Stalking the Angel

by Robert Crais

  Jillian uncrossed her arms. “Good. I’m glad this was helpful. Now let me lock up.”

  I went out and waited. It was cool in upper Holmby and the earth smelled damp from having been recently watered. When Jillian came out, I said, “Thanks for getting me in here.”

  She walked past without looking at me and went to her BMW. She opened her door, then she closed it and turned back to me. Her eyes were bright. She said, “I worked my butt off for a job like this.”

  “I know.”

  “You don’t walk away from something you’ve worked so hard for.”

  “I know.”

  She opened her car door again, but still didn’t get in. Out in the street some rich kid’s Firebird with a Glaspak muffler blasted past, wrecking the calm. She said, “You go to school, you work hard, you play the game. When you’re in school, they don’t tell you how much it costs. They don’t tell you what you’ve got to give up to get to where you want to be.”

  “They never do.”

  Jillian looked at me some more, then she said good night and got into her white BMW and drove away. I watched her. Then I drove away, too.

  20

  Glenlake School for Girls is on a manicured green campus at the border between Westwood and Bel Air, in the midst of some of the most expensive real estate in the world. It is a fine school for fine girls from fine families, the sort of place that would not take kindly to an unemployed private cop asking to be alone with one of its young ladies. Real cops would probably be called. As would the young lady’s parents. When you got to that point, you could just about always count on the kid clamming up. So. Ixnay on the direct approach.

  There were other options. I could go to Traci Louise’s home, but that, too, would involve parents and an equal possibility of clamming. Or I could stake out the Glenlake campus and abduct Traci Louise Fishman as she arrived. This seemed the most likely option. There was only one problem. I had no idea what Traci Louise Fishman looked like.

  The next morning I forwent my usual wardrobe and selected a conservative blue three-piece pinstripe suit and black Bally loafers. I hadn’t worn the Ballys for over a year. There was dust on them. When the tie was tied and the vest buttoned and the jacket in place and riding squarely on my shoulders, the cat topped the stairs and looked at me.

  “Pretty nice, huh?”

  His ears went down and he ran under the bed. Some people are never happy.

  At twenty minutes after nine I parked in the Glenlake visitors’ lot, found my way to the office, went up to an overweight lady behind the counter, and said, “My name’s Cole. I’m thinking about applying to Glenlake for my daughter. Would it be all right if I looked around?”

  The woman said, “Let me get Mrs. Farley.”

  A thin woman in her early fifties came out of an office and over to the counter. She had blond hair going to gray and sharp blue eyes and a smile as toothy as a Pontiac’s grill. I tried to look like I made two hundred thou a year. She said, “Hello, Mr. Cole, I’m Mrs. Farley. Mrs. Engle said you wished to see the school.”

  “That’s right.”

  She looked me over. “Had you made an appointment?”

  “I didn’t think one was necessary. Should I have called?”

  “I’m afraid so. I have an interview scheduled with another couple in ten minutes.”

  I nodded gravely, and tried to look like I would look if I was recalling an overbooked personal calendar, then shook my head. “Of course. Being a single parent and having just been made a partner in the firm, my schedule tends to get out of hand, but maybe I can get back in a couple of weeks.” I let my eyes drift down the line of her body and linger.

  She shifted behind the counter and glanced at her watch. “It seems a shame not to see the school after you’ve gone to such trouble,” she said.

  “True. But I understand if you can’t make the time.” I touched her arm.

  The tip of her tongue peeked out and wet the left corner of her mouth. “Well,” she said, “maybe if we hurry I can give you a short tour.” She said it deviously.

  Some guys can charm the stitches off a baseball.

  Mrs. Farley came around the counter, put her hand on my back, and gave me the short tour. The short tour included a lot of laughing at unfunny things, a lot of her feeling my shoulder and arm, and a lot of her breathing in my face. Violets. We saw the new gymnasium and the new science labs and the newly expanded library and the new theater arts building and a lot of coeds with moussed hair and bright plastic hair clips and skin cancer tans. Five girls were standing in a little knot outside the cafeteria when Mrs. Farley and I walked past, Mrs. Farley’s hand on my back. One of the girls said something and the others laughed. Maybe Mrs. Farley didn’t require as much charming as I thought.

