Last Breath (30 page)

Walsh found the stillness spooky. He glanced at Donna Cellini, riding beside him in his department-issue sedan, and wondered if she felt the same way.

Probably not. Cellini was remarkably levelheaded about most things. More levelheaded than Walsh himself. But then, she was young. She hadn’t seen as much.

He parked at the curb, making no effort to conceal the car, even though it screamed
police
with its boxy contours, its DARE bumper sticker, its outsized antenna protruding from the trunk.

There was no need for stealth. Nolan wasn’t home. The garage reserved for his unit had already been checked by two West LA cops, who found it empty. The same cops then buzzed Nolan’s condo for five minutes, getting no reply.

He was someplace else. And so, no doubt, was C.J. Osborn.

Another woman as the victim of an obsessed ex-husband. What the hell was it about this part of town?

“So how’d Nolan strike you in the interview?” Cellini asked as they got out.

“Very fucking sincere.”

“Good liar, then.”

“The best.”

“You do your Columbo impression?” Cellini knew his methods.

“Yeah.” Walsh grunted. “Thought I was so slick, and all the time he was playing me. The bastard.”

“He’s a lawyer,” Cellini said, as if that explained something—his slickness or his being a bastard. Maybe both.

Another unmarked car pulled up, and Boyle and Lopez got out. “This the place?” Boyle asked unnecessarily. Nobody answered.

A minute later a patrol car parked behind the two unmarked vehicles, and a pair of West LA officers emerged. Walsh asked if they were the ones who checked out the garage and buzzed the intercom.

“Yes, sir,” answered one cop, whose nametag read “JOHNSON.”

“Where the hell did you go? Doughnut run?” Sarcasm was unusual for Walsh, but he was peeved at having to wait.

Johnson was unruffled. “No, sir. Saw a BMW cruise past and thought it might be the suspect’s car. Followed it up to San Vicente and got a look at the tag. False alarm.”

“Lotta BMWs in this neighborhood,” his partner added pointlessly.

Walsh accepted the explanation. He wasn’t really angry at the patrol cops anyway, or even at Adam Nolan. He was angry at himself. He’d been in the same room with the son of a bitch and, good liar or not, the guy should not have been able to fool him.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s go in.”

“Wait.” Cellini held up her hand. “There’s one more in our party.”

Another sedan, clearly official, pulled up behind the patrol car. Its markings were obscured behind the glare of its headlights.

“I didn’t contact anybody else,” Walsh said.

Cellini looked away. “I did.”

The headlights switched off, and Walsh saw that the car was a Sheriff’s cruiser, and the man stepping out was Deputy Tanner.

“I called him at the hospital,” Cellini said. “He was looking after his men. I told him we had a lead. A chance to save her.”

Walsh didn’t like it. “This is LAPD jurisdiction.”

“He’s her friend, Morrie. He deserves to be part of this.”

“You should’ve cleared it with me.”

“You were busy. Besides, I knew you’d say yes.”

She was right, but Walsh didn’t say so. He glanced at Tanner, jogging up to the group, and snapped, “Fall in, Deputy. We’re entering unit four-nineteen.”

The two local cops had a master key to the building, which got them through the security gate and the lobby door. In the elevator Lopez asked about a warrant.

“Telephonic approval from Judge Lederer,” Walsh said. Lederer was known to be a soft touch for warrants, and once or twice Walsh had actually gone bowling—bowling!—with the man to cement their friendship.

Tanner spoke up. “You seem pretty sure Nolan is our guy.”

Walsh remembered the distraught young man cradling his head while he fretted about his ex-wife. “We’re sure,” he said curtly. “How’s your SWAT team doing?”

“Multiple bites, a lot of venom in their systems. Pain, swelling, fever—but they’ll live.”

“You okay?” Cellini asked.

“Not a scratch. Any word on Treat?”

“He’s disappeared,” Walsh said. “Like smoke.”

Then they were on the fourth floor and there was no more conversation, only a quick march down the hall to the door marked 419.

Officer Johnson and his partner paused outside the door, listening. “Don’t hear anything,” Johnson said after a moment.

Walsh rang the bell, then rapped on the door and yelled, “
Police!”
When there was no response, he looked at the patrol cops. “Open it.”

Johnson used the master key. The door to 419 swung wide.

The patrolmen entered first, followed by Tanner. Walsh and the other task force members took up the rear.

The living room lights had been left on. Adam Nolan’s condo was small but neatly kept, with a view of the Indian laurel trees lining the sidewalk below. Abstract paintings hung on the walls. Chrome appliances were arrayed in a tidy kitchen—toaster, waffle iron, electric grill, coffeemaker—looking like a line of demo models in a store display. Only the coffeemaker appeared to have been used.

“Hard to believe anybody lives here,” Cellini said.

Walsh had been thinking the same thing. The place had the blandness, the absence of personality, that he associated with motel rooms and other way stations.

Tanner and the other two uniformed cops had already checked out the rest of the condo. “All clear,” Tanner reported.

“We’ll have to call in SID,” Cellini said. “Maybe they can find some clue to where he took her.”

“Maybe.” Walsh was thinking hard. “Get Boyle in here.”

The detective entered the kitchen a moment later, hands spread in mock apology. “What’d I do now?”

“You called Nolan to set up the interview, right?”

“Sure.”

“Called his home number?”

“Only number I had.”

“But he couldn’t have been here. Not if he was with
her
.”

Cellini saw where Walsh was going. “You think he had the call forwarded?”

“That’s possible, right?”

“Absolutely. The phone company offers residential call forwarding for a monthly fee. Once you’ve signed up for the service, you can activate it anytime by entering a two-digit code on the keypad.”

“Let’s find his phone bills,” Tanner said.

Adam Nolan was as meticulous in his record keeping as in the other aspects of his domestic life. The bills were in a folder labeled “telephone” in a file cabinet in the den.

“Last month he paid three dollars and twenty-three cents for call forwarding,” Tanner said.

Walsh studied the bill. “No way to know the number he’s forwarding the calls to?”

“Probably his cell phone,” Cellini said. “That’s how it usually works. You want your calls forwarded to your mobile number.”

Tanner leafed through the folder and found Nolan’s cellular phone bills. “Here’s his account number. We can find out if there was any activity on his cell account when Detective Boyle made the call.”

“If there was,” Cellini said, “it’ll give us the cell phone tower that transmitted the signal. The tower closest to Nolan’s location at the time.”

Tanner nodded. “And if he was with C.J. when he took the call—”

“Then we’ll have some idea where he’s hidden her,” Cellini finished. “Trouble is, the cell site will narrow down the search area only so much. We could still be looking at an area anywhere from a couple square blocks to several square miles.”

“There’s another problem,” Walsh said. “We’ll need a court order to pull Nolan’s records. It’s not as straightforward as getting permission to enter his residence. It takes time.”

Cellini frowned. “There might be a better way. Those Baltimore feds we’ve been working with—they’re in the computer crime squad, right?”

“I think so, yeah. So what?”

“You know how they say it takes a thief to catch one? That’s true of cybercrime too. To catch a hacker, you’ve got to
be
a hacker.”

Walsh took this in.

“Rawls isn’t going to like it,” he said softly. “He won’t like it at all.”

“You want to know why I married you, C.J.?”

The question, bizarrely irrelevant, echoed through the crawl space. She didn’t answer.

“Want to hear what really turned me on about you? It was the fear in you. The fear you’re always fighting, always denying, always overcompensating for. I could sense it. And I liked it.”

I was never afraid of
you
, she thought fiercely. And I’m still not.

She expected him to say more, but instead she heard the BMW’s engine rev up, then a crunch of tires on gravel.

What was the plan? Did he intend to ram through the crawl space? It made no sense.

She tightened her grip on the hammer and waited.

The car pulled away, then maneuvered briefly before easing toward the crawl space again. This time the motor noise sounded different, and she caught a glimmer of red light from outside.

The engine resumed idling as the car shifted into park.

“I told you why I married you.” Adam’s voice was startling like a slap. “Now you want to know a bigger secret? Why do you suppose
you
married
me
?”

I thought it was love, she answered inwardly.

He surprised her by responding as if she’d spoken aloud. “It wasn’t love, not really. It was need.” He made a sound somewhere between a grunt and a chuckle. “You need protection. You thought if you could just feel safe enough, the fear would go away.”

She wanted to deny this, at least to herself, but she knew it was true.

“You weren’t aware of that, were you?” Adam taunted.

Yes, she had been—but she’d never known that he’d been aware of it also. She had thought better of him than that. Now she saw that he’d been on the prowl right from the start. Like a predatory animal he had sniffed out her fear and vulnerability, tasting the scent and relishing it.

“You didn’t feel strong enough to face your fears alone,” he was saying. “And when you arrived in LA, you were alone—all alone—for the first time in your life.”

No, not quite the first time. She remembered that other night when she had huddled in a dark crawl space.

“You were alone and scared,” he went on, “and you latched on to the first nice guy you met, the first guy who treated you with respect.”

It was true—even if the respect had been an illusion, even if the nice guy had turned out to be a control freak and a cheat and, now, a psychopath. She shut her eyes, wishing he would stop talking and just go away.

“You think you’re so independent, so self-reliant. It’s all bullshit. You’re weak, too weak to face the future by yourself. I’m the only one who sees it. That nickname your cop friends gave you—what a joke. You’re no killer, C.J.” Another grunt of laughter. “But I am.”

She opened her mouth to tell him she was glad not to be a killer and she hated that damn nickname—but what came out was a cough, hoarse and racking.

It was hard to breathe. The air in here ... the air ...

Then she knew what he’d been doing with the car. He had turned it around—the red light had been the glow of brake lights—and backed it up against the crawl space. Now, as the engine idled, the tail pipes were pumping fumes into this narrow, airless place.

He meant to asphyxiate her. Or more likely, drive her out into the open where he could finish her with his own hands.

She shrank away, retreating into the deeper recesses where the fumes had not yet penetrated.

A stopgap measure only. Before long, carbon monoxide would fill the entire passageway.

I have the hammer, she thought desperately. I can crawl out, take him by surprise ...

It was hopeless. Half-asphyxiated, she would be unable even to defend herself, much less to attack.

He had outplayed her. He had won. Unless the security system really was monitored by an outside agency. If it was, the police might be on their way, or if not the police, then a private security patrol—the rent-a-cops she and her colleagues in uniform always looked down on. She wouldn’t cast aspersions on them now, if they came. If anybody came.

But no one would. The truth hit her hard, robbing her of strength. She coughed again, doubling over, as the air thickened around her.

Adam would know if the alarm system was monitored. It was exactly the kind of detail he would check—Adam, with his lawyer’s mind, his eye for detail, his careful planning.

Had help been on the way, he would have fled already. But he hadn’t fled. He knew there was no danger.

“Getting a little woozy in there, C.J.?” he called. “This LA smog is getting worse all the time.”

God, she hated him. She ran her fingers over the steel hammerhead, the large striking surface and twin-pronged claw. She wished she could bury it in his skull. She wished—

The hammer.

She glanced upward, touching the low ceiling that was actually the floor of the building above.

A plywood subfloor, not a concrete slab. Three-quarters of an inch of plywood, if standard specifications had been met.

She knew all about this stuff. She remembered shadowing the building inspector as he checked out the bungalow she and Adam had purchased. The bungalow, too, had a crawl space under a plywood subfloor. She had forced herself to belly in there with the inspector, overcoming her fear of the confined area and the memories it roused. To distract herself, she asked many questions, and he answered patiently, perhaps intrigued to find himself in the presence of a young, pretty woman with an interest in plywood underlayment.

Above the subfloor, there would be a second floor—hardwood, nailed or glued down. Another three-quarters of an inch. One and a half inches in all.

Could she batter her way through one and a half inches of wood before the fumes finished her off?

She could try.

With new determination she retreated to the farthest corner of the crawl space, navigating around lumber posts and plumbing pipes. She flipped on her back and groped upward, touching thick lumber girders that traversed the subfloor and provided additional support. Perpendicular to the girders ran the thinner floor joists, and in the spaces between the joists she felt the plywood sheets of the subflooring itself. She searched for a wood seam between the sheets—the weakest spot, or so she hoped.