The Shadow Hunter (22 page)

“Anonymous female.”

“Any idea who?”

“Probably Barth’s housekeeper. That’s always been my theory, anyway.

She came into his house twice a week to pick up after him. I figure she stumbled across the stuff while she was cleaning and realized it was hot.”

“Why was it just a theory? Wouldn’t she talk to you?”

“I never found her. She must’ve amscrayed out of town after making the phone call. I’m guessing she was worried the charges against Barth wouldn’t stick, and he’d come after her. They stuck, though. He’s tucked away safe and sound.”

“Had she worked for him long?”

“The housekeeper? Just a month, I think.”

“What was her name?”

“Hell, I don’t know anymore. Wait a minute, it’s coming back to me.

You know, if my wife was here, she’d say an elephant never forgets.

That would be in reference to a few pounds I’ve put on over the years.”

“The name?” Wyatt prompted.

“Connie Hammond. Fairly common name, hard to track down. We didn’t bust our asses trying to find her.”

Wyatt nodded slowly.

“Connie Hammond.”

Cahill gave Wyatt a hard look.

“You wouldn’t happen to know Miss. Hammond’s whereabouts, would you. Vie?”

“Me? No.”

“Cause I’d still like to chat with her, just for the record.”

“Never met the lady.”

“Right. Sure you haven’t. You don’t know shit. And this whole conversation, dragging me out here on a Friday afternoon to this friggin’ mud hole—it’s all just an exercise in intellectual curiosity on your part.”

Wyatt met his gaze.

“Exactly, Sam. That’s what it is.”

They talked a little more, about fishing and Cahill’s wife and a homicide in the Valley that was taking up most of the detective’s time.

Then Cahill was on his way, and Wyatt was left alone, looking at the water.

The reservoir was a peaceful spot, a haven for joggers and power walkers and people who wanted someplace tranquil to visit on their lunch break. He came here fairly often to escape the grit and gridlock of the city, and to think. He had a lot to think about right now.

Abby had interviewed him about Emanuel Barth just a month before Barth went back to jail. Wyatt had always assumed it was no coincidence. At the time he’d thought that in the course of her research, she had uncovered some incriminating fact that she’d passed along to the police. He had never inquired about it. He hadn’t wanted to know too much.

Later, as she involved herself in other cases, he began to suspect that she was doing more than research.

Vaguely he’d imagined that she tailed a suspect or observed him from a distance. Surveillance work, maybe a few discreet payoffs to informers. Now he knew there was more to it than that.

A jogger chuffed past him, red-faced and sweaty.

Somewhere a bird lifted off the reservoir in a clatter of wings. Wyatt watched it fly away into the deep azure of the sky, and briefly he wished he could follow.

Cahill’s reading of the Barth case had made sense, with no more loose ends than any other criminal case in the real world. The housekeeper, Connie, had ratted on her employer and fled for her own safety.

It was logical but dead wrong. There never had been any Connie. There had been only Abby, whose DMV records, as Wyatt recalled, listed her middle name as Constance.

She had obtained work as Earth’s housekeeper, probably a day or two after talking with Wyatt. Twice a week she had shown up, dusting and vacuuming, perhaps searching a different corner of Earth’s house each time, until finally she had found the stolen items.

The 911 call had followed. And Connie Hammond, who had never existed, had disappeared.

Abby hadn’t merely studied Earth from a distance.

She’d made herself part of his life. And now she was doing the same thing with Raymond Hickle, a guy who had a penchant for becoming obsessed with beautiful women, a guy who might have tried to splash acid in Jill Dahlbeck’s face.

Wyatt wondered how often Abby had tried her skill at this kind of contest. It was amazing she was still alive. She must be damn good or damn lucky. Maybe both. Eut everyone made mistakes, and nobody’s luck held forever.

Wyatt let out a slow breath. So what was he going to do about her? He didn’t know. Maybe the best option was to walk away, leave her alone.

She had told him she didn’t want his help. I can take care of myself, she’d said.

Eut suppose she got in over her head. Would she admit it? Or would she plow onward, too stubborn and proud to back down?

