Dangerous Games

by Prescott, Michael

  This was getting to be a little more of a challenge than she liked. She decided to switch to a more proactive mode.

  Another of her pockets carried an infinity transmitter, a voice-activated bug that could be installed in any telephone. The bug worked off the microphone that was part of the phone’s mouthpiece and would pick up both ends of any phone conversations, as well as discussions taking place in the apartment. Installing the bug did entail a small risk. If Kolb was sufficiently paranoid, he might take the phone apart to check for listening devices. But her search hadn’t turned up a field-strength meter or any other surveillance-detection equipment. She was willing to chance it.

  In less than two minutes she’d planted the transmitter. Its range was fifty feet. The receiver had to be stationed nearby, but preferably outside the apartment for easier retrieval.

  She wasn’t sure what she expected to pick up, since Kolb certainly would not use his home telephone to contact the authorities. Still, there was an idea that had occurred to her last night when she looked through the FBI report. It seemed unlikely that Kolb could have raised the cash or worked out the details necessary to open multiple secret bank accounts in the Cayman Islands. If he was good for the kidnappings, then he probably had help. A partner.

  She’d almost raised the possibility with Tess, but the idea was too speculative and didn’t fit what she knew of Kolb’s paranoid, antisocial personality. Even so, she couldn’t quite convince herself to drop the notion. She didn’t see Kolb pulling off something this complicated all by himself.

  If there was a partner in the picture, then bugging the phone could prove to be an investment that paid big dividends.

  She took a moment to stand still and simply absorb the atmosphere of Kolb’s home. Every residence had its own aura, not in any metaphysical sense, but simply as a result of the accumulated detritus of someone’s life. The sparse furnishings and closed window shade and general air of neglect told her a lot about Kolb. They spoke to her of disappointment and frustration, of anger and desperate rationalizing. Though the apartment was bare, there was a lot of ego here. Kolb’s ego, undeveloped past the stage of late adolescence, the stage when intelligent but alienated youths cultivated a liking for German philosophers and antisocial elitism.

  Maturity, she’d learned, was a gradual process of discovering and then disowning the ego. An infant had no ego, no sense of self. By age two, the child had formulated a personal identity, but no empathy—hence, the “terrible twos,” when most kids ran amok. Slowly this naked narcissism was suppressed by social conditioning, and the child was taught to think of other human beings. But egocentricity, still the dominant theme, persisted through the teenage years. For a teenager, every setback was a crisis, and every disappointment was a tragedy. The world orbited around the fragile, frightened self.

  Most people outgrew that phase in their twenties or thirties, but arrested adolescents were narcissists for life. They never gained perspective on their problems. They continued to imagine themselves the center of the world, and when the world ignored or abused them, they would respond unpredictably. Some would retreat into solipsistic fantasies. Others would join cults. Others would seek power to avenge themselves against a universe that did not take them seriously. The ego—vain, defensive, covetous, angry, needy—would puff itself up into a monster, transvaluing its defects as virtues, its weakness as strength.

  Kolb was one of the power seekers. Anger and ferocious self-absorption drove him. He nursed grudges and spun schemes for revenge. Possibly he was putting one of those schemes into practice. Possibly he meant to show the city, and by extension, the world, that he was not to be trifled with. Possibly he was the Rain Man. She couldn’t prove it, not yet. But—

  Outside, a noise.

  The chug of a motor, a faint rattling sound.

  Kolb’s Oldsmobile. She recognized the clatter of the damaged front end.

  She peeled back the window shade. The tenants’ carport was directly outside. Kolb was pulling into his assigned space, number six.

  He was back from work, much too soon.

  She quickly left the apartment, locking the door behind her. The stairwell was only a few steps away. She started to push open the door, then froze with a thought.

  In her stakeouts on Sunday and Monday, she’d watched the front entrance. But Kolb hadn’t come out that way. Both times he’d gotten from his apartment to his car without using the lobby exit.

