The Shadow hunter

"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.

"Another day, another nightmare," Amanda observed.

Kris smiled.

"At least no more pint-size pachyderms came into the world at the last minute."

"Still a madhouse. Looks like we won't have time for that heart-to-heart we talked about."

Kris was surprised Amanda even remembered their conversation.

Surprised-and touched. She had never imagined Amanda as the type to worry about feelings and personal crises.

"Maybe after the show," Kris offered, just to have something to say.

Amanda shook her head.

"No can do. I've got a… an engagement."

"A date? Is that what you started to say?"

Amanda looked away, embarrassed. This was Kris's second surprise. She had never imagined that Amanda could be capable of embarrassment on any topic.

"You do have a date, don't you? You, the workaholic?"

Kris gave her a playful punch on the arm.

"Who is he?"

"I'd rather not talk about it."

"You'll talk. This is big stuff. I want to hear all the details."

The elevator doors opened. Amanda got out first, in a hurry to leave.

"Can't oblige you now. I've got a show to get on the air."

"Tomorrow, then." Kris stopped her at the door to the newsroom.

"You tell me the secrets of your love life, and I'll tell you mine, okay?" She shrugged.

"Who knows, maybe we have more in common than we know."

Amanda pushed open the door.

"Stranger things have happened."

"Is it a deal?"

"Sure. Deal. Now I've gotta run." She vanished through the doorway.

Kris headed down the hall to her office, smiling. Her marriage was falling apart, but her executive producer had found.a boyfriend. Maybe there was a cosmic balance to the universe, as her New Age friends said.

Her office was a large sun-streaked room cluttered with award certificates and statuettes, mementos from other stations where she'd worked, and framed snapshots of herself and Howard in happier times.

Ellen, her personal assistant, was typing at her desktop computer.

She glanced up when Kris entered.

"Hey, boss lady"

"Hey. Stopped by to pick up my outfit."

"Linda dropped it off an hour ago." Ellen nodded toward the door to Kris's dressing room, adjacent to the office.

"It's a new one, very snazzy."

Kris found her outfit hanging in the closet. It was a periwinkle blue suit with a cream-colored blouse, a good choice. That particular shade of blue always looked good on camera. Having been in the business for years, Kris knew what worked and what didn't.

Solid colors were good; patterns, especially small, complicated patterns, were bad. Off-white tones were good; solid whites were bad.

She changed into the suit, checked herself out in the full-length mirror, and decided she looked quite elegant except for her flat-soled sneakers. Since she was always behind a desk while on the air, no viewer would ever see her footwear.

To complement her outfit, she selected a pair of earrings and a pearl necklace-costume baubles, large and ridiculously ostentatious. Small items of jewelry were distracting on camera; outsized items photographed better. With the jewelry stowed in a plastic bag for later use, she headed out of the office, then paused in the doorway.

"How many calls?" she asked.

"Got a stack of message slips, but nothing urgent-"

"No, I mean voice mails… from him."

"Oh. Actually, none."

"No calls?"

"Not today." Ellen shrugged.

"Maybe he's losing interest."

"I should live so long."

Kris proceeded to the makeup room down the hall.

It was strange that Hickle hadn't called. Ordinarily by this time of day he would have left a couple of messages on her voice mail and one or two others with the switchboard. She should have been relieved by his silence.

Instead she found it unsettling.

Julia, her makeup artist, and Edward, her hair stylist, were waiting by the barber's chair with impatient expressions. Edward went first. On Mondays he gave her a complete styling. For the rest of the week, a touch-up was all that was required. He did the job quickly, trimming and fluffing and spraying.

"Done," he pronounced.

"Though, you know, with a shorter'do-"

"I'm not cutting my hair short."

"All I'm pointing out, Kris dear, is that after a certain age, long hair becomes unfashionable."

"I haven't reached that age." She picked up his scissors and clicked them menacingly.

"Tell me that I have, and I'll cut you shorter-and I don't mean your hair."

Edward quailed.

"I entirely see your point." He departed in haste.

Then it was makeup time. Kris sat patiently, reviewing script changes, as Julia applied a thick coat of Shiseido foundation to every exposed inch of her skin, even the insides of her ears. The blush followed. It seemed that the reworking of her face became more elaborate every month.

Soon she would do the news from behind an inch-thick mask of cosmetics, looking as stylized as a geisha. No one would recognize her.

She could change her name, move to another city, continue doing the news-and Hickle would never find her.

