The Shadow Hunter (18 page)

It’s possible. He does love his toys. But I don’t know.

And once I walked in on him while he was sending email, and he shut down the program fast, as if it was something he didn’t want me to see.”

“E-mail love notes?” Amanda looked dubious.

“Haven’t you heard of cybersex?” Kris shrugged.

“It’s a new millennium. People don’t send sonnets anymore, or even regular love letters, I suppose.” Except for Hickle, a voice at the back of her mind added.

Amanda shook her head.

“Have you discussed this with him? Does he know you’re on to him?”

“He doesn’t know anything. Courtney, our housekeeper, is my informer.

She confided in me after… after Howard came on to her.”

“Right in your own house? Divorce the bastard.”

“We can work it out.”

“Not if you two don’t start talking.”

“We will when this stalker thing is over. When it’s taken care of.”

Amanda sighed.

“I thought you two were a happy couple. You know, the kind who get a perfect score on the Cosmo compatibility test.”

“I used to think we were. Now I don’t… I…” She couldn’t talk about this anymore.

“Look, I just wanted to say I’m sorry if he was getting in your way last night.”

“Forget about it.” Amanda glanced at her watch.

“I’ve gotta run, but tomorrow if we have time, let’s talk, okay? Heart to heart?”

Kris smiled.

“I never took you for the sob sister type.”

“It’s an unfamiliar role for me, but I can handle it.”

She gave Kris’s arm a comforting squeeze.

“Hang in there, kid.”

Kris watched her walk away. She knew there would be no heart-to-heart conversation tomorrow, because there would be no time. In TV news there was never time for anything. That was all right. She wasn’t sure she wanted to further unburden herself to a woman who, after all, was one of Howard’s fantasy conquests.

She looked past the computers and gray metal desks to the row of wall clocks set to different time zones.

California time was seven-forty-five. Better get moving.

She needed to grab a late dinner and read the script and touch up her cosmetics and hair. Of these three items her personal appearance was the main concern.

It seemed she spent a lot more time in the makeup room since turning forty.

“Funny how that works,” she murmured. She must have a streak of masochism to have chosen a profession in which success was so utterly dependent on youth and beauty, then to have compounded her error by choosing a husband whose priorities ran along the same lines.

Hickle knew there must be something he could say to bring his date with Abby to the proper conclusion.

In the movies people were always saying clever things. Why was it so much harder in real life?

He mulled over the problem as the elevator carried him and Abby to the fourth floor. Even when he escorted her down the hall to her door, he had not found a solution.

“Well,” Abby said, “here we are.”

This was his moment. He had to go for it. Be spontaneous.

“It was fun,” he managed.

Damn, that was no good. Any jerk could have come up with that. But Abby surprised him by smiling in reply.

“A blast,” she said.

“Your taste in restaurants is excellent.”

“Oh, well… I work in a restaurant, remember?” He wasn’t sure why he repeated his earlier lie.

“I remember. Maybe I’ll drop by sometime for a free meal.”

Caught, he had to think fast.

“The owner frowns on that,” he answered, hoping he sounded casual.

“But you never know. We’ll see.” He decided to quit while he still could.

“Good night, Abby.”

““Night.”

He wondered if he was supposed to kiss her. He had never kissed a girl, except for Priscilla Gammon in the third grade, whom he had smooched on a dare.

Priscilla had screamed and called him gross and wiped her mouth elaborately with her sleeve, and for the next two weeks whenever she had seen him she’d made retching noises. He doubted Abby would do anything like that. Still, he’d better not risk it.

“Good night,” he said again, pointlessly.

Abby smiled, unlocking her door.

“Don’t let the bedbugs bite—which in this place is more than just an expression.”

He nodded, not knowing what to say. He went on nodding until she disappeared inside her apartment.

Then he found his keys and entered his living room. It occurred to him that he ought to check the VCR to be sure it had taped the 6 p.m. news, but somehow this didn’t seem important, and he decided it could wait.

