“I was surprised, I must admit,” Elizabeth said.
“About the shooting?”
“That Lawrence invited you here. Of course, he is free to do as he chooses, but I did wonder what Heather might think about Lawrence’s ex-wife staying in the cottage.”
“I don’t understand,” Catherine said, but a part of her was beginning to understand. It was like a light slowly turning on in her head. Lawrence hadn’t mentioned that he was currently involved with someone else, but then, he had never mentioned the other women.
“Heather Montgomery, his fiancée. It did cross my mind that she might not approve.”
Fiancée! The word hit her with the sharp impact of a stone. She recognized the name. Heather’s father was a telecommunications billionaire.
“Oh, I’m sure he told you about her,” Elizabeth went on, and Catherine knew that she knew Lawrence hadn’t said anything about his fiancée. “The engagement will be announced in Sunday’s Journal. The wedding will be September fourteenth.”
Catherine turned around and walked over to the cottage. Elizabeth Stern was talking about the reception that would be held at the Denver Country Club when she slammed the door.
11
The Stern Ranch was dense with pines, boulders, and brush penetrated by columns of morning sunlight. Erik had taken the dirt road that looped around the ranch twice last evening before he’d located a funnel through the trees that offered a view of the front door of the guest cottage. He’d parked in a square of meadow across the road and watched the cottage. What he’d seen was unexpected. A gentleman caller, none other than Lawrence Stern the third or something, checking up on his ex-wife. He’d watched until the lights had dimmed in the windows and finally flickered out. A couple of hours, long enough for cocktails and dinner.
He’d gotten a good laugh at what must have come next. He had done his research on Lawrence Stern. Secretaries were such an excellent source. They knew everything about the boss. A few drinks at a bar with a handsome stranger interested in their lives, and they told what they knew. Catherine McLeod either didn’t know her ex was engaged to somebody else, or she knew but didn’t care. Either way, she seemed more complex and interesting. If she didn’t know, it was because she hadn’t wanted to know. Whatever was going on in her ex’s life hadn’t been important enough for her to investigate, which meant she investigated only the subjects she cared about. And once she started, she didn’t stop until she had the full story. Erik had read everything she’d written over the last six months. She’d closed down daycare centers. She’d sent the state treasurer to prison.
On the other hand, it was likely she had heard about Lawrence’s fiancée and didn’t care, and that told him something else. She wasn’t as tough as she wanted people to think. She was scared. The little scenario that had played out at her town house had scared her to death and sent her running to the ranch where she had jumped into bed with a man—it could have been any man, he was thinking—who might protect her. This scenario made her seem more vulnerable and helpless, more likely to kick logic aside and act on emotional impulses. He would have to watch her carefully, be prepared for anything. He felt as if he’d found himself facing an unstable opponent in a poker game, one who might jump up and turn the table over and spill the cards across the floor.
He had driven back down the mountain and spent the night in a flat-roofed motel that sloped downhill on the outskirts of Conifer, with red neon lights blinking Vacancy over the dirt parking lot and a few pickups nosed toward the doors along the front of the building. He’d handed forty-eight dollars to the fat man behind the counter who reeked of tobacco and perspiration, and the fat man had pushed a register toward him. It was the kind of place where nobody cared what name you signed—pick your name tonight—but on the other hand, Erik was careful. The name couldn’t be obvious. No John Does or Smiths. Nothing that might call out to the fat man, should he get bored with television and decide to read the register, and stick in his memory. He’d signed Matthew Arnold, figuring the fat man wouldn’t get it. Inside the seedy room that reeked of cigarette smoke, stale food, and urine, he’d called Deborah, assured her that the business was going well. He would conclude it tomorrow morning and be home by dinner. “Kiss the kids good night for me,” he’d said. “A kiss to you, too, sweetheart.”
