by Allan Folsom
He nodded pleasantly to two women chatting on the street corner, then turned down Gregory, walking toward Linden Drive. No longer the businessman with slicked-back hair, but wearing Speer’s jean jacket, T-shirt, and jeans, his backpack over his shoulder, and an L.A. Dodgers baseball cap pulled down over freshly colored purple hair, Raymond looked like any young man in his early to mid-twenties walking through this quiet neighborhood of manicured lawns and apartment buildings.
Reaching Linden Drive, he turned left and started looking for number 225, the apartment building where Alfred Neuss lived and where he would return for lunch at exactly 1:15. The same as he had six days a week, every week for the past twenty-seven years. A precise seven-minute walk from his exclusive jewelry store on Brighton Way. Raymond had bought further insurance against any last-minute change of habit a week earlier using the same strategy he had in San Francisco, Mexico City, and Chicago, simply by calling ahead and, using a fictitious name and inventing a credible story, making an appointment to meet his victim. Neuss had been no different. He had simply called and, in a midwestern accent, told him he was a Kentucky horse breeder named Will Tilden who was coming to town, had heard of the jeweler’s fine reputation, and was interested in buying an expensive diamond necklace for his wife. Neuss had been all too happy to make an appointment, and they had, for the following Monday at two o’clock, thereby giving Neuss every opportunity to follow his daily routine. The ice storm forcing Raymond to change his method of transportation had delayed things, but he’d called Neuss from the train and changed the appointment to Tuesday. That he had not shown up would no doubt have irritated Neuss, but there had been little he could do about it. Still, if Neuss had been in town on Monday and Tuesday and had kept a strict six-day workweek, week in and week out all these years, there was no reason to believe he would have done anything to change it now, or, for that matter, his daily habits.
If Neuss’s sense of the clock was excessively phobic, Raymond’s timing was impeccable and had been done with near-military precision. He had killed Josef Speer in MacArthur Park at 11:42 and taken his clothes and backpack. At 11:47 he had gone into the men’s room of a service station on Ninth Street in Koreatown and changed from Bailey’s business suit into Speer’s jean outfit; he found the jacket sleeves a little long but, rolled back, good enough. At noon exactly he’d stuffed the consultant’s suit and now useless credit cards and driver’s license into a Dumpster at the side of the service station and gotten back into the car. By 12:10 he was passing a strip mall on Wilshire Boulevard just east of Beverly Hills when he saw what he was looking for—Snip & Shear, a hairstyling storefront. What got his attention was a big, hand-lettered sign in the window—WE COLOR HAIR ANY COLOR, 30 MIN. At 12:45 he walked out with his hair barbered in the style of Speer’s and colored purple. At 12:48 he came out of a sporting goods store in the same mall with the L.A. Dodgers cap he now wore.
1:08 P.M.
Raymond stopped in front of 225 Linden Drive, a three-story apartment building with its entrance shaded by a large royal palm. He slipped a credit card from Josef Speer’s wallet into the lock of the ornamental ironwork door at the entrance. There was a click as the lock slid open and then he was inside.
1:10 P.M.
He walked up the last steps to the Neuss apartment on the top floor. The covered patio outside was decorated with several large potted, shaped podocarpus trees and a diminutive white iron table and two matching white-iron chairs. Directly across was an elevator door. Both the elevator and the stairs opened onto the patio, so it made no difference which Neuss chose to use. The elevator was more likely. Neuss was sixty-three years old.
1:12 P.M.
Raymond slid the backpack from his shoulder and took out a small hand towel he had purchased from the proprietor of Snip & Shear. Next he took the Beretta from his waistband and wrapped the towel around it as a makeshift silencer. Then, shouldering the backpack once more, he stepped behind the palm trees and waited.
Lufthansa flight 453 left Los Angeles International Airport at 9:45 P.M. and arrived nonstop at Frankfurt, Germany, the next day at 5:30 P.M. One seat, coach class, reserved for Josef Speer. Raymond had made the reservation himself using Charlie Bailey’s cell phone during the drive from MacArthur Park to Beverly Hills. Frankfurt was Germany’s main international airport. It was an obvious destination for a German student returning home. Moreover, once he had Neuss’s safe deposit key and the location of the bank, he could fly to whatever city it was in and the next morning, Friday, go to the bank, open the safe deposit box, take its contents, and take a short flight to London, landing at Gatwick Airport instead of Heathrow and passing through passport control as a member of the European Community with no close check of his papers at all.
So it made no difference if the police had his bag with his first class British Airways ticket to London/Heathrow. Even if they had alerted the London Metropolitan Police, the search for him would be concentrated at Heathrow, looking for him on a flight coming in from the United States. Once he was at Gatwick and through the gates it was a simple thirty-minute train ride to Victoria Station and from there a few minutes by taxi to the Connaught Hotel and into the welcoming arms of the Baroness.
1:14 P.M.
Sixty seconds and the indecently punctual Neuss would be there. Five seconds after that and Raymond would give the Baroness the prize she had demanded.
1:15 P.M.
No one. Nothing.
