The Protector

11

Near the entrance to Prescott's street, Cavanaugh stopped again, got out of the car, and stayed well to the side as he approached the turnoff. Now that his eyes were practiced, he took only five minutes to find the miniature TV camera, its lens about the size of a flashlight's, attached by a metal strap to the crook of a branch in a Monterey pine about thirty feet in from the entrance. The strap was painted the brown of the trunk. The camera was the same type that Prescott had said he'd hidden in the parking garage to watch for anybody who might be following him. "The Internet's crammed with advertising for them," he'd said. "Check up on your baby-sitter. See your neighbor's teenaged daughter sunbathing."

Or watch the police stake out your house and try to catch you by surprise, Cavanaugh thought. Last night, Prescott saw every move we made from when we drove into the Highlands to when Rutherford set up the roadblock here to when the SWAT team snuck up on the house. Cavanaugh recalled how the lights in Prescott's house had gone off a few seconds after the SWAT team had started to approach it. Sure, he thought. Prescott hoped that a brightly lit house would be a deterrent and buy him some time, but when he saw the police move toward it, he proceeded to stage two, shut the lights off, set the motion detectors for the strobes and the siren, then filled the house with the hormone.

Staying out of the camera's sight, Cavanaugh returned to the car. When he drove onto Prescott's street, he peered toward the end of the block and for the first time got a clear look at Prescott's house, which was low, modernistic in design, and made from flat sections of stone set on top of one another. Flanked by shrubs, a curved driveway led up to the front entrance. The door to the double-car garage was open. Yellow tape with police crime scene do not cross on it went from tree to tree, encircling the property. Other things caught Cavanaugh's interest. On the right, a large truck had a platform raised next to the utility pole, two workmen replacing the electrical transformer Cavanaugh had shot the night before. In the driveway, a bearded man in coveralls was removing sheets of plywood from a pickup truck. Half of the broken windows in front of the house had already been covered with the wood. To the left, parked along the street, pointing in Cavanaugh's direction, were two police cars and an unmarked car that Cavanaugh recognized as the dark sedan belonging to Rutherford and some of his fellow agents.

Cavanaugh made a U-turn in front of the house, doing it slowly, taking the opportunity to study the corners under the house's eaves without seeming to. Small boxes with peepholes might have been birdhouses, or they might have been receptacles for miniature TV cameras hidden under the eaves.

After parking in front of the police cars and walking toward the house, he saw Rutherford come out and study him wearily.

"Is your wife's condition any better?" Although Rutherford had changed his suit and shaved, he looked haggard. The lingering bruises on his face made his black skin seem pale.

"She's still unconscious." Cavanaugh made himself continue. "But the surgeon says her life signs are better than he expected. We're more hopeful."

"Good." Rutherford sounded genuinely relieved, despite the betrayed tone in what he said next. "Incidentally, I just found out her name's Jamie, not Jennifer."

"I'm sorry."

"Of course."

"I figured if I kept her real name a secret, in the long run she wouldn't be involved," Cavanaugh said.

"But she got involved anyway, didn't she?"

"Yes," Cavanaugh said, "she got involved."

"Why are you here?"

"There's nothing I can do at the hospital. The waiting…" Unable to finish the sentence, Cavanaugh looked around. "I hoped you could use my help."

"I don't see how. Prescott's long gone. Either he had a vehicle hidden in the area or he managed to steal one," Rutherford said. "We've got an alert out to every community north and south of here. Highway Patrol. Airports. Marinas. Train depots. Bus stations. Name it. We've staked out the car he left at the scenic lookout in Pacific Grove when he made contact with you. We're also watching the van he told you he kept in the parking garage where he stored the Porsche."

As the repairman nailed a plywood sheet to another broken window, Cavanaugh nodded toward the open front door. "Is the lab crew finished?"

"They didn't find anything useful. We confiscated Prescott's computer and all the documents he had. Maybe they'll point us in his direction."

Entering, Cavanaugh heard voices from various rooms to the right and left, FBI agents and detectives presumably making a final inspection of the house. In daylight, the building's sprawl was dramatic. Its expensive modernistic furniture matched its architecture, although bullet holes had destroyed most of the chairs, sofas, tables, and lamps. The walls and framed black-and-white photographs of the Carmel region had been similarly destroyed. Broken glass lay everywhere. Through the shattered rear windows, an ocean breeze dispelled any lingering odor from the bloodstains amid the chalk outlines on the hardwood floor.

Cavanaugh stared at the strobe lights mounted in a corner. Their variously colored compact bulbs had been discreetly arranged to look like an abstract artwork and wouldn't have attracted suspicion if seen through a window.

"Is the casualty count still the same?" he asked. "Five dead. Five critically wounded. In stable condition. It looks like they're going to pull through." "Something to be thankful about."

Cavanaugh crossed the living room, heading toward the French doors, then ducked under more yellow crime-scene tape and stepped out onto a flagstone terrace that had shrubs and flowers in pots. Preoccupied, he peered over the waist-high stone wall toward where a forty-foot cliff dropped sharply to the crashing surf. Spray rose toward him.

"We have boats searching for a body in the water, in case Prescott was crazy enough to have tried climbing down there," Rutherford said.

"It's worth checking."

Doing his best to seem casual, Cavanaugh turned from the cliff and glimpsed two more birdhouses mounted under the eaves, one to the extreme right, one to the extreme left. They were angled toward the opposite corners. If miniature TV cameras were in them, as Cavanaugh was certain, their position would have allowed Prescott to see anyone coming around either side of the house.

When Cavanaugh reentered the house, the repairman hammered another sheet of plywood over a broken window. Four detectives headed out the front door. Two FBI agents waited for Rutherford.

"We'll stay and lock up after the electricity's back on and the windows are sealed," Rutherford said.

Cavanaugh nodded.

He checked the office, the bedrooms, and the bathrooms. He went into the garage and inspected the laundry room and the photo-developing room.

All the while, Rutherford followed him.

After Cavanaugh returned to the front of the house and studied it some more, he finally shook his head from side to side.

"See, I told you," Rutherford said.

"At least you can't blame me for trying."

"Right. This is one time I can't blame you."

"I should have stayed at the hospital."