14

Justine Poole’s filing cabinet had held the temporary white printout copy of the ownership papers for her car and a copy of its registration the night when Sealy had broken in. He had taken a picture of each. The car was a gray Honda Civic, and the license number was seven letters and numbers strung together, not a vanity plate or a tag that spelled a word or anything. He spent hours checking and rechecking Justine Poole’s condo building, but her car never appeared, and now it was so late he was sure she wasn’t coming. He was beginning to wonder if she had left town after all.

Sealy decided to use a skip tracer. He had also taken pictures of the copies she had made of both sides of two credit cards, so he had what he needed. Using skip tracers was tricky. They collected information about not only the people they traced, but also about the clients who hired them. Their fees were high, and presumably some clients skipped out on them, or tried to.

A few years ago, after he’d been told about the skip tracers, Sealy had used a false identity to incorporate a company, listed the business as an employment service, and begun paying a monthly fee to be a regular client of a skip tracer. Since then, he had used their services only a few times for his real business, but more often just had them locate random strangers so a survey of the subjects of his searches didn’t all lead to people who were now dead. He also wanted to keep the volume of searches high enough to justify the fees he was paying. Nothing would make the skip tracers curious faster than noticing that a client was wasting his money on their services.

He typed his account number into the rectangle over the screen and waited. The site recognized it and bloomed into its full-color home page. He clicked on “New Search” and filled in all of the things he knew about Justine Poole. She was a woman who lived a neat, orderly life, so he wasn’t surprised that she only had one card in each category. She wasn’t the kind who applied for every credit card that had a new come-on offer.

He supplied the information he had gotten from Justine Poole’s Visa and Mastercard backup copies the night he had been in her condo. This was the part that had always made the high fees worth paying. Skip tracers had twenty-four-hour instant access to information that ordinary people simply couldn’t get. They could get purchase histories for the people they were tracing, and because credit transactions occurred in seconds, the information was fresh.

He kept the site open while he made a cup of coffee. A few seconds later the tracer site produced an entry on her Mastercard. This was one for a Mobil gas station on La Cienega Boulevard, forty-six dollars and seventy-two cents—about half a tank. It figured that she was a person who never let her tank get below half full.

The next charge was for the Aero-Won Hotel on Century Boulevard. It was a hundred dollars even. He began to feel excited. That was the charge that hotels put on a card at check-in to be sure the card was real, current, and had unused credit. When a person checked out, they deleted the hundred and put in the actual cost, which was almost never a round number. If the skip-tracing site was up to the minute—and why shouldn’t a computerized system be?—then she had not checked out yet.

He typed in the name “Aero-Won Hotel” and looked at the web site. The hotel was right near the airport, which explained the name. She could practically walk to the terminal. Sealy had not put away the equipment he had laid out for his canceled early-morning trip to the three women’s apartment building. It took him only a few minutes to put it all into big black trash bags and carry it to his car.

After seeing the photographs of the man in the garage, Justine knew she could be in trouble, and she suspected her situation was deteriorating. It had taken about ten minutes after Ally Grosvenor’s first interview for her condo building to be recognized and the address to appear on the internet. Now her photograph was out there too. She looked in her wallet and found the business card from the police officer who had been the main interviewer when she and Ben were taken to the police station after the shooting. His name was Sergeant Rodriguez. She considered calling him to ask if she could get some help, but she already knew that would backfire.

The police department was understaffed and too busy to be even marginally useful for protection. The profession she’d been in since college was based on the common knowledge that the department’s motto “To Serve and Protect” was mostly aspirational. The most the cops could do for her was send a car past her condominium building a couple of times a day. And asking the police for help would be giving them permission to keep checking that she was in one place and not moving around, which was the opposite of what she would have to do if she wanted to stay alive.

Justine put away her two phones and began to pack. Whatever she was going to do, she had better get started. In minutes she had collected her belongings, packed them in practical order in her suitcase, and checked out of the hotel. She was in the lobby on her way to the parking lot when she saw him.

She was looking at him through the thick and reflective surface of a glass door, so she wondered if she had imagined this was the same man. She decided that she had not made a mistake. She had stared at his picture too many times, and he was close, just driving past the main entrance toward the parking lot beyond.

He had a BMW—black, like most of them were—and he pulled into the small strip of spaces reserved for the cars of people who were just checking in, then got out and started walking toward the front entrance.

Justine clutched her bag and hurried to the elevator, rode it to the second floor, then hurried along the hallway to descend the next staircase to the first-floor hallway and slip out the side door to the large rear parking lot. She had parked her car near the back of the building when she’d arrived because she hadn’t wanted it or herself to be visible from the street. She got into her gray Honda, drove along the rear of the lot to the exit, and headed away from the airport.

