The Shadow Hunter (13 page)

Lying on the floor, she performed a stretching routine, working her hamstrings and the muscles of her back, then limbered up her neck and shoulders with yoga exercises, and concluded the session with ten minutes of deep breathing. Then she considered the problem of how to search Hickle’s apartment.

The job would be tricky. At first she contemplated breaking in through his bedroom window via the fire escape. But surely he had locked the window before leaving for work, and she doubted she could defeat the window latch without leaving evidence of intrusion.

Better go in through the door.

After a breakfast of oatmeal, cinnamon toast, and a banana, she ran the shower, rinsing her hair in the thin, tepid stream. As Hickle had warned, hot water was scarce. She dressed in old jeans and a faded blouse.

She passed the time rereading the case file until after nine o’clock, when those tenants who had jobs were likely to have left for work, and the others had settled in for a day of soap operas and talk shows. Tool kit in hand, she stepped into the hall and looked around.

Every door on the fourth floor was closed. A neighbor peering through a peephole might catch her in the act of a breakin, but she was willing to chance it.

Before Hickle’s door she set down the tool kit and took out an electric pick gun and a feather-touch, coil spring tension bar. The door was secured with a Kwikset pin-tumbler deadbolt lock. To turn the plug, it was necessary to free the pins, lifting them into the pin wells. She inserted the tension bar into the lower half of the keyway and the pick gun’s blade into the upper half, then switched on the pick. It whirred like a dentist’s drill until the row of pins popped free. The plug rotated under the pressure of the tension bar, and the deadbolt retracted with a metallic snick.

She stepped inside, shut the-door, and looked through the peephole, watching for any activity in the hall. There was none. Evidently the pick gun’s motor’noise had aroused no concern.

Turning, she surveyed Hickle’s apartment. The furniture was different from hers but of no better quality.

Although Hickle had lived in the building for years, he had not enlivened the decor with mementos or artworks or small, homey touches.

There were no paintings on the walls, no framed photos resting on end tables. The place was as nondescript as a motel room.

She crossed the living room and closed the Venetian blind, then turned on a light. The first thing she noticed was the VCR under the TV.

Hickle must have bought the VCR himself; unlike the TV, it had not been bolted down by the landlord. She found the all-purpose remote and turned on both devices, then reviewed the on-screen programming menu.

Hickle had set the VCR to tape Channel Eight every weekday from 6 to 6:30 p.m. and again from ten o’clock to eleven.

Kris Barwood’s two daily newscasts.

She turned off the machines, then inspected the kitchen. The fridge was stocked with several large plastic containers of rice and beans, Hickle’s dietary staple. She found no snacks, no dessert foods, not even any sugar. At least he couldn’t use the Twinkie defense.

Before proceeding with the search, she took care of one more item of business in the living room. She installed a surveillance camera.

The camera was an inch wide by an inch deep, with a 3.6mm pinhole lens that resembled a pen’s ball point.

The lens covered a ninety-degree field of view, and its light rating was .03 lux, permitting photography even in semidarkness. Soldered to the camera was an inch long UHF crystal-controlled color video transmitter that broadcast 420 lines of video resolution without shakiness or drift. The transmitter had a range of three hundred feet and would send its signal through walls and any other obstruction except steel.

For extended use the unit had to be run off an external power supply.

Fortunately there was a smoke detector mounted above Hickle’s sofa, hard-wired into the main current. She took the smoke detector apart and found room inside for the camera-transmitter package, which she wired to the AC. Before replacing the smoke detector on the wall, she aligned the camera lens with one of the pre punched holes in the cover.

The camera was not equipped with a microphone.

She considered installing an infinity transmitter in the base of Hickle’s telephone—the device would pick up room noise along with both ends of his telephone conversations—but decided against it. Hickle, like many paranoids, might periodically inspect his phone for bugs.

Besides, it was unnecessary to monitor his phone calls. The only calls that mattered were the ones he made to Kris Barwood, and TPS was already recording and tracing those.