He wandered into the bathroom, not knowing why, and left without doing anything. He opened his windows, letting the night breeze filter through the swinging blinds. The cool air felt fine. In the kitchen he poured himself some water and drank it fast, belching pleasurably.

He looked around at his apartment, and although it had always looked like a dump to him, tonight it seemed better, almost livable. He thought his life was pretty good, better than he had realized, and he wondered why he should be feeling that way.

Well, it was Abby, of course. They’d had a great time together. When the check had come, impulsively he’d insisted on paying it, though she had offered to pay half. He had wanted to treat her to the meal because that was the kind of thing a man would do, and it wasn’t often he got to feel like a man.

Certainly Jill Dahlbeck had never let him feel that way. He remembered summoning the courage to ask her out, and the strained, false politeness in her voice as she turned him down, giving some weak excuse. He had hated her in that moment and for years afterward.

She had emasculated him, humiliated him, as women always did, because all women were bitches at heart, bitches and lying whores-He calmed himself. Not all women, he reminded himself. Not Abby. She was different. She had to be.

The phone rang.

He looked at it, astonished. Nobody ever called him.

It had to be a wrong number.

Unless it was Abby. Had she gotten his number?

Was she calling to talk? He picked up the phone, his hand trembling a little.

“Hello?” he said into the mouthpiece.

Silence for a moment, and then a female voice said, “You have mail.”

Not Abby’s voice. He wasn’t sure it was even human. It sounded false, electronic. Baffled, he pressed the receiver closer to his ear.

“Who is this?

Hello?” The voice said again, “You have mail.”

Click. A dial tone hummed.

Slowly he set down the phone. He understood now.

The voice had been a recording, the kind that greeted users of an Internet service provider when they logged on.

It meant the user had email.

In her bedroom with the lights out, Abby sat curled on the floor watching closed-circuit, real-time coverage of Raymond Hickle’s living room. The video image was crisp and stable on the seven-inch picture tube of a portable TV tuned to an amateur frequency.

The TV—which Abby had brought from home, not trusting the antiquated set provided by the landlord-sat atop a VCR capable of recording forty hours of time-lapse video on a standard VHS cassette.

Audio from the two surveillance microphones was received on a stereo deck and recorded on a longplaying tape reel. Both audio transmitters operated at one of the standard frequencies for cordless telephones.

Anyone who happened to intercept the signal and heard Hickle’s mutterings would assume it was a stray, indecipherable telephone call.

Abby had set up the gear in her bedroom closet so that it could be easily hidden behind the closet door whenever she left. Not expecting her efforts to yield significant results right away, she’d been paying only desultory attention to tonight’s broadcast until Hickle’s telephone rang.

She saw him answer the phone, and via the surveillance microphone she heard him say hello and ask who was there. But she didn’t know what, if anything, was said on the other end of the line. She found herself wishing she’d taken the risk of installing an infinity transmitter in the phone.

Hickle hung up and stood unmoving for a moment, then stepped into his bedroom, out of camera range. A minute passed before he emerged, carrying his duffel bag. The look on his face was grim. He left his apartment, moving fast.

“What the hell?” Abby was already on her feet, grabbing her purse. She ran to her door but hesitated.

Hickle might still be in the hall. She peered out. At the far end of the corridor the elevator doors were closing.

She pounded down three flights of stairs. When she reached the parking lot, Hickle’s car was already gone.

She tossed her purse into her Dodge and pulled onto Gainford. The street was dark in both directions. She went north to Santa Monica.

There was no stoplight at the intersection; a left turn into the constant stream of traffic was impossible. If Hickle had come this way, he had headed east.

She shot into a gap in the traffic and accelerated, shifting from lane to lane as she scanned the boulevard for a white VW Rabbit. She didn’t see one anywhere.

“Where are you, Raymond?” she whispered.

“Where are you going in such a rush? And what do you want the gun for?”

She had no idea what was happening, but her intuition, which seldom failed, insisted that it was big and somehow dangerous. Dangerous to Kris? she wondered.

Or to me?

She didn’t know.

Two blocks from Gainford, Hickle veered off Santa Monica, cutting south on Wilcox, then negotiated a maze of side streets and arterial boulevards until he reached Western, where he turned north. He checked his rearview mirror repeatedly.

There was a chance that Jack was following him, that the phone call had been a ruse to lure him out of his apartment after dark. It seemed unlikely, but Hickle had no way to fathom Jack’s motives or the extent of his knowledge. To Hickle he was only a name on an e-mail account, untraceable, mysterious.

He remembered the letter that had arrived a month ago, bearing a downtown LA postmark and no return address. The letter had consisted of three lines of computer printout, unsigned. It had said that a Zoom Mail account had been opened for Hickle under the name Jackbquick, with the Volkswagen’s license plate number as the password.

The note had advised him to check his mail regularly. It had concluded simply. Destroy this letter.

Hickle had obeyed the instructions, first burning letter and envelope, then visiting the library and using a public terminal to find Zoom Mail home page, where he logged on as Jackbquick. There had been two messages in his Inbox. One was a note from Zoom Mail congratulating him on selecting their free service. The other, according to the return address, had been sent by a Zoom Mail client who called himself Jackbnimble.

It was right out of the nursery rhyme:

Jack, be nimble Jack, be quick Jack, jump over the candlestick Whoever had made contact with him was someone who enjoyed playing games.

The e-mail message, though brief, had been dense with detailed information on the security measures that protected Kris. Hickle had read it slowly, pausing often to draw a breath. He’d learned that Kris employed a security firm called Travis Protective Services, that a bodyguard accompanied her at all times, that the bodyguard carried a 9mm-Beretta and served as her chauffeur, that additional agents were posted in the guest cottage on the property. There had been more, a wealth of facts.

If they were facts. They might have been lies designed to ensnare him in some subtle way. He couldn’t be sure. He could trust no one, not even his anonymous benefactor.

But if the message was what it appeared to be, then Jack was someone with inside knowledge of the TPS operation. A TPS employee, perhaps, or a member of the Barwood household. This person knew a great deal about Hickle—his address, his Volkswagen’s plate number—and wanted Hickle to know a great deal about Kris.

The last lines of the message had been the most intriguing:

The Malibu Reserve compound is securely gated and fenced, but a drainage pipe affords access to the property on the northwest side, sixty feet from Pacific Coast Highway.

Access to the property. [email protected] had wanted him to know this.

Hickle had replied to the message, typing one word:

Why?

He’d reread Jack’s note until it was committed to memory, then deleted it from his mailbox as the sender had instructed.

Hickle hadn’t slept well that night. For the next few days he’d checked his e-mail account every afternoon.

A week had passed before he received the next message.

More security details, capped by a provocative closing observation:

Kris is most vulnerable when she returns from work in her Lincoln Town Car shortly after midnight. An assailant could lie in wait in the darkness and not be seen.

Think about it.

There had been no answer to Hickle’s question.

Jack’s motive, it appeared, was not for him to know.

Hickle had spent his next Sunday afternoon in the brush near the Malibu Reserve, tracking down the drainage pipe. It was narrow, but he could wriggle through. Once inside, he was within sight of the Barwoods’ house. Several times he had returned, snapping Polaroids of Kris as she jogged on the beach in the company of her bodyguard. He had watched the guest cottage long enough to see men enter and leave.

Agents were indeed stationed there. Everything Jack had told him had checked out.

There had been two more recent messages, different from the earlier ones. Jack was growing impatient. He goaded Hickle. The last message had been a childish taunt:

Kris laughs about you. She thinks you’re a joke. She’s told the TPS agents that you’re no threat because you don’t have the guts to take action.

Crude manipulation. Hickle hadn’t fallen for it. He had come to distrust Jack. Something was going on here, something complicated and mysterious. Maybe TPS was sending the messages to grod him into committing some foolhardy arrest able offense. After the last e-mail from Jack, he had sent a one-sentence reply:

You can’t make me your bitch.