She drove to the new economy parking garage on 94th Street, took a ticket from the dispenser, and parked on the third level. She locked her bag in the trunk, went down the stairs, and walked quickly to the shuttle pickup spot at the southeast corner of the first level, where she boarded a shuttle bus that was just filling up with travelers.

When Justine had traveled by air with a client, most of the time Spengler-Nash assigned a second bodyguard to drive them to the right terminal, but she had occasionally driven the client to one of the terminals herself, dropped them at the curb, parked in the economy parking garage, taken the shuttle back to the same terminal, and rejoined them in one of the airlines’ VIP lounges to wait to board their flight. She had judged that this complicated route—driving to the airport, then doubling back, disappearing into a garage that held four thousand cars, and returning in a crowded bus identical to every other bus—would be very difficult for an enemy to follow. That difficulty was what she needed now.

She knew the ride to the airport’s loop of terminals only took about five minutes. She sat back in her seat so the bigger bodies of the male travelers would block her from view. She took a few pictures of the road behind the bus by aiming her phone over her shoulder at the back window. Then she looked down at the screen to see if the black BMW had followed. She had learned the habit of using her phone to take pictures of what was behind her when she was guiding a client through public places, and had occasionally detected unexpected threats.

There were nine terminals at LAX, but the one she wanted was Terminal 1, because just north of it was LAXit, the pick-up spot for the rideshare services and the loading zone for taxi cabs. The shuttle took an elevated lane to the departure level to begin its long horseshoe-shaped counterclockwise route. When the shuttle stopped and the doors huffed open, Justine joined the file of passengers shuffling up the aisle and stepped down onto the sidewalk. She went inside the terminal immediately and rode down the escalator to the arrival level, walked across the baggage claim between the carousels, and went out the automatic door to the street. She joined the straggling stream of people pulling their wheeled suitcases along the pavement toward the LAXit.

When Justine got there, she found the crowd was large. She could see that the line for Uber and Lyft rides was long and looked disorganized. It wasn’t a surprise, because the rideshare services were cheaper than taxis. But she saw people going to the wrong cars and being turned away, families or travel companions who were too numerous or had too much luggage to fit in one car, people frowning at their phones, seeing their drivers had canceled, and starting the process over.

She went to join the taxi cab line. Most of the rideshare line was English-speaking Americans, but the taxi line held lots of tourists from the rest of the world, some of whom spoke no English. The confusion was the right kind for Justine, because foreign tourists knew enough to stand in line, and taxi drivers knew enough to wait for the cab ahead to load and leave, pull up to the loading zone, load and leave. There was no matching of passenger to car.

After Justine was in line, she could see one problem. There were too many people with too much luggage and too many children, and not enough cabs.

She stayed in the line, but looked around to see whether it would be practical to walk back to the Uber and Lyft area. As soon as she turned, she saw the black BMW again. It was in the LAXit, moving a few feet whenever the cars ahead did, and then stopping, another few feet and then stopping. How could he have followed her so closely? Had he seen her drive out of the hotel lot? Speculating about it was just a distraction. Whatever she had done wrong was already done.

She knelt on the pavement, pretending to tie her shoe so she could crouch beside a big suitcase belonging to the family ahead. The suitcase stood upright on its wheels with its handle extended. She didn’t dare look straight in the direction of the BMW, only peering out from behind the suitcase with one eye and then looking down again. She was sure the driver was the same man, but now he had two signs on his dashboard saying Uber and Lyft. The car seemed out of place to her. Who would use a high-end BMW to drive for a rideshare company? Nobody else seemed to even see him. The car was moving so slowly that the killer could look at all the people standing in the ride lines. His slow advance would bring him within fifty feet of her. She slipped her phone out of her pocket and held it down near her foot to take several more pictures in the direction of the BMW, then put it away and pretended to finish tying her shoe.

She kept her face turned away from him, but that brought on the excruciating feeling that he would be approaching with a pistol on his lap, and at any moment he could be right behind her pressing the button to roll down his window and shoot her in the back. How close was he now? How close now?

Then the man who owned the upright suitcase grasped the handle and moved it ahead in the taxi line. He came back to the rest of his family’s suitcases, grasped the handles and moved them ahead two at a time until they were all collected ten feet closer to the cab loading zone. Justine moved to catch up more slowly than she could have because she wanted the murderer to get past her and drive on. He must be almost beside her now, and she couldn’t kneel here any longer, because the people ahead of her had moved forward and taken her hiding place with them.

