Justine heard pounding. Her mind tried at first to incorporate it into her dream. What entered her dream was a team of big football players running down a long corridor that led out onto the broad green playing field. They emerged and there were loud shouts, maybe from the people sitting in the stands, and others from the players themselves. “Open up! Open up!” Her brain couldn’t fit this into the dream, so her eyes opened.
There was a stamping of feet, and she realized she had been hearing that too. It took her a second to place herself in the hotel room, and then the telephone on the nightstand rang far too loudly, and she realized it was all the phones on the floor ringing at once. She snatched up the one beside her.
It was a pleasant female voice, a recording. “This is an emergency. If you’re hearing this message, you must immediately leave your room and make your way to the nearest stairwell, which is marked with a red ‘Exit’ sign. Do not attempt to use the elevators. Leave all luggage and personal belongings. I repeat—” Justine hung up. It was obviously a fire. She stepped into the new pants she had laid out for tomorrow on the desk, tugged the top over her head, stuck her feet into the new walking shoes and wriggled into them, and slipped her purse over her shoulder.
The invisible men reached her door a second later and pounded on it. A man shouted “Police! We’re evacuating the building! Come out now!”
Justine put her hand on the doorknob gingerly, her mind still clouded but aware that it might be hot, found it wasn’t, and opened the door. What she saw was motion. The cop had already moved on, replaced by a stream of people of many sizes and ages, not stampeding but walking at a brisk pace from left to right across her doorway. She saw a break between a big man with a mostly bald head whose gray side-hair was standing up so it looked like animal ears and a woman who was wearing a long, graceful blue bathrobe with padded shoulders and a narrow waist like a 1930s gown, with stack-heeled shoes. Justine stepped into the gap and adjusted her speed to the procession, leaning to the side to peer around the tall man to see what was ahead.
The squad of police officers had moved out of sight already, but there was one standing under the “Exit” sign holding the stairwell door open and using a sweeping arm gesture to direct people into the stairway. “That’s right, everybody. Keep it nice and orderly, and go down carefully. Watch your step, and hold onto the railing. Help anyone who seems to be having trouble. The officers in the lobby will direct you.”
A man about forty-five years old who had a wife and a teenage daughter stopped in the doorway and said, “What’s the emergency?”
The officer said, “The officers at the bottom will explain,” and he adjusted his next sweeping hand gesture to guide the man through the doorway. “Eyes forward and watch your step, ladies and gentlemen.”
Justine was aware that it was best for her not to be recognized, so she followed more closely behind the big bald man and kept her head down as she reached the stairwell entrance.
She had to be careful to merge into the stream of people already coming down from the floors above. The first steps onto the staircase where an unpleasant surprise. Each section of the structure was a free-standing flight of steel steps that went from one rectangular landing to the next, followed by another flight aimed in the opposite direction. The whole structure seemed not to be well anchored to the walls, so it was shaking with the heavy footfalls of the dozens of people hurrying downward.
She started to look upward to see how the staircase was held together—bolts? welds?—then caught herself and conceded that it didn’t matter because the decision had been made long before now, but that made her wonder how long ago it had been.
She concentrated on the downward motion. Stepping down put people in the position where she wanted them. The ones in front were looking away from her, and the ones behind could only see the back of her. The one place where she had to look away was on each landing, when everyone had to walk in a semicircle to the next flight down.
One of the things that puzzled her was that she wasn’t noticing anything she had expected in a fire—hearing an alarm sound, people coughing. She didn’t smell any smoke. She was glad, of course. Maybe all of these people could get out before things got ugly and life-threatening. Her mind searched for an explanation—they had found an electrical fire right away and ended it, but had to be sure it was the only one, or there had never been a fire. Were they allowed to run fire drills in a hotel with real, paying guests? She’d never thought of it before, but it didn’t seem possible. A more likely story might be that the fire had been real, but small, and they had decided to avert a panic by getting everyone out instantly. None of these ideas satisfied her.
She had been avoiding an idea that had been nagging to be recognized. The cops had said “emergency,” not “fire.” The emergency could be a man seen on the premises with a gun, an active shooter. This idea was now seeming the most likely, and the probable suspect would be her killer. Marina Obermaier had warned Justine that somebody would figure out she was staying here, but she had been speaking about a reporter, not a killer. Justine’s next thought was that it didn’t matter what anyone talked about. What mattered was what happened.
This was Justine’s fault. She had been trying to stay ahead of the killer for three days, but she was the only one who knew how tenacious and skillful this guy was. She had tried to get Sergeant Kunkel to understand how urgent it was that the police go after him, but they’d already known, and then she’d realized she’d blown their sympathy by having called a lawyer instead of waiting to reassert her rights.
She looked at the number “2” stenciled on the wall by the door on the next landing. She was elated because she was almost to the ground, and then she felt frustrated, because she was almost to the ground and had spent her time thinking in the present instead of planning. In one more flight she was going to be out of the stairwell and in the open. She kept up the pace because she had to. There were people behind her who were terrified and descending faster to escape what they probably thought was a fire.
When she reached the concrete floor at ground level the door marked “1” was propped open and she heard a deep, authoritative male voice saying, “… bomb threat. The call has been deemed credible, so please keep moving. Don’t stop until you and your party are on the far side of the yellow police tape.”
It had not occurred to Justine that the rush down the stairwell could have taken more than a few minutes, but apparently the cops had been here long enough to cordon the place off. During the evacuation descent she had never been near anything but solid windowless walls, but as soon as she stepped out into the lobby, she faced the glass side wall, where she saw the rotating blue and red lights atop police cars; red, white, and yellow flashing lights on fire engines and ambulances; spotlights sweeping the street and the grounds of the hotel. She could see vehicles of several sorts moving around at the periphery. Staring made her move too slowly, so the flow of people from the stairwell engulfed her and swept her through the brass-framed doors onto the sidewalk.
Once people were outside, there were more police officers and firefighters to direct them away from the building, but most people went a hundred feet, stopped, and began to coagulate into thick crowds. They seemed assured that the emergency—at least for them—was over.
A few times, Ben Spengler had included visits from members of the police bomb squad in his training curriculum, because events involving people like Spengler-Nash clients—concerts, galas, awards ceremonies—were possible targets. The bit that came back to her now was that when there was a chance of high explosives, they had advised that a bodyguard move everybody at least five hundred feet from the probable device. She reminded herself that what she’d heard was that this was a bomb threat, not necessarily a bomb. One of the bomb techs had mentioned that only about a third of LA bomb calls resulted in a device that could even cause an explosion. That had seemed like few at the time, but tonight a third seemed like a lot. And the man who was after her wasn’t some nut or prankster; he was a pro.
She began scanning the crowd, looking for her killer. She saw knots of people who were obviously hotel guests roused from sleep—couples, some middle-aged and some young, clinging together, while others seemed to see this as a social occasion, talking with animation about what they’d heard, seen, or felt. There were children, some so young that their parents were trying frantically to keep them in hand, or at least in sight as they strayed among the taller adults. The older ones seemed deeply bored and put out by the experience, but the attitude was a pose, because in spite of their flat expressions, their eyes were always moving, flicking from one sight to another.
Justine had trained herself to expect the threatening person to be less than obvious, and tonight he’d have to be very careful, because these cops would know enough to look for the man who had made the call, expecting him to show up. She raised her eyes to the tops of the nearby buildings, then the darkened windows, trying to spot an open one or a balcony that had anything on it that could be a man or hide one. She knew a professional killer must be good enough to pick her out in this crowd and make a head shot.
The cops were now making progress in herding the evacuees across the wide pavement of the boulevard to the opposite sidewalk and the recesses in front of the buildings there, and the lanes of the street were filling with emergency vehicles. She saw the fire engines with the long extension ladders were moving closer in case there was any need to fight a fire, but the ambulances were a bit farther away. She spotted the big rectangular bomb squad vehicle near the side of the building and the round steel containment vessel on a tow rig behind it. They were taking this bomb threat very seriously. As she had the thought, she realized that she wasn’t—not the bomb, anyway.
She was almost certain that the caller had been the man who was hunting her, trying to flush her out of her hiding place in the hotel so he could get at her. She had stayed in the crowd as much as possible since she’d been awakened, trying not to be alone or to present a clear target. This had given her time and opportunity to study the evacuees and the nearby buildings. The people she’d ignored were the first responders.
There were dozens of cops at the fringes of the crowd. Most people—including Justine—thought of them as protectors. What if her killer had come dressed as a cop? She was sure that anybody who killed for a living must have at least considered using that disguise. Maybe her killer had done it tonight. She looked hard at each cop she could see, trying to find the man. As she looked at face after face, the idea seemed more likely. There were about ten thousand cops in the LAPD, and they couldn’t possibly all recognize each other, especially when there were so many brought together in an emergency. And why not a fireman? There were dozens of them here too, most wearing helmets and turnout coats.
She noticed that an increasing number of the other evacuees were looking at their phones. She took her phone out of her purse and slowly turned around, making a video of the scene. Then she repeated it in reverse, taking a still snapshot every few degrees. If the killer managed to get her this time, maybe he would be recorded on her phone. She knew the police took pictures of bystanders watching arson fires. She assumed they did it on bomb threats too—better photos than hers—but at least she was doing something.
Some people were talking on their phones. She wouldn’t stand out if she called someone. Who could she call? She looked at the time on her phone: 1:10 A.M. The people from the Spengler-Nash office had been warned that if they spoke to her, they would be fired. She knew that there were plenty who would ignore that if she asked. This was a tough choice. She was sure she was vulnerable; she was sure she was defenseless. But was she positive that this threat call was the work of her killer? She felt that it was likely, but it could easily not be.
Most of the Spengler-Nash agents had worked there longer than she had and were older than she was, meaning that they were likely to have people they were supporting and were less likely than she was to find new jobs. The older they were, the higher up they were, meaning the jobs they would lose were mostly supervisory. She couldn’t throw somebody’s career away because of a suspicion.
She admitted to herself that there was only one person she could use to get herself out of this. She pressed the picture of a telephone on the little screen.