by Thomas Perry
Varney heard two men come through the door into the men’s room. He stood up and flushed the toilet, then went to the sink to wash his hands. He would go to the public library to see if he could use one of the computers. He would look up what he could find about Roy Prescott.
8
An hour later, Prescott moved his boxes into his new office and left them in a corner unopened. The place was much like the last one, only on Sunset the lawyers down the hall were more likely to be entertainment lawyers than corporate or criminal, and most of the other offices were occupied by talent agencies or small film-development companies that lived off the excess money and vanity of some actor or director.
The telephone jack was about all he was interested in for the moment, and he was in a hurry, so he plugged in his phone and answering machine and left. He took the elevator down to the street level, so he could get back in his car and drive to his rented storage space near the airport on his way down to the marina.
A number of years ago, Prescott’s wife had announced to him that he was not temperamentally suited for marriage—something he had begun to suspect on his own—and asked him to move out of their house. Prescott had learned a couple of years later that a man in his business should not live in a house at all. After the divorce, he had bought a small house wedged in on a short, unremarkable street in Van Nuys. It was shaded by old magnolia trees that dropped thick, brown, leathery leaves on the pavement and lawns year-round, but added white, rubbery flower petals in the spring and summer, and grenadelike woody cones in the fall. His name had not been known to people he had not met face-to-face. Since his hunting had been conducted in cities far from Van Nuys, all that was required for safety was that he never give up on a hunt until it was finished, leaving some killer free to follow him home.
The house had appreciated in value through the eighties, as every piece of land in California did even if it was situated on a toxic-waste dump astride the San Andreas Fault. He had done what all the world seemed to consider inevitable—sold it and bought a better one. The second house was two miles away in Encino, south of Ventura Boulevard. He selected it for its appropriateness to his high income, paid five times as much for it as for the last one, and then remodeled it with an awareness that things sometimes happened to people like him if they momentarily forgot who they were.
It was a two-story Spanish-style stucco rectangle in the middle of three acres of land, with a high wrought-iron fence around it. He installed an electric gate, had a row of decorative spearheads welded to the top, and planted climbing roses along the fence that rapidly grew into a dense, thorny barrier. He dug up trees and ornamental gardens and had the yard graded with the regularity of a putting green. He had motion-sensitive security floods along the eaves that went on when anything as large as a cat crossed too near the house. They bathed the empty, featureless lawn in blinding light that converted it into a kill zone like the margins around prisons. The windows were equipped with steel shutters, and beneath each of them was a hollow window seat containing a flashlight, a cell phone on a charger, and a loaded Smith & Wesson nine-millimeter pistol.
He lived there for about three years before a job took him into the woods north of Minneapolis. He had been hired as a subcontractor by a private detective. The detective’s name was Paul Mellgrim, and he was a highly visible man who had made his name protecting celebrities and handling the investigations that surrounded their many lawsuits. Mellgrim was searching for the daughter of a studio executive who had been a student at the University of Minnesota. He had traced her movements, and found that she had been easy to follow until ten o’clock one evening when she’d left a coffee shop near the campus, said good-bye to a few friends outside the door, and walked off the face of the earth. Mellgrim had called Prescott and said, “I’m telling you, I got a real strange feeling about this. Ugly.”
It was ugly. The day after the call, the girl’s red Porsche turned up in Duluth painted green and with different plates, all ready for resale. Prescott arrived just as the state police and a group of local volunteers were starting on a sweep through the forest in St. Croix State Park. The place surprised him. It was only ninety minutes north of Minneapolis, but it was a kind of wilderness that he had not been expecting. The forest ran right to the highway. If a car entered on the only road in, it drove five miles through uninterrupted woods before it even reached the first ranger station, where visitors were supposed to stop voluntarily and buy a pass. Three times on the way in, Prescott had needed to slow down to let deer bound frantically across the road.
The reason for the sweep was that a biologist who had been busy following the trail of a tagged bear had come across the remains of a young girl in the forest. The body had been mutilated so badly that it was a good thing the biologist had been the finder: he had been able to assure everybody authoritatively that she had not been mauled by a bear. The preliminary examination that had been carried out in the city had confirmed his claim for any remaining doubters, but it had raised another: the girl wasn’t the one Mellgrim had been looking for. Prescott had parked his car and joined the search. It had taken hours of fighting blackflies and sweating through low brush, often losing sight of the line of searchers and staying with them by the sounds they made. But they found the bodies of four more girls, all killed with about the same ferocity and dumped in the woods.
Prescott recognized the pattern without waiting for the state police to get around to discerning it. One body belonged to a girl missing much longer than the others—nearly two years—but the third had died only two months after the second, and the fourth only two weeks after the third. The fourth was the one Prescott had come to Minnesota to look for, the daughter of Mellgrim’s client. The one that had set the sweep in motion, the one the biologist had found, was the most recent. She had been killed only a week after the fourth.
