Hero, p.5
Hero, page 5
He wore dark clothes, a baseball cap, a surgical mask, and sneakers. He had clear surgical gloves on his hands and kept his hands in his jacket pockets. He knew from the photographs that the building had a pool, a spa, and a big patio with two stainless steel propane grills. He approached the building from the alley behind it, stepped to the wall surrounding the pool area, pulled himself to the top of it, swung his legs over, and lowered himself instead of dropping, to prevent even the smallest sound. The windows in the building were all dark. The whole neighborhood was almost certainly asleep at this hour, and he didn’t want to wake anyone.
Sealy stood still and studied the building. When a man who made his living murdering people studied a building, it was a particular kind of view. He looked for openings and irregularities in walls that could be handholds or footholds, vents that could be wide enough for a human body if the covers were unscrewed. He liked louvered kitchen windows, because the frames could be bent with a knife and the strips of glass removed. He liked sliding glass doors on patios and balconies, because most of them had only a single latch by the door handle, which was really only a hook that went over a bar. Other sliders had deadbolts, but their owners were lazy about setting them.
Tonight, he was interested in balconies. The parking garage was about a half-story above ground level, so the second-floor balconies were an extra six or seven feet up. He stayed back near the wall beyond the pool and walked along beside it looking at the balconies. Each was about six feet by three feet of flat space with a steel railing. There were eight condos, four on each of the two floors. Numbers one through four would be on the first floor. Numbers five and six should be on the second floor, at the front corners. Eight should be on the back right corner. He stopped and looked at that balcony and was satisfied that it was the one. No security expert, especially a woman, would live in a ground floor condo in a big city. If she had enemies, she would want her windows to face the pool rather than the street, so she couldn’t get popped from a parked vehicle while looking outside to check the weather.
He saw his way up. He didn’t like it, but he could do it. There was a ladder made of steel bars built into the left side of the building so repair men could go up to work on the central air conditioning or patch the roof. It was not close to the balconies, but he could see that there was an architectural detail, a recessed line about an inch wide and an inch deep running around the building just below the level of the balcony, and another about six feet above it.
Sealy walked to the enclosure where the pool motor and filters were and found the leaf skimmer. It was about twelve feet long. He unscrewed the net and then collapsed the pole so it was only around four feet long. He judged that with the pole at three times its extended thickness, it would be strong enough. He slid it into the back of his belt, so it was out of his way, and went to the ladder. He climbed to the right height and stepped off the ladder to the wall, sticking his toes into the lower groove and gripping the upper groove above his head with his fingertips.
As he edged along the wall he felt fear, and it made him angry that he had to take so much risk for this. The anger made him more determined than ever to kill this woman. He hated her. He hated her most of all when he came to the corner of the building and had to reach around it and set his right hand and right foot in the continuation of the grooves he could only locate by feel and ease himself around. Six feet beyond it he arrived at the first balcony and climbed over the railing.
He began to pull the aluminum handle of the pool skimmer out of his belt so he could lay it from the railing of this balcony to Justine Poole’s balcony, but then he noticed something that surprised him. The sliding glass door beside him was not closed. The screen was closed, but the glass door was open to let the night air into the bedroom.
Sealy leaned the aluminum pole against the wall, took out his pocketknife, and opened the blade. He tested the screen and realized it wasn’t even latched. Why should it be? he thought. Few people could even get up here, and nobody but him would want to. He remained still for a moment, listening. Then he slowly moved the screen to the side on its rollers and track, stepped into the room, and slid the screen shut.
He gripped the knife as he looked at the couple on the bed. If he had to kill them, it would be with the knife, and the big danger was to have a loose hold on the knife so it slipped and cut his own fingers. The two people were older, the husband bald and the wife’s bleached blond hair cut short. Both had sleep masks over their eyes.
He didn’t hurry as he walked past the foot of the bed. He loved the way this condominium building had been constructed. They had used rebar and reinforced concrete instead of a cheap wood frame, so the floors didn’t creak. He made his way out of the bedroom and then across the living room. He unlocked the door, opened it slowly, and stepped out. He made a point of not resetting the hand lock in case he needed to get out through this condo later.
He moved to the door with a metal “8” on it and looked at the lock. It was the same model as the older couple’s lock, which was crap. He reached into his pocket for his wallet and found the membership rewards card from a liquor store that he had discovered to be perfect for this purpose. It was thinner and more flexible than a credit card, so he could get it into the narrow space between the door and jamb and bow it a little to slip into the depression where the plunger went into the frame. He worked it for a few seconds and opened the door.
He pivoted into the condo, shut the door, and stood still. He reached for the revolver he preferred for killing, but left it in his jacket pocket and instead took out the semiautomatic and attached the silencer to the muzzle. He was going to have to kill at least one, maybe two, people and get out before the noise woke the neighborhood. A silencer wouldn’t be silent enough, but it would help. He looked around the living room for something else to help muffle the sound. He felt the pillows on the couch until he found one he could wrap around the pistol. Sealy held it in place and moved slowly toward the rear of the condo, then stepped into the bedroom with the bulky pillow-wrapped pistol aimed at the bed.
