Mortal Faults

10

Abby liked making a dramatic exit, but that didn’t mean she actually had to leave. Sometimes it was smarter to hang around, especially when something interesting appeared to be on tap.

Sitting with Reynolds, she’d noticed his gaze move once too often to a spot across the room. On her way out she had glanced over, and what do you know, there was Kip Stenzel. Interesting that he would be here; more interesting that Reynolds evidently hadn’t wanted her to know it.

Curious, she waited outside the rendezvous court, studying a painting and watching Reynolds at his table in the reflection on the glass. Sure enough, he was joined almost immediately by Stenzel. The two of them remained deep in conversation for several minutes before Reynolds dismissed him.

Abby ducked out of the sight as Stenzel walked through the doorway. Following at a distance, she passed behind him while he spoke with a clerk at the desk. She picked up enough of their exchange to know that Stenzel was inquiring about a car rental.

Presumably Reynolds and his campaign manager had come to the Brayton together. Now Stenzel was going off on his own in a rented car. Reynolds must have other travel plans.

She couldn’t follow them both. The congressman interested her more. With any luck he had used the same Ford minivan he’d driven to the town hall meeting last night.

She took the elevator to the hotel’s underground garage and wandered among the parked vehicles until she found the van, easily identifiable by the two REELECT JACK REYNOLDS bumper stickers on its rump. From her purse she took out a roll of reflective tape and tore off a six-inch strip, which she attached to the bumper. In the dim light of the garage, the tape was invisible, but outside, in direct sunlight, it would throw off considerable glare. She would be able to stay well back and still see the telltale shine.

Reynolds had said he was going to lunch at noon. He ought to be through by one thirty or so. Then she would see where he went.

Tailing a client wasn’t exactly standard procedure. But then, Reynolds wasn’t her client anymore. In fact, inasmuch as he refused to reimburse her for her services, he had never really been her client at all.

“Should’ve paid me, Jack,” she whispered.

By two o’clock she was starting to wonder how long it took Reynolds to chow down. She’d been sitting in her Miata, parked across the street from the hotel garage, for more than an hour.

Finally the Ford came into view, heading up the exit ramp. She keyed the ignition. When the van breezed past, she followed. Reynolds headed onto the southbound Harbor Freeway, the 110.

The tail job was easy. Reynolds, unlike most of the people she had surveilled, wasn’t paranoid. He executed no evasive maneuvers. He signaled when changing lanes, only moderately exceeded the speed limit, and gave her plenty of warning when transferring from the 110 to the 10, and from the 10 to the 405.

He was headed back to Orange County, it appeared. Going to his office or his home. Stenzel might have had a more suspicious destination in mind. She was beginning to think she’d followed the wrong man.

Just past the Huntington Beach exit, Reynolds’ cell phone chirped.

“Yeah,” he said, cradling the phone between his head and shoulder.

“We got her.” Stenzel’s voice was excited, higher than usual.

“You sure?”

“She’s on the mailing list. She lives in San Fernando, fifty miles outside our district. And her paper trail only goes back eight years. What’s the protocol for me now?”

“Nothing. I’ll handle it from here. Just give me her address.”

“903 Keystone Drive.”

Reynolds nodded, committing the address to memory. “I’ll be a little late getting back to the office,” he said. “Need to see some people. Do I have anything on for this afternoon?”

“Your schedule’s open.”

“Keep it that way. And, Kip-you did a good job on this. Excellent work.”

“I aim to please.”

Reynolds nearly ended the call, then remembered a question he’d meant to ask. “What name is she using?”

“Andrea Lowry. Does that matter?”

“No.” Reynolds smiled. “No, it doesn’t matter at all.”

Abby was getting seriously bored by the time her quarry entered Orange County. But when the van left the freeway, heading into Santa Ana, she got interested all over again.

Reynolds, she remembered, had been raised in the Santa Ana barrios. Possibly he was indulging in a little nostalgia by venturing home again. She doubted it. He didn’t seem like the sentimental type.

On TV, Orange County existed as a place of endless beaches, posh malls, and glistening marinas. And all of those things were real enough, and had earned the shoreline its nickname, the Gold Coast. But TV always oversimplified, and the reality of the county was inevitably more complex. Inland, away from the yachts and beachfront condos, there lay a massively overdeveloped patchwork of freeways, urban centers, and suburban sprawl. Hillsides, once bare, now sprouted condos, and condos on top of condos, and still more condos on top of those. Newness was the driving force here.

The wealthier areas were adult playgrounds where everything was new, glistening, beautiful, and oddly sterile. They drew in prosperity and commerce. The older districts, left behind, became home to Orange County’s underclass, which was sizable and, like everything else in California, growing.

Santa Ana was one of the old sections. Its population was largely Hispanic. Here was where the bus lines brought the chambermaids who made beds in Newport Beach’s luxury hotels and the gardeners who trimmed bushes outside Irvine’s million-dollar homes. Santa Ana was crowded and noisy and unpolished, its crime rates were high, and it was not a place where a man like Jack Reynolds was likely to spend his leisure time.

Abby stayed two or three cars behind him, catching glimpses of the reflective tape through gaps in the traffic. The van turned down a side street. She continued straight, afraid to pull directly behind her quarry. Her red sports car would stand out, and even a driver who wasn’t looking for a tail might spot it.

At the next corner she turned, then paralleled Reynolds’ projected route for a few blocks before cutting over to the street he’d been traveling on. The van was nowhere in sight. It was possible she’d lost him, but there was an equal chance he’d parked somewhere along the way. She retraced the route and spotted the van in the parking lot of a motorcycle repair shop.

Reynolds wasn’t at the wheel. He must have gone inside.

She cruised past the shop, a dingy square structure with off-white stucco walls that had turned considerably more off-white with the passage of time. From inside came the whir of power drills and the sputtering cough of a faulty engine. A hand-painted banner over the door read HARLEY SPECALISTS. She wondered why someone would take the time to paint the sign by hand but wouldn’t check the spelling first. She also wondered what the hell Congressman Reynolds was doing in a cycle shop. Nothing on his Web site or in his office had indicated a passion for motorcycles, and she seriously doubted that he would drop by to shoot the bull with a bunch of mechanics on a Friday afternoon, even if they did happen to be his constituents.

The situation was becoming more complicated-and more troubling. She didn’t like the fact that Reynolds had come here so soon after their meeting, as if her refusal to cooperate on the case had led him to take some more drastic measure.

Such as? She didn’t know, but a fair number of bikers were known for their participation in criminal acts. Reynolds had been willing to tiptoe along the edge of the law by hiring her. Maybe now he’d been prompted to cross the line entirely.

Well, she could hardly walk into the bike shop and ask him about his plans-although her sudden appearance in that environment would boast a certain theatrical flair.

If she couldn’t talk to Reynolds, who could she talk to?

There was one obvious choice, and that was Andrea Lowry herself.

It was a good thing Reynolds wasn’t her client, because going behind a client’s back to get info on him from his own stalker was definitely not in her usual playbook. And of course Andrea might not tell her a thing. They hadn’t exactly hit it off last night.

The thing was, though, Andrea knew when she was being lied to. She must have been lied to a lot. But suppose someone were to try telling her the straight truth. No lies, no games, just simple honesty. Would she respond?

It was worth a shot, if for no other reason than it was the only shot Abby had left. She drove out of Santa Ana and headed north on the 405, which would take her back to L.A.