The pattern that sexual psychopaths often followed was asserting itself with unusual intensity this time: two years, two months, two weeks, one week. The first crime was some kind of power experiment, usually an abduction for the purpose of rape. The killing had probably not been planned. More likely, it had been the result of an impulse, or panic. That had ended the incident, but an unexpected problem had arisen after the girl was dead. The killer, consumed by the stew of emotions he felt—fear, shame, remorse, self-hatred—had looked back on it, and remembered. And when he’d remembered, he’d discovered that he liked it. He’d run through it in his memory, and reliving it had made him sexually excited. After a long interval, he’d become so obsessed with repeating it in his mind that he’d wanted to repeat it in the world with a new girl.
He’d tried to duplicate his first experience, and when he had, he’d made some more discoveries: he’d found that his fear had been groundless, because this time the crime was planned, and it was much easier. He’d found that once he had done this to the first girl, the shame and remorse had become meaningless: they were fake. He’d quickly begun to realize that he had never really felt those things. They were just ideas imposed on him by a repressive society, and he had imagined feeling them because he was supposed to. But now his mind had been expanded. He knew far too much to fool himself again. That took care of the self-hatred; he had transcended all rules.
After that, he’d become more and more attached to what had become his new purpose in life. Before long, he had turned himself into something that even he had probably never imagined existed at the start—a predatory creature that wandered in the night searching for victims, needing to feed on their fear and pain. Prescott judged that the man who had left the girls in the woods was reaching some final stage, doing practically nothing now but killing.
Prescott selected his decoy carefully. It was not hard to find a tall, thin blonde of about the right age in Minneapolis. This one was good at impersonating a University of Minnesota co-ed, because it had not been many years since she had been one, and she still returned to some of the hangouts from those days often enough to fit in. Her na
me was Stella Kaspersen, and she was working as a private detective out of an office on the other side of the river. He spent four hours with her one afternoon, partly letting her convince him that she knew exactly what he wanted her to do, and was capable of doing it.
It was Prescott’s theory that the man knew there were three or four policewomen out acting as decoys each night, but that he was very good at spotting the traps: there were always observation vans somewhere within view, and at least two chase cars around a corner. Prescott believed that the police operations offered a special opportunity. The sight of the policewomen would make the killer agitated, more eager to strike than he had been in the past. Those police operations would also keep him away from whole parts of the city. Any other place might suddenly become very dangerous for a woman alone at night.
Prescott and Stella Kaspersen began to work the streets in areas the police were not covering. Four nights later, they were at their third stop, and Stella was walking alone down the empty sidewalk away from the quiet bar where one of the girls had sometimes been seen. A man in a four-wheel-drive utility vehicle pulled over and asked her if she wanted a ride. She replied haughtily that she didn’t, then walked faster, as though her reply had been a way of hiding fear. But as she and Prescott had rehearsed, she was hurrying from a lighted, open street toward a dark parking lot at the end of an alley. Prescott watched the man from the dark space between two buildings nearby. He saw that Stella’s fear and revulsion were not disappointing to the man. They were making him more interested.
When Stella was in the alley, the man watched her for a moment, then pulled his vehicle over and turned out the lights. Prescott ducked back into the dark space where he had been hiding, and studied the man’s face. The man was aware that the police would be using decoys to find him, and that Stella might be one of them. He was using this time to study the area around him to detect the presence of cops. He looked closely at the line of cars parked along the curb for pickup teams, looked at the windows of buildings for spotters. Prescott could tell that he was frustrated and upset: he was not positive that the area was clear, but he was very aware that time was passing. If he let Stella make it to her car, she was going to be out of his reach. After thirty or forty seconds, the man made his decision: he would chance it. He turned on his lights, pulled out, and sped up the alley after Stella.
Prescott broke from his hiding place. He had been expecting the man to go after Stella on foot, but since he had not, Prescott would need his car. He dashed between the next two buildings out to the street where he had left it, got in, and drove up the alley. He pulled in behind the man’s vehicle and blocked his exit. When he got out of his car, the man was already pushing Stella away so he could face Prescott.
The man was big and muscular, and Prescott could see in the man’s eyes that he was not reacting well: he looked almost glad to see Prescott. In a single, quick motion, he reached into the cab of his truck, came back with a two-foot crowbar, and swung it hard and fast at Prescott’s head. Prescott stepped back only long enough to let the claw of the bar get past his face, then lunged forward while the man’s arm was across his body trying to stop the bar’s momentum to begin the backhand swing. The heel of Prescott’s right hand pounded into the middle of the man’s face to drive the bones of his nose up into his brain.
Then Prescott called the police and waited patiently. They arrested him, as usual, but Stella had already begun her narrative of his heroism, and her version got better with repetition. She seemed to have judged that a little exaggeration was warranted by the edgy, slit-eyed look both of the cops gave Prescott, and she had determined not to tolerate having equivocal judgments issued by the authorities. Prescott and Stella were allowed to leave the station at the same time the next morning.
Prescott flew home to Los Angeles and received a big check from Mellgrim’s client. But when he arrived he discovered that Stella’s wild tale of his uncanny brilliance and his deadly combat skills had made it, undiluted and not tempered by skepticism or even common sense, into the wire-service reports, and then onto national television news.
