The Shadow hunter

25,1995).

He had committed himself to her. He had given his life to Kris Barwood.

For a long time he had sustained his hopes that somehow they would be together. Yes, of course she had a husband, Howard Barwood, whom she'd met at a Brentwood fund-raising event for cerebral palsy.

Howard Barwood, who had made more than twenty million dollars in Westside real estate by buying old houses on choice lots, tearing them down, and putting up mansions worth three times the original price. All these details had been revealed in an interview with Mr. Barwood in the April 1996 issue of Success magazine.

But Howard Barwood was not the man for her. He was merely an accident in her life. Hickle was her destiny.

She should have been able to see this. He had explained it often enough in letters and phone messages.

But she refused to be reasonable, refused to treat him with any courtesy or decency whatsoever. She had rebuffed him. She had been rude.

She-Wait.

Down the street came a long gray car. A Lincoln Town Car? Yes.

Kris's car.

It eased forward to the studio gate and stopped, engine idling.

Hickle lifted the gun. His finger fondled the trigger.

Could he kill her at this distance? He wasn't sure.

The spray of shot would fan out wide. It would certainly shatter the side windows, but he couldn't be sure of hitting her. She would take cover, and the driver would squeal into reverse and spirit her away…

The gate lifted. The car pulled through. Hickle watched it go.

He'd never had any intention of shooting her. Not here. When the time came, as soon it would, he would choose the right place for the ambush.

He would make no mistakes.

The Lincoln cruised to the far end of the parking lot, finding Kris Barwood's reserved space near the rear door of Studio A. Hickle reached into the duffel bag and produced a pair of binoculars. He watched the car through the lenses. The driver got out first. He opened the side door for Kris, who emerged into the sunlight, tall and blond. She was wearing a blue pantsuit, but he knew she would change into another outfit before airtime.

Then someone else climbed out of the sedan's rear compartment. A man.

Hickle focused on his face and identified him as Howard Barwood.

He had never seen Howard Barwood in person before.

On previous occasions Kris had not been accompanied by her husband when she went to work. Hickle was surprised the man was here today.

He studied Howard, a silver-haired, grinning, thick necked fool who had won a woman he could not possibly deserve.

Hickle felt a band of tension tighten across his chest.

Briefly his hand went to the shotgun again, but the distance was much too great, of course.

Anyway, Howard might have Kris now, but he would not have her for long.

Hickle contented himself with this thought as he watched the bodyguard lead the Barwoods toward the studio door. At the door Howard stopped to say something to Kris, then leaned forward, clasping her by the waist, and kissed her.

Kissed her.

"You fucker," Hickle whispered, his voice hoarse with outrage.

"Don't you do that. Don't you even touch her. Don't you dare."

The kiss lasted only a moment. Then the door opened, and the Barwoods went inside. The door swung shut behind them.

Hickle kept the binoculars fixed on the door for a long time. He was not seeing the door. He was not seeing anything at all except the memory of that kiss.

He had watched Kris on TV for months, taping her shows, playing back the tapes frame by frame and freezing on her varied expressions. He had collected images of her from magazines and newspapers. He had watched her jog on the beach and had caught glimpses of her in the windows of her home.

But he had never seen her with her husband. He had never seen him kiss her perfect mouth.

He lowered the binoculars. His hands were shaking.

It took him a moment to recognize that what he felt was rage.

Kris belonged to him, whether or not she would acknowledge the fact.

She was his, by destiny. She was his, not that other man's. That man had no right to hold her. Had no right to meet her lips with his…

Hickle shut his eyes, but it didn't help. Now he saw the two of them in bed together, Mr. and Mrs. Barwood, Kris naked and supine, Howard mounting her, the paired bodies shivering, Howard driving in deeper, rutting like an animal, and Kris liking it, liking what he did to her, asking for more-His eyes opened. He blinked at sunlight and blue sky.

All of a sudden he knew he had to get the hell out of here. And he knew where to go, what to do.

He started the car and drove away, avoiding the studio gate so the guard wouldn't catch sight of his car.

He hooked up with the Glendale Freeway and proceeded north to the Angeles National Forest. Near the town of La Canada Flintridge there was a secluded section of the woods, which he had discovered during an aimless drive last year. A brook whispered through a sunlit glade at the end of a dirt road.

He parked. When he got out of the car, he took the duffel with him.

He marched a hundred yards into the woods, set down the bag, and removed a pair of sound-insulating earmuffs, which he slipped over his ears, and the shotgun and two boxes of shells.

His first shot scared up a flurry of birds. After the second shot there was only stillness and the muffled echo of the shotgun's report.

The gun had a four-shell capacity. He emptied it and reloaded, then repeated the process. Deadfalls of timber and drifts of small stones were his targets. But really he had no targets. A shotgun was not a weapon to aim; it was a weapon to point. The wide spread of shot would wipe out anything in the direction of the blast.

What he sought was not accuracy but familiarity with the weapon. He needed a feel for its range, power, recoil. It must be part of him, an extension of his arm and shoulder. When the time came to use the gun for real, he would get only one opportunity, and he couldn't fail.

The Wilshire Royal was one of the more expensive JL buildings in Westwood, and Abby's mortgage payments were insanely high, especially given how little time she actually spent at home. But the place offered two features she prized: luxury and security.

Luxury was on display in the gushing fountain that ornamented the driveway, the gray marble expanse of the lobby floor, the excellent reproduction of Rodin's Eve facing the elevator bank. Security was less obvious.

The doorman who greeted her when she headed up the front walkway, toting her carry-on bag, didn't look like a guard, but under his red blazer the bulge of a shoulder holster could be detected by a practiced eye. The two uniformed men at the mahogany sign-in desk wore their sidearms in plain view, but the array of closed-circuit video screens they monitored was hidden below the desktop.

