Hero, p.16
Hero, page 16
She had spent the night of the shooting in the police station answering questions. The first night after that she had slept in Ben Spengler’s office while Ben had been murdered. The second night was in the hotel by the airport, and that made this one, borrowing a stranger’s bed, the third. And then she realized that she had lost her train of thought some time ago and was too exhausted to sort through the threads again. She slept.
Joe Alston slid the false wall panel to the side and unlocked the door to James Peter Turpin’s combination office and panic room in the architectural center of the big house. The hidden room had no windows, of course, and even the entry panel was off a large, sparsely furnished second-floor common room that could be fully surveyed by an intruder from the doorway on the upstairs landing and dismissed. It seemed designed to accommodate groups, possibly cocktail parties or even dancing. The last owner of the house had been a music executive who had needed a safe place because he had tax, drug, and hatred problems, so this innovation had probably been his.
Joe went inside the office, closed the door, and turned on the large surveillance monitor with the remote control on the desk. He looked at each of the twenty sections for a few seconds and satisfied himself that nobody was lurking on the property at the moment, then ran the recording in reverse until the time was three P.M. and restarted it.
He ran the recording in fast forward until he saw movement, then ran it at normal speed. There she was, coming out of his guesthouse carrying his bath towel. She stopped on the pool deck, looked around her in every direction, looked back a second time at a few things he could not see on the screen, and then stepped out of her clothes and walked down the steps into the pool until she was completely immersed. She came up, the water streaming from her hair, and began to swim.
She was a strong, graceful swimmer with a good, correct freestyle stroke. When she reached the end of the pool she completed a quick flip turn, pushed off the wall, and remained submerged while she swam breaststroke back to the wall beside the steps and pushed off to swim backstroke for a length. She swam easily and unhurriedly for about twenty minutes, smoothed her hair with her fingers, then sat on the steps for a few minutes. She ducked herself under again for a few seconds and then stood, went up the steps, and lay on the nearest chaise longue while the sun dried her skin.
She was very pretty—beautiful was the only appropriate word in spite of how liberally people bestowed it—much more attractive than he had allowed himself to admit, because it had seemed to him to be a distraction, and therefore a probable source of manipulation and clouded judgments. He had already taken a much more leisurely view of her swimming session than would have been necessary to identify what had been going on. He ran the file back to the moment before she had stepped out of the house, erased all of it up to the present, and then turned to the security camera focused on the desk and said, “Hi, James. I just came in to see if there had been a prowler poking around in the yard while I was gone today, and I accidentally erased part of this afternoon’s security recording. It was all birds and squirrels, so if you see this, don’t worry.” He shut off the monitor, turned off the light, and stepped out. He relocked the door, slid the panel over it, walked down the hall toward the guest rooms, and thought about Justine.
She had been overconfident, probably because security was part of her profession. She might have assumed she would see any security cameras, which would have normally been mounted along the eaves of the house. She hadn’t known about the previous owner before James, who’d had twelve keyhole cameras mounted in places like false drainpipes and circuit boxes and even woven into a coaxial cable on the guesthouse.
Joe stopped at the door to the first guest room. He remembered that James had told him once that when he’d moved in, the old owner had left some of his belongings in addition to the fixtures and wiring. James had not said what they had been, but now Joe wondered if at least one of them might have been a gun. Maybe he should go back inside the office and open the safe to see. James had shown him where the combination was hidden, but he had never had any reason to use it.
The old owner had apparently exhibited that familiar combination of paranoia and malice that made it unlikely that he hadn’t had guns somewhere. It didn’t matter where they had been; if James had them, they would be locked in the safe and had probably not been touched since then. But now Justine was here and she was in real danger. Joe decided against the guns. He had seen no indication that anyone knew she was here, and getting caught with an unregistered pistol that might easily have been used in some old crime was not going to make her safer.
As Joe pulled back the covers of the bed, he had a difficult time forgetting what he had seen on the recording. Sleep would be welcome, maybe to blur the bright, sunlit clarity of the memory image, at least.
21
Justine woke at five in the morning, probably because she had finally gotten a night of quiet, comfortable sleep. Justine had not spoken with anybody at Spengler-Nash since she had gotten the pictures of Ben’s killer lurking in the company garage. She texted another friend, Linda Fry, “It’s me—JP—can you call me when you get home?”
Five minutes later her phone buzzed. She said, “Hi.”
“Hi, Justine. I’m in my car, and I’m out of sight a half-mile from the building, pulled over, so it’s safe to talk.”
“I’m a half-mile poisonous?”
“More than that—radioactive. We can’t see it or how potent it is, but it’s bad. They both came in at the start of all three shifts to say a lot of crap about moving the business into a new era, which only showed how little they know about the business. They also mentioned that you had made some unprofessional choices and were no longer associated with the company. Any communication with you from now on could make the company and us, individually, share legal jeopardy for your actions. Mostly us, since management—meaning Ben—could no longer be charged.”