She tried to smile at this fantasy, but there was nothing funny about Hickle. He hadn't called her at work.

Strange… "Julia."

"Mmm hmmm."

"Bring the phone over here, would you? I need to make a call."

Julia obeyed, sulking; like any artist, she resented interruptions.

Kris called her home number. When the machine answered, she asked one of the TPS agents to pick up.

"This is Pfeiffer," one of them said.

"Hi, it's me. I wanted to know what the tally is. You know, his phone calls to the house."

"It's zero, ma'am."

"Zero?"

"He hasn't made a peep."

"He hasn't called my work number either. Does that strike you as peculiar?"

"You can never tell with these guys. Tomorrow he could call twenty times."

"I suppose you're right. Okay, thank you." She switched off. Julia asked what that was all about.

"My stalker seems to have varied his routine," Kris said.

"Is that bad?"

"I'm not sure."

Julia applied the last cosmetic touches.

"You know, I used to think it would be cool to be famous," she said.

"Now I have to wonder."

"It has its ups and downs."

Even after her makeup was complete and Julia was gone, Kris remained seated in the chair, thinking about Hickle and his unnatural silence.

"Kris." The floor manager was at the door.

"Ten minutes."

"Thanks." She hadn't realized airtime was so near.

She almost left the room, then changed her mind.

She picked up the phone and called Travis.

Her fear might be groundless, but it didn't feel that way.

Abby passed an hour watching the bungalow in silence.

After six o'clock the sky began to darken.

By six-thirty a sunset flamed over the rooftops. She thought about leaving. She should get back to Hollywood and see if Hickle was home, but as long as Kris was at KPTI, there was no immediate danger. She decided to wait a little longer.

To use her time more productively she fished her micro recorder out of her purse and dictated notes. She reported her visit to Travis's house, tactfully leaving out the steamy stuff but including everything else, then her unlawful entry to the bungalow and what she'd learned.

If she died, she would at least leave an up-to-date record of her activities.

In the hot tub she'd come close to cashing it in, and if things had gone a little differently when she was escaping from Hickle's apartment last night, he might have unloaded his shotgun on her at pointblank range.

She had cheated her own mortality twice already.

Third time's the charm? she wondered ruefully, and then headlights flared in her rearview mirror.

She sank lower in her seat and watched a black Lexus roll by. As it eased past her car, she glimpsed the driver's profile, lit by the glow of the dashboard. It was Howard. No surprise.

The Lexus pulled into the bungalow's driveway, and Howard got out to lift the garage door, then parked in the garage. He entered the house via the front door. Lights came on a moment later, but the curtains remained shut.

Abby had seen all she needed to see, but she lingered, curious about Amanda Gilbert, who was sure to show up before long.

At seven-fifteen a white BMW parked at the curb a few doors down. The woman who hurried to the house was slim, almost bony, and quite young.

She started to unlock the bungalow's front door with her own key, and then the door opened from inside and Howard ushered her in.

Abby got out of her car and took a stroll, partly to stretch her legs and restore the circulation to her tush, but mainly to check out the BMW. She noted the license plate number and, resting on the dashboard, a parking permit for KPTI stamped with the words March and Employee.

Amanda Gilbert worked at Channel Eight. She was one of Kris's colleagues, and if her car was any indication, she didn't occupy an entrylevel position.

Driving out of the neighborhood, heading toward Hollywood, Abby activated her cell phone. She obtained the number of KPTI's switchboard from Information, then called the station.

"I have some correspondence for Amanda Gilbert," she said when the receptionist answered.

"May I have her exact title, please?"

"Executive Producer," she was told.

"News Division?"

"Yes, that's right."

"Thanks very much." Abby ended the call.

So Amanda was Kris's executive producer. All of a sudden Abby found her dislike of Howard Barwood rising to uncomfortably high levels. She supposed the identity of his illicit paramour shouldn't have made any difference to her assessment of him. Yet it did, because intuitively she knew that it turned him on to be balling Kris's boss, that in doing so he obtained a sense of power and control over his wife that no call girl or receptionist could have provided.

She pulled into a mini-mall and found a pay phone.

Her next call was too sensitive to entrust to a cellular transmission.

She dialed Travis's office, expecting him to be working late. He answered the phone personally; his assistant had gone home.

"The bungalow is Howard's love nest," she reported, keeping her voice low to be sure she wasn't overheard.

"He meets his girlfriend there."

