31

Sealy drove up the quiet street toward the corner with only his fog lights on. He switched off even those and let the car’s momentum carry it into the turn onto the street where Joseph Alston lived. He accelerated out of the turn and took his foot off the pedal to coast the last block in silence. As soon as he spotted the right house he pulled over to the curb and parked.

He looked at the clock set into the dashboard. It was already after three A.M. The delay he had run into had been maddening. By the time he had walked back to the lot a couple of blocks from the hotel to get his rental car, things had changed. While he’d been chasing Justine Poole, the police had received so many reinforcements that they had greatly widened their security perimeter and made it impervious to vehicle traffic. Hours earlier, when he had called in the bomb threat, he had been certain that his car had been parked far enough away to be outside any perimeter they might set up.

The phone conversation had been a tricky one. He had needed to tell them enough to persuade the bomb squad that he could do real damage. He had needed to distinguish himself from the lunatics and from the amateurs who used black powder or dynamite. He had mentioned a few ingredients of military-grade high explosives. That had brought out many more backup units and convinced the commanders that they needed a much wider margin of safety. He had needed to wait over two hours for the police to finish their full search of the hotel and roll up the yellow “Police Line Do Not Cross” tape before they opened the block where his car was parked.

The bomb threat call was an instance of Sealy getting in his own way, but it had happened long before the shift in the current of the universe. Things had begun to improve while he was at the hotel.

Since then, it seemed to him that the universe had begun to correct the imbalance that had allowed the girl bodyguard to survive this long. Sealy had failed at everything tonight and risked making Mr. Conger cut his contract short, but here he was.

Justine Poole was undoubtedly in that house over there, and after all the running she’d done tonight she was almost certainly asleep. The man who had picked her up on the street had been tall and slim and appeared to be in his thirties. He had to be Joseph Alston. He was probably her boyfriend or somebody who wanted to be, so Sealy had to be prepared to find him in the same bedroom and needed to be prepared to kill him too. Mr. Conger would certainly not consider him a bystander but an unavoidable obstacle. It would take two shots instead of one; not a big deal.

Sealy made one change. He had been planning to take the .357 Magnum revolver for this visit and use it on the girl so he wouldn’t have to deal with brass being ejected all over the place by the Glock. Now he decided it would be best to take only the Glock. It was lighter and slimmer than the .357 Magnum, and even the two spare loaded magazines wouldn’t hamper his movement because he could separate them in two pockets. He reached into the console between the front seats, took out the Glock, and put it in his right jacket pocket.

It seemed a bitter irony that after an eight-year career of extreme care and professionalism, he found himself suspected by a repeat client of having become overconfident and careless. He gave his head a small involuntary shake and reached back into the console to adjust the position of the revolver. He wanted the muzzle pointed downward and the grips upward just under the lid of the console. He wanted the pistol there for insurance. There was a possibility, however remote, that he might be driving away in a few minutes with an empty weapon or feeling the need to make someone think he was, when he actually had a loaded revolver ready to go and in easy reach.

He also had a knife in his pants pocket and a strangling cord with two wooden handles in case he had the chance to work silently. Working in a big city meant there was always somebody close enough to hear. He looked at his car’s clock. He had been parked here for almost five minutes. The average emergency call to the police brought a car in about that many minutes. They always said it was three, but it was more like six. He gave it another two minutes before he was sure nobody had seen him and called. This was just another item on the checklist in his head.

He opened the car door. The dome light didn’t go on because he had turned it off before he’d headed to the hotel. This time was going to be it—the final visit. He got out and closed the door without slamming it, locked it with his key fob, and walked toward the house.

Justine lay on the grass and watched her killer walking toward the house. What the hell could he have been doing sitting in his car all that time? He had looked as though he was busy moving things here and there.

And then she knew. He was a pro. He had not been doing something stupid like using his cell phone to talk to somebody. He had been preparing his equipment. He’d been doing what she would have done—putting each item he needed in the right place on his body so his hand would go right to it when he needed it.

It was at that moment that she understood something else about him. Yes, he had been loading his pockets with the things he would need. But he had been fiddling around in the car so long because he had equipment that he wasn’t bringing. What would that be? She didn’t dare to let her mind jump at what she wished it would be. Instead, she left it open for her observations and instincts to work their way to it. She kept her eyes on him as he walked the last stretch of sidewalk, crossed the street to James Peter Turpin’s driveway, and turned into it.

He was wearing a lightweight black windbreaker, dark pants, a dark-colored baseball cap, and a black surgical mask. She knew he’d worn it to keep his white skin from reflecting light and making him visible. She regretted that she didn’t have a mask too.