The bed was empty. The blanket and sheets were tight and neat across the mattress, the way soldiers did it. She was not home. He stepped closer and verified what he thought he had seen in the dim light from the window. There was only one nightstand and one pillow. He went to the closet and opened it. There weren’t any male clothes and not enough female clothes for two women.
He stepped out to the hallway to look for a second bedroom. There wasn’t a second bedroom. One woman lived here, but she wasn’t here now. He decided to search the condominium and see what he could learn about her.
He returned to the bedroom, opened the drawer of the nightstand, and found a flashlight. He looked at his watch. He could afford to give himself an hour.
6
Sealy searched the condominium for anything that would help him find Justine Poole. There were a desk and a filing cabinet in an alcove off the living room. She had kept the desk’s surface clear, but the filing cabinet gave him hope. The file drawers were probably full of folders that held pay stubs, receipts, and bills with notations and check numbers written in. He opened the bottom drawer first. It held three blue folders with labels that said “Taxes” and a year. Copies of tax returns would have Social Security numbers, birth dates, accounts. He opened them, but there was nothing inside. Had she scanned them into her computer?
He looked at the front of the first blue folder again. The name on the folders wasn’t hers. The taxpayer was a woman named Anna Sophia Kepka. He looked at the other two folders. They were for this Kepka woman too. Had he broken into the wrong condo? He went back into the bedroom and opened the closet. He turned on the flashlight and ran it along the rack of clothes. He found a woman’s suit, navy blue, with a laundry tag on it. He looked closely at the tag. The name was Justine Poole. Anna Kepka could be a current or former girlfriend, a relative or something.
He opened the file cabinet again and went through the other drawers. There was a pink slip for a car, and it was in both women’s names. He found the deed for the condominium, and again there were both names. He found printed copies of a MasterCard and a Visa, front and back. He set them on the desk and photographed each of them, the pink slip, the deed, and the car registration. He didn’t want any of this crap. He wanted things like bank statements, restaurant receipts—things he could use to find her. He used the flashlight to look for other places where she might keep such things and noticed the black shredder she had beside the desk. It fit his growing impression that she didn’t like allowing clutter and piles of paper to build up.
What he needed most right now were photographs of her. He moved the beam of the flashlight to sweep the walls for framed pictures, searched the desk and the file drawers for an envelope or file of them, then looked for a passport, for an album, and then for a zip drive or other digital storage device, but found none of them.
She had gotten herself into trouble firing a pistol, but he had found no pistol here. He supposed the police must have taken her gun for ballistic testing, and if she had another, she had taken it with her. He’d found no ammunition either, but if she knew she might be in danger, she had probably taken her supply with her. He supposed it was possible that Spengler-Nash issued its agents firearms and had them turn in their weapons at the end of each shift. If that was the system, the gun wouldn’t even be hers. Bodyguards didn’t have any responsibility to protect anybody when they weren’t on the clock, the way LA cops did.
Sealy checked his watch. He had already used up his hour. He took a last walk through the condo with the flashlight and made a video of the trip with his phone. He didn’t expect to be able to come back, but if he did, he would have a record of where everything was. As he passed through the little office area, he noticed the shredder again. He stopped and lifted the motorized part that held the blades and looked down into the wastebasket part. There was only a small mound of shredded paper in it. He returned the flashlight to the nightstand beside her bed, went to the front door, opened it and relocked it, then went out and closed it.
He went down the hallway to the stairs, descended to the underground garage, cut across the empty space marked 8, walked between the electric eye and its beam projector, there to detect a car ready to leave, and watched the bars of the garage door swing upward out of his way. He kept his face turned away from the building so the security cameras wouldn’t get his image. He walked at a brisk pace until he reached his car.
By the time he was inside it and starting the engine, he knew where he had to go next. This young woman had been with Spengler-Nash for a while if they’d trusted her to protect big clients like the Pinskys. Anybody who knew much would know her troubles were not over. She was too smart to be at her condo. So where would she be?
Sealy drove to the address on Roe Street he had found for the Spengler house. It looked nearly the way the picture taken in the 1940s had looked, a two-story structure inspired by a 1920s architect’s idea of an early Spanish hacienda. It had a red clay half-pipe roof and white stucco walls arranged in a rectangle around a courtyard with a fountain and garden. The only windows he could see were on the second floor, and they were a foot wide and a foot and a half high, too small for him to squeeze through. The picture he had seen of the inner courtyard side showed walkways along the first and second floors, with the doors to bedrooms along the walkways at intervals. He couldn’t tell from here if that was still true.
There was a long cobbled driveway that began on Roe Street and ran about three hundred feet up the lawn before it widened to a broad parking area, then continued along the side of the house to another paved area in front of a garage with five doors.
The part that surprised Sealy was that a house like this still existed. It was at least five acres in one of the most desirable parts of the city, all lawns and mature shade trees. He left his car around the nearest corner and walked across the lawns of two other large houses to get to the Spengler house. There was no fence or wall, probably because the empty land around it served as a security feature. If Spengler was expecting trouble, he would see it coming, and no burglar wanted to carry stolen goods the length of a football field to get it to his car. There were too many other houses that looked easier to rob.