As she stood, she saw a young blond woman about twenty feet ahead of her who had a hoodie on that said “Sorbonne.” It seemed like something only an American tourist would wear. She stepped to the left of the line away from the curb and advanced to where the young woman stood. She said, “Hi. Do you speak English?”

The young woman said, “Yep. In Encino most of us do.”

Justine said, “If you’ll let me share your cab, I’ll pay for both of us.”

The woman smiled. “You know it’s at least a hundred bucks, right?”

“I’ll pay for the trip, the tip, and give you an extra fifty for your trouble.”

“Why would you be in such a big hurry?”

Justine snatched a lie out of the air and began to tell it. “I’m divorced, and in an hour my child custody days start. If my ex comes to drop them off and I’m not there to take them, he gets to make a big thing out of it. I’m the unreliable parent and all that.”

The young woman craned her neck to look down the long line behind them. “Some of those people are not going to be happy, but okay.”

Justine stood with her in line, agreeing that the people behind her were probably resenting her, but hoping they’d think she was just joining a traveling companion after getting separated in the terminal and then searching for her. Justine’s need to stay alive was more likely to be urgent than other people’s need to get to their hotels, but she still felt guilty.

Justine took the dangerous move of glancing toward the rideshare lane where she had seen the killer. She didn’t see the black BMW, but couldn’t risk looking harder and longer. Losing sight of him didn’t make her feel safer. It didn’t mean he was gone. He could have pulled out, left his car at the white curb in front of Terminal 1, and be making his way back to her on foot.

She needed to stop staring in all directions and looking tense and uncomfortable or she was going to spook this girl and lose her ride. She forced herself to look into her eyes. She said to her, “Are you just getting back from France?”

“The Maldives,” the girl said.

Starting a conversation with this person was an effort, like trying to get a fire started in the wilderness. Justine had just struck a spark, but it had not gotten the tinder to burn. She had to keep the conversation alive, and she sensed that the young woman distrusted strangers who asked questions, so she stopped asking. She tried another lie. “Before I got married I always wanted to go there, but it never worked out. I had a boyfriend who actually thought of it himself and asked me to go with him. We set everything up months in advance, but by the time the date came we had reached that awful stage where you know the relationship is not getting any better, and being stuck for a month in a foreign country together will not help. Other times I was set on going alone, but that didn’t work either.”

The young woman said, “Why not?”

“Whenever I had that much extra money it was because I had a good job and didn’t have enough time off. When I had the time, it was because I was laid off and it didn’t seem smart to spend my savings having fun until I had another job. And then I got one and the cycle began again. Then I got married, and since then all my travel is about meetings.”

The couple ahead of them stepped into a cab and a moment later it pulled away toward the exit lanes. Then they were first in line. Even the wait while the next cab nosed up to them and stopped seemed an eternity, and she spent most of it trying to spot the man who had been driving the BMW. The next cab driver popped the trunk and came around to take the young woman’s bag and put it inside, then looked at Justine, shrugged, and got back in. The young woman got into the back seat and Justine quickly slid in beside her so she wouldn’t be visible for an extra second.

The driver said, “Where to?”

The young woman said, “Encino. 46001 Blossom Court.”

The driver entered the address on his phone, then looked at Justine, so she said, “You should take her first. After that, I’ll tell you where to let me off.” She had not chosen a destination, and this would give her time to select one.

“You don’t need to do that, Miss. I just put it in the phone and the GPS will take us to it.”

“Studio City. The cross streets are Laurel Canyon and Ventura.” She had chosen it because it was in the Valley at least a couple of miles from Encino, but was several miles and over the hills from her condominium and the Spengler-Nash building. It also formed a picture in her memory that was pleasant and included pedestrians. The driver typed it in and pulled ahead.

She buckled her seat belt and let herself scan the cars and the people walking on the sidewalk outside the baggage claims of the terminals. She didn’t see the man or his car, and she felt her heart beginning to slow and her muscles relax. The cab’s backseat side windows were tinted, so it was unlikely that anyone outside could even see her face. The cab pulled onto Sepulveda and took the entrance to the 405 freeway.

The northbound freeway this morning was a sluggish stream as tens of thousands of cars competed for an extra car-length of progress while the pavement narrowed and shed lanes to pass through the central part of the city. As time went by, Justine’s one-sided conversation began to run thin without the young woman contributing more than grunts and nods and the occasional half-hearted chuckles, and eventually it died. When the cab reached the young woman’s address, it was a vast green space with a huge brick house on it. The young woman got out, accepted her suitcase, and walked into the house without saying anything. As the young woman disappeared, it occurred to Justine that neither of them had remembered that she’d offered the young woman fifty dollars plus the cab ride.

