The four-story low-rise in Beverly Hills—owned and occupied by the law firm Woodbine, Kravitz, Larkin, and Benedetto—was actually six stories if you counted the two levels of subterranean parking. The garage could be entered only from the alley behind the building. And as the single lane allowed just one-way traffic, Jane Hawk knew from which direction Randall Larkin would be coming.
She would have preferred to take him in his house. Using the library computer to background him the previous day, however, she had learned that he was married to his second wife, Diamanta, and that, according to a laudatory Los Angeles Magazine article about this so-called “power couple,” they lived in a twelve-thousand-square-foot home, had three live-in staff, and adored their two Dobies. A wife, three servants, and two Doberman pinschers made home invasion a nonstarter.
According to the same magazine piece, Larkin was an early riser, proud of the fact that before six o’clock each morning, he had completed an hour-long workout in his home gym. No later than seven, he was at his desk in his Beverly Hills office. He enjoyed reciting a motto of his own imagined cleverness: The early bird doesn’t just get the worm; he gets the worm’s entire family.
Guns and ZZ were waiting for her where the alleyway met the main street, about two-thirds of a block from the Woodbine offices. The building in front of which they’d taken up position was occupied by a restaurant that didn’t serve breakfast, so they were not likely to be hassled for loitering. She gave each kid another two hundred dollars, trusting her judgment enough to leave them to their own devices while she made her way along the wide alley.
There was no litter common to the alleys of other cities, no homeless people bedded down among their bags of soiled and ragged possessions, no soot-stained masonry, no walls emblazoned with gang signs or other graffiti, just clean dumpsters standing in measured order, their lids fully closed, no extreme odors issuing from them.
The large segmented roll-up door that provided access to the lawyers’ underground garage was clad with brushed stainless steel, in which her reflection, featureless and blurred, moved like a menacing revenant, her shorn spirit stalking her in some self-haunting that she could not escape. The penny-size glass lens of a microwave receiver, embedded in the upper-right corner of the frame, meant the door responded to a remote control.
Across the alley from that door lay a narrow serviceway, just wide enough to accommodate deliverymen and their hand trucks. Jane stepped into that pocket of shadows and consulted her wristwatch and hoped that Larkin would come for his worms as early as he bragged that he did.
An airliner arrowed the sky at high altitude, a sound avalanche of jet rumble sliding down the day. A police helicopter crossed at a few hundred feet, not searching for her, perhaps not for anyone in particular, merely on patrol, westward slanting light flaring off its advanced-glass cockpit. This early, the streets beyond the alley were lightly trafficked, and without the masking noise of rush hour, she heard three vehicles, each in its time, come along the alley, passing her from right to left, none preceded by the signal that Guns and ZZ would send to alert her that the car and driver fit the description she had given them.
While at the library computer, employing an FBI passcode, she had accessed registration files at the DMV and had learned that four cars were registered to Larkin at his Beverly Hills address. The least expensive, a Ford Explorer, was most likely provided for the use of the hired couple who managed the household. Guns and ZZ were on the lookout for one of the other three vehicles, and they had a description of the attorney.
When it seemed that the action should soon begin, she took from her handbag a six-ounce spray bottle purchased at a beauty-supply store. It was filled with the chloroform she had needed for the takedown of another guy the previous week. She had derived it from acetone by the reaction of chloride of lime, the former bought in an art-supply store, the latter purchased from a janitorial-supply warehouse. A motel bathroom had served as her laboratory. Now she held the spray bottle firmly in her left fist and the handbag in her right.
Under her pale-gray sport coat, she wore a sapphire-blue silk blouse. She undid the top two buttons to ensure that when she leaned forward, Larkin would for a crucial moment be bereft of common sense. Online, she had seen numerous photographs of him at social functions with his first wife and then his second. If he married them for the quality of their minds and their personalities, those were criteria two and three, because the depth of cleavage in both cases was too striking to have been a happy coincidence.
At the farther end of the alley, Guns and ZZ began hooting, cat-calling each other in a boisterous boyish fashion.
The throaty saber-toothed purr of a powerful engine echoed off the walls of the buildings.
When she heard the engine slow slightly and thought he might be cutting wide to angle toward the steel-clad door, she burst from the serviceway, into the alley, into the path of a black Mercedes S600, not as if she were fleeing someone, which might alarm him, but as if she were in a hurry to get to an important appointment.
With a brief shriek of brakes, the big car jolted to a hard stop, and Jane dropped her purse as if startled, conspiring to collide with the front fender. She pushed away from the sedan and reeled to the driver’s window, passing the spray bottle from left hand to right, below his line of sight. Leaning forward to look in at him, feigning surprise, she said loud enough to penetrate the glass and any music to which he might be listening, “My God, Randy Larkin. Is that you, Randy?”
He didn’t know her, certainly not as she looked now, and he didn’t know that the fugitive Jane Hawk had become aware of him by eavesdropping on his phone conversations with Lawrence Hannafin. He had no reason to suppose this accidental encounter might be in fact a bold assault. Beyond the window, as she peered in at him, his gaze traveled the silk-enfolded curves of her breasts, a sight that encouraged him to decide that, after all, he knew her but must be suffering a brief lapse of memory.
At the farther end of the alley, Guns and ZZ kicked the wooden chocks from under the wheels of a dumpster and rolled it away from the restaurant wall, turning it sidewise to block other traffic that might try to enter from the street.
With an electric hum, down came the driver’s window as Larkin managed to raise his stare from breasts to full blue lips, to the serpent nose ring with the ruby eye, to her eyes, which were of a singular shade of blue and which some men thought were her best feature. Her exotic appearance had sprung loose in him long-coiled adolescent fantasies, and as he said, “Are you all right, dear?” she raised the bottle of chloroform and pumped it with her thumb and doused his open mouth, his nose.
Larkin’s eyes rolled back and his head lolled to his right. He slumped forward and sideways in his seat.
His foot slipped off the brake pedal, and the Mercedes began to drift. Jane reached through the window, pulling the steering wheel hard to the right, staying with the car as it traveled a few feet and bumped against the stainless-steel garage door with too little energy to trigger the air bag.
She slipped the spray bottle into a jacket pocket and pulled open the driver’s door. The rattle of skateboard wheels on patched pavement confirmed that Guns and ZZ were living up to the terms of their agreement. As they approached, Jane opened one more blouse button and steeled herself for the trickiest part of this operation.