  She hadn’t seen any back door to the building, but a side door was possible—and it would open onto the stairwell.

  She looked inside the stairwell, and yes, there it was, a door that must lead to the parking area. If Kolb had gone out that way, he would most likely reenter through the same door.

  He would walk right into her.

  She glanced up the stairs, thinking she could hide on the landing. No good. The stairs were metal treads without risers, and the landing was a metal mesh. If Kolb looked up, he would see her. And she didn’t think she had time to escape into the second-floor hallway.

  She retreated from the stairwell. Make a run for the lobby? Two problems with that plan—number one, he might surprise her by returning that way, and number two, she didn’t think she could make it there in time.

  Directly across from Kolb’s apartment there was a door with no number on it. Not an apartment. A storage room, janitor’s supply closet, something like that. Unlike an apartment, a closet wasn’t likely to have much of a lock on the door.

  She whipped out a plastic shim, flat and flexible, and swiped it along the crack between the door and the jamb.

  The latch popped. She opened the door, exposing a deep, narrow room crowded with slop buckets, brooms, mops, and bottles of cleaning solvent.

  From the stairwell came the sound of the outside door squealing open.

  She threw herself into the closet and quietly pulled the door shut, sealing the room in darkness.

  Footsteps in the hall.

  He must have entered through the hall door just as she’d shut herself in the closet. It was possible he’d seen her slip inside.

  Carefully, working in the dark, she undid the clasp of her purse and found her gun, curling her finger over the trigger.

  Then she heard a jangle of keys and a creak of hinges. The door to his apartment opened and shut.

  “Close one,” she breathed.

  Now that it was over, she decided it had been kind of fun.

  And it had delivered a fringe benefit. She’d found a place to conceal the receiver.

  She tugged the pull chain that turned on the bare ceiling bulb. At the back of the closet, behind a row of paint cans overgrown with cobwebs and littered with insect carcasses, she cut away a section of the drywall with an X-Acto knife. She concealed the receiver inside and replaced the cutaway panel. The device would receive the infinity transmitter’s intermittent signal and record a maximum of twenty hours of audio on a memory card. It had no moving parts and used little power. The fresh battery she’d installed this morning would keep it running until sometime tomorrow, eliminating the need for her to hardwire the device into the main current. When she returned tomorrow, she would do a diaper change—replace the card and the battery.

  She left the closet and exited via the lobby, taking a long detour back to her car so she wouldn’t pass in front of Kolb’s window. Probably he kept the shade drawn, but she couldn’t count on it—and she’d taken enough chances for one day.

  14

  The morning meeting was held in the ADIC’s conference room, where a dozen squad supervisors gathered before nine o’clock to await Michaelson’s arrival. No one spoke to Tess. She felt hostility radiating at her from every seat around the long conference table. She wondered if it was possible to spontaneously combust under the pressure of so many hot glares.

  To distract herself, she fixed her gaze on a large pad mounted on an easel at the front of the room. Across the top sheet the word STORMKIL was written in black marker. The rest of the
sheet was blank. It seemed like an appropriate metaphor for the case.

  Michaelson entered on schedule, preceded by Larkin and by someone who apparently was with the media-relations office. Somehow it wasn’t surprising that the AD would have his mind on the media even during a strategy session.

  As he passed her, Tess searched Michaelson’s face for any indication that Crandall had informed him of her unauthorized activities. She caught no sign of it.

  Michaelson sat at the head of the table, the media rep at his side. Larkin positioned himself by the easel.

  “Go,” the AD said with a finger jab at the nearest supervisor.

  The man delivered a weather forecast. Heavy rains were expected to fall by ten P.M. The killer had snatched his first two victims roughly four hours before the storms broke. If he stuck to his previous pattern, they were looking at an abduction by six o’clock, an hour after sunset. That was nine hours from now.

