Meanwhile, the closed gate could mean any number of things, but only one that was truly interesting. If Nicole Stryker had left it open for him, then someone else either had recently been on the premises to close it—or that someone else was still here.
Burke stayed at the base of the pines for a few moments, just listening, then crouched low and worked his way closer to the mansion. The grounds had an unnatural stillness to them; the plants were rigid enough to appear artificial and the grass, though cool and somewhat damp, felt like the Astroturf flooring of a domed stadium. From somewhere to the south Burke heard the gruff rumbling of an airliner approaching LAX. His tennis shoes whispered through the foliage. His instincts flared. He was soon moving at a good, solid clip. He angled for the side of the massive porch and duck-walked beneath the picture window. At the edge of the doorway he reached for his ankle and unclipped the .38. It felt improbably light—and a bit unimpressive—once in his grasp.
Burke blinked sweat from his eyes. He reached up with one gloved hand and carefully tried the doorknob. The door was unlocked and it swung open. Burke slithered into the foyer, the .38 low and pointed toward the tiled flooring. He was surprised how well he could see. He peered down into the huge living room. The house was riddled with night-lights; they were plugged into dozens of receptacles near doorways and closets.
For some reason, Peter Stryker had been abnormally afraid of the dark.
Burke was on the premises legally, with keys that belonged to the family, and he was licensed to carry a firearm. None of those facts were of any particular value to him at the moment. They would not make him bulletproof. In fact, he wished he'd brought the Kevlar vest he left hanging in a closet at home. He eased through the foyer, barely noticing that the ornate, doubtlessly expensive tiles were identical to those that adorned Nicole Stryker's residence.
The living room had thick, plush carpeting. Burke moved through it rapidly and soundlessly. He did not know what he was looking for, but if Stryker's death was something other than suicide, the presence of an intruder would likely be connected. He had taken the young woman's money. Since he was here, he felt obligated to follow through.
A floorboard squeaked on the upper landing. Burke flattened against a wall near the bottom of the spiral staircase, between two massive wooden bookshelves. For the first time, he noticed several small indicators of a careful, possibly recent search of the property. Some books had been replaced upside down and a few papers slipped under end tables or protruded from desk drawers. He listened intently. He could hear faint music coming from upstairs; something classical, although he did not recognize the piece.
Then footsteps, confident and brisk, crossed the floor above him and paused at the top of the stairs. I saw a man who wasn't there, he thought. How did that old poem go?
Burke braced the .38 in his hands. He would wait for the intruder to deal the cards. He couldn't retreat to the front door, which was still standing open, without being seen. Neither could he approach the staircase. His best hope was that the man on the landing would decide he'd left the front door open himself and make a run for it, or perhaps would know another way out of the home and not choose to take any undue risk. By staying still, Burke might have the upper hand. All he had to do was be patient and wait. Or so he hoped.
The intruder also waited.
Burke tried to get a sense of the man or woman upstairs. The floorboards had squeaked, rather than complained, as they likely would with someone Burke's size. The person was probably not exceptionally large. The lock on the front door was not damaged in any obvious way, and was the likely point of entry because it was open, so the burglar was either a professional or someone with a key. And this was also someone who could stand in utter tranquility for several minutes after having been interrupted in the middle of ransacking a dead man's home.
More time passed with no movement, no sound. Sweat rolled down Burke's face and tickled his lips. He licked it away. His Delta training had prepared him for long and boring periods of motionless anxiety, waiting for a target to appear. He was confident he could wait his opponent out, regardless of how long it took.
Time slowed, almost stuttered to a halt. Burke could hear the ticking of a clock in another room.
Movement? Yes. The figure was backing away from the staircase now, probably not convinced there was someone else in the house, but unwilling to walk downstairs to be sure. Burke knew he could either call for the police or try to corner the intruder somewhere on the upper floor. But he did not know the layout of the house, and the undamaged lock suggested his opponent may have had an opportunity to familiarize himself with floor plans, or perhaps had even been on the premises before. That gave the intruder a decided advantage.