  When we got back to the office, a man in a flowered shirt and a woman in sweat pants and a New Balance running shirt were waiting. Mrs. Farley’s appointment. She smiled at them and told them she would only be another moment, then thanked me for my interest in Glenlake, holding my hand a very long time as she did, and apologized twice for not having more time. She offered to be available whenever I might have more questions. I asked her if it would be all right to take a short stroll around on my way out. She took my hand again and said of course. I smiled at the man in the flowered shirt and the woman in the sweat pants. They smiled back. To think that I dressed for this.

  Two minutes later I was back in the library. There was a birch-and-Formica information table as you walked in, and a girl sitting behind the table chewing bubble gum and reading a Danielle Steel novel. The girl had the same moussed, sun-streaked hair and walnut tan that every other girl at Glenlake had, and the same large plastic hair clip. I said, “I thought Glenlake didn’t require its students to wear uniforms.”

  She gave me blank eyes and blew a bubble.

  “Where could I find last year’s yearbook?”

  The bubble popped. “In reference, over there on the shelf above California history. You see the David Bowie poster? To the left of that.”

  Traci Louise Fishman was on page 87 of last year’s yearbook, sandwiched between Krystle Fisher and Tiffany Ann Fletcher. She had a heart-shaped face and a flat nose and pale frizzy hair and round, wire-framed glasses. Her lips were thin and tight, and her eyebrows looked like they would have a tendency to grow together. Like her friend Mimi, she wasn’t what you would call pretty. From the look on her face, you could tell she knew it. I put the yearbook back on the shelf, left the library, went back to the Corvette, cranked it up, drove off the campus, and parked in the shade of a large elm just outside the school’s front gate. Traci’s letters to Mimi said she would be taking two morning classes to leave her afternoons free. It was 10:20.

  At 11:45, Traci Fishman came around the rear of the administration building, walked into the student parking lot, and unlocked a white Volkswagen Rabbit convertible. Dad wasn’t such a cheap shit after all. She was putting the top down when I walked up behind her. “Traci?”

  “Yes?” She pronounced the word clearly.

  “My name’s Elvis Cole. I’m a private detective. Could I talk with you for a few minutes?” I showed her my license.

  She stopped futzing with the top, looked at the little plastic card, then looked at me out of round, expressive eyes. No glasses. Maybe when you started thinking in terms of having some guy “make you a woman,” you ditched the glasses and got contacts. “What do you want to talk with me about?”

  I put my license away. “Mimi Warren.”

  “Mimi’s been kidnapped.”

  “I know. I’m trying to find her. I’m hoping you can help me.”

  The big eyes blinked. The contacts didn’t fit well, but in a world of plastic hair clips and chocolate fudge tans, she was going to wear them or die trying. Also, she was scared. She said, “I don’t know. Are you working for her parents?”

  “I was. Now I’m working for me.”

  “How come you’re not working for Mimi’s parents if
you’re trying to find Mimi?”

  “They fired me. I was supposed to be taking care of her when she got snatched.”

  She nodded and glanced toward the front of the school. More girls were coming from behind the administration building and from other places and were going to their cars or heading through the gates to the street where parked cars waited. Traci chewed at her upper lip and stared at them through blinking alien eyes. Her frizzy hair was cut short and stuck out from her head. She was heavy and her posture was bad. Some of the girls looked our way. More than a couple traded looks and made faces. Traci said, “You want to sit in my car?”

  “Sure.” I held the door for her, then closed it and went around to the other side.

  Three girls with moussed hair and plastic clips and mahogany tans and pearl-white lip gloss walked past the Rabbit to a catch-me red Porsche 944 Turbo. I watched Traci watch them. She tried to do it sneaky, out the corner of her eye so they couldn’t tell. The girls at the Porsche leaned against its fenders and looked past each other so they could see the Rabbit and me and Traci, and there was lots of laughter. One of them stared openly. I said, “You think they share the same lip gloss tube?”