  Larkin leaned over the easel and wrote 1800 HRS: ABDUCT. The words seemed to shout at the room.

  The next supervisor reported that all agents were working staggered shifts today—sixteen hours on duty, eight hours off.

  The head of Communications said that the scrambler of every agent’s Handie-Talkie unit had been reprogrammed, eliminating any possibility that the Rain Man could eavesdrop on FBI radio exchanges.

  Someone else summarized a psycholinguistic analysis of phrase selections from the two ransom notes and Paula Weissman’s tape recording. It was presumed that the wording of all three messages closely reflected the Rain Man’s original text. The analysts believed the unsub was a Caucasian male with some college education, in his late twenties to early forties. Tess noted silently that, from what she knew, William Kolb fit the description.

  Then there were the phones in the mayor’s office, where the Rain Man was expected to call, if and when his latest ransom demand was met. A trap-and-trace had been installed on every line, allowing an instant trace if the killer called from a landline. If he used a cell, as he had last time, then a trace became more difficult.

  “We’re anticipating he’ll have a new phone,” the super said, “or at least a new number programmed into the existing phone.” Working cell numbers could be snatched out of the air during cellular transmissions, or purchased at black-market Internet sites. “We need to identify the cell phone number, match it to the owner’s account, then get the location of the cell tower at the point of origin. We’ve made arrangements with every major cellular provider in the area to have technicians on standby.”

  If the caller’s location could be determined, LAPD SWAT units and FBI strike forces stationed throughout the metro area would be ready to move on him.

  “And the money?” Michaelson asked.

  For Angela Morris, the Rain Man had demanded one million dollars. For Paula Weissman, two million. The assumption was that he would again double the amount. Four million dollars in municipal revenues was available for electronic transfer.

  The AD frowned. “There’s no question the city will pay?”

  “Officially they’ve announced no position. Privately they’re committed to making the payoff. The mayor’s already taken enough heat for hesitating on the Weissman ransom. People are saying if he’d paid sooner, she might have been saved.”

  Tess didn’t think so. She was fairly certain the Rain Man didn’t want his victims recovered alive. There was too great a risk that they could identify him.

  “Suppose he goes higher than four million,” Michaelson said.

  “It starts to get a little tricky.”

  “Politically?”

  “Yes—and also logistically. But I think they’ll find a way to cough it up, no matter how much it is. I mean, as long as it’s within reason.”

  Tess didn’t think anything the Rain Man did was within reason. She said nothing.

  “Assuming they pay,” Michaelson said, “and he calls with the victim’s location, what kind of response time are we looking at for the rescue effort?”

  The supervisor handling the phone trace answered. “The same SWAT units and strike forces are ready to go underground anywhere in the city. The way they’ll be deployed, we estimate that one of those teams can get to any point on the map in under twelve minutes.”

  “Twelve minutes is an eternity,” Michaelson said. “Last time, he didn’t call in Weissman’s location until the rain started falling. If he waits that long again…”

  “Then we have to hope the response time is shorter. I said under twelve minutes. It could be a lot less.”

  “It had better be. Damn it, this son of a bitch is calling all the shots.”

  “Not for long,” Larkin said out of habitual sycophancy.

  Everyone ignored him.

  As Tess expected, Michaelson took credit for sifting through the call-ins and identifying the few that seemed promising. These he doled out to the various squads, pointedly giving none to Tess. She was a nonperson, the invisible woman.

  Michaelson wanted agents, police officers, and sheriff’s deputies posted near as many storm-drain access points as possible. Coordinating this effort was the task of the C-1 squad supervisor, who had bad news.

  “We’ve gone over this with DWP, and the simple fact is, there’s no way we can cover more than a fraction of the entry points.”

  “Why the hell not?”

  Before the super could answer, another voice cut in. “Let me field that one.” Tess looked to the doorway, where a new man had joined the briefing. “Sorry I’m late,” he added. “Traffic.”

  His gaze swept the room and briefly met hers. He was trim, wide-shouldered, his dark hair close-cropped. Unexpectedly he extended a hand across the table. A large hand with a powerful grip, though he wasn’t much taller than she was.

  “Ed Mason,” he said. “Assistant chief engineer in DWP’s Stormwater Management Division.”

  Tess got it. He could afford to annoy Michaelson because he wasn’t a Bureau employee. She started to give her own name in reply, but Michaelson interrupted.

  “So tell us—why can’t we deploy our personnel at the entry points?”

  “Because,” Mason said as he took a seat, “the tunnel system is just too damn big. We’re talking about sixty-four main lines and hundreds of smaller service tunnels. Fifteen hundred miles of underground pipe extending from Canoga Park to San Pedro. You can’t post people at every ingress. It’s physically impossible.”

  “There has to be some way to narrow it down,” the AD insisted.

  The C-1 super didn’t think so. “His first two vies were taken in completely different parts of the city. It’s not as if he just works one neighborhood. He could go anywhere.”

  “Then we seal off all the access points so he can’t get in. We lock him out of the system.”

  There was a laugh, a deep, throaty sound.

  Michaelson swiveled toward the source. “Something funny, Mr. Mason?”

  Mason was still chuckling. “You want to seal off the entire drainage system of Los Angeles. That doesn’t strike you as impractical?”

  “Not the entire system. Just the access points big enough for a man to use.”

  “There are thousands of those.”

  “Then we seal off only the biggest ones. The ones that can accommodate a vehicle, say.”

  “It still won’t work. Street runoff would cause major flooding.”

  “We’ll use nets. Steel nets. Water gets through, but he can’t.”

  “Nets would get clogged with debris in a matter of minutes.”

  Michaelson wouldn’t be put off. “I’ve seen nets in place along the river channel.”

  “Sure you have. In the dry season, we use nets to filter out trash and debris. The last time we put up nets at the junction of the LA River and Ballona Creek, we caught a hundred thirty tons of waste. That was when the water wasn’t moving fast.”

  Tess spoke for the first time. “Why would there be any water in the system during the dry season?”


  “Because,” Mason said, “there’s always runoff from fire hydrants, construction projects, people watering their lawns or hosing down their cars. Or dumping chemicals—or taking a pee in a manhole. Even when there’s no wet weather flow, the pipelines have plenty to carry. And tonight, in a big storm like they’re predicting, we’ll see twenty thousand times the dry season flow. Tens of billions of gallons. That’s billion with a b.”

  “Christ,” Michaelson said, appalled.

  “Put up nets this time of year, and they’ll be torn to pieces. And if they hold, you’ll have logjams and citywide flooding. This system moves a lot of water, Chief.”

  Michaelson clearly didn’t like being addressed as Chief, and Tess was pretty sure Mason knew it. “Personally,” the AD said, chafing, “I wish you’d never built your goddamned system. Didn’t it ever occur to anybody that installing the world’s largest labyrinth right under your feet was an invitation to every psychopath within a thousand miles?”

  “It’s not the world’s largest,” Mason said, unfazed. “And it seems to have issued an invitation to only one psychopath. At least, he’s the only one who’s RSVP’d. Besides, if we didn’t have the tunnels, where would all the water go?”

  “I was stationed in Tucson once. That’s a metro area of nearly one million, and they have no storm-drain system. They let the rain flow naturally into dry washes and percolate underground. You people could’ve done the same thing.”

  “That idea is only a little less impractical than those nets you tried to sell us, Chief.” There was no doubt the nickname was a dig. Tess saw Mason’s mischievous smile. “LA is basically one giant floodplain. Without proper drainage, you’d have water up to your armpits from East LA to the Westside. That’s pretty near what happened back in the flood of 1938. Then the Army Corps of Engineers came in with three million barrels of concrete and paved the LA River. All it is, really, is an engineered flood-control channel.”