Raymond took a breath. Maybe Neuss was caught at a traffic light and had to wait to cross. Or there had been a problem at the store. Or he had stopped to talk with someone.
1:16 P.M.
Still no one.
1:17 P.M.
Nothing.
1:20 P.M.
Where was he? What was he doing? An old friend unexpectedly in town and he had reluctantly accepted an invitation to lunch? An accident of some sort? The former, no. Neuss did not socialize during working hours. An accident was always possible, but not likely because the jeweler was as neurotic about his own physical well-being as he was anal about promptness. He would look four times before crossing a street and drove a car the same way. There could be only one thing keeping Neuss. Business. It was always business. That meant for some reason he had remained at his store. The only solution was to go to the shop, somehow get him alone, and do what he had to do there.
37
PARKER CENTER. 1:25 P.M.
“Okay, he killed the kid for his clothes. Why the hell did he shoot him in the face like that?”
“Maybe he was nervous.”
“And maybe it was some other reason.”
“You’re still assuming it was Raymond.”
“Yeah, I’m still assuming it was Raymond. Aren’t you?”
Barron stood with Halliday and Valparaiso at urinals in a men’s room down the hall from the squad room, one talking over the other, each as frustrated as the next. Never mind they were wholly focused on the situation or that most of the department’s nine thousand sworn officers were mobilized in some way or other trying to find Raymond. Not only had they not been able to apprehend him, they still had no idea who he was. From what they’d learned he might as well have been a ghost.
Specialists from U.S. State Department Passport Services had scanned the information strip on Raymond’s passport using the TECS II system linking communications terminals in law enforcement facilities across the country with a master terminal at the U.S. Department of the Treasury (and thereby the Department of Justice). The finding, confirmed by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, was that the passport itself was valid and had been issued from the Los Angeles passport office at the Federal Building in Westwood two years earlier. According to the record, Raymond Oliver Thorne (birth name: Rakoczi Obuda Thokoly) had been born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1969 and had become a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1987. The trouble was the INS had no record of that naturalization, even though Raymond would have been required to provide the passport office with a
U.S. government-issued Certificate of Naturalization. Moreover, the address he had given to the passport agency turned out to be a private postal box rental company in Burbank, California, and the address he had given the rental-box company as a place of residence was nonexistent.
So, what they had was a seemingly valid passport with nothing to back it up. Still, the passport did provide a record of his latest activities, showing that he had come into Dallas, Texas, from Mexico City on Saturday, March 9, and that he had come into Mexico City from San Francisco on Friday, March 8.
Raymond’s prints and ID had come back clean from the Chicago Police Department. But there was still the question of the dual murders in the tailor shop and a ballistics test and report on the Sturm Ruger found in Raymond’s valise, which was being done. So what they had was a valid but not valid passport and a possible murder charge against Raymond in Chicago. As a follow-up to the Chicago incident, inquiries had been sent to police departments in Dallas, Mexico City, and San Francisco for possible Raymond Oliver Thorne activity in their cities on the dates he had been there. Barron himself had initiated two other inquiries. The first, through FBI Special Agent Pete Noonan, a longtime racquetball partner at the Hollywood YMCA where they both worked out, sought information from FBI data banks on nationwide fugitives that might match Raymond’s description. The second was even broader, a request for similar information internationally, made through Interpol Washington. He provided both agencies with Raymond’s booking photo and fingerprints. It was all well-intentioned, professional police work. The trouble was none of it helped the here and now. Raymond was still somewhere in L.A., and no one here could find him.
There was a loud whoosh as Barron flushed and went to the sink to wash his hands. Despite his emotional and very public challenge to Raymond and despite his own desperate and equally emotional need to quit the 5-2 and leave L.A., two other things raged inside him—his sense of how very important it was to get Raymond off the streets before he killed again, and then the secondary piece that went with it: the knowledge that if it was the 5-2 and not some other part of the nine-thousand-strong LAPD who got Raymond, they would quickly take him aside and kill him. Once again he would be right there and part of it. And horrifying as it would be, there was something that was worse. Some part of him was beginning to feel that Raymond’s actions had been so savage and brutal that making certain he never had the chance to kill again seemed almost justified, even the right thing to do. It was a feeling that terrified him because he could understand how easy it would be to become like the others and immune to it. It was something he couldn’t think about. Wouldn’t allow himself to even contemplate. Immediately he dried his hands and turned for the door, purposefully shifting his thoughts to the dead kid in the park. As he did, a piece of it suddenly came together.
“Delay! Delay, damn it!” He turned back to look at Halliday and Valparaiso. “Multiple face shots make him all but impossible to ID in a hurry. That’s why Raymond did it and why he picked him. They’re close enough in age and build, and the kid wasn’t poor. Raymond would know he’d have some kind of ID, money, and probably credit cards. It wasn’t just the clothes he was after, it was the rest of it. He’s going to try and pass himself off as the victim.”
Barron shoved out the door and into a fluorescent-lighted corridor. Halliday and Valparaiso were right behind him.