Justine said, “I kind of knew that was going on. I just wondered if there was anything new.”
“Yes,” Linda said. “When we were all getting back from the night shift a few minutes ago the cops were here waiting for us. They thought you would be working your usual night shift with us, I guess, and they wanted to talk to you.”
“Oh, crap,” Justine said. “Who did they talk to?”
“They went straight for Bailey, like most strangers do.”
Bailey was tall, straight, and gray haired. He was about fifty, and he looked like a Black Marine general. “What did he tell them?”
“What we all agreed among ourselves to say—that you’re taking personal time off to get over what happened. Anybody would, and if they didn’t, Ben would have made them.”
“Thank you, Linda. And please thank Bailey when you see him. If I keep getting in touch with people directly, I’m afraid I’ll get somebody fired.”
“The cops asked for your address and phone numbers again, like they thought they must have copied them wrong the first time or something. They want to talk to you, and that doesn’t go away. They said a detective has been assigned to your case. I have his card. His name is Sergeant Kunkel.” She spelled it and said, “I’m sending you his phone number.”
“Thanks, Linda. I’ll give him a call today and get them off all of your backs.”
“I’m so sorry it all hit the fan, Justine.”
“Me too.”
“Don’t let it keep you from calling our personal numbers. The nightmare twins aren’t going to be hanging around when our shift lets off.”
“Thanks. I appreciate all of you. Go home and get some sleep now.”
“Will do.”
They both hung up. Justine put away the backup work phone she had been using since her work phone had been taken into evidence and called the number of the police detective on her personal phone. “May I please speak with Detective Kunkel?”
“Speaking.”
“Hi,” she said. “This is Justine Poole. I just heard you wanted to talk to me.”
“That was quick,” he said. “We do. What time is good for you?”
“You mean today?”
“Yes, I do.”
She tried to calculate how long it would take to get to the airport, case the parking area and surrounding roads to be sure it was safe to pick up her car, and then drive it to the LAPD headquarters building at 100 West First Street, get inside, and find him in Homicide Central. “I think I can be there at ten, depending on this morning’s traffic.”
“All right,” he said. “We’ll be expecting you.”
Leo Sealy had been delighted with the television coverage of the people picketing Justine Poole’s building. The lawyers that Mr. Conger had hired had made it sound crazy that the authorities hadn’t already arrested her. He knew nothing about the parents and relatives Mr. Conger had recruited, or if they were even real, but they made good victims. They acted like anybody who had ever lost a kid. He guessed that the lawyers had persuaded them that they might even get some money from a lawsuit against Spengler-Nash, its liability insurance company, maybe even the city. Anything would do—that the police didn’t let the ambulance team onto the property fast enough, or that they’d concentrated on the three healthy robbers instead of the two shot ones. The city would do anything to settle instead of going to court, because so many people hated the police.
Sealy looked at his watch. It was about the time of day when Justine Poole must be used to getting home, so he figured she must be up by now. Whatever she was going to do next, she was going to be running out of clothes. That meant her first stop would be the place nobody else expected her to return to now, her condo.
Justine decided to sign onto the Lyft app with her old work phone instead of waiting for Joe to wake up and asking him for a ride to the police station. He already knew who she was, but that didn’t mean he had to know that she knew he knew. She didn’t want to have the Lyft driver pick her up at his place, because then there would be a record of the exact spot where they had picked her up, identified by her name and photograph.
She put Joe’s sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine and started it, and then wrote him a quick note. “Dear Joe, thank you for your hospitality and generosity.” She considered signing it “Justine,” to show him she knew, but she couldn’t think of a good reason for the impulse. What would she gain by letting him know she had caught him? She signed it “Anna.”
She hurried out and walked two long blocks down the hill to Mulholland, picked the place where the street sign for the next side street between canyons was, and summoned her Lyft car. When the driver’s face and vehicle came onto her phone, he was already three minutes away.
When the car arrived, she got in quickly and told the driver what he knew already, that she wanted to go to the airport. The driver was Eastern European and had skin about the shade of her grandmother’s, with a similar accent. It occurred to Justine that he could be a distant relative. The driver made his way onto the 405 freeway and headed south. He didn’t talk much during the trip, so she sensed she shouldn’t either. It was still very early, and she wondered if it was good for her because she could move quickly, or bad because she had no crowds to hide her. She knew that she was an innocent person who was thinking and behaving like a criminal, but she reminded herself that what the police were investigating her for was murder.
When they reached the Century Boulevard exit, she said, “Please turn right. I need to go to economy parking.”
He pulled up outside the lot entrance and let her off, so she said, “Thank you,” and as she walked away, gave him a twenty percent tip on her phone screen. The lot was filling up already and people there for morning flights were dragging rolling suitcases toward the shuttle bus pickup. She told herself that her car was close and she was not encumbered by luggage, but it took her longer to find it than she had expected. She got in at last and started the engine, drove to the exit kiosk, paid for her time with the Anna Kepka card, and headed toward her condominium. She needed clothes. She needed a plan for her upcoming police interrogation. She needed a lawyer.