Prescott had still lived happily enough in his house in Encino until one night a month later. He awoke to the flashing of the light on the silent alarm and the low buzz it made in his room when the perimeter of the house had been breached. He began to move silently down the back stairs, his gun in his hand, gliding through the darkness. He slipped out the back door onto the lawn, and quietly made his way around the house to the window where the intruder had entered. As he approached, he noticed that a dim illumination from inside the house was throwing a square of light on the lawn.
The silence was shattered by a piercing electronic shriek, and the square of light seemed to brighten. Prescott stepped forward and looked in the window just as the fire alarm reached 120 decibels. The flames rose from the center of the living room floor and blossomed outward at the ceiling, with thick black smoke pouring ahead of the brightness toward the dining room and the staircase. The color of the flames—bright yellow with blue fringes—told him it was gasoline. The front door swung open and he got a glimpse of a man wearing a blue windbreaker and jeans slipping outside.
Prescott sprinted around the corner of the house in time to see the man running hard toward the front gate. Prescott strained to gain on him, the balls of his feet digging hard into the grass and his strides lengthening. The man pushed on the gate, then realized it would not open, and reached up to pull himself to the top.
Prescott stopped twenty feet from him and aimed the gun. “Don’t leave just yet.”
When the man dropped to the driveway and turned to face him, the explanation settled on Prescott all at once. In the brightness of the fire, Prescott could see that the man’s face and hands were deeply scratched and skinned from going over the fence through the hedge of climbing roses. Trickles of blood ran down his cheeks to his chin, making streaks in the black carbon that had come from the mistake of lighting a big pool of gasoline in an enclosed space. His eyebrows and the hair above his forehead had been singed off by the first flash of ignition, but the eyes glowed with excitement, and the mouth was set in a delighted grin. On the heart of the windbreaker were the words MINNESOTA TWINS.
There followed a fraction of a second that Prescott used by cursing himself for letting this happen. He had been too willing to accept it when the police had insisted that the man who had gone after Stella Kaspersen was a solitary, introverted type who could not have had an accomplice. Prescott had not been sure. The murdered girls had merely been dumped in the woods after they were dead. The way they had first been overpowered and killed somewhere else argued for the idea that there was a somewhere else, and the police had not turned up a suitable spot that was owned or controlled by the man with the crowbar. The police had assured him it didn’t mean anything, because that part of Minnesota was full of sparsely populated places where a man could do virtually anything and not be heard or seen. Prescott had assumed they must know more about their territory than he did. Now, a month later, here the nonexistent accomplice was, burning Prescott’s house down around his ears.
When the fraction of a second had elapsed, the man’s right hand was slipping into the windbreaker’s pocket. Prescott had seen from the white-toothed grin in the middle of the black-singed face that this was going to happen, so while the man maneuvered the hidden pistol so he could fire it though the windbreaker’s pocket, Prescott took the time to place a shot through the bend of the M in Minnesota.
While he was bent over the body to check for any unwelcome signs of life, he happened to glance toward his house and see the center beam burn through to dump much of the tile roof into his living room and create a suitable flue for the forty-foot flames to billow upward into the night sky.
As he watched his beautiful, carefully planned house burn down, Prescott admitted to himself that he had become too notorious to live this way. It also occurred to him that in a large city, almost any good hotel had a bed as comfortab
le as he’d had, a chef who could cook better than he could, and a bathroom that was cleaned more often than he was willing to clean it. He rented a storage space for the possessions he felt he needed to own but didn’t want to carry from one hotel to another in a suitcase.
Without the burden of the big house, or the temptation to buy things to put in it, he spent a smaller portion of his income. He put his money into stocks and bonds that were in the physical custody of major brokerage firms, and they automatically fed his checking account every month. If anybody wanted him, they could dial his business telephone number or send a letter to his post office box.
Within a month after the fire, Prescott had effectively disappeared as a physical presence that could be limited at any given moment to a single set of coordinates on the earth.
9
Varney chose the North Hollywood branch library because it was miles from the big central one downtown. It was small enough so that he could see the entrances and most of the employees at a glance. Even if Prescott’s suggestion that he do some research was a trap—if Prescott had some insider’s way of getting the library’s computer-system controller to call the cops as soon as someone started running searches on his name—Varney was fairly confident that he would notice odd behavior in the librarians or patrons in time to get out.
The library was a low brick building at the edge of a huge, tree-shaded park that stretched for blocks in three directions. Near the building, right on the corner where Magnolia Boulevard met Tujunga, there was a life-sized too-bright golden statue of Amelia Earhart holding, oddly, the disconnected propeller of her airplane. On wooden benches near her and at various spots in the park, derelicts and homeless people congregated or slept where the shade would protect them from the ferocious sunshine for a time. It would be easy to slip into one of those groups and sit with that tired, bent-over posture, then make his way slowly to his rented car parked a hundred yards from the freeway entrance on Tujunga.