He was pretty sure he knew the answer.

Abby woke in a bed that was not her own. She came alert instantly and knew where she was—Travis’s bedroom. And she knew it was late, well past noon, and that Travis had let her sleep when he left for work.

She looked at the clock on the nightstand. The time was 3:47. She’d slept nearly all day. She ought to have felt guilty about it, but she knew she had needed the downtime. A body could run on adrenaline for only so long.

Hunger had awakened her. It urged her out of bed now. She went into the kitchen and raided Travis’s fridge, finding a gourmet frozen pasta meal, which she microwaved and then ate out of the container while standing up. According to the package, the meal was only two hundred calories—not enough, but it would hold her.

When she was through, she returned to the bedroom, where she retrieved the spare house key Travis had left on the bureau. Then she took a long look at the TV that was really a safe. When Travis had punched in seven digits on the remote control, she’d been watching.

She knew the code.

Feeling vaguely disloyal, she picked up the remote and pressed the necessary buttons. The safe’s false front swung open. She looked inside. The CDS were arranged alphabetically. She flipped through them until she found the one she wanted. When she lifted it out, the disk flashed, catching the light. The label read

“SINCLAIR, ABIGAIL.”

She was not surprised. If Travis performed background checks on his clients’ friends and business partners, it made sense for him to take similar precautions with his own associates.

Of course, she was more than an associate, wasn’t she? She had been Travis’s lover for four years, his protegee, his confidante. Yet her life, or as much of it as could be gleaned from databases, had been stored on this electromagnetic disk and filed away for safekeeping here in the same bedroom where Travis had made love to her, not only today but many times.

Perhaps she should have been outraged. But she knew how this business worked. No one could be trusted fully. Everyone had to be checked out.

“Even the. people you’re sleeping with?” she wondered aloud, but she knew the answer to that.

Especially the people you’re sleeping with.

Those were the rules of the game. She had to accept them.

She replaced the CD and shut the safe, then left the house, wishing she could be naive enough to be angry.

Anger would have felt good right now.

The house in Culver City was located on an unappealing side street off Sawtelle Boulevard. Decrepit garden apartments were interspersed with bungalows in the old craftsman style, houses that once had been comfortable starter homes for young families. Back then, the lawns had been neatly tended, the paint touched up every year. Now cars stood on cement blocks in weedy driveways, and graffiti decorated the brick walls that had been raised as ineffectual barriers to crime. Barred windows were everywhere. Although it was late afternoon, no children played in the street, and no one walked here. The only visible life was a stray dog nosing through the litter that lined the curb.

“Looks like the people at Trendline made one hell of an investment,” Abby muttered as she parked down the street.

The address had come up on the computer screen when Travis reviewed the data with her. It had been visible long enough for her to commit it to memory.

She’d had a feeling she would be paying a visit to the property.

She got out of her car and approached the bungalow.

Unlike its neighbors, it was freshly painted, the lawn only slightly overgrown. A detached one-car garage lay at the end of a short driveway. She passed between the house and the garage into a small, unfenced backyard, pausing to look into the garage through a side window.

No car. Most likely, nobody home.

The rear door was screened from the sight lines of neighboring homes by the garage on one side and a large fig tree on the other. She could work on the lock without fear of being seen. Her complete set of locksmith tools was back at the apartment in Hollywood, but in her purse she carried a picklock and tension bar.

She inserted the pick in the keyhole and pressed the bar against the latch. In two minutes she had the door open.

No alarm went off.

“Hello?” she called into the emptiness.

She heard no response, no creak of floorboards, nothing to indicate another presence in the house.

Briskly she explored the place. It was a typical southern California bungalow—one-story floor plan, high ceilings, big windows. The living room had a fake fireplace. The kitchen was so tiny and ill-equipped that it would be more properly called a kitchenette.

There were two bedrooms, one bath.

In the medicine cabinet she found a few personal items: a man’s electric shaver, aftershave, and cologne, and a woman’s toiletries and lipstick. There were bath towels on the racks and more towels in a linen closet.

She checked out the bedroom closet, but only a couple of bathrobes hung there. The bed was comfortable, new, and of higher quality than the home’s other furnishings.

She poked around in a wastebasket and found a condom wrapper.

“At least he practices safe sex,” she muttered.

He. A safely ambiguous pronoun. She wanted to believe that Howard Barwood was the he in question, but so far nothing she’d found in the house could be tied to him.

Whoever made use of the bungalow evidently followed a simple routine. A romp in bed, then a quick shower to cool off. The place wasn’t used for any other purpose. There were no foodstuffs in the pantry or the fridge other than some chocolate candies, a half-eaten block of cheese, and an unopened wine bottle. There were no books or magazines anywhere, no evidence of mail delivery to this address. Most likely the utility bills went directly to Trendline Investments and were paid out of the Netherlands Antilles bank account.

Abby searched the drawers of all the bureaus and cabinets, hoping to find some of Howard Barwood’s stationery or a cell phone registered to Western Regional Resources. No such luck. Most of the drawers were empty. But in the nightstand beside the bed, she found a gun.

It was a Colt 1911 pistol, loaded with seven .45 caliber rounds. The pistol was an excellent firearm, sturdy and reliable, one of the few models that could be detail-stripped and reassembled without the use of tools, but the gun required care, which its present owner had neglected. It was in need of lubrication, and the extractor had lost some of its tension and should have been replaced. Abby frowned. She disliked the idea of a gun in the hands of an amateur, and a careless amateur at that. And if the amateur in question was Howard Barwood, and Howard was Hickle’s accomplice, she liked the idea even less.

She moved to the second bedroom, which had been made into a study. The room had few accouterments-a thirteen-inch TV on a cheap stand, a worn sofa and armchair, built-in shelves that were depressingly bare, and a telephone.

Not a cell phone like the one that had been used to call Hickle last night. Still, it might tell her something.

She lifted the handset and pressed redial. She counted four rings, and then the ringing stuttered as if the call had been transferred. A moment later a recorded female voice came on the line: “You’ve reached Amanda Gilbert’s voice mail Abby hung up. The name Amanda Gilbert meant nothing to her. She hadn’t seen it on any of the folder icons in the Barwood file. Possibly the man of the house had called Amanda at work, or Amanda herself had called to retrieve her messages. Either way, it was a fair assumption that Amanda’s duties here had little to do with business.

Before leaving the study, she wiped her fingerprints off the phone, a procedure she had followed with every other item she had touched. She checked the other rooms and returned, at last, to the master bedroom. It had occurred to her that she ought to take a closer look at the bathrobes in the closet.

Persistence paid off. One robe, as she saw when she examined it in good light, was monogrammed HB. Of course there were plenty of HBS in the world—Halle Berry and Humphrey Bogart came to mind. But she couldn’t see Halle Berry hanging out in this neighborhood, and Bogart was dead.

“Gotcha, Howard,” she whispered.

“You’ve been a naughty, naughty boy.”

She replaced the robe, then spent a little more time in the bedroom.

When she was done, she left the bungalow via the rear door. She drove around the block, parked across the street, rolled down the window, and slunk low in her seat, getting comfortable. She intended to wait awhile and see if Howard and Amanda showed up. Travis had said Howard went out nearly every evening to drive his new car. There was a good chance this address was his nightly destination.

There was no longer any serious doubt in her mind that Howard was the owner of the house, but the issue was too important to rest solely on a monogram. If Howard was indeed the HB in question, she would know three things with certainty: the house was still his, he was cheating on Kris, and he was the owner of the mysterious Trendline. And if Trendline could be tied to Western Regional Resources—well, she would have all her ducks neatly in a row.

She almost hoped it didn’t work out that way. Kris had been hurt badly enough already. It would be better for her if neither Trendline nor Amanda Gilbert had any connection with her husband. But Abby wasn’t betting on it. The world was not kind.

The production meeting for the six o’clock news broke up shortly after 5 p.m. Kris left in a rush, stuffing her yellow legal pad into her carrying case, and boarded the elevator with Amanda Gilbert. The two of them rode to ground level together.