Hero, p.10
Hero, page 10
The flashlight was wrong. She always had it aimed at the back of the drawer, not the front, and as close to the bed as possible so she could roll over, open the drawer, and turn it on with her left thumb without fumbling around for it. She wanted it in her left hand, to keep her right, the dominant hand, free to defend herself.
She felt a chill. The flashlight had been taken out and put back. She was beginning to think about asking the cops to fingerprint it, but then realized that she couldn’t even be sure its rough, knurled surface would hold a print. And could one of the cops have picked it up? A cop looking around to see if a woman had been taken might use a flashlight to see if there were signs of a struggle—marks on a wall, tiny spots of blood, strands of long hair pulled out. But cops carried their own flashlights, so why would they open the drawer at all? She had to get out of here.
She emptied her overnight bag into the laundry basket and then repacked it, putting an envelope at the bottom with the important papers she’d taken with her when she’d packed to sleep at the office.
She went into the kitchen, put the perishables from her refrigerator that wouldn’t fit in the freezer into her trash bag, and added the shredded papers. She took a quarter cup of flour from the canister, returned to her bedroom, and tossed two pinches of the flour into the air to create a thin layer on the hardwood floor that would show footprints, and did the same for the floor just inside the sliding door from the balcony.
She went down the back stairs and out past the dumpster, where she left the trash bag, and kept going to her car. She started it and drove.
The killer had been in her condo. She needed to find another place where she would be out of sight for a while. She couldn’t stay with any of her friends from work. That would make finding her too easy for the killer. Even if he couldn’t get a list, he could follow each of them home and make his own list. When she was two miles from her condo she pulled over and called a hotel near the airport for a reservation. She had been inside it a couple of times with business clients who needed to meet with a foreign counterpart and had found it safe. That was all that mattered now.
12
Sealy woke up feeling eager. He made his breakfast, did some exercises, and then sent the digital images of the three women from his phone to his computer so he could enlarge and study them. He saw right away that the shots were as good as he had hoped.
He had been up all night, but he had remained alert and determined. He enlarged the image of the blond woman with the overnight bag so it took up the full screen, and then zoomed in until her face was about half the picture and saved it that way. He had clear shots of her from the back and side, so he enlarged those too. It seemed likely that he would need to spot her from the side or back. There was no advantage to walking right up to her and staring her in the eyes. She should be dead before she looked in his direction.
He took up his phone again and used his fingerprint to sign into his bank account to check his balance. It was healthy. He didn’t need to deposit any of the money Mr. Conger had given him. He might not need money to get this job done anyway, but if he needed it, he had it.
He went back to the computer and looked at the rest of the pictures he had taken. He had accidentally turned on the video near the end, and he pressed the arrow and watched the women finish the walk into the building. He concentrated on the blonde. He watched her closely, concentrating on the differences between her and her friends. He didn’t want to shoot the wrong one.
The main difference between a professional like him and the amateurs was in the planning. No matter how much thought and effort he put into the kill, he put just as much into what would happen afterward, and how he would navigate the transformed environment—the noise, confusion, people in motion to run or hide—and disappear unidentified or, better, unnoticed.
When he was confident that he would recognize the blonde, even from a distance or in dim light, he decided to prepare himself with a fallback strategy. He printed ten copies of the best picture of her. He didn’t think he was going to need them, but he liked to anticipate needs before they occurred. If he needed to, he would show people the photo and say she was his sister, who had mental troubles and had wandered off a few times before, but this time she had left her medicine behind, so he was very worried. He would give a fake name and the number of whatever burner phone he was using at the time.
In midafternoon he prepared his equipment. He chose to bring his 5.56-millimeter AR-15 in case he had a chance to get her the easy way, from cover at a distance. The rifle was small, light, and easy to break down, and no pistol had remotely comparable range and velocity. With the night scope, he would see clearly and she would see nothing but shadows and shapes.
He knew what usually happened the instant when the deafening clap of a gun’s report shattered the silence. Most people nearby jumped or jerked and then swiveled their heads, looking for the place where the shot had come from. Often one of the people nearest to the dying person knelt by the body to provide help while others ran for cover. The biggest group would be paralyzed, apparently able to see everything, but unable to move.
The exceptions were the quick reactors, the few who could think clearly right away. They would instantly have a phone out, dialing 911 or trying to get a picture of him. Others would be trying to chase after him to see his license plate, or would even try to attack him. A couple of times he’d had to kill one or two of them to escape, and he was always prepared for more.
He knew how bystanders were going to behave, but almost none of them knew because they had never been to a murder before.
Sealy charged his night scope’s battery, his phone’s battery, and the battery of his bright tactical flashlight. He made sure his two pistols and rifle were fully loaded with rounds that he had never touched without gloves. This time his plan included a few defensive measures. He had seldom had any need to wear his bulletproof vest, but he planned to wear it tonight. The time to take out Justine Poole was in the hour before first light, when she and her friends had just ended a shift. He would choose a position that would give him the best view of the door they had used when he’d followed them home.
