17

Leo Sealy had turned in the BMW and was driving a white Toyota, his third rental car since he’d begun this job. He was changing everything he could, in case Justine Poole had seen him at the airport or afterward. He would keep changing things until he got her. This afternoon he was wearing a tan baseball cap with no insignia on the crown and a pair of wraparound sunglasses. These small transformations mattered. He had to fool not only Justine Poole, but random people too. Anyone who saw him twice was a potential witness.

A different car made it possible to make any sight of him a onetime thing. He was just one driver in the endless stream of cars going past. A second sight of him could raise curiosity. He tried to rent his cars in the most common colors—black, white, or silver—and never the same make or model as the last one.

Since he had succeeded in finding her hotel, guessing she would be at the airport, and following her cab from the airport way the hell out to Encino, he had temporarily lost sight of her when she’d doubled back. He had sped up and realized the cab must have turned off around the Studio City exit, so he’d gone back, found a parking space and searched Ventura Boulevard. He had walked in and out of about ten stores, four restaurants, and a coffee shop, stared into many windows, and not seen her. He had gotten back into the car and driven up and down Ventura Boulevard and its cross streets for another hour. She was on foot, so she should have been visible on the sidewalk at some point. “Should have been” meant nothing. She had probably gotten a Lyft or Uber out of there right away.

Leo Sealy usually had more success at stalking female targets and finding them quickly. They were smaller and slower and they didn’t have his physical stamina. The vast majority wore shoes that hurt them and about half were used to wearing clothes that made them stand out—bright colors, very tight or very loose, and, in this weather, short.

This one was different. She had worked in a job that involved getting clients in and out of public places without attracting attention, glancing at spaces ahead and instantly judging their risk potential and the directions trouble might come from. He was beginning to wonder whether she had seen his face at some point and could see him coming. It would also not be out of the question for her to turn serious about getting on an airplane. Los Angeles wasn’t the world. She had not done it this morning but it might have been because he had been too close behind her. She would know he’d buy a ticket, follow her in past the metal detectors, and see which plane she took.

For the moment he had to keep trying the standard methods in the hope that he would see her in one of her usual places—her home, her employer’s building, and the streets between them. If that didn’t work sometime this afternoon, his skip-tracing company might find more activity on one of her credit cards. If she was determined not to go home, she would probably need another hotel. If she kept moving with a small bag, she would need to buy clothes. If she had no place to cook, she’d need to pay to eat somewhere. Almost anything she did would bring him straight to her. He was also always thinking, trying to invent another way. That was what made Leo Sealy one of the best.

It took Joe Alston five minutes to decide to set aside everything else and write the story of Justine Poole. He liked to think of himself as a man dedicated to finding and revealing the truth. He used this view to make himself get out of bed each morning and get to work. Not all truths were lofty or useful or made him like human beings better, but he had to write stories that were likely to strike editors as worth pursuing because people would read them.

This story seemed to have everything—a very attractive woman who had a career protecting celebrities and powerful people. That didn’t necessarily make her a sympathetic figure. It was pretty much what the Praetorian Guard had done for a living in ancient Rome. She was already shaping up to be the latest one to be canonized by the media as a hero, something they often did just before they tied the hero to a stake and set them on fire. For the moment he had to set these bits of knowledge aside and get to work.

Joe had to concentrate on taking practical steps right now, before everybody started moving again and it was too late to guide the situation in the direction he wanted it to go. At the moment, he had exclusive access to the heroine of an adventure story. He hoped he could keep it that way.

She was behaving as though she was desperate to stay hidden. She had gotten herself home with him by taking on a false identity—Anna—and acting flirtatious in a way that women almost never were with strange men. He made a mental note to see if he could get her to spell the false surname when he was ready to write, since she hadn’t even said it aloud yet. The main thing was to keep her here.

She had pretended to be attracted to him, which was almost insulting because she would never have acted that way unless she thought he was stupid. She had probably really been avoiding somebody and maybe it was really a rejected suitor, as she’d said, but it could also have been a reporter, or even someone she thought might harm her—friends of the robbers she’d shot, maybe? His internet introduction to her had mentioned that the supervisor who had been with her at the shooting scene had been murdered the next night. That would be enough to scare anybody.

He had to keep her here, but behave in a way that would avoid alarming her. He had to lie to her in a way that meshed with her lies to him. She would be Anna, and only Anna, for now. He had to let her believe he was fooled by her lies, but at the same time, not fear he expected an instant sexual relationship with her. That would make her bolt for the next hiding place, one that would hide her from him as well as everyone else.

