” Even from a distance she saw the heavy swallowing motion of his throat. “It’s not true.”
“What isn’t?”
“All the crap they’re saying on TV. The charges and allegations. I never talked to Hickle. I never gave him any help. I never wanted to see you hurt.”
“Then why did you call him on that cell phone?”
“I didn’t. It’s not even my phone. I never bought it.”
“Then how did it get into our downstairs closet?”
“I don’t know. It’s a frame. It has to be.”
Kris had done enough interviews with the guilty to know that nearly all of them said they had been framed. “Then why did you run?” she asked tonelessly.
“I got scared. I figured these sons of bitches planted the phone to hang me. I figured there was no way to fight them.”
The man who must be a detective spoke Howard’s name in a low tone of warning. He and the two patrol officers hadn’t liked being called sons of bitches. Howard didn’t seem to notice.
“I came back,” he said. ‘That’s what you have to understand.”
“You got caught.”
“No, I turned myself in. I walked into the West LA station and surrendered. I didn’t have to. I was halfway to Arizona when I turned back.”
“Arizona? What’s there for you?”
“Nothing. That’s what I realized. That’s why I had to come back. I called Martin”—he glanced at the attorney as if reassuring himself that Greenfeld was still there—“and he worked out a deal. I would turn myself in, and in exchange I’d be brought here.”
“Why?” She tried to sound hard, though the effort was exhausting her. “Did you forget your toothbrush?”
“I wanted to see you…here, in our home. I had to tell you what I just told you—whether you want to hear it or not.”
Kris was quiet for a moment. “That was the deal? Just to be escorted home?”
“Yes.”
“Then what?”
“County jail, until Martin can work things out, however long that takes.”
Despite herself, Kris almost smiled. “A night in stir? I’ll bet you’d rather be in Arizona.”
“No. Right here is where I have to be. All I want is for you to believe me.”
“You did transfer our assets overseas, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And you’ve been having an affair?”
“Yes.”
“With whom?”
To his credit Howard did not avert his gaze. “Amanda.”
Kris blinked, appalled as much by his bad taste as by anything else. “Amanda at work? Anorexic Amanda?”
“I’m sorry, Kris.”
She thought of Amanda Gilbert’s sympathetic cooing when told that Howard might be unfaithful, her promise to sit down for a nice heart-to-heart. She made a mental note to have the bitch fired. “You could have done better,” she said simply.
“I already did. I was too stupid to know it.”
Kris knew he was hoping for some encouragement or forgiveness. She would not give it to him. “I think you should go,” she whispered.
“I didn’t do it,” Howard said.
Martin advised him not to say anything more.
The two patrolmen were easing him toward the door when he turned back, grief written on his face. “I never even wanted her. It’s just that she was available and, well, she was—
“Young,” Kris said. It sounded like an epitaph.
He left with the others. Before Courtney shut the door, Kris heard the whir of a chopper overhead. Somebody was getting first-rate footage of Howard Barwood as he was led down the garden path to the police car.
It would lead the late news on some local station. Kris hoped it wasn’t KPTI.
The Shadow Hunter Page 30