Pursuit: A Novel

6

Varney made his reservations so that his flight to the West Coast left the next afternoon. He would land at night. There was no reason to wait even one extra day and give Prescott time to dream up some kind of trap. Varney could use the flying time to sleep and plan.

This, he had decided, must be a virtuoso performance. Its purpose was not practical but psychological. He had listened to Prescott’s laconic, skeptical tone, and it had given him a strong urge to wake Prescott up. Prescott had been overconfident, absolutely certain that he could assume Varney was no threat, although he knew nothing about him. It was time to teach Prescott something about Varney, to let him know that this time he had made a fatal miscalculation.

Varney rented a car at the airport, then drove north past the center of the city into the San Fernando Valley. He had to assume that Prescott would have called the L.A. police as soon as he had hung up, and that by now they were all on edge and preparing to be attacked. He was still in their jurisdiction but far from Prescott’s office, and he was willing to bet that the police here had taken the warning less seriously. All cops patrolling this late at night were tense, suspicious, on guard. They already seemed to have adrenaline trickling into their veins at a steady pace before anything happened, because they were never at ease. He had decided that the place to do his hunting was in the suburbs, where the people were richer and the cops weren’t treated like an occupying army. They would be calmer, and easier to approach.

He had decided that a good place to find what he wanted was a hospital, so he went to Valley Presbyterian because it was the biggest one he knew of in the area. He parked his car a few blocks away on a quiet residential street and walked back. He walked the circuit of the hospital to study the entrances, exits, and parking lots carefully. Then he extended his walk around once more to stop near the emergency room. He found a concrete bench in a little niche that people seemed to use as a smoking area, sat down, and watched.

He had sat for only a half hour in the dark before he saw what he had been waiting for. The police car came up the driveway toward the emergency-room entrance quickly, but without flashing lights. There were two cops in the front seat, the smaller one behind the wheel. The car coasted smoothly up to the curb in front of the emergency-room entrance and stopped. Both front doors swung open, and the cops got out.

The one on the far side of the car was a big man who immediately opened the back door on his side, leaned in, and pulled out a thin passenger who seemed to think there was still a roof over his head. Even after he had taken two unsteady steps away from the car he was still bent over, as though he didn’t want to bump his head. The cop said something to his partner and ushered his charge toward the double doors. The person was not handcuffed, but seemed not to be entirely free, either. He straightened and became recognizable as a teenaged boy in a T-shirt that had been stretched out of shape, and he had a trickle of blood running from his hairline down the side of his temple to his neck. He had to be a victim, Varney decided: a loser.

The shorter cop had come around the front of the car to help but had found nothing to do, and now returned and approached the open door on the driver’s side. Varney could see that this one was a woman. Her dark hair was tied back in a tight bun, and the body armor under her shirt made her look rectangular. The heavy, blunt-toed black shoes she wore seemed calculated to make her walk like a man. She got into the car quickly, restarted the engine, and drove it around the building to a reserved space by the wall at the edge of the driveway.

Varney was up and moving into the darkness along the wall as soon as she started the car. He reached the spot he wanted while the car was still moving, then crouched and froze. He was twenty feet from the driver’s door, behind a large electrical-circuit box in the shrubbery by the wall. He listened for her footsteps as she hurried along the driveway by the dark wall to join her partner in the emergency room. She came along quickly, almost trotting, and he knew from the sound that he had chosen the right place to hunt. She was busy, her brain was fully occupied, and she was not feeling any sense that she could be threatened. She hurried past his hiding place, but he didn’t move until she was two paces beyond him and her peripheral vision would not help her.

He sprang. His right hand delivered a blow to the side of her head to stun her, then moved smoothly to her wrist so she could not reach the big, blocky grip of the pistol in its holster. His left forearm was around her throat. He crushed the trachea and let his weight drag her down, then quickly broke her neck. He pulled her pistol out and stuck it into his belt at the back, then lifted her body and propped it in the driver’s seat of the car with the feet out on the ground and the steering wheel holding her up as though she were sitting there listening to the police radio. He searched the leather cases on her belt for useful tools. He found a set of handcuffs and a short, broad-bladed knife for cutting seat belts to remove accident victims from cars.