He looked up from the computer search he had been performing on Justine Poole as though staring at the wall for the right unwritten word, and took the chance of giving her a sideward look. She had fallen asleep on his couch. He was relieved. He would have more time to think through what he would say to her.

Justine had seen him look up at the wall and then at her and then go back to work. She felt relieved that his reaction had been to leave her alone and let her sleep. She knew it wasn’t going to last, but the truth was that she really had fallen asleep until she’d heard his movement across the room. She was used to working at night and the change in schedule and the hide-and-seek of this morning had left her tired. She hoped she hadn’t snored, as exhausted people sometimes did, and she knew that some also drooled. She moved her face on the pillow no more than an inch and moved it back, and found that she hadn’t been drooling. She didn’t want to be gross and disgusting—to anybody, not just Joe Alston, whom she barely knew and would probably never see again.

Joe was a victim. She had seen the killer through the coffee shop window and the easiest way to evade him was to use the man she’d caught noticing her. She had not been exactly lying when she’d pretended she’d felt some attraction to Joe. The qualities she’d thought might make him easy to manipulate, if viewed another way, were compliments, but she couldn’t think in those terms at the time. He was there, someone she could use as a way out. He had turned out to be a good choice, but depending on a stranger had created new problems and maybe even new dangers. As soon as she let him know she was awake she could be dealing with unwanted advances.

She moved ever so slightly to restore her circulation and waited to see if he had noticed. For a moment she thought about the articles she had read. He wasn’t stupid. He was also not a jerk. She had to hope that he was—what? Trusting, maybe. That trust might buy her a little more time in invisibility.

What she realized was going to interfere with her plan was that she had drunk most of that stupid large iced tea. More than large. What did they call it? Venti. And she had not gone to the restroom to pee, but to sneak out the window. She felt that now she had used up the time her body would allow her before she had to get up from the couch.

As she stood, Joe looked up from his computer. “Good morning,” he said.

“Sorry to fall asleep.” She had dropped the Anna accent. “Is your bathroom through there?”

“Yes,” he said. “The door on the right.”

She got past him and was inside with the door locked at last. After she had relieved herself she fixed her hair with his hairbrush and used some Kleenex to blot her lipstick and make its borders conform better to her lips. She was mainly concerned about what her next few steps should be. She was safe until Joe kicked her out, but she’d thought of nothing that would help catch Ben’s killer, or even decided on her next refuge. She returned to the main room.

He was still at his desk frowning at the laptop screen, the keys clacking as he worked. She glided by behind him and walked along looking at the pictures on the walls as though she were in a gallery. There were only four of what she thought of as trophy photographs, pictures of Joe in exotic places with one or more politicians or other well-known people. One that she lingered at showed him without a shirt on a sailboat tilting in a strong wind and gripping a rope with one hand beside Lars Helgerson, the composer and conductor of the Oslo Symphony Orchestra. She only recognized him because she had seen him at a performance in LA where she had been assigned to accompany an Italian opera singer. If the pictures were intended to impress women Joe brought here, he must have courted only smart ones. Maybe he displayed these as a test.

There were also a few good paintings. There was an autumn landscape that could be from one of the nineteenth-century Hudson River clique; a big sailing ship on a level course on a blue sea, so minutely detailed that she could feel the painter’s pride in the ship as the latest and best; and a couple of naked women, probably turn of the century French, by somebody who liked women. She didn’t think Joe’s essays were the sort that would make him able to afford these, but plenty of people who did the sort of work he did were born into rich families and got sent to the best universities, then felt they had to do something to justify all that luck.

As her browsing brought her closer to him, he closed his laptop, turned to look up at her, and said, “Do you need to get someplace this afternoon? I’ve done enough on this project for now, so I can take you anytime.”

“That’s really sweet, Joe,” she said, “but I was just about to call a Lyft.” She walked past the cluster of furniture and unplugged the phone she’d been charging. She had blown an opportunity to stay out of sight for a few more hours, but maybe there never had been an opportunity after her odd behavior in the morning.

“Or we could talk,” he said. “I mean, as you pointed out before, we both noticed each other in a place that was full of people this morning. It seems as though that might be worth looking into.”

She smiled and shrugged. “I was mostly trying to be funny. But okay.” He wasn’t so smart after all. But he must think that she was attractive—not unpleasant looking, anyway—and she might be able to use that. She could still stretch this for at least an hour or two and maybe even stay invisible until dark. Maybe right now the best she could do was to stay alive and let the piece of human scum who had killed Ben Spengler wear himself out looking for her.