  Traci giggled. She looked at me sort of the same way she looked at them, out from under her eyes, as if she really didn’t want you to know she was looking, as if she thought that if you knew, you’d say something sharp or do something hurtful. “Don’t you think they look like clones?” she said. “They have no individuality. They’re scared of being unique, and therefore alone, so they mask their fear by sameness and denigrate those who do not share their fear.” She just tossed that off, like saying, Hey, buddy, how about a bag of nuts? She said, “They’re talking about us, you know. They’re wondering who’s that guy and why are you sitting with me.”

  “I know that.”

  “I knew they would. That’s why I wanted us to get into the car.”

  “I know that, too.”

  She looked at me a long time, then looked away. “Do you think that’s shallow? I hate to be shallow. I try not to be.” Sixteen.

  “Traci,” I said, “I think maybe Mimi was mixed up with some people who might’ve had something to do with her kidnapping. People she might’ve thought were her friends and who she might’ve gone out with.”

  Traci pooched out her lips and chewed them and shrugged. “Friends?”

  Even Traci Louise Fishman did it. I said, “Do you know a couple of Mimi’s friends named Carol and Kerri?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “You sure?”

  Traci chewed the lips some more and shrugged again. Nervous. “Why would I know them?”

  “Because you guys were buddies.”

  Shrug.

  I said, “Traci, I’ve seen seven letters that you wrote to Mimi last year when she was away. I’ve read them.”

  She looked shocked. “You read other people’s mail?”

  “Monstrous, isn’t it?”

  She chewed harder. “If you find her, what are you going to do?”

  “Rescue her.” Sir Elvis.

  “You won’t tell her that I’m the one who said?”

  I said, “I know you want to protect your friend, babe, but you have to understand that right now she is in a world of trouble. We’re not talking about her shoplifting a radio and you telling. Bad people have her and whatever you know might be able to help me find her.”

  She chewed harder and then she nodded. “You really think it was people she thought were her friends that did it?”

  “Yes.”

  The irritated eyes grew pink and blinked faster. Maybe starting to cry. “It’s just that Mimi liked to make things up, you know. She was always telling me about these stud guys and the parties they would have and how they would ride around in limousines and go to clubs and all these things that you just knew she’d made up.”

  “Bigger-than-life stuff.”

  “Uh-huh.” She began to sniffle. “So when she told me about these new people, I didn’t believe her at first. She said she had these new friends and that they weren’t full of bullshit like everybody else in her life. She said she had a boyfriend and she said he was really buff and they partied every night and had real good cocaine and stuff and that they were the seeds of a revolution and all this crazy stuff, and after a while I said, ‘Mimi, you’re full of crap,’ just like I always did, and she said it was true and she’d prove it.”

  Traci Louise Fishman dug through her purse and took out a battered red leather wallet and dug through that and pulled out a bent color snapshot. “A couple of days later she gave me this. Kerri’s the girl with the white hair. I don’t know about Carol. I really don’t.”

  The photograph had been taken on the street at night and was of half a dozen smiling young men and women. Mimi Warren was standing next to a girl with white hair, but Mimi Warren wasn’t Mimi Warren as I had ever seen her. She had blue electroshock hair and heavy emerald eye shadow and she was giving the finger to the camera. She was also standing beside a big, good-looking kid with huge shoulders. The big guy was giving us the bird with his right hand and had his left hand on Mimi’s breast. I took a deep breath, then let it out. Carol and Kerri didn’t matter anymore. The big kid was Eddie Tang.

  I touched his image in the photograph. “And this is Mimi’s boyfriend?”

  “Uh-huh. That’s what she said.”