“We’re looking for a guy with purple hair trying to get out of town and maybe out of the country as fast as he can! We find out who the kid was, we’ll know where Raymond is the minute he puts down a driver’s license or tries to use a credit card.”
38
BEVERLY HILLS. 1:30 P.M.
Raymond walked quickly down fashionable Brighton Way, passing exclusive shop after exclusive shop on sidewalks so clean they might have been polished. A Rolls-Royce went by and then a stretch limousine with darkened windows. And then he was there. Alfred Neuss Jewelers. A gleaming black Mercedes was double-parked in front, a chauffeur in a black suit standing beside it.
He’d been right. Neuss was doing business.
Raymond adjusted the backpack. Then, feeling the solid press of the Beretta under his Levi’s jacket, he opened the polished brass and mahogany door and went inside, fully prepared to explain why a young man in jeans with purple hair under an L.A. Dodgers cap would be entering so fashionable and prohibitively expensive a store.
His feet touched thick carpet, and the door closed behind him. He looked up expecting to see Neuss right in front of him waiting on the Mercedes customer. Instead he saw a very well dressed, very well coiffed, very matronly saleswoman. The customer was there, too, a young, sensual blonde in a short, revealing dress. He thought he’d seen her in the movies, but he wasn’t sure. But that, like the story he’d invented as to why he was there, made no difference. Because the moment he asked for Alfred Neuss his entire plan disintegrated.
“Mr. Neuss,” the saleswoman informed him with more arrogance than he’d ever encountered even among the super-rich friends of the Baroness, “is out of town.”
“Out of town?” Raymond was stunned. That Neuss might be away was never a consideration. “When will he be back?”
“I don’t know.” She drew herself up to glare at him. “Mr. Neuss and his wife have gone to London.”
London!
Raymond felt his feet on the pavement as the door to Neuss’s shop closed behind him. He was numb, beside himself with his own folly. There had to be only one reason Neuss had gone to London, and that was that he had learned about the killings in Chicago, and maybe the others as well, and had gone not only for his own safety but to confer with Kitner. If that were the case, there was every reason to believe they would go to the safe deposit box and move the pieces. If that happened, everything he and the Baroness had planned would—
“Raymond.”
Suddenly he heard a familiar voice say his name and froze where he was. Next to where he stood was a specialty pizza store. The door was open, and a number of patrons were gathered around a large-screen TV. He stepped inside, stopping by the door. The people were watching a news broadcast. On the screen was a videotaped interview with John Barron. He was standing in MacArthur Park in front of the bushes where Raymond had killed Josef Speer.
“I’d like to know how you’re feeling, Raymond. Are you alright?” Barron was looking directly at the camera and mocking him with the same feigned concern Raymond had used against him at Parker Center barely twenty-four hours earlier.
“You can call nine-one-one the same as anyone else. Just ask for me—you know my name, Detective John Barron, Five-Two Squad. I’ll come and pick you up myself, anywhere you want. That way nobody else gets hurt.”
Raymond moved closer, piqued at Barron’s manner but equally surprised to find they had come on Speer’s body so quickly and in the same breath realized who had done it.
Abruptly he felt a presence and looked to his left. A teenage girl was watching him. When she saw him look at her, she turned away and moved closer to the screen, seemingly drawn to the immediacy of what was happening.
Raymond looked back and saw Barron’s picture vanish from the screen. In its place came his LAPD booking photo. He saw himself shown front view and then side view. Now the video cut back to Barron in the park. The mockery had vanished and he was deadly serious.
“There are nine million of us and only one of you. Do the math, Raymond. It’s not hard to figure the odds.”
Again Raymond’s photo flashed on the screen. The teenage girl glanced back over her shoulder looking for him.
He was gone.
1:52 P.M.
39
2:00 P.M.
Raymond crossed Wilshire Boulevard in a rush of emotion. Angry with himself for taking Alfred Neuss for granted, with Neuss for going to London, with the arrogance of John Barron. What made it more serious was the effectiveness of the Los Angeles police and their exceedingly rapid and relentless pursuit of him. It made it all the more imperative he get out
of the country now, tonight, as he’d planned. It meant, too, that he had to inform the Baroness.
He stopped in the shade of a large overhanging palm and took Charles Bailey’s cell phone from his backpack. Calling the Baroness with more bad news was the last thing he wanted, but he had no choice, she had to know. Clicking on, he started to punch in her number. Immediately he stopped. Two in the afternoon in Beverly Hills was ten at night in London, and the Baroness would still be at 10 Downing Street attending the dinner the British prime minister was giving for the mayor of Moscow and the Russian Federation minister of defense, and he couldn’t call her there.
Immediately he clicked back on and punched in Jacques Bertrand’s number in Zurich, where it was 11:00 P.M. If Bertrand was sleeping it was too bad. The call rang through and Bertrand came on the line, awake and alert.
“Il y’a un nouveau problème,” Raymond said in French. “Neuss est à Londres. Il est là maintenant.” We have a new problem. Neuss has gone to London. He’s there now.
“London?” Bertrand asked.
“Yes, and he’s probably with Kitner.”