Still, she wanted some audio surveillance. Mrs. Finley had reported that Hickle sometimes shouted when alone. No doubt he also talked to himself at times.

Most people did.

“Even me,” Abby said, proving her point.

A simple hidden microphone would do the trick. She planted one inside the stove’s ventilation hood. The microphone and its transmitter used less energy than the video camera and did not need to be hooked up to the main current. A single nine-volt battery would allow continuous transmission for more than a week.

The bedroom was next. Here was where Hickle truly lived, where he felt free to be himself. He had made the room a shrine to Kris Barwood. Her image was everywhere. The walls were papered with KPTI advertisements, photos of Kris from feature articles, and eight-by-ten glossies of Kris at various stages in her career.

“He really is her number one fan,” Abby whispered.

She snapped a series of still photos with a pocket camera.

She was disappointed that there was no computer in the room. Hickle had told Kris Barwood that he’d searched the Internet to obtain her home address. Presumably he had used a publicly available terminal. It seemed odd. Even on his income, he could surely afford a garage-sale computer. Maybe he was a technophobe or something.

The first thing she did was plant a second audio bug.

This one she taped to the underside of his nightstand drawer. If he talked in his sleep, she would know.

Then she began her search. In a cabinet she found rows of videotapes, each eight hours long and carefully labeled with five dates in chronological order.

Weekdays only. Kris’s newscasts. The half-hour 6 p.m. show and the hour-long 10 p.m. edition added up to ninety minutes per day. Hickle recorded a week’s worth of shows—seven and a half hours—on each tape. Thirty-six tapes in all. He’d been taping for roughly eight months, and by Abby’s calculation he now had two hundred seventy hours of Kris Barwood.

And he was still taping her, still adding new shows to his collection.

Two rows of books took up the cabinet’s lower shelf.

Some bore the labels of used book shops, while others were stamped “LIBRARY.” The front row consisted of true-crime titles, many with photo sections. The photo pages were noticeably dog-eared. Hickle had spent time poring over black-and-white shots of stalkers escorted under guard after their arrest. Did he picture himself in the same circumstances, and if so, did the prospect bring him worry or satisfaction?

The second row leaned toward more practical subject matter, dealing mostly with the intricacies of finding confidential information in government archives or on the Internet. Blurbs on the dust jackets promised. You can track down anybody! Other books focused on tactics and strategy in guerrilla warfare. Passages concerned with the art of the ambush were copiously underlined.

The last few books, nestled in a corner, were of a different type. She brought them into the light and felt a chill run over the muscles of her back. They were Kris Barwood’s high school yearbooks.

Abby looked at the most recent one, dated 1978. The senior class photos were in the front, in alphabetical order. Kris’s picture was one of the first.

Kris at eighteen, a graduating senior. Her activities had included the school newspaper and the debate club. Her quotation was from Blaise Pascal: The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.

Hickle surely must have agreed with that.

She examined the other yearbooks, which collectively provided a detailed record of Kris’s teenage years. How had Hickle obtained them?

Back copies might be offered for sale by the school itself, or perhaps he had gone all the way to Twin Falls and stolen them out of the school library.

After replacing everything in the cabinet, she focused on the bedroom closet, the last place left to explore and the one most likely to yield secrets. The closet had bifold doors, the knobs encircled by a short length of padlocked chain. Hickle wasn’t taking any chances.

The padlock had four cams, each numbered with ten digits. That meant ten thousand possible combinations, from 0000 to 9999. There had to be some way to narrow it down. What would a person use for a combination?

His birthday. The information was in the TPS report, but she’d left it next door, and she wouldn’t go into the hall merely to retrieve it; the risk of being spotted by another tenant was too high.

Instead she used her cell phone, speed-dialing Travis’s office, and pulled him out of a meeting.

“Yes?” he snapped.

“What’s Hickle’s birthday?”

“What?”

“I need to know.”

“For God’s sake… All right, hold on.” She waited until he came back on the line.

“October seventh, 1965.”

“Don’t hang up. I need to try something.”