  21

  One of the moussed girls by the 944 went around to the driver’s side, got in, and leaned across to unlock the passenger door. The other girls climbed in, but the Porsche didn’t start. One of the girls lit up. The one in the tiny back seat turned crosswise, and kept raking her fingers through her hair. Music blasted out of the Porsche’s door-mounted speakers, rolling across the parking lot, and you could see them passing around an Evian bottle. They had gotten in the car, apparently, to better watch us from Black Forest comfort.

  I looked at the photograph that Traci had given me and at the people in it. Eddie was the oldest, and the biggest. The other two guys were probably not out of their teens and were slight, one wearing narrow-legged jeans and a white shirt and a couple-of-sizes-too-big cloth jacket with a lot of buckles and studs, the other a uniform that looked like something a Red Chinese National would wear, all gray and plain with a single row of buttons down the front and a Nehru collar and a Red Army cap. The kid in the uniform was Asian. He didn’t look like a yakuza thug, but maybe he was executive material. Kerri and the other woman were also Asian. The one Traci didn’t know was dressed in Jordache jeans and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up and a Swatch watch. Normal. Kerri was a Clorox blonde with a spike cut and a powdered face and neon-red lips and nails. There was a dog collar around her neck. Billy Idol. I said, “Traci, this is important. Did Mimi ever say what she talked about with these people?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Was it about something called the Hagakure?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  “What did she talk about?”

  “Stuff I didn’t understand. She said they were real. She said they loved her. She said they were the first people she’d ever met who truly had purpose.” I looked out the window. Purpose. When you’re sixteen, maybe all life is drama. I looked back at Traci. Her big eyes went from pink to red and she rubbed at them and said, “I gotta put in drops.”

  She took a little plastic bottle from her purse and put two drops of something into each eye and sat with her eyes closed for a couple of minutes. Trying not to cry.

  “When was the last time you spoke to her?”

  Nervous shrug. “About three weeks ago.”

  “Did she tell you what she would do when she was hanging out with these people?”

  Traci stared at the photograph. I handed it back and watched her put it in her wallet like something precious that had to be handled carefully.

  “She told me they went to all these clubs. She told me they did all these drugs and had sex and it sounded just like when she would make stuff up only this time I
believed her. I said she ought not. I said she was gonna get in trouble or get fucked up or get arrested, and Mimi got real mad so I shut up. This one time she got so mad at me she didn’t talk to me for a month. You have to be careful.” Traci said it like she was telling me a secret that only she knew, like it was important and special and I had probably never heard anything like it ever before.

  I said, “Mimi could sneak out, make herself up and change her clothes, and be with these people, then undo it all and go back home and be a different Mimi and her parents never knew.”

  Traci nodded, sniffling.

  “Man.” I stared out the front of the Rabbit at the Administration Building. It was large and clean and old with thick Spanish walls and a red tile roof. The hedges and the lawn and the trees were neat and well-groomed. Small knots of girls still moved along the walks, some carrying books, some not, but almost all were smiling. I shook my head.

  Traci Louise Fishman picked at the steering wheel some more, then gave me the Special Secret look again. Like there was something else I’d never heard before, and something Traci had never been able to tell, and now she wanted to. “You want me to tell you something really weird?”

  I looked at her.

  “Last year, we were up in my room, smoking. My room is on the second floor and in the back, so I can open the window and no one knows.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “We were smoking and talking and Mimi said, ‘Watch this,’ and she pulled up her shirt and put the hot part of the cigarette on her stomach and held it there.” I sat in the Rabbit, listening to sixteen-year-old Traci Louise Fishman, and my back went cold. “It was so weird I couldn’t even say anything. I just watched, and it seemed like she held it there forever, and I yelled, ‘That’s crazy, Mimi, you’ll have a scar,’ and she said she didn’t care, and then she pushed down her pants and there were these two dark marks just above her hair down there and she said, ‘Pain gives us meaning, Traci,’ and then she took a real deep drag on the cigarette and got the tip glowing bright red and then she did it again.” Traci Louise Fishman’s eyes were round and bulging. She was scared, as if telling me these things she had been keeping secret for so long was in some way giving them reality for the first time, and the reality was a shameful, frightful thing.