The driver said, “Okay. Now for Studio City.”

Justine thought of asking him to wait while she ran to the front door with the fifty dollars, but she realized that maybe the girl had felt uncomfortable accepting fifty bucks in front of her parents’ eight-million-dollar house. She hesitated, and the driver pulled away.

The drive back along the freeway seemed faster to Justine, and as the cab came closer to the destination, she began to dread the end. She’d had no plan except to get out of immediate danger. She seemed to have slipped the noose, but now she needed to make a plan that would last more than a few minutes. She had not proven to herself yet how the man had found her hotel, but the most likely way she knew of was to pay a company that had access to credit card purchases. Everything that had happened in the past couple of days had seemed to come from some unexpected place, some other reality, but she had to react to what she saw and heard, not what she’d expected. Using the credit card that she’d used to pay for the hotel was now a risk. Any card in the name Justine Poole would be a risk.

While the cab veered onto the exit ramp at Laurel Canyon and kept going south for the next two blocks, she looked at the meter. The ride was going to be over a hundred dollars without the tip, and she didn’t have enough cash with her. She had stopped carrying much money during the pandemic, when clerks became reluctant to touch anything that had been passed around from one person to another. She opened her purse, felt for the secret pocket opening and took out the Visa card that said “Anna S. Kepka.”

The corner of Ventura Boulevard and Laurel Canyon was too busy for a cab to stop and let a customer off, so the driver pulled forward fifty feet into the entrance to the free parking lot behind a row of stores beside the CVS pharmacy. She paid with her Anna Kepka credit card, got out of the cab, and stood still for a few seconds fiddling with her purse by the open door while she scanned for any sign that they’d been followed by the BMW. There was no sign of it, so she said, “Thanks,” closed the door, and hurried into the pharmacy.

She walked through the pharmacy and out to Ventura Boulevard. There was a lot of traffic going east and west on the street, and the broad sidewalks held a steady stream of people walking among the stores, restaurants, and banks. Ventura Boulevard was essentially the main street of the San Fernando Valley.

She’d had a few long-term assignments during her time at Spengler-Nash, and one was running interference for Melisandre LeVos, a young Canadian singer who lived nearby and liked to stop at a coffee shop near here. Justine had enjoyed some parts of the assignment—being awake in the sunlit hours, staying on one assignment for more than a night at a time, working with a client her own age. She had been able to relax a bit during rehearsals and taping sessions, where studio security departments were already providing most of the protection. She began to look for the coffee shop.

She walked west at a quick pace, past the art deco Studio City Theater, which had been converted to a giant bookstore long before she’d ever seen it, then past an antique furniture store and a hairdresser’s salon. She wanted to get indoors, to a place where she could be safely off the street while she figured out what to do next. Finally, she recognized the coffee shop she used to go to with Melisandre. She stepped inside and joined the short line of people waiting to order. The line moved quickly, and she ordered and paid in cash for an iced black tea and a muffin and gave the name Terry for it. Terry was called in about two minutes and she picked up her order, went to the end of the counter, and added the cream her grandmother had always put in the tea but omitted the sugar. She sat at a small table near the back of the shop so she wouldn’t be easy to see from the street.

As she nibbled at the muffin and sipped the tea, she thought about how the killer had found her. The fact that her name had been released so quickly was a by-product of reporters’ eagerness rather than an intent to endanger her. Her name had led him to her address, and her photograph came to him courtesy of Ally Grosvenor via Channel 7 news. He had broken into the Grosvenors’ apartment and hers. That must have given him access to her credit card number—maybe all of her Justine card numbers.

She studied the other people in the coffee shop. There was nobody who seemed even remotely threatening. She’d had a difficult morning, but for the moment she was in a calm, sheltered place, and she had apparently bought some time. The people around her definitely didn’t include the man who had come for her in the BMW. Most of them were young and sitting with other people. She liked the fact that about half were female, because the kinds of erratic behavior that were dangerous were almost exclusively male.

She had become expert at these assessments and it had helped her steer her clients away from trouble. Her gaze drifted upward over the heads of the coffee drinkers and caught an image that made her breath stop and her lungs stay inflated for two seconds. It looked like the same black BMW, sitting at the traffic light outside. She watched it nose into the intersection and turn right. As it did, the car showed its left side to the coffee shop window, and she saw the face of the driver. It was the killer’s face. He was scanning the side street for parking spaces.