She put down the phone and set the combination to 1007—October 7. No result. 1065? 0765? Nothing. Her gaze drifted to the walls covered with Kris Barwood’s face, and the solution was so obvious she wanted to slap herself.

When she picked up the phone, Travis was practically shouting her name.

“Abby, damn it, what’s going on?”

“I’m back. Tell me Kris Barwood’s birthday.”

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“Yeah, right. April fool, a week early. Just do it.”

Another interval of silence, and then grumpily he announced, “August eighteenth, 1959.”

She set the combination to 0818, and of course it opened.

“Thanks, Paul. You’ve been a big help.”

“What the hell are you—”

“Gotta go.” She switched off the phone.

When she parted the closet doors, she saw a Heckler & Koch Model HK770 rifle, complete with telescopic sight, standing in a corner.

“Armed and dangerous,” she breathed. She examined the gun. A light-emitting diode was installed in the trigger guard, wired to a pressure switch in the walnut stock. A laser sighting system. That kind of modification didn’t come cheap. Neither did the gun itself.

The whole package must have cost Hickle nearly a thousand dollars. Now she knew why he didn’t own a computer. He had plowed all his savings into firearms.

A brown duffel bag lay on the closet floor. She unzipped the flap and found a Marlin Model 120 twelve gauge shotgun and six boxes of ammunition. Two of the boxes were empty. The sportsman’s plug had been removed from the shotgun, allowing it to hold four of the three-inch Federal Super Magnum shells Hickle favored.

She turned the bag upside down. The bottom was encrusted with dark earth. He must have lugged it into some wooded area with the Marlin inside and used up two boxes of shells in shooting practice.

Most likely he’d purchased the rifle first, but he’d had trouble with his marksmanship. The scope and the laser sighting system had been an attempt to solve this problem. Later he’d realized that in the heat of battle he couldn’t depend on steady aim. He needed a gun that could simply be pointed in the direction of its target, a gun that would spray a wide scatter of shot shell pellets to cut down anything in its path. The Marlin had replaced the HK.

He had given the killing some thought. He had assessed his limitations, his inexperience, and had selected the weapon best suited to his needs.

“} don’t know about anybody else in the room,” Abby said, “but I’m getting nervous.”

She wondered if she ought to disable the guns, remove the firing pins or something. No, too risky.

Hickle practiced with the shotgun and perhaps with the rifle as well.

If either gun was tampered with, he would know it.

Standing on tiptoe, she scanned the shelf built into the top of the closet, where she found a large cardboard box. She took it down.

Inside was paper, a lot of paper. Newspaper and magazine articles, bundled together, many dating back years. Some were clippings;

others were printouts of material Hickle must have tracked down on the Internet or on microfilm. All the stories related to Kris Barwood.

She flipped through the articles, then paused on a copy of the birth certificate for Kristina Ingrid Andersen.

Hickle had gotten hold of that too.

At the bottom of the pile she came across a photocopy of a zoning map that showed the layout of Malibu Reserve. One house on the beach was circled in red. He must have obtained the map from the county assessor’s files, open to the public.

There was one other item in the box, a plastic carrying case with a Polaroid camera inside. Resting beside it was a stack of color photos bound with a rubber band.

They were Polaroids of Kris running on the beach.

“Not good,” Abby whispered.

“Not good at all.”

At two o’clock Kris arranged her hair, smoothed her clothes, and asked Steve Drury to bring out the Town Car for the trip to KPTI.

“We’re leaving early today.”

She found Howard in the game room, lining up a shot on the electronic putting green.

“Good run?” her husband asked without looking up.

“I didn’t go for a jog.”

“No?”

“Wasn’t in the mood. You know what that’s like, don’t you? Not being in the mood?”

This was the closest she had come to broaching the subject of their unconsummated liaison in the bedroom last night. She meant to wound him, but if she drew blood, he didn’t show it. He merely tightened his frown of concentration as he tapped the ball into the hole with an expert touch. Tinny, synthesized applause issued from a hidden speaker. The playing surface automatically recontoured itself to simulate a different hole—an uphill putt this time.