"Who is she?"

"Does it matter? If not, let's leave her name out of it.

What's important is that Howard owns the bungalow, which means he owns Trendline, which almost certainly means he's tunneling assets overseas without Kris's knowledge."

"Which means he has a motive for getting Kris out of the way."

"True. Marriage has become inconvenient for him.

He seems ready for a fresh start. I doubt he's capable of arranging Kris's murder on his own, but when Hickle came along, he may have seen an opportunity."

Abby blew out a tired breath.

"You remember how concerned he was about my safety, asking if I had backup or if I was on my own? I thought he was being chivalrous or sexist, depending on how you look at it.

But maybe not. Maybe he wanted to assess my vulnerability so he could attack me."

"He may have had the opportunity. The guest cottage logs show that he left Malibu at six o'clock on Wednesday evening and didn't return until shortly after midnight-later than usual."

"I was in the hot tub around ten o'clock, ten-thirty."

"It fits. When he failed to finish you off personally, he may have decided to rat you out to Hickle and have him handle it."

"Was he out last night? The phone call reached Hickle around eight-thirty."

"Howard was out from six-thirty to eleven."

"Okay, then he might have spent the first part of the evening at the bungalow. After that, he called Hickle, using his Western Regional phone because he didn't know if Hickle's phone was tapped, and he figured it would be harder to link the cell phone to him. Speaking of which-" Travis cut in.

"We're still trying to nail down a connection between Western Regional and Trendline.

Nothing so far, but I've got two of my computer jocks burning up their high-speed modems. They're pros.

They can nose out anybody's secrets." Even mine? Abby wondered, but what she said was "How about Hickle? Any escalation in his attempts to contact Kris?"

"Just the opposite. A total shutdown. No phone calls to her home or office all day. Kris is worried."

"She should be. You'd better tighten her security."

"I will. Where are you now?"

"Heading back to Hollywood. Don't try to stop me."

"I wouldn't dare." She heard him sigh.

"Good luck, Abby. And watch yourself, all right?" "Always do," she said.

The lights in Hickle's apartment were on when she reached the Gainford Arms, and his Volkswagen was in its assigned space, at the opposite end of the parking lot from her own. She was glad he was home. At least he wasn't in Malibu, lying in ambush outside the Barwoods' house.

She rode the elevator to the fourth floor. As she was fumbling with the key to her door, Hickle emerged from his apartment next door.

"There you are," he said.

The first thing she noticed was that his right hand was positioned awkwardly behind his back, concealing something. Her mind inventoried the possibilities: shotgun, handgun, jar of battery acid.

She still hadn't unlocked her door-she was trapped in the hall, Hickle two feet away-and the.38 Smith in her purse was not instantly accessible.

Hickle was smiling, but it was a tight, false smile.

"I've been waiting for you," he said.

"Really?" She shifted her purse, placing two fingers on the clasp.

"Yeah. I've got sort of a surprise." He stepped forward, his right hand swinging into view.

She saw "what he'd been concealing, and it wasn't acid or a gun or a weapon of any kind. It was a bulky paper sack emblazoned with "Shanghai Palace." "Hope you haven't eaten yet," Hickle said.

"I ordered Chinese."

Abby kept smiling as she admitted Hickle to her apartment, and she emitted the appropriate exclamations of delight when he removed the food from the bag and filled the kitchen with its medley of aromas.

"Sweet and sour pork," he announced, "almond chicken, and-because I know you like veggie meals-broccoli with black mushrooms."

"Sounds great," she said, still smiling, smiling. But she didn't like this situation, didn't like it at all. Hickle was a profoundly antisocial man, not the type to press for close friendship with anyone.

He was too insecure, too scared of women, of people in general, to take the initiative so boldly unless he had a compelling, hidden motive.

Maybe he was planning an attack in the privacy of her apartment. Or he might have doctored the food-the veggie dish, the one he'd bought for her. Might have put poison in it, or a sedative.

One thing was certain. This was no casual get together. It was a chess move, a tactic in a deadly serious contest of strategy, and she had a sense that it was perilously close to the end game "Still warm," Hickle said, touching the sealed containers.

"I hope it wasn't presumptuous of me to order this stuff without asking you."

"Not at all."

"I just thought… well, I enjoyed our dinner last night."

"Me too."

"I guess I don't get out as often as I should."

"I don't know if dinner in my apartment exactly constitutes getting out."

"Is it a problