“That’s a lovely ethical precept to live by.”
“If I’d wanted a theological discussion, Agent McCallum, I’d have gone to a priest.”
Tess thought it might have done her some good. “You do realize I could have you prosecuted?”
“Go ahead. I have the money to fight it. And whom do you think the public will side with? The government, which refused to help me—or the victim, acting in her own defense?”
“You can’t take the law into your own hands.”
“I wouldn’t have had to, if the system worked. Find a jury that will convict me. Find a jury that isn’t as fed up as I am.”
That was a tall order, and Tess knew it. “You never told Abby?” She’d asked the question already, but it seemed essential to hear the answer a second time.
“No, I didn’t. As far as she knows, the things she found were Kolb’s. All she did was move them out of the cabinet into plain sight.”
“And start a fire to draw an engine company to the scene.”
“Clever of her, don’t you think? So are you going to have me arrested?”
Tess would have loved to snap the handcuffs on, if only to see the expression on Madeleine’s face. For a moment she understood why this woman had gotten under Kolb’s skin when he pulled her over for a traffic violation.
But she wasn’t Kolb, and she wasn’t interested in personal vendettas. And Madeleine was right. A jury would take her side.
“No,” Tess said.
“Then do me a favor.” The sudden sincerity in her tone was startling.
“A favor?”
“Don’t tell Abby what I did. Please.”
Tess was baffled. “Why not? What difference would it make?”
“It would needlessly upset her. You see, I know Abby better than you do. She has standards. She would be highly disturbed if she were to learn there was anything underhanded in a case in which she had participated.”
“Underhanded? Everything she does is underhanded.”
“That’s not true and not fair. She plays by her own rules. They may not be your rules, but they’re hers.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, she’s a vigilante. She’s the Lone Ranger.”
“Some people might say the Lone Ranger is a hero.”
“In the movies. Not in real life.”
Madeleine smiled, a little sadly. “This is Los Angeles. The difference isn’t always so clear-cut.”
“That’s very clever, but—”
“I’m not trying to be clever. You may not see it or agree, but Abby is doing what she thinks is right. She has integrity, Agent McCallum. Whatever you may think of her, she’s on your side.”
Tess didn’t know about that. She wasn’t sure whose side Abby was on.
But one thing was clear to her, as she gave back the goggles and ear protectors and left the gun club. Abby hadn’t lied about her participation in the Kolb case. She’d told what happened, as best she knew it. And Tess had cut her off, refusing even to listen to her side of the story.
She punched Abby’s number into her cell phone, but there was no answer. Either she’d turned off her cell or she wasn’t picking up.
The time was six thirty-five. Probably she was with Kolb already—Kolb, who might be the Rain Man, on a night with rain in the forecast.
No support. No backup. Alone.
But maybe not for long.
29
Kolb wedged his gun into his waistband, then practiced reaching behind for the draw. When he was satisfied, he put on a leather jacket to conceal the weapon. In one pocket of the jacket he stowed a roll of duct tape and a spray bottle of chloroform. In the other, handcuffs and a powerful flashlight.
Abby would be wearing the tape and the cuffs soon. She was going into the storm drains. But first she would write the ransom note—he had paper and pen in his car. There would, however, be no need for her to record a message for the phone call to the mayor. There would be no phone call. Even after the city paid him the ten million, he wasn’t giving them her location. He couldn’t risk having her rescued. She had to drown.
His plan, like any improvised course of action, had certain weaknesses. If the authorities knew Abby was investigating him, then he would be tied to her kidnapping. As a precaution, he would not return to his apartment. He’d already loaded the few personal items that mattered into the trunk of his car. He would never see this place again.
Then there was the wild card—McCallum. She might be planning to follow him tonight. That would complicate things. He would have to either lose her or take care of her. The second option was preferable, but it would require subduing Abby first. The chloroform would knock her out, but he preferred to keep her conscious. He wanted her to know what was happening. And he had questions that deserved an answer.
If he could shake McCallum loose, he would. Then get Abby alone and make her talk. As a cop, he’d been good at getting suspects to open up, and he’d learned some new tricks in prison, tricks even a pro like Abby wouldn’t know. He wondered how much pain it would take to break her. He looked forward to finding out.
There was a rap on his door.
He straightened the jacket, confirming that the gun was properly hidden. Then he opened the door and saw Abby standing there in her skirt and blouse, all eager innocence.
“Hi, William.”
He smiled in reply. “Come in. I’d give you a guided tour, but this is pretty much all there is.”
“It’s not so bad.”
“It sucks. But it’s better than the last place I lived.” He answered her questioning gaze. “Chino State Prison.”
She hugged herself, a nice dramatic touch suggesting an ingenue’s nervousness. “I’m glad you can joke about it. I don’t think I could.”
“If I couldn’t keep a sense of humor, I’d have gone psycho by now.” He shut the apartment door. It was better if his neighbors didn’t see him with her.
Abby was looking around with polite curiosity. He wondered what sort of silent inspection she was conducting, what estimates of his personality she was drawing from the soiled futon and faded carpet.
“They say everything happens for a reason,” she said. “Maybe what happened to you was meant to be.”
New Age crap. He doubted she believed it, but she was playing a character who did. “Destiny? I don’t buy that. I think you make your own destiny. You know that poem, the one that goes, ‘I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul’?”
“I think I’ve heard that one.”
He was sure she had. It was the poem Timothy McVeigh had quoted before his execution for the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building. He’d wanted to see her reaction to the quote, but she disappointed him, revealing nothing.
“Is that really the way you think of things?” she added as she poked at his small collection of books. “You think any of us has that much power?”
“We have as much power as we’re willing to take. Most people are afraid to grab the brass ring. They live in fear.” This was an honest answer.
She turned and met his gaze. “Not you, though.”
“Not me.”
She looked away. “I admire that. I’m a real weenie. Everything scares me.”
He felt his face shift into a tight smile. “I have a feeling you’re underestimating yourself.”
“Nope. Here’s how much of a scaredy-cat I am. On my way over, I kept thinking I might chicken out and not actually knock on your door. And I was afraid that if you saw my car parked on the street, you’d know I’d been here. So I parked two blocks away.”
“Two blocks away?”
“See? I’m a wuss. All my friends say so.”
“What did your friends say about your tracking down my phone number?”
“Oh, I didn’t tell them. I didn’t tell anybody.”
“You never mentioned you might be coming to see me?”
“I never said anything about you at all. I was so ashamed of the way I’d acted th
is morning, I just didn’t want to talk about it. It’s one thing to be a weenie, and another to be rude.”
She was good; he had to give her that. She’d succeeded in establishing that there was no way of connecting her with him. Her car wasn’t parked near his building, and her supposed friends knew nothing about her encounter with him this morning. She was sending every possible signal that she was easy prey.
Obviously she hoped to goad him into taking action, with her friend McCallum acting as backup. The plan might have worked, if he hadn’t tumbled to them both.
“I don’t think you were rude,” he said. “Just cautious, like a big-city girl should be. But now that you’ve spent some time with me, maybe you can see I don’t bite.”
She answered this with a little laugh, lowering her eyes daintily. He wondered how many men she’d had. He wondered if he could add himself to the total after he’d secured her in the tunnel.
“So,” he said, “you want to get something to eat?”
“I’m starved. You have anything in mind?”
Kolb had lots of things in mind, and none of them involved dinner. “You like Mexican?”
“Can’t be an Angeleno unless you like Mexican.”
“Great.” He picked up his key chain and opened the door. “I know a place. We’ll take my car—it’s parked closer.”
“Yeah, rub it in.”
They left the apartment. He took a last look at the dirty hole that had been his home since his release. Then he shut the door and locked it.
“Where is this restaurant, anyway?” Abby asked as they headed down the hall.
“Few miles away,” he said vaguely. Near the river, but he didn’t mention that detail.
She would find out soon enough.
30
The direction-finding gear was still in Tess’s Bureau car. There were two carrying cases, one containing the antenna assembly and the other containing the companion receiver.
She opened the antenna case first. Inside were four antennas of a special low-profile design marketed exclusively to government agencies. The design reduced the antennas’ visibility and simplified the job of covert tracking. She mounted the assembly on the sedan’s roof, being careful to correctly orient the four antennas in a cross pattern—right, left, front, rear. No special attachments were required. The antennas were held in place by built-in magnets.
The system was of the switched-pattern type. When it was operational, the receiver would alternate among the antennas, picking up a signal from only one at a time. This procedure minimized multipath interference, the confusing ghost signals produced by reflections off buildings, bridges, and power lines.
But interference could never be completely eliminated in a cluttered environment like Los Angeles. She would have her work cut out for her just keeping up with Kolb—if she could find him.
She rolled down the passenger window and snaked the coaxial cable from the antenna to the second carrying case. The receiver inside was a single-channel, high-sensitivity, high-selectivity model equipped with microprocessors that analyzed the signals’ phase shifts as additional protection against multipath noise.
There was a bracket for dashboard-mounting the receiver’s remote-control head, but she didn’t bother with it. She could see the displays and manipulate the controls on the receiver’s front panel well enough with the carrying case lying open on the passenger seat.
This was supposed to be a turnkey system. All the pieces ought to work when the power came on. Tess hoped so.
The receiver was loaded with rechargeable gel-cell batteries, but she preferred to use the car’s own power supply. She plugged the meter panel into the cigarette-lighter socket. When she pressed the power button, the displays lit up. The two that mattered most were the bearing indicator, consisting of sixteen LEDs in a full circle, which would indicate the signal’s direction, and the signal strength meter, a twenty-segment bar graph that would show how close the target was.
Neither display showed anything at the moment; nor did the built-in speaker produce any beep tones. She dialed the system’s sensitivity to maximum. Still nothing.
The transmitter in Kolb’s car had a range of only five miles in flat, open terrain—less than that in the city. Wherever Kolb was, he wasn’t within range.
If she was lucky, he hadn’t left his apartment yet. She wasn’t counting on it. And if he’d left with Abby…
It didn’t seem likely that she could find them in the huge sprawl of LA. But she would try.
You can only do your best, the priest had said. She was beginning to see what he meant.
Abby was getting a funny vibe from Kolb, and she didn’t like it. “What happened to your car?” she asked as they entered the carport. She didn’t expect an honest answer, but it was a question he would expect.
“Somebody cut me off.” Kolb unlocked the Oldsmobile.
She made a sympathetic noise. “There are lots of bad drivers in this city.”
“Well, they’d better stay out of my way.” He gave her an odd look. “People who get in my way sometimes get hurt.”
Was she crazy to detect a double meaning in the words? She got into the car, not fastening her seat belt because she wanted to retain her mobility if she needed to react quickly.
Kolb backed out of the carport and headed down the street. She noticed that his gaze cut frequently to the rearview mirror. He was watching for pursuit. No surprise there. Paranoia was part of his usual style of driving.
She kept her purse on her lap, her right hand resting on the hidden compartment that contained her Smith .38, its muzzle conveniently pointing in Kolb’s direction. If necessary, she wouldn’t even need to draw the piece—just get her finger on the trigger and fire through the bag.
She’d never had to shoot one of her stalking suspects. Rarely had she allowed the situation to get so far out of control that defensive violence was necessary. In the few exceptional cases, she’d fought back without gunfire.
Tonight felt different. Tonight she might need her gun.
If Kolb was the Rain Man. She still couldn’t be sure. To assess his intentions she needed to press his buttons, get him talking.
The car rattled over a pothole. It gave her an opening.
“This street’s in pretty crummy shape,” she said. “With all the taxes we pay, you’d think the city would keep the roads in good condition.”
“The city doesn’t give a damn about the roads or the people who drive on them.” Kolb checked the rearview mirror again. “The politicians and bureaucrats only care about lining their own pockets. Goddamn civil servants are nothing but parasites.”
Abby goaded him gently. “Not all of them.”
“Yes, all of them. Every goddamn one. They’re parasites leeching off the rest of us. Greasing the wheels of the system with our sweat and blood. I’d shovel shit for a living before I’d work for them—or with them.”
“The police, too?”
“The police more than anyone. And the FBI. And anyone who works for them. Anyone who carries a badge.”
She didn’t like the way he’d said that—as if he were including her in his general condemnation.
“You used to be a cop,” she said. “That’s a government job, last time I looked.”
“I had a different perspective on things then. I was naive.”
It was dangerous to keep pushing him, but she wanted to see how far she could go. His police background was a sore spot. She poked it. “Come on. You’d be a cop again if they’d let you.”
A shake of his head. “No way would I ever wear the uniform. I see through it now.”
“You see through the uniform?” she teased. “You’ve got, like, X-ray vision?”
He didn’t crack a smile. “I see through the bullshit. I’m not buying the party line anymore. I’m not so easily fooled.”
His glance fell on her as he spoke the last words. For a moment she was sure he did have X-ray vision, and he could see the gun in her purse and
read the thoughts in her mind.
Nutty idea, but it had come from somewhere. It was a way for her subconscious to send a warning.
Kolb could be on to her. She had no definite reason to think so, only a feeling. But she trusted her feelings.
It was how she’d stayed alive.
Tess found Kolb’s apartment building and cruised past. His Oldsmobile wasn’t in the carport. He was gone, and there was a good chance Abby was with him.
He could be anywhere. But she hadn’t picked up a signal between West LA and his mid-Wilshire address, so the odds were fair that he’d headed east. Of course, he could have gone north into the San Fernando Valley or south to Long Beach, but she couldn’t cover the entire city. She was already traveling east, and she continued in that direction. Maybe she would get lucky.
Her cell phone rang. Caller ID said it was the field office. She didn’t want to have that conversation. She turned off the phone and kept driving.
Questions nagged her, questions about Abby. More precisely, about her own feelings with regard to Abby. Her reactions—or overreaction, as the case might be.
She tried to reconstruct her thought processes of a few hours ago. Yes, she’d been concerned that Abby had gone off the reservation completely. But there’d been more to it than that. Something had made her leap to the conclusion that Abby was guilty and cling to that opinion with fierce righteousness.
Righteousness, she’d found, was invariably a cover-up for some unattractive and unadmitted motive. Criminals were often righteous. The more obviously guilty they were, the more righteous they acted. It was a defense mechanism, a way of directing blame away from oneself and onto others. A way of finding a fall guy…a scapegoat.
That was the term Abby had used.
It was always safe to blame the scapegoat, because the scapegoat was entirely separate from the self. Tess had worked hard to convince herself she and Abby had nothing in common. She hadn’t wanted to believe there could be any part of herself in Abby or any part of Abby in her.
Yet there was, of course. She’d planted the bumper beeper, hadn’t she? She’d shown Abby the confidential report. She’d been willing to break the rules, just like Abby. They both spent part of their time in shadow. Abby might be more comfortable there, but Tess was no stranger to the darkness, either. She hadn’t wanted to admit it, that was all—so she’d disowned that part of herself, and Abby along with it. She’d wanted to prosecute Abby, lock her in a cell, because that way she could exorcise the shadow side of herself.
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