Ben Spengler had hired various kinds of experts to give his agents basic instruction on various specialties every year—the capabilities of new weaponry that an assailant might use to attack a client; new scams they might use to track or record phone conversations or emails to learn locations, routes, or schedules; new devices for tracking cars without being seen; and real nut stuff like ways of blowing up a car.
It had already occurred to her that the person hired or assigned to murder her might be capable of using an explosive. Explosives were rarer and more vivid than gunshots and made a frightening noise that was capable of knocking bystanders off their feet or killing them with concussion. If the purpose was to obliterate her and scare other potential enemies, it was hard to beat a well-made antipersonnel bomb.
She had not thought of giving her car the sort of examination she had been trained to give it, and now she was speeding north on the 405 freeway. If she had missed something, it hadn’t been connected to the ignition circuit. She supposed there could still be a chance of an initiator that only fired after a wheel or fan had turned a set number of times, or of an accelerant ignited by the heat of the exhaust manifold, but neither seemed likely. She needed to think about things that were likely.
She needed a lawyer, but what lawyer was in his office at 6:22 A.M.? She had been foolish to say she could be in police headquarters before ten. It made everything she had to do harder to fit in. She took the Olympic Boulevard exit and pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, then used her phone to look up law firms. There was one named Ralph Zaragoza, who had a bunch of television commercials about car accidents and the wiles of insurance companies who didn’t want to “give you what you deserve.” There were a couple of guys she’d seen wearing ties and white shirts under leather biker jackets who specialized in motorcycle cases. Most of the other names might as well have been random lines of letters ending with either “& Assoc.” or “Esq.”
She thought about the cost of lawyers. She had heard they started around six hundred dollars an hour, so the kind she would need must be at least twelve hundred. She didn’t have serious savings or a job. As she was thinking about all of the obstacles that were lining up against her, she thought about the television news coverage. It had blown her identity, revealed the building where she lived, and shown her photograph while she had needed to stay out of sight.
The publicity had also done something else. It had made her problem into news. Maybe a big lawyer of the sort that appeared on television every third case would like to be on television again. She found the name of a law firm she remembered—Smallwood, De Kuyper & Fein. They had represented some clients of Spengler-Nash, and when the clients had talked, it had sounded to her as though they handled all kinds of legal issues.
She called the number. There was a recorded woman’s voice. “Law Offices.” Justine had forgotten that: they never seemed to say which law offices. “Business hours are nine A.M. to five P.M. Pacific time, Monday through Friday. If you would like to leave a message, wait for the tone.” Justine noticed that there had not been a promise to call back, but when she heard the tone, she spoke. “Hello. My name is Justine Poole. I’ve been asked to go to an interview at police headquarters at 100 Main this morning at ten A.M., and I need to find a defense attorney. The detective in charge is Sergeant Raymond Kunkel. My phone number is …” and she read it off the screen and ended with “Thank you.”
She pulled onto Olympic Boulevard and then back onto the 405. Talking about the interview had reminded her that she was still wearing two-day-old jeans, a tank top, and running shoes. There were no clothing stores she knew about that opened before ten. She thought her situation through again. There might very well be a plan to arrest her this morning, complete with a perp walk in handcuffs. In any case, they would be planning to intimidate and overwhelm her with their questions, trying to get her to say something stupid or get her locked into a story that included misleading statements. She knew that was the way the game was played whether they knew she was innocent or thought she was guilty, because it put her in their power.
It was foolish to be in this predicament. If she’d thought clearly about this day, which she’d known must be coming, she should have started looking for a lawyer right away. Clothes were a lesser issue, but they made an impression. She had a really nice blue pantsuit that had been bought for her by Spengler-Nash so she could appear to be one of the accountants and executives accompanying Giancarlo Scrimante, the head of the Scrimante Milano fashion company, while he was in LA on business. It was hanging in her closet in a suit bag right now.
She had decided it would be worth taking the chance of going there if she was careful and efficient, but her decision had been made in the absence of other options. She drove into her neighborhood at 7:20. It was no longer very early, and each second things could get worse in many ways. She had to meet Kunkel in Homicide Special, which probably wasn’t a place she could just walk right into, and before that she would have to get ready here and face the serious and unpredictable downtown morning traffic. It was also late enough now so that many people in her building would already be up and about, so sneaking in and out unseen might be hard to do.
Justine couldn’t ignore everything she knew about moving in safety. She cruised the neighborhood searching for signs of trouble—the man who had been stalking her, the car he had been driving, any sort of parked vehicle that kept its driver shielded from view, like a car with too-dark tinted windows. She didn’t see any, so she parked her car a block away from the back of her building and walked toward it.