Justine slowly and quietly emerged from her position among the shrubbery and stood up, listening. She heard no sound of her killer backtracking to see if he was being followed or hurrying forward to come around the house to appear behind her. She went away from the house to the front gate, out to the sidewalk and across the street. She made the rest of her trip by maintaining the maximum distance from the house, ready to hide or run or freeze. If he saw her now, the hammer and boning knife she’d brought were nothing. If he shot her from the driveway, they would just be two things to drop when she fell.

When she reached his car, she took out her phone. The license plate was undoubtedly stolen, and she knew she was taking a risk, but she had a faint hope that she could leave one more lead for the cops if she died. She set her phone’s camera, moved her body so the faint light from the street lamp would not be blocked, and took a picture, then ducked below the car’s side, crept forward, waited, and listened, holding the hammer and knife. She sent the photograph to Detective Kunkel’s phone. She was protected, for the moment, by the car’s engine block and right wheel.

She crouched, ready to spring, and stayed that way for thirty seconds before she peeked out past the car’s grille at the house. He wasn’t coming, so she raised her head to window level and looked down into the car. She couldn’t see anything on the seats or the floor, even when she used the glow of her phone’s screen. She knelt beside the right front tire again and poked the side wall of the tire with the boning knife, applied both hands to the butt of the handle, and pushed hard. The blade went in, she tugged it out, moved to the rear one and stabbed that too, then dared to come around for the other two. She heard the hiss of the air escaping and saw the car beginning to settle slightly as the tires softened.

She looked at the big house. The guesthouse wasn’t visible behind it. She knew that her killer might look for her in the main house, and if he did, Joe was in trouble. She couldn’t put off the next part any longer. It had never really been a choice.

Justine stepped to the car’s passenger window and swung the hammer. It hit the window with a bang and pounded a spray of small cubes of glass inward onto the seat and floor. She reached inside to the armrest and found the door handle. She opened the door and knelt on the seat, opened the glove compartment, found it empty, reached for the console, and flipped the top open.

The gun’s handgrips were more than a shape she had been hoping for. They had a texture that made her hand feel good as it gave her hope of living another few minutes. She lifted the revolver close to catch a little light, saw that there were rounds in the cylinder, drew herself back out of the car, and began to run.

Joe Alston woke up, swung his feet off the bed, and moved to the window. What was that noise? It had sounded like a car accident—a bang of an impact and then glass. There was nothing visible from this window, only the roofs of the garage and the guesthouse, and the dark foliage of trees and the lawn. He sensed that he shouldn’t be in a rush to turn on any lights. Justine had been in terrible danger tonight, and there was no reason to believe that had changed. He couldn’t imagine that a gang of young thieves had found her here, but he couldn’t assume that they or the professional killer hadn’t.

He stepped out of the room, across the hall to the bedroom that faced the street. He moved the window’s curtain aside and looked out. A couple of houses away there was a car parked by the curb. That was unusual for this neighborhood. All of the houses were big, with enough driveway and garage space for the inhabitants and their guests to park.

He was looking from above, so he couldn’t be sure, but there seemed to be something odd about the car. The chassis looked very low to the ground, as though the suspension had been custom-modified. Maybe it just seemed that way because there weren’t other cars to compare it to.

He moved his face closer to the glass and looked up and down the street. There was nobody on foot near it or visible anywhere, but he was still uneasy. He left that bedroom and kept going to the big sitting room at the top of the stairs.

There were big windows here that looked out over the yard, but he had already looked and seen nothing out of place in that direction. He still had the feeling that something was up. He turned and stepped to the bookcase, pulled open the section that was built into it to hide the door, slid the pocket door aside, stepped into James’s safe room, and closed both doors behind him.

He turned on the light. It was time to test his theory about the last owner’s guns. If James had been stuck with them, they would be here in the safe, and James had told him where he kept the combination. If there weren’t any, then he was sure that he had seen baseball stuff in a downstairs closet, including a bat. He would go outside and take a look with that.

Justine had to assume that her killer had heard her break the car window, and if he had, he would be on his way. He certainly knew what he had left in his car, so he would not come out into the open driveway. He would come around the back of the house to ambush her from roughly the place where she had chosen to wait for him to arrive. She forced herself not to wonder whether he would step into the electrified pan of water and kill himself, because she needed to think about what to do if he didn’t.

She dashed up the driveway, running on her toes to keep her steps quick and quiet. When she reached the five-car garage she veered to the left to reach cover quickly and go around the back of it. As soon as she was beside it she stopped and then moved forward slowly. Both the left and right sides had human-sized doors. She gave the doorknob of the one beside her a gentle half-turn to be sure she had left them both unlocked, and then kept going, turned right at the end of the wall and continued around to the back of the garage, then moved along it toward the backyard.

Sealy had been sneaking along the side of the main house studying it for openings and vulnerabilities when he had heard the bang. Instantly he’d been certain what made a noise like that. Justine Poole, or someone, had broken a window of his rented car. He had to assume that in a fancy neighborhood like this one it hadn’t been some unrelated vandal or thief. Justine Poole hadn’t been asleep after all.

She had broken into his car, which told him several things. She had seen him coming, because otherwise the car could have been anyone’s. If so, she must have sat waiting for him to arrive. Worse, if she had not been armed before, she was armed now. The bang meant she’d tampered with his car, and he was probably not going to be able to use it to leave. Had she known or expected he would find the envelope with this return address on it? Could she have swept it out of the car to lure him here?

Sealy knew he had to take each of the obstacles, one at a time. She had probably made his car inoperable, but he could solve that. When he had arrived, he hadn’t seen the car she’d driven before, but there had to be one nearby. As soon as she and any housemates were dead, he could find any keys in the house and use them to locate and start the car they went with and get out of here. First, she had to be dead.

She was more of a problem than most. The reason she was in her predicament was that she had been called to the yard of a big house at night and shot two attackers to death before any one of the five of them could shoot her. What that probably meant was that she had been patient and controlled while they had been aggressive and stupid, thinking if they fired enough rounds in her general direction, some of them had to hit her.

He would need to be smarter and more patient than she was to win. She was probably away from his car by now, beginning to make her way toward him in the dark. He needed to make a few preparations before she arrived. His first move was to step along the side of the big house, looking hard for something he knew had to be there. He found it about where he’d expected, on the end of the big building away from the driveway. He saw the distinctive shape of the meter first, with the glass dome. Beside it was what he needed, the main circuit box. He opened the metal door and held up his phone to get a faint, weak light from the screen, found the main power circuit breaker, switched it off, and shut the door on the box. He had brought a padlock for this, and he closed the latch on the box and padlocked it. He moved his phone close to the meter so he could see the little wheel inside. It wasn’t turning now. He pocketed his phone and moved on beside the house.

When Justine heard the clack sound of the circuit breaker her breath caught in her throat and she crouched where she was, behind the garage in the dark. This had never occurred to her when she had been preparing, but it had been the first thing her killer had done. She was enraged at herself for not thinking he would cut off the power to the house. He wasn’t going to step in the pan of water and electrocute himself. Her trap had instantly been turned into nothing. He must have wanted to be sure he didn’t set off some motion-sensor floodlight and suddenly be lit up in the open. Had he thought he’d neutralize the alarms? No, if he was a pro, he would know that the systems had a battery wired in, and the newer ones also sent wireless mobile phone signals to the company. It had to be the lights that he was afraid of.

Didn’t he know that she would hear the sound of the circuit breaker? Yes. If he hadn’t before, he knew now, after he’d tripped it. Maybe that had been his own kind of trap, and he’d wanted her to hear it. He could be crouching in the dark near the main circuit box with a round in the chamber waiting for her to come check it. She had to rely on what she knew about him, which included what he knew about her. He would know that she wasn’t completely inept in a gun fight at night. He knew she’d broken the window of his car and taken his revolver, so he knew she was armed. He had decided that his chances were better if there was no light. Justine had to make light.

Sealy was moving along the side of the house that he believed was farthest from the bedrooms, at least the ones most likely to be occupied. The big master suites were most likely to be on the upper floor at or near the wings, where it was easiest to set aside large spaces and preserve privacy. He chose a set of French doors. It was impossible to see anything inside, but their position in the back near the middle of the building was promising. It might be a dining room or a conservatory, since there was a kitchen door only a dozen feet farther along the wall.

The fact that Justine Poole had just tampered with his car proved she was outdoors. That meant that right now, for this moment, at least, the alarm system was disarmed so she could get back in. He had a choice of going inside to wait for her to return or going after her. He decided that waiting inside was too dangerous unless he knew more. He hurried along the side of the house to the corner near the driveway and stopped. She would be coming back up the driveway to get in one of the two back doors. He looked at the guesthouse or pool house or whatever it was. Maybe she would be heading there when she returned instead of the main house, but it changed nothing. He was at a choke point between the pool deck, the main house, and some kind of exotic garden. If she came up the driveway he would hear her and open fire.