"Hey, Abby," one of them said.

She smiled.

"Vince, Gerry, how's it going?"

"Slow day. Have a nice trip?" They thought she was a sales rep for a software firm, on the road a lot.

"Productive." She asked if there was a Fedex Same- Day package for her, and they found it behind the counter. She tucked the box under her arm.

It was good to have the gun back. She always felt a little naked without it.

"Thanks, guys," she said with a smile and a wave.

"See you."

The elevator that carried her to the tenth floor was equipped with a hidden TV camera. The control panel was rigged to set off a silent alarm at the front desk if the elevator was intentionally stopped between floors.

There were cameras in the stairwells and in the underground garage, access to which was controlled by a pass card-operated steel gate. The gate, too, was monitored by a surveillance camera. All that was missing was a crocodile-infested moat. She might bring up the idea at the next meeting of the condo board.

She wasn't sure these precautions were necessary.

By LA standards Westwood was a safe neighborhood.

But she took enough chances in her work. She liked having a refuge to come home to.

Her apartment was number 1015. She opened the door and stepped into her living room, which took up half the floor space in her unit's thousand-square-foot plan. A faint mustiness hung in the air; the place had been closed up for a week. Otherwise, it was just as she'd left it.

She dropped her suitcase and the Fedex package onto the ottoman of an overstuffed armchair. The apartment's furnishings had been chosen primarily for comfort, with no concerns about consistency of style.

She liked a chair she could sink into, a sofa softer than a bed. Throw pillows and quilts were tossed here and there, along with the occasional stuffed polar bear and fake macaw, all contributing to a general impression of disorder. Her decorating skills were limited at best, but she had managed to find two paintings that pleased her. Both were prints purchased out of discount bins.

One was a late work by Joseph Turner, the landscape dissolving in a bath of light, and the other was one of Edward Hicks's many studies of "The Peaceable Kingdom," predator and prey as bedfellows. The Turner had a spiritual quality that touched a part of her she rarely accessed, and the Hicks, with its naive optimism, simply made her smile.

Briskly she opened the curtains and the glass door to the balcony, airing out the room. Her apartment faced Wilshire; she was high enough to be out of earshot of most traffic noise.

In the kitchen she drank two glasses of water. Flying always left her dehydrated. She found blueberries and peaches in the freezer, defrosted them in the microwave, and dumped them into the blender along with a dollop of vanilla yogurt and some skim milk two days past its expiration date. A few seconds of whirring reduced the blender's contents to a bluish, frothy sludge, which she poured into a tall glass and drank slowly, pausing to swallow assorted vitamin and mineral supplements.

Leaving the kitchen, she changed into a white terrycloth robe and ran the bathwater. Briefly she considered pouring bath oil into the tub, but ruled against this indulgence. She was about to strip off the robe when the intercom buzzed.

She answered it, irritated.

"Yes?"

"Mr. Stevens is here to see you," one of the lobby guards said.

"Okay, Vince. Send him up."

Stevens was the name Travis used when he stopped by. The guards weren't supposed to know that Abby had any connection to the security field, and Travis's name had been well publicized recently.

She waited, wondering why Travis had returned.

When the doorbell chimed, she opened the door, and he stepped inside without a word.

"Hey, Paul. Forget something?"

"Not exactly. I changed my mind."

"About what?"

"The urgency of my return to the office."

She smiled, relaxing and at the same time feeling a rush of pleasant tension.

"Did you?"

"What's that they say about all work and no play?"

He took a look around the apartment.

"Place looks the same as I remember it."

"Hasn't been that long since you were here," Abby said, then realized she was wrong. It had been weeks, and not only because she had been traveling. Even when she was in LA, she had seen less of Travis in the past few months-since the Devin Corbal case.

He circled toward the balcony.

"I see your view hasn't improved." Late last year an office tower had been erected across the street, coal-black and butt-ugly and, so far, unoccupied; some financial or legal screw up had interrupted construction during the finishing stages.

"I'm used to it," Abby said, "though I have to admit, it doesn't do a lot for the neighborhood. All that vacant office space…"

She stopped. Both of them were silent for a moment, and she knew Travis was thinking of the empty offices in the TPS suite. She wanted to kick herself.

But when Travis turned away' from the balcony, he was smiling.

"Do I hear water running?"

"I'm drawing a bath."

"Sounds intriguing."

"I don't think there's room for two."

"Have you ever tested that hypothesis?"

"Actually, no."

"You should. Why don't you see if the water's gotten hot?"

"Why don't I?"

She left him in the living room and retreated down the hall to check the tub. It was half-full and the perfect temperature. The air in the bathroom was sensuously humid, thick with steam. Bath oil didn't seem like a bad idea anymore. When she added it to the water, a lather of white bubbles sprang up, reflecting the overhead light in a bevy of rainbows. She took off the robe, hung it on the back of the door, and lowered herself into the tub. The space was cramped, and she thought pessimistically that she'd been right: there wasn't room for two.

Then he came in. He had left his clothes outside, and she saw him through the steamy haze. He bent over the tub and kissed her, and she felt a small disturbance in the water as he slid his hand into the bath to caress her breast. It was a slow circular caress-the light touch of his fingers, the firmer pressure of his palm-and then with his other hand he was stroking her hair, her neck, the lingering tension in her shoulders.

"I still think you won't fit," she said mischievously.

"We'll see."

Travis reached behind her and turned off the tap, then stroked the lean, toned muscles of her back. The bathwater, leavened with oil, was smooth, supple, some exotic new liquid, not ordinary water at all.

"I've missed you," Travis said.

She was briefly surprised. He was never sentimental.

"I…" Why was this so hard for her to say?