He knew that he was trying to penetrate a place that was likely to be difficult and risky. The owner of a security company had no reason to live in a house that wasn’t thoroughly wired. He was almost certain to have all of the standard devices—security cameras, perimeter door and window alarms, glass-break detectors—and might even have some of the more troublesome stuff—dusk-to-dawn motion sensors to light up prowlers who approached the building, infrared body heat detectors, interior electric-eye beams across doorways, trap alarms wired into any interior door, pressure pad switches under carpets, big batteries and automatic generators that would kick in if he cut power to the system. None of this equipment was hard to get, and most of it was probably not expensive if you already had installers on the payroll.
The first step was for Sealy to see what obstacles he could detect from outside the range of cameras. He kept his cap and mask on as he walked around the edge of the vast yard. He saw the security cameras set at regular intervals under the eaves of the house, a transmitter near the peak of the roof to send an alarm signal by cellular transmission to—where?—probably to both the cops and Spengler’s own security company. That meant Sealy couldn’t just cut some wires in the phone company circuit box and isolate the place. A minute later Sealy saw a second transmitter on a different section of roof, meaning an intruder prepared to take out one transmitter wouldn’t have time to disconnect the other in the fraction of a second it would take for it to report the state of the system, including the loss of the first transmitter.
Sealy was not a man who accepted obstacles as defeat. As he walked, he thought of ways to overcome them. Strong defenses could be made irrelevant by luring defenders outside the perimeter. Alarms could be circumvented, and houses could be entered through openings where alarms had not been installed.
The fact that this was an old house encouraged him. Air conditioning existed but wasn’t common in 1922, so Southern California families kept doors and windows closed in the mornings to hold the cool air in, and opened everything late in the day to cool the house again. Houses had open vents to prevent attics and kitchens from collecting heat, and windows were installed on opposite sides of rooms to let cross-breezes pass. He continued walking in a wide circle at the edge of the property, studying the house for vulnerabilities.
Sealy reached the big, rounded archway that served as entrance to the courtyard. He stood two hundred feet away, remaining still for a long time, staring through the opening. There were two trees in the courtyard that had grown much taller than the architect could have anticipated more than a hundred years ago. They were taller than the roof of the house, jutting up so the canopy of foliage must shade the house in daylight.
There was a high wrought-iron gate across the arch. It had hinges built into the left side of the portal and a frame with a latch and rings for a lock. He decided to stay away from this entrance for the moment. If Spengler was hiding the woman who worked for him here, he would be making it as hard as he could to get to the house. This entrance looked to Sealy like a trap, an obstacle that he could probably climb over, but while he was doing so, he would be in the open and in no position to defend himself from someone in the courtyard.
Sealy moved so he could see the right side of the portal and looked at the windows of the row of rooms along the walkway on the left side. On the second floor one of the windows seemed to have a faint light behind it, from something like a plug-in night-light in the suite’s bathroom, or even the screen of a cell phone or tablet. Sealy’s heart began to beat faster and he felt the muscles of his arms and legs tightening on their own as he studied the walkway. The other windows were all dark. Maybe the light meant this was the bedroom Spengler had Justine Poole staying in, but maybe Spengler was only making it look that way so an intruder would climb the open steps to the second-floor walkway and make his way along it toward the room, while Spengler sat in some dark corner watching his progress through a rifle’s scope. Sealy decided to keep walking.
Sealy walked past the archway and saw no promising way of entering the building until he reached the common part of the house, directly opposite the arch. It contained the living room, dining room, kitchen, pantry, and probably other things. There was a wide brick chimney at this end, and Sealy stared at it from the same distance. He saw something that interested him. It was too far and the night was too dark to be sure.
He assumed he couldn’t prevent his image from being picked up on the security cameras. All he could do was to hope that nobody in the house was up at three A.M. watching the monitors. Since he’d been here for a few minutes without a response from the police or Spengler-Nash, he decided to take the risk of moving closer. He adjusted his mask to be sure it covered as much of his face as possible, pulled his hat brim down, and bent low to advance. The chimney was wide and tall, and when it came down to the level of about six feet, it jutted out on both sides, presumably because the fireplace inside the building was large.
Sealy leaned closer and touched the brick structure. He had been right: set into the outside of the lower part of the chimney was a steel rectangle about three feet by two feet, with four wing fasteners to hold it in place over an opening. It was an access hatch so the fireplace could be cleaned from outside. Most of the ones he’d seen on modern houses had been only about one foot by one foot, but this chimney was older and larger, and the door was too. He tried moving the first wing fastener and found it was easy and silent, so he undid the others. He took out his pocketknife and ran the blade along the edges, inserted it, and opened the hatch. He was looking past a couple of logs resting on two andirons into a large space where a long couch and three armchairs were arranged around a Persian rug. He listened. There were no sounds—not an electronic shriek or the thud of a running footstep.