He went back to his hiding place and waited. It was a pleasant surprise to him that the male police officer was coming out of the hospital alone. Either the victim they had brought was being admitted or the cop was wondering what had become of his partner and had left him for a moment. The cop called, “Marianne!” but he didn’t seem alarmed when she didn’t answer him or move. Instead, he quickened his pace toward her, and gave Varney a chance to take him.

The cop did not hear Varney, but he seemed to have a sudden suspicion that made him spin to look around him. Varney was already in the air, and the knife was in his right hand. Varney knew better than to try to cut through the Kevlar vest, so he slashed at the throat above it. The cop looked surprised, then lowered his head and saw that his blood was spurting into his hands. Varney went low and kicked to sweep his legs out from under him, then plucked out his sidearm and tossed it out of reach. He stood beside the body and waited until the cop had lost consciousness.

When Varney was sure the cop was dead, he considered slipping off into the darkness to his rental car. But things were going so well that he decided to take a risk. He took the man’s wrists, dragged him to the side of the police car, opened the rear door, and backed in, then hauled the body in after him. He climbed out the other side and stepped to the front. He pushed the female to the passenger side, strapped her upright with the seat belt, took her place behind the wheel, and started the car. He knew he probably had little time to do what he wanted, but he judged it would be worth the effort.

Two hours later, the telephone in Millikan’s living room rang. It was very late, but he had not been to bed. He picked up the receiver on the first ring. “Yes?” he said.

Prescott’s voice came on. “He did it.”

“How? When?”

“Not long ago. He just called me.”

“Do you believe him? There’s nothing stopping him from lying.”

Prescott’s voice was tired, but insistent. “I recorded it. Listen.”

Millikan could hear a hissing sound, then, “Prescott. In the morning they’re going to find the bodies of Marianne Fulco, badge number 4852, and Jonathan Alkins, badge number 3943. You should get a kick out of them.”

Millikan heard Prescott’s voice come on again. “Thanks for trying to warn them, Danny.”

Millikan said quietly, “I’d better let them know.”

Millikan got out of his car and walked slowly and cautiously toward the row of police cars and emergency vehicles parked along the side of the road. There were more than usual for a murder scene, but he had expected that. When a police officer was murdered, there was always anger and sadness at the death of a colleague, but there was also a public-safety concern.

People who did this were something special. They were attacking someone they knew would be heavily armed and well trained and who could get reinforcements almost instantly by pressing a radio button and asking for them. But most alarming, they were killing a person they almost certainly had never seen before. What they hated had to be the uniform. And that made several thousand other people potential victims.

Millikan moved toward one of the cars near the center of the line and a cop came around it, walking briskly toward him with his hand up, palm outward, as though to stop him. But now they were both illuminated by a set of headlights. “Millikan,” he said, and lowered his arm.

“Hi, Pete,” said Millikan, and stepped closer. “Did they tell you I was coming?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t recognize you at first.” He shook Millikan’s hand. “I thought you might be the first of the reporters.” They began to walk toward the park together. Carrera was much taller than Millikan, and he had always made the most of his height, carrying himself with his spine straight. Now he glanced down at Millikan, just moving his eyes and not his head. “It’s good to see you, Danny.”

“I’m sorry it has to be like this,” said Millikan. “How’s Denise?” He brought back a memory of children. “And the kids?”

“Not bad. We split up a few years ago, but I still see the kids. I’ll tell Denise you asked about her. And how’s your family?”

Millikan could tell that Carrera was as embarrassed as he was. They had seen each other every day for years, but after all this time, neither could remember the names of the other’s children. “We’re fine,” said Millikan.

Carrera said, “They say you knew this was going to happen: predicted it.”

“Not me,” said Millikan. “Roy Prescott. He got a threat from this guy. I decided I should be the one to call it in.”

Carrera nodded slightly, but the name Prescott seemed to puzzle him. “Makes sense. I’ll show you what we’ve got.”

As they approached, two other cops turned their heads and made moves as though to challenge them.

“It’s all right,” Carrera said softly. “It’s Lieutenant Carrera.”

Millikan said quietly, so only Carrera could hear, “Why is everybody so jumpy? Trying to keep something back from the reporters to sort out false confessions?”

“You’ll see.”

Millikan came down the hillside to the picnic area of the park. The police car was stopped among the wooden picnic tables. There were several people from the forensics team stepping gingerly around the car, shining lights on every inch of ground, and others taking pictures or brushing surfaces for fingerprints. Millikan came closer.

When Millikan started around the car, the nearest forensics officer, a woman named Dale Chernoff, spun her head toward him with an expression that was almost angry.

“Hello, Dale,” he murmured.

She nodded and gave him a small, sad smile as she returned to her work. He stepped past her, saw the picnic table, looked down at the ground beside it, and winced. It was all clear to him now. The two bodies had been posed.

The killer had placed the two of them on the ground beside the table. He had yanked the male officer’s pants down to his ankles. He had done the same to the female officer, but had removed her shoe from her left foot so he could get the trouser leg all the way off on that side and fit the male officer between her legs.

The cops were working in full force on the crime-scene preliminaries because they really wanted this killer. But they were working fast too, out of an almost instinctive compulsion to protect the bodies from the gaze of outsiders. The police wanted them in body bags before the reporters came.

“Dale, can I go in beside them yet?”

“Yeah,” she answered. “We’re done there.”

Carrera stepped closer, at his shoulder. Millikan glanced into the car and said, “They were killed somewhere else. The bodies were driven here and dumped. Where did it happen?”

“Outside Valley Pres. They had just dropped off a kid that had been hurt in a fight at a party.”

“Any prints?”

Carrera shook his head. “The best hope was Marianne’s shoe. That’s the female—Officer Marianne Fulco. She had them all spit-shined like a marine. And this character pulled off one of them to get her pants off. If there was going to be a print, the heel of that shoe was probably where it would have been. He was wearing gloves.”

“He brought gloves?”

Carrera shook his head. “They had just brought in this kid who was bleeding. They put on disposable rubber gloves, and the box was still on the car seat.”

“He’s good at using what he finds.” Millikan knelt beside the bodies. “Whose blood is that?”

“The male. Officer Jonathan Alkins. He had his throat slashed. Looks like the guy used Officer Fulco’s knife. It’s on the floor in the back seat.”

“I think I see this,” said Millikan. “He must have waited in the dark until the two of them were separated somehow. One of them must have been in the car or near it, probably listening for calls. That would be Fulco.”

Carrera raised an eyebrow, but he didn’t ask how Millikan knew.

Millikan said, “If he used her knife on Alkins, he had to get her first.” Millikan lowered his head nearly to the grass to look at the woman’s face. The eyes were open, the mouth gaping.

“See her neck?” asked Carrera.

“I’ll bet it’s broken,” said Millikan. “He did that in Louisville, too: a quick twist to the head from behind.” Millikan looked down toward the feet at the crumpled pants, and his eyes passed along her belt. “He took their sidearms?”

“Right. He tossed Alkins’s in the bushes by the hospital, but he kept hers, and a couple of ammo clips.”

“I wonder why he didn’t take both?”

“I wonder why he did any of this,” said Carrera. “He didn’t do this to get guns. You say he’s from out of town, so it can’t be retaliation. And leaving the two of them like this . . . it’s just sick, mean stuff.”

Millikan looked back at the bodies one last time. “He was trying to show that he could kill just about anybody, just for the hell of it, anytime he wants.”

“Who is he trying to scare—you?”

Millikan shook his head. “Not me. I was convinced by what I saw in Louisville. But Roy Prescott has been hired to look for him, and he was trying to rattle him.”

Carrera’s head spun to the side to stare at Millikan. “Roy Prescott? What a waste. Prescott. Shit.”

Millikan stepped away and began to examine the car. The interior was blotched with fingerprint powder, and the bloodstains were still clearly visible. They confirmed the details of the story he had already constructed, but he could tell that he was not going to learn any more until Dale Chernoff’s report had been completed. He studied the ground and walked up the gentle slope to examine the angle of the indentations left by the car tires when it had pulled off the road. Then he walked up the shoulder of the road a hundred yards, trotted to the other side, and tried to determine what had made the killer choose this spot. Did he know L.A. well, or had he seen one of the signs at the entrance to the park and assumed that any park was adequate for his purpose? Millikan decided it could have been the signs. The raised roadbed let the killer see that there were no lights, no cars in the park.

Millikan stood still and watched the line of officers with flashlights walking along, staring at the ground and searching for the killer’s footprints. They wanted him so badly, and they knew nothing about him. They would probably never know enough. The thought reminded him of why he was here. He had to go somewhere to call Prescott and tell him what he had just seen. After that, he was through.

Prescott sat in the dimly lighted lobby of the office building and waited. It was situated directly across Wilshire Boulevard from his own building. It did not enter his mind that the killer might not show up. He had killed the two cops, and Prescott was next. The only question to be settled was whether this was the right time. This one had a lot of braggadocio, but he was not about to do anything crude. He was not like any of the others Prescott had known. It was important to plenty of them that they be smarter than anybody else, and being smarter required that they act carefully in situations like this, when their professional competence was in question. But this one was simply better at it.

Prescott knew the general tenor of what this one was thinking. But he could not yet know the details, and the details were what got a man killed. Prescott had managed to insinuate himself into this one’s brain, and get him to focus. That was a necessary step, but it had brought on the rest of the job more quickly than Prescott would have liked. It was like setting a fire at the entrance to a cave: there was no question that what was in there would be out shortly, but whatever it was, it would be moving fast and looking for the guy holding a match. This one had fooled him. Instead of coming for Prescott, he had stopped to kill two innocent people. Now Prescott could only wait and hope that he would be faster, or stronger, or maybe just luckier.

He watched the lighted lobby of his building, where the two security guards sat behind the big counter. There was a console above them with twelve little television screens that showed nothing much this time of night but empty hallways and the locked main entrances of the building. Prescott had to admire the two men. Since he had been here, they had both looked at the screens pretty regularly, in spite of the near certainty that there would be nothing more on the screens than there had been every time before: right angles and bare surfaces.

A lot of buildings around here had security guards with fancy uniforms and no sidearms. To Prescott, that defied logic. Anything that could be handled by an unarmed man wearing a uniform was not something that Prescott had much concern about. When he had been looking for an office to rent, he had paid special attention to the security guards. As soon as he had verified that at the building across the street they all carried sidearms, he had been able to proceed to their mental equipment. Rent-a-cop companies had a bad record as judges of character. They ran a quick check to see if the job candidate had any felony convictions under the name he happened to be using on his application, then hoped for the best. Most of the best-known serial killers of the past thirty years had, at one time or another, been security guards.

Before he had signed the lease, Prescott had taken the time to stop in at different times over a week to chat with whatever men were on duty, to be sure there were no symptoms of craziness or ineptitude. His excuse had been that he wanted to introduce himself and be sure they all recognized his face. There was some truth to it: the instant of some emergency wasn’t the moment when Prescott wanted a scared man with a gun to have to choose between him and an intruder.

He stared across the street at the lighted lobby again, then looked up and down the sidewalks and at the cars going by. He was hoping to spot this shooter on his first scouting visit, before the game had even started. He wanted to see him when he was still sitting in a car outside and counting floors and windows, or walking in a leisurely way down the sidewalk, gazing up at the sides of the building to search for ventilator grilles that a fat fifty-year-old architect would not have considered accessible but might serve as an entrance to a man in his late twenties who killed people for a living.

The thought reminded Prescott again of his summers working as an exterminator. He had learned to look at buildings the way a rat would look at them—with a mind that was without preconceptions concerning the purpose or suitability of openings, free of awareness of what they were designed for—merely gauging their sizes and shapes against the capabilities of his body to climb or squeeze or flatten itself. This killer would be like that. He was accustomed to using whatever he found. But before he committed himself this time, he would take a long, hard look, and Prescott would know him.

Prescott could only guess what he might look like, because Prescott had lied about the surveillance videotape in the store in Louisville. When the killer had stopped in front of the steel grate to open the padlock and chain, the camera had caught nothing useful. Prescott had counted on making the killer hate and fear him enough to keep him from remembering clearly some things he had seen and done, so that he would not to be able to disprove Prescott’s assertion.

The killer had stepped to the center of the grate to steal the padlock, but the center was directly in front of the door. The camera mounted inside the building had been aimed at the door, so that if an intruder opened the door and entered, it would catch him full on. But the store had been closed, and the big CLOSED sign had been hanging over the glass upper half, blocking the view. All Prescott had seen was a blurred, shadowy shape drift from the right side of the alcove to the sign, then pause for a couple of seconds to unlock the padlock, take it with its chain off the grate, open the grate, and grab the CLOSED sign as he slid off to the right again.

Prescott caught movement in the corner of his eye. In the lobby of the building, one of the security guards was up and walking. He went to the elevator. The other guard, a younger man, kept fiddling with something at the console in front of him, staring closely, but he said something that made the older one stop, look back, then change his course. The older man called something to the younger man, waved his arm, and then moved quickly to the staircase. The younger man stood up and hurried toward the rear of the building, out of Prescott’s sight.

Across the street, Prescott was already through the glass doors and hurrying out onto the sidewalk. His eyes first moved up and down the street—what had he missed?—then up at the windows of his own building. There was nothing obvious enough to see from here. He waited for a car to pass, then trotted to the center line before the next one arrived, and waited for three cars to race by in the other direction before he dashed the rest of the way across. He had his key in his hand when he reached the big glass door in the center. He turned the key, punched his entry code into the panel beside the door, heard the buzz, and jerked the door open to slip inside. He listened for footsteps from beyond the elevators, but he heard none. The younger guard must have been heading for the other set of stairs at the rear of the building.

Either an alarm had been tripped somewhere in the building or they had seen something in one of the television screens on their console. He stepped around the desk to see: the screens were all black. Prescott looked at the three rows of alarm indicators: all were glowing a steady green.

He wondered for a moment whether his punching the keypad and coming in had reset the system and made a break indication go away, but he dismissed the idea. They must have seen something on one of the television screens before they had all gone out, or they would not have known where to go. He was pretty sure he knew what they had seen.

Prescott stepped to the elevator, but stopped himself without pushing the button. If he rode up that way, then when he reached the ninth floor, the indicator light above the ninth-floor doors would go on, the bell would sound, and somebody—either a scared guard or a killer—would be standing in front of them when they opened. At least if Prescott went up the stairs, he would not be the one making the most noise. He slipped into the rear staircase and started upward.

He climbed the stairs as quietly as he could, rushing up a flight and then crouching at the inner rail at the top of the flight to look and listen. The younger security guard must have left the stairwell already, because there was no noise coming from above. Prescott was particularly worried about him. The older guard was one he had seen a number of times, one of the men he had talked to before he had leased an office here. His name was Chet or something like that. No, Cal. The younger guard was one Prescott had never spoken to, and he might very well take a look at Prescott and assume he was the problem. Prescott stopped at each floor, cautiously opened the door to the hallway a crack, and listened. On the fifth and sixth floors, he heard nothing. On the seventh, he put his hand on the grip of his pistol. He wanted it where he could reach it, but he didn’t want to have one of the guards see him in profile holding a gun, and pop him.

While he was climbing, he revised a few theories. The killer must have wanted, as he had expected, to get into Prescott’s office. But everything else was wrong. Prescott had expected him to case the building tonight, not make an attempt on it. Somehow or other, this killer had skipped a couple of steps. He was already past the alarm system and inside the building. He had somehow disabled the electronic surveillance system. The only mistake he seemed to have made was to assume he could do that without having the guards notice it and come after him.

It was disconcerting to be wrong about so much, but Prescott was still certain that the killer would be on the ninth floor trying to get into his office.

Prescott moved to the stairwell door on the eighth floor, opened it a crack, and listened. He heard nothing, so he slowly, carefully pushed it open another six inches. There was still no sound. He slipped out and eased the door shut behind him. The best way to do this was to let the complete emptiness and silence of the building magnify and sharpen his senses. He needed to know precisely where the three men in the building were. He moved close to the elevator door, put his ear to it, and listened. There was no hum. He moved to the front stairwell, the one he had seen the older guard, Cal, enter. He put his ear to the door and listened, then opened it a crack and saw the shoes.

The body was lying face-down on the landing above him, and the feet protruded over the highest step. Prescott climbed higher, and knelt to reach for the carotid artery to feel for a pulse, but withdrew his hand without touching it. The head had been wrenched to the side and the neck broken. The gun was still in its holster.

Prescott stepped over the body and out of the stairwell onto the ninth floor. He moved to the first turn of the hall, then kept going past the corner into the center, staring at the hallway along the barrel of his gun. There was nobody in sight. He waited, listening for footsteps, then carefully made his way toward his office. Each of the possibilities suggested itself to him: the killer had planned to wait inside the office until Prescott showed up in the morning, but the security guards had made it impractical; the killer wanted to booby-trap the office, so when Prescott opened the door he would be either perforated or fricasseed. Prescott hoped that was what it would be, because that took time, and the killer would be fully engaged for a few more minutes.

What worried Prescott most was the younger guard. Could this guy have killed them both already? No, the older guard had been killed silently. At that point the younger guard had still been alive: there was no reason for silence if there was nobody alive to hear. The second one, he would simply have shot. Prescott moved into the corridor where his office was. As he silently approached, he kept his eyes on the doorknob, watching to see it turn. He had never let the photographs of the bodies in the Louisville restaurant fade from his mind: all rapid, clean shots done without moving anything but the gun arm. If Prescott saw this character, he probably wasn’t going to get more than one shot unless the first one cut flesh.

He stepped to the door, moved to the side, set his left hand on the knob, and held the pistol in his right. He formed a clear, sharp image of the office in his mind, tracing the way every shape would look from here. Whatever did not perfectly conform to that picture had to be shot, a round placed in the middle of it instantly.

Prescott heard the elevator bell ring and he spun, then froze. He heard the elevator doors open. If the killer was in Prescott’s office, he must have heard it too. Prescott couldn’t let the young security guard stumble into the middle of this. Prescott held his gun in front of him and began to back away from his office. He heard the elevator doors slide shut. He backed to the turn in the hallway and looked. The indicator lights lit up as the elevator descended.

Prescott dashed to the stairwell and slipped inside. He bent over the body again, checking for the keys. The elevator would not work unless it was operated with a key. The older guard’s keys were still clipped to his belt. Prescott shoved his gun into his jacket pocket, grabbed both railings, and began to vault down the steps four and five at a time.

On the fifth floor, he paused and opened the door to look at the elevator. Above it, he could see the number two, just lighting up. He kept going, trying desperately to reach the lobby in time. When he arrived at the ground floor, he was winded, but he flung open the door, his gun ready. The elevator was open, the lobby deserted.

He ran to the telephone at the security console and dialed 911. As soon as he heard the click of the connection, he said, “My name is Roy Prescott, and I’m at 98503 Wilshire Boulevard. An armed killer has just murdered a man and left the building. He’s extremely dangerous, and he’s dressed as a security guard.” Prescott paused and then added, “Might as well send the bomb squad too. He’s the sort of person who may have left a little something.”