By early evening, he had his clothes and equipment prepared and laid out on the living room floor, and his mind was calm and resolved. He set his alarm for 3:45 A.M.
At eleven he turned on the television news. He was excited to see the newswoman standing in front of Justine Poole’s condominium. “This morning I was at this condominium building, where Justine Poole lives. She’s the heroic young woman who foiled the armed robbery of the beloved Hollywood couple Jerry and Estelle Pinsky two nights ago. I spoke with her next-door neighbor Ally Grosvenor. And just this evening I spoke with her again. Here’s what she said.”
The lighting of the next picture seemed to be evening. The woman Sealy had seen on an earlier broadcast wearing a running outfit said, “It was chilling. My husband and I knew what she did for a living, but we never expected that the job would ever be so violent.”
“What about Justine herself?” the reporter said. “What can you tell us about her?”
“She’s a quiet, respectable young woman—very kind and soft-spoken, and pretty as they come, but bright too. One of those girls whose smile can light up a room.”
Sealy smiled. For some reason that was the cliché that somebody was sure to say about every murdered woman. This time it had come early. He hadn’t even killed her yet.
The newswoman said, “And you have a picture to show us?”
“Yes.”
Leo Sealy leaned forward in his seat and looked at the DVR to be sure the recording light was on.
In her hotel room near the airport, Justine was watching the interview with Ally Grosvenor. She heard herself whisper, “No, Ally. Don’t!”
But there it was. In the editing they had made the picture fill the screen. It was Ally and Justine smiling at the camera, both of them in bathing suits and cover-up tops holding plates of food from the barbecue grill on the building patio. Justine’s dark brown hair was wet and hanging very straight and stringy, because she had just pulled a comb through it after getting out of the pool. That picture was fresh, taken during the recent Fourth of July weekend. It was probably going to get her killed. Now the shooter would know her face.
Sealy stared, open-mouthed, at the television screen as he watched the news report scrolling rapidly backward. He stopped the image and pushed the arrow to play the segment forward, his thumb resting lightly on the pause button. When the photograph of the two women at the pool party reappeared, he stopped it, lifted his cell phone, framed the younger woman, rested his elbow on the arm of the couch, and took the picture. He took three more to be sure he had the best, steadiest version of it.
This was not the woman he had seen leaving the Spengler-Nash building. This was not any woman he had ever seen. He had been completely prepared to go out in a few hours and kill her, or all three of the women, if necessary, and none of them was Justine Poole.
13
Justine’s cell phone buzzed. She stiffened as though a high-voltage shock had gone up her spine, and opened her eyes, ready to fight. She recognized the sound and rolled over in bed to reach in the direction the sound had come from, and at the same moment remembered why she was in this strange room. She had been crying about the death of Ben Spengler for most of the night until she was too tired to be able to think clearly, and she must have dozed off with her clothes on. On her phone was a text message from Janice Fortner, night shift supervisor of communications at Spengler-Nash.
Justine was pretty sure she knew what this was going to be. Janice was undoubtedly getting in touch to say she was sorry that Justine had been fired.
There had already been about a dozen of those. All had included compliments, and some had offered to serve as references. Since some of the older ones had titles like shift commander or director of international operations, the offers were not worthless, but she was not thinking about her next job. She was thinking about staying alive until the end of the week.
She noticed her phone screen said 8:21 A.M., which meant it was too late to go back to sleep anyway. She had a vague memory of noises in the hallway hours earlier, which hadn’t been annoying enough to bring her to full consciousness, but now she was awake. She touched the screen to read the text. “Justine, the security cameras in the garage picked this man up watching at shift change the night after Ben was killed. Maybe trying to find you? We’re not supposed to communicate with you, but you need to see these.”
Justine touched the symbol of the attachment and saw the first picture appear. It showed a man trying to stay in the shadows behind the last row of parked cars. The garage was dimly lit, but the security cameras made him clear and sharp. There were other pictures, but she wanted to answer right away. She typed, “Got them. I owe you. Take no more chances. Love, etc.” Janice was the last person in the world to make a mistake like using a Spengler-Nash account or a piece of company equipment for personal calls, but her job gave her legitimate access to the security recordings.
Justine looked at the first picture. She remembered that when Ben had ordered the newer cameras installed, he had said that they were to protect company clients. If someone was planning to stalk a client, one way to do it would be to track the car of the client’s bodyguard to wherever the client was. Ben would never admit he was also trying to protect the bodyguards, but he was still protecting her now.
Justine looked at the next few pictures. The man was white. His hair was light, but not light enough to be blond. It was straight and short. His face had a chiseled look, maybe partly because he was straining to see something in the parking garage. His eyebrows were drawn together and jaw muscles tight. He seemed to be in his midthirties to early forties, not a kid waiting to break a car window in a lot to steal something. He was too well dressed to be down on his luck and sleeping rough—creases in his pants’ legs, a dark, well-fitted jacket, a baseball cap with no logo. She realized she might very well be looking at the man who had shot Ben Spengler to death two nights ago.
She wished Janice had sent the shots to the police too. They might recognize him or have his car on a license plate reader near Ben’s house. She was almost positive Janice hadn’t sent them, though. Sending them would bring the police back to Spengler-Nash asking more questions, and if Ben’s siblings learned she’d been in touch with Justine, she might be considered disloyal, and she’d lose her job too.
Justine looked at the pictures again to try to discern anything she could. One of the shots showed the man standing by the stairwell door. She knew that the doorway was seven feet, and he seemed to be about a foot shorter, but he was ducking his head, so he could be slightly taller than six feet when he stood up straight. He was trim, but not thin, with a flat belly and upper arms that looked thick.
In the end, what she could tell about him was all bad. He was ordinary looking for Los Angeles. He was mature but not old. He was in good physical condition and patient enough to stand for at least an hour or two doing reconnaissance. She kept thinking about him, looking at each of his pictures again and again, but there was a block between her and what she wanted to know. He might as well be a statue of a man. Nothing about who he was or what he was thinking could be gleaned from any of the pictures. She had a panicky feeling that she was letting herself waste time sitting in this hotel room while the day went by. She needed to put her phone down and get ready to use these pictures to start trying to find Ben’s killer. She went into the bathroom to take a shower.
She turned on the water, let it run long enough to adjust it so she wouldn’t get scalded, and stepped in to let the water soothe her. She found herself thinking about Justine Poole.
The name had happened near the beginning of her second summer at Spengler-Nash. Ben had begun her training for the part of the business that wasn’t done in an office. He had come to her desk and said, “I want you to think up a nom de guerre. Everybody here has to have one.”
“Why?”
“A bunch of reasons. It’s like an actor’s name, the right name for the image you want to project. Good ones are simple and comforting. They make clients remember you. If somebody wants to bitch about you, they only know a fake name. They’ll complain about Lisa La De Da or whoever. If the complaint sticks, we make up a new name for you. Sometimes female agents get noticed in the wrong way. You’re young and not as ugly as you could be, so you might get stalkers. You’re not completely incompetent so you’ll make an enemy or two. They want to come after Lisa La De Da? Let them. She’s gone, moved on.”
“I’m kind of used to being Anna Kepka.”
“Oh, and the other reason is that I told you to. Bring me a good name before end of shift. Write it down so we both spell it the same.”
The name she had invented was Justine Poole. It sounded like the name of a woman whose family had come from a place along the Thames, not the Volga or the Danube. It was short and easy to remember. When she had handed him the name he had nodded and typed it on a form in his computer.
Two days later he brought her the plastic identification card that said she was Justine Poole and showed a picture of her like the others all had. Eventually she had one that carried all of her professional information on it—the number of her concealed carry permit and the firearms she was authorized to carry—9 millimeter, .40 caliber, .45 caliber. It noted that she had completed a defensive driving certification, CPR and lifesaving certification, and martial arts training. That was all for the benefit of clients, an easy way to reassure them that she was qualified. It also said she was a level 4 protection agent. There was no level 1, 2 or 3. After that he never called her anything but Justine Poole, and nobody else did either. Anna Kepka faded and became a bit of private history. Over the years she had used “Justine Poole” more and more often, so her real name got to be like an alias.
As she stood in the shower she thought about Anna Kepka. The surname was already a shortened version of her family’s name, an abridgment her grandmother had done so it would be easy for Americans to say and accept. Her grandmother had told her that Americans were impatient people who resented having to memorize long or difficult names from other languages, so she had decided not to irritate them. When Anna had asked her what the long version of the name had been, she’d said, “You’re an American too. Use your America name and be grateful. You’ll only need this one until you’re married and he gives you his nice new one anyway.”
14
Justine Poole’s filing cabinet had held the temporary white printout copy of the ownership papers for her car and a copy of its registration the night when Sealy had broken in. He had taken a picture of each. The car was a gray Honda Civic, and the license number was seven letters and numbers strung together, not a vanity plate or a tag that spelled a word or anything. He spent hours checking and rechecking Justine Poole’s condo building, but her car never appeared, and now it was so late he was sure she wasn’t coming. He was beginning to wonder if she had left town after all.
Sealy decided to use a skip tracer. He had also taken pictures of the copies she had made of both sides of two credit cards, so he had what he needed. Using skip tracers was tricky. They collected information about not only the people they traced, but also about the clients who hired them. Their fees were high, and presumably some clients skipped out on them, or tried to.
A few years ago, after he’d been told about the skip tracers, Sealy had used a false identity to incorporate a company, listed the business as an employment service, and begun paying a monthly fee to be a regular client of a skip tracer. Since then, he had used their services only a few times for his real business, but more often just had them locate random strangers so a survey of the subjects of his searches didn’t all lead to people who were now dead. He also wanted to keep the volume of searches high enough to justify the fees he was paying. Nothing would make the skip tracers curious faster than noticing that a client was wasting his money on their services.