It annoyed Burke to have to wait. He knew it made sense to call the police and report someone in the house. He even gave the idea careful consideration. But having the person arrested would eliminate a juicy opportunity for some intense, brutal questioning. The footsteps backed away from the upstairs foyer and into a hall or bedroom, somewhere where there was carpeting. Burke did not know if the stairs themselves would make noise. He doubted it. In the dim light of the many tiny bulbs peppered around the house Burke could make out that the stairs had also been carpeted. That meant only the boards at the top of the stairs presented a serious risk that could give away his position. He stepped forward and looked up.
A grotesque, leering face was peering down at him from the upstairs railing.
He raised his gun to fire but stopped just in time. The face was a carved, wooden gargoyle at the top of a wooden rail post. Burke swallowed and stepped to one side. He flattened against the long bookcase and moved to the foot of the carpeted stairs. Still no additional movement from above, so Burke took a breath, released it, and sprinted lightly up the stairs with the .38 raised. His eyes searched the shadows at the top of the stairs. He moved carefully, but each whisper of carpeting was like the shriek of a bone saw to his stressed ears. At the top of the staircase he crouched again. The sounds had come from the left. He had heard nothing from the hallway to the right. That did not prove that no one else was in the house, just that if there was, he or she hadn't been dumb enough to make a noise.
Burke saw no option but to continue with the assumption that he faced only one person. He crawled along the floor, tried not to pressure any particular point with the blunt point of an elbow or a knee. He was hoping to get into the hall without alerting the intruder to his presence. He was less than a yard from the hallway when a board groaned beneath him.
There came a rustle of clothing as someone moved amazingly fast. Burke was on his feet and following, but the man had unscrewed several of the night-lights during his last passage through the hall. Now Burke was at a disadvantage, eyes were not used to the darkness. His gut clenched, waiting for the boom of a gunshot or the blade of a knife. He stopped several yards down the mansion's enormous hallway, listened intently for movement and caught only a vaguely familiar sound, something akin to fingernails scratching at thick fabric.
Burke moved closer. His pulse was thudding. His mouth had gone dry and was coated with the dirty-penny taste of adrenaline. Everything was pitch-black now; huddled clumps of furniture brought back memories of blood-soaked corpses piled in the moonlight after a mission gone wrong. He came to the room at the end of the hall, the source of the faint rustling sound, and whirled into the doorway, weapon raised.
Burke was surprised to see reasonably well. He was in a large master bedroom. On the far side of the canopied, California King bed stood an open window flooded with moonlight. The talons of tree branches were scratching and tapping on one large pane of glass.
Wary of a trap, Burke slid along the wall. He cleared the walk-in closet and bathroom before approaching the window. He eased his head out, withdrew it quickly, waiting for a shot. After a few seconds he peered out again. The tree was as tall as the two-story home, and the branches thick enough to support a large man. Burke was certain when he not
iced the carpet of pastel leaves at the foot of the tree. There were four human footprints there, like perfectly spaced exclamation points. As he watched a strong gust of wind erased the evidence.
Damn . . .
He stepped back from the large window, closed and latched it with a gloved hand. Despite the cool of the evening he was perspiring heavily. He closed the curtains, turned on his flashlight, and started to explore the premises.
Whoever searched the house was careful, neat, and had some reason to believe one or more of the many bookshelves contained what he was looking for. In fact, almost nothing else has been touched. As for the shelves, it was clear each one had been carefully examined. Although attempts had been made to put things back, traces of the search remained. As Burke had seen downstairs, some random books were either upside down or not returned to their proper places. Peter Stryker was a very obsessive and anal-retentive man. It is apparent that most of the books had been arranged alphabetically. Now some were clearly out of order.
But what the hell was the intruder looking for? It seemed unlikely that the object or information was found, unless it had happened exactly when Burke arrived, for there were still two bookshelves in the master bedroom that appeared undisturbed. Burke proceeded on the assumption that the goal had not been achieved. He moved to the bookshelf furthest away. He started at the bottom, removing books and fanning the pages; looking into the empty spaces for anything that seems like a panel or the opening to a safe. He didn't know what he was seeking, but someone wanted something from the house badly enough to have come here illegally.
He was nearly through the second row from the bottom when he finally started to pay attention to the titles. These were all the classics on mass-murderers, The Eye of Evil, Depraved, Deranged, and Deviant by Harold Schechter and The Man-Eating Myth by Arens. There were several true crime books by authors such as Ann Rule and former FBI agent John Douglas. Stryker also has numerous books about forensics and forensic psychiatry, such as Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream. All things considered, probably a normal collection for a horror novelist. Nothing about the bookcase itself struck Burke as unusual. He ran his hands along the sides and behind the edges but found no buttons or switches.
The last bookcase was stuffed with books, many of which Burke immediately recognized. Peter Stryker also had a rather comprehensive library on comparative religion. Here sat the works of Huston Smith and Joseph Campbell, books on the Kabbalah, Christian mysticism, Zen and the Birds of Appetite and other works by Thomas Merton, Daisaku Ikeda on Japanese Nichiren Shoshu meditation, and even some tracts on Zen Buddhism by D.T. Sukuki. All in the bookshelf closest to Stryker's bed.
Burke was dryly amused by the concept of a horror author who somehow managed to scare himself into religiosity.
He examined these bookcases as well, but spotted nothing unusual either in or on them. He moved to the large walk-in closet and slid the mirrored door fully open with the tips of gloved fingers. The flashlight revealed a long row of expensive, tailored suits. Each suit was either gray or pale blue and all of the shirts were white. There were dozens of pairs of polished black dress shoes placed neatly on the floor of the closet. It seemed as if Stryker never wore the same outfit twice. Burke closed the door.
What could the intruder have been seeking? Perhaps just a slip of paper he had reason to believe was in one of the books, or maybe a suicide note that revealed something a bit too scandalous?
Shit! What if the man he was chasing had simply slipped around to the front of the house and came back inside from below, perhaps to make one last furtive search of the books?
Burke stepped quietly down the hall to the balcony again, looked down.
The front door was now partly closed. The difference was subtle, but it had been moved.
The tiny hairs on the back of his head fluttered and came to attention. Holding the flashlight as far from his body as possible, Burke let the beam sweep the living room below. Nothing seemed out of place. He trotted down the stairs, .38 pointed at the carpet, and scoured the gloom again. Nothing, no one. Okay, this is all getting way too weird.
Burke looked at the books again, even more carefully this time.
The middle shelf was all medical texts, many quite obscure; everything from Gray's Anatomy to books on bird flu and other strains of influenza virus, also infections and their varied responses to antibiotic intervention. The fourth row of those texts sat about waist high for a man of average size. It was impeccably arranged, alphabetically organized, not a book was out of place.
And they were not that way before.
Burke grunted softly, moved closer. He examined the sides of the shelves. He ran his gloved hands along them. He found a small switch, on the left side of the shelf, behind the row in question. He pressed it, heard a faint whirring sound. The shelf slid back into the body of the wall; meanwhile, another shelf rose to supplant the first.
Burke used the flashlight. There were papers on this new shelf, most carefully assembled into packets and bound by large, colored paper clips. Some of these had clearly been shuffled around and then replaced. Burke removed a small metal flash camera from his pants pocket, arranged the various pages on the floor and photographed them all.
Some seemed to contain equations of some kind. Burke remembered very little of chemistry or math, but knew Doc could likely decipher them. He took more pictures. Other pages seemed hurriedly scrawled and contained symbols so arcane they might have come from some ancient civilization. Within minutes all the papers had been put back together in the same order, clipped in the same matched way, and replaced on the hidden shelf. He touched the button again and the bookcase returned to normal.
Burke slipped out the front door into the cool night air, jogged across the lawn. He crawled back over the wall and into his car. He stripped off the surgical gloves, stuffed them into a fast-food sack, and drove away. Moments later that sack was buried in a trash bin behind a restaurant off Doheny. Although Burke had done his job efficiently, without having used the key that had been given him or leaving the slightest trace that he had been there, he was not at all happy.
He was at least one step behind.
THIRTEEN
La Pergola was a small Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in the middle-class neighborhood of Sherman Oaks. Its chief selling point to the health-food conscious denizens of the Valley was that the owner grew his own vegetables on a nearby vacant lot. It was also known for its exceptional homemade pasta dishes. Burke came in through the back of the small restaurant and ordered espresso. He waited until the obsequious waiter had wandered off into the kitchen and opened his cell phone.
"It's me. I had company."
"What?" Gina sounded sleepy. Burke could hear the stilted dialogue and sappy string music of some old black and white film playing in the background. Without a relationship to obsess about, Gina was becoming addicted to the Romance Channel. "Damn. Broken-nosed kind or the government kind?"
"I don't know, but he was good."
"The plot sickens."
"He was after something hidden in the house." Burke would not say more over a cell phone. "Gina, I think he might have found it, too. I'm going to speed things up."
She pondered and then caught up. "Okay, do you want me to meet you?"
He dropped sugar and cream into the espresso and downed it in one gulp. "Nope, you get some sleep. I'll handle this part solo."
"You won't be welcome there."
"I'll be careful."
Gina woke up. Her voice rose as she remembered something. "Burke? Major Ryan has been trying to reach you. He was using some dumb-ass southern accent again, but I know it was him. Why does he bother with that spook shit?"
"I don't know, Gina. I think he enjoys it."
"Call me in the morning."
He broke the connection, folded the telephone and put it back into his pants pocket. He lifted the beaded glass, drank some of the chilled water, left a few dollars on the table and exited through the
back door.
Although Burke was always careful to be sure he was not being followed, he now took precautions that bordered on paranoid. He drove up Colfax toward the lower-class part of the Valley, one eye on the rearview mirror, and then took a sharp right onto Burbank Boulevard. Anyone tailing him would be forced to duplicate a very dangerous move. As soon as he was around the corner he pulled into the driveway of a small business, cut the engine and flicked off the headlights. He unfastened his seat belt, turned and studied the street intently. Nothing.
Satisfied, Burke continued on until he arrived at Lankershim Boulevard in North Hollywood. He turned south toward the towers of Universal Studios. The entrance to the theme park, restaurants, and five-star hotel was a long and deeply sloped driveway that ended in a brightly lit circle before the Sheraton Hotel. Burke parked in the self-park area. He did not want anyone to remember his face. He got out of the car and checked out the parking garage. A young teenaged girl was standing near a Bronco, necking with her boyfriend. Burke turned his back to the couple and pretended to screw around with something on the front seat. He made some noise while doing that. Taking the hint, the kids drove away.
Once no one else was on his floor Burke went around to the back, opened the trunk of the car and removed a small suitcase. The inside lid contained a makeup mirror. He worked smoothly, efficiently, an actor preparing for an old, familiar play. He changed his shirt and windbreaker for newer clothes, located a gaudy knockoff watch, slipped it on his wrist. He closed the suitcase, chose a brand new briefcase, and slammed the trunk.
A few moments later Burke emerged as a tall, vaguely familiar-looking man with a goatee and entered the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel. He was youngish and obviously athletic and wore the standard L.A. uniform of a Hollywood producer: an expensive, black James Perse tee shirt and coat, old tennis shoes, and faded jeans. He also sported what appeared to be a platinum Rolex watch to shout that he was actually worth a bundle and could dress expensively if he weren't so humble. The producer, who carried a pristine briefcase, strode through the lobby as if very familiar with the surroundings. Therefore, none of the support staff thought to offer him assistance.
The Pressure of Darkness Page 9