It was starting to get light, the sky in the east layered in crimson and gold, when he had gotten back into the brown sedan and climbed up the mountain. A pair of hawks glided along the high peaks. He’d driven slowly, stopping at the turnouts to study the terrain and the road falling away below. The highway threaded through the canyon, a strip of silvery asphalt in the half light with a thin line of vehicles flashing past, yellow headlights wobbling ahead. A bridge crossed the highway and bent into the entrance to the eastbound lane. By the time he had parked in the meadow and settled down to wait, he knew how it would come down. Catherine McLeod wouldn’t remain at the ranch all day; she was bound to leave. She’d start out for Denver, intending to go to the hospital again, check in at the newspaper, pursue her foolish story, because that was the type of woman she was. An actress playing out her role, choking back her fears.
The air was cool; the outside temperature on the dashboard said fifty-eight degrees. He opened the thermos he’d filled yesterday and sipped at the coffee that was about the same temperature as the air. There was no sign of movement at the guest cottage. The faint morning light shone in the windows.
Waiting is the most important part of the job. He could almost hear the voice of Colonel Walter Blum, as if the man were in the backseat, leaning over his shoulder. Waiting takes patience. Patience is everything. How many hours had Blum waited to take out the Viet Cong sniper in ’Nam? Something like forty-eight. Living on drops of water and hard-tack and snails, waiting for the sniper to show himself. The bastard had been picking off American patrols. A couple here, a couple there, before he melted back into the jungle. Blum had figured out the area the sniper liked best and had settled in to wait. He’d spotted him coming through the trees, a little guy in baggy black pants and black blouse, rifle slung over one shoulder. Blum had waited until he’d stopped and taken up his shooting position, then he’d walked up behind him and blown his head off.
Walked up behind him, and the gook hadn’t heard a thing. But he was good, Blum. One of the best instructors at Yellow Jacket. The place looked like a real college campus three miles outside of a crummy little town in Florida, with buildings and training grounds that sprawled across a filled-in swamp. He’d heard that the town fathers had actually raised the money to fill in the swamp and convinced the founders of Yellow Jacket—three retired Army generals—to build the private training camp close enough to town that the students could spend their money on the crappy restaurants and one-picture movie theater, and far enough away that the town fathers could claim they had no idea what went on at the camp.
Yellow Jacket taught men to kill. There were a few women at the academy, but most of the students were men. “Soldiers of fortune,” was how Blum used to refer to them. The term sounded better than “mercenaries,” and their skills brought a high price. Erik had earned six hundred dollars a day stalking and killing insurgents in Iraq. The money beat the hell out of what he’d earned in the Army, but it was the Army where he had learned to shoot. Yellow Jacket had just perfected his skills. When he’d gotten out of the Army, one of his Army buddies had called. It had been the middle of the night, Erik remembered, and he had been sound asleep. The ringing phone had pissed him off. He’d been about to tell the guy to go to hell, when he’d mentioned money. Lots of it for doing what he was good at—shooting people. A few months training, getting even better, then time in Iraq as part of a security detail for visiting dignitaries, paid for by the government, and money in the bank, old buddy. Money in the bank.
There were other jobs that came in. Discreet phone calls similar to the discreet ads placed in certain types of magazines. But there was always risk with an advertiseme
nt. Any undercover federal agent might answer an ad. On the other hand, a phone call to certain instructors at Yellow Jacket would net the best-trained candidate for the job. Experienced. Professional. Must be willing to travel. Fifty thousand dollars.
Blum had given him the first job a month after he’d returned from Iraq. He wasn’t looking forward to going back. He worried about Deborah and the kids. What good was six hundred bucks a day if he was dead? He’d been looking for something else when Blum arranged a meeting at a diner in the crummy town and told him that a Dallas businessman had a domestic problem he wanted solved. Seems his wife liked the next-door neighbor better than she liked him. “Go to Dallas. Follow the neighbor around for a while. Learn his habits. Where he goes to dinner, gets his hair styled, plays golf. Get the layout of the country club he belongs to.” He would blend right in, Blum had said. He was the type of man that different people would describe differently, depending upon the moment or the situation where they had seen him. Dark hair, blond, muscular, a little overweight, trim and in shape. Educated and refined, scruffy and hard. Arrogant, friendly. “These kinds of jobs take a chameleon like you,” he’d said.
The Dallas job had been easy. Four days of following the bastard around and waiting.
The next job had been in Los Angeles, followed by jobs in Salt Lake City, Evanston, Illinois, St. Louis, and Baltimore. No job the same, all of them interesting, and all of them solving a problem for somebody with a lot of cash. Erik had watched his account in the Cayman Islands climb to a quarter of a million dollars. He had just finished the job in El Paso when Blum had called with the Denver job.
He’d been waiting more than two hours—the coffee gone, his stomach growling, and the temperature rising—when the front door of the cottage opened and Lawrence Stern came outside. He stood in the sunlight on the porch a moment, hands jammed into the pockets of a gray jacket that hung open, glanced around, taking in the ranch, savoring the quiet expanse of it, Erik thought. All this land, and all of it mine. God, what was it like to be Lawrence Stern III?
Stern’s BMW growled into life, disappeared beyond the trees for a few minutes, then emerged on the dirt road past the gate. It swung east and started into the downhill curves. From the meadow, Erik watched the taillights of the BMW glowing red through the puffs of gray dust.
He waited almost an hour. Sunlight began to penetrate the trees and splash over the meadow. It started to get hot inside the sedan, and he rolled down the front windows. A squirrel or a chipmunk was chattering somewhere nearby. The breeze ruffled the pages of the newspaper on the seat beside him. Beneath the newspaper was the Sig.
The front door of the cottage opened and the dog bounded outside. There was a glimpse of her in the doorway, sleepy and ruffled looking, in a flimsy, short nightgown that the breeze blew around her legs. What he had to do was unfortunate. A woman with a great body like that. He shoved the thought back into the shadows of his mind. He wasn’t paid to think about such things. Too much thinking led to pity, and pity wasn’t an emotion he allowed himself to feel. He’d made a mistake the other night. He wouldn’t make a mistake again.
The door cracked shut in the mountain quiet; the dog raced into the trees, then circled back onto the driveway, skidded in the gravel, and headed for the trees again. A beautiful creature, he thought, a free thing with no plans or commitments or worries, absorbed in the exhilaration of being alive. “You should be like that,” he said out loud, and wondered if he were talking to himself or to the woman inside the cottage.
Here she was again, in blue shorts and white tee shirt, the black hair tucked up into a baseball cap that shaded part of her face. She spent a couple of moments stretching, leaning over and touching the toes of her white running shoes. “Rex,” she called. Her voice sounded like the muffled chime of a bell through the trees. The dog leapt across the driveway, and they took off running. Erik watched until they disappeared around the corner of the cottage, the dog darting in and out of the trees along the path.
Erik nosed the sedan across the mossy undergrowth of the meadow and onto the dirt road. He drove carefully, keeping an eye on the thick junipers and ponderosas that ran between the road and the ranch itself. The log fence darted toward the road here and there before losing itself in the tangle of trees and brush. He could see the white shoes flashing through the trees and hear the faint sounds of her running, as if she were running a long ways away.
He could drive ahead, locate a clearing from which he could get off a good shot, and wait for her to run into his line of sight. But he would not do that. He had spotted the cameras mounted on telephone poles when he’d taken the road this morning. The ranch was monitored. Somebody could be watching her. If she went down, a posse of cowboys would be bouncing overland in SUVs. There was only one road down the mountain, and the SUVs would catch him before he could reach the highway. In any case, he had learned at Yellow Jacket to make a good plan and stick with it. A plan considered all possibilities, allowed for the unexpected, and mapped out escape routes ahead of time.
He had deviated from the plan at her town house. He had intended to shoot her while she was out walking the dog, but he’d gotten greedy. He’d wanted more. He’d decided to allow her to return home. He would break into the house and take his time with her. In an instant, he had convinced himself that it was the better plan. It would appear to be the random rape and murder of a single woman alone in her townhome. He had deviated again when her friend arrived. He’d burst through the door, furious that she’d called someone and thrown a monkey wrench into his plan. He’d been consumed with shooting them both and getting the job over. But she had eluded him in the shadows somewhere in the living room, and the sirens had started screaming outside. He had fallen back on the original plan that he’d mapped out on how to make his escape, which he had done through the backyards of the townhomes to the sedan that he’d left in an alley.
She spotted the sedan, he was certain, as she ran past a brush-studded opening between the trees. He saw her head pivot about to get a better look in the instant before he pressed hard on the accelerator and shot ahead, throwing up a wave of dust in the road behind. He kept going, circling the ranch and parking in a spot across from the gate, not wanting to take the chance that she might spot him again and grow suspicious. She was wary, this one. He had learned that about her. She had instincts.
He had been parked for five minutes when he saw that the ranch was coming alive, waking up. The caretaker slammed out of the cottage near the gate and jumped into a Jeep with a roll bar across the top. The Jeep swung into a U-turn and ground down the road toward the main house where an SUV was backing out of the garage. The two vehicles stopped side by side for a moment—he could see the caretaker leaning over the passenger seat to speak to whoever was under the wide-brimmed straw hat in the driver’s seat of the SUV. Then the Jeep spurted past the house and into the vastness of the ranch.
The SUV took its time—backing up, inching forward, and backing up again until it was in the center of the road, heading toward the guest cottage as the dog loped out of the trees. Catherine was close behind, running more slowly, the tee shirt plastered to her skin, as if she had taken a detour through a waterfall. The sight of the SUV took her by surprise because she stopped in mid-step, one foot poised for an instant in the air. Then she seemed to collect herself. She threw her shoulders back and walked over to the woman who had gotten out of the SUV.
Erik pulled a small pair of binoculars out of the glove compartment and focused on the woman. A fringe of red hair poking from the straw hat, eyes hidden behind rounded sunglasses, the skin stretched smooth over sharp cheekbones. An attractive face, no longer young. The jawline was firm, the red painted lips parted in a controlled smile that, he imagined, she had perfected at a thousand gala events. This would be the matriarch of the family, Elizabeth Stern herself, and whatever she was saying caused Catherine to spin around, walk over, and let herself into the cottage. The sound of the door slamming shut rang into the
quiet a moment, then the SUV’s engine revved, and the vehicle started toward the gate that was already opening. He was able to get a better look at Elizabeth Stern as she drove through the gate and turned onto the downhill road that her grandson had taken two hours ago.
Now he would wait. Something had happened between Catherine and her ex’s grandmother. Whatever it was, he had the sense that Catherine would be leaving soon. The way she had stomped away from the SUV, thrown herself into the cottage, as if she had to get away from whatever refuge the ranch was supposed to provide.
Fifteen minutes later, Catherine stomped out of the cottage, pulling a backpack that bounced across the dirt road, black bags hanging off her shoulder, a brown paper bag clutched against her. She’d flung most of it into the trunk and let Rex into the backseat.
Erik turned the ignition. The engine coughed itself awake, and he drove onto the road and started down the mountain. He kept his foot steady on the accelerator, both hands holding the wheel as he turned through the switchbacks. He could feel the rear tires skidding, his own adrenaline pumping, every muscle tensed. He dropped through the last turn and came out on a straight road that ran toward the metal bridge sparkling in the sun ahead.
He drove fast onto the bridge, the tires clumping over the metal slats, then slowed into the entrance to the highway. It was a long entrance that ran downhill a quarter of a mile then gradually flattened into the outside lane. But before the entrance joined the highway—and here was the beauty of the plan he’d formed this morning—it ran past a triangular expanse of bare dirt. Erik tapped on the brake, swung left onto the dirt, and stopped. He left the engine running and slipped the Sig out from beneath the newspaper. Holding it low, he checked to make sure that the silencer was fitted on tight.
The traffic moving toward Denver was heavy, the end of the morning rush hour into the city from the mountain suburbs. There was safety in numbers, he thought, many witnesses always better than one. The motorists passing at the exact moment would all see something different. They would contradict one another, wonder if they had seen what they had actually seen, doubt their own stories, reshape them to fit into what surely must have taken place. By the time the police had sorted through it all, he would be on a plane home, sipping a bourbon and mapping out a tentative plan for the next job.
Blood Memory Page 11