Justine was behind the garage again in the darkness. She had knelt here a few minutes ago and tried to remember everything that she had seen in the garage earlier when she’d had light, and then she had gone in the side door and walked straight to them, a blind woman walking in a memory. For a moment she had considered trying to restore power by starting the generator, but only for a moment. The generator had a gasoline engine, and that made noise. Instead, she had picked up the two gasoline cans stored beside it, stepped out the far door and made her way behind the garage to the spot where she stood now.

She wasn’t quite certain where her killer was. She had been listening since the moment when she’d returned to the yard, but he seemed to be as careful as she was about making noise. She lifted the nearest five-gallon can to the back corner of the garage and set it down. She looked up at the sky again, but couldn’t see the moon or stars because of the thick layer of clouds. In LA summers, the nighttime clouds and haze almost always burned off by noon and the sun took over. It occurred to her that she might not be alive when that happened this time. She would try to be. She adjusted the revolver in her waistband and unscrewed the cap of the can. The fumes of the gasoline seemed to engulf her, and she worried that in this motionless night air her killer would smell it. She tilted the can to let a thin stream go out into the trench she’d dug in the ground, pouring it slowly so that it didn’t make a glug-glug sound. It wasn’t collecting in a puddle, so it must be flowing away from her, and when she’d poured more, she guessed it must be moving past the grass in the direction of the tropical garden. She knew she couldn’t keep pouring much longer than a minute, or he would smell it and figure out what was going on.

She closed the cap, set the can aside, and took out the book of matches she’d taken from the workbench. She held it in her left hand and tore off a match with her right. She struck the match and released it, and as she pulled her right hand back, she was already reaching for the revolver.

Sealy heard the skritch sound, and then a huff like a breath of wind, and then the whole yard behind the big house turned bright—first an explosion of blue, and then a wall of glaring orange fire streaking across the yard toward him. He tugged out his pistol, but the fire arrived and he jumped back to evade it. He had a sense of where the fire had started, so as his feet landed on solid ground, he fired five shots along the corner of the garage.

Joe Alston heard the pow-pow-pow-pow-pow. He snatched up the pistol he had just loaded, ran to the sliding door, and stepped out into the sitting room. The big windows were a single wall of bright orange light from flames as high as the second floor. He sprinted out to the upstairs landing and then ran down the staircase, turned at the bottom and ran for the French doors that led to the backyard. He stopped for a second to look, saw nothing that made any sense, but pulled the door open and stepped outside.

Sealy felt pain, looked down and saw that the left calf of his pants and his left jacket sleeve had been lit by the fire. He slapped at the flames, but his vigorous movements only made them grow and flare brighter. He dashed to the pool deck and dived. There was a wild, bright moment of flight, and then his body arced downward and plunged through the water’s surface into the cool, quiet world beneath, now illuminated by the flames billowing into the air above it.

Justine ran, closed her eyes, and covered her face as she jumped through the wall of fire to the pool deck. The heat behind her told her when to open her eyes. She caught herself, stood at the end of the pool deck, and raised the revolver.

She could see her killer under the surface of the water. He was moving his legs and arms to stay upright, but going nowhere. His right hand still held the pistol he had just fired. He let out some air that bubbled to the surface, and she saw what he was trying to do. Without the air his body sank. He brought his legs together and pointed his toes. When he touched bottom he bent his knees, pushed off, and began to rise. She watched him straighten his right arm and move his finger into the trigger guard as he rose.

Would his pistol even work? She gripped the revolver and watched him. Should she try to get back and take cover, and did she even have time? He was only about two feet below the surface now, and his right hand with the gun was coming up above his body. His legs gave a strong scissors kick.

Justine aimed the revolver at a spot about six inches below the surface and forced herself to wait until the very top of his head broke the surface, then fired. The bullet churned the water and threw up a splash so she couldn’t see him for a second, but then she could and what she saw first was blood. It was coming from his head, a swirling red cloud.

Joe Alston was running toward the gunshot noise, and he saw something through the veil of bright flames. He stopped at the deck with the gun in both hands and aimed at the only figure standing. The figure turned to look at him, and he saw that it was Justine.

That was when Justine heard the first sirens. It occurred to her that what they were responding to probably hadn’t been the shots. It had to be the fire. The flames didn’t seem to have caught anything else yet, but they were high and bright. She set the revolver down on the pool deck and said, “Put it down, Joe. They’ll be hoping to see a man with a gun.” Then she walked toward the guesthouse, unplugged the extension cord, and headed toward the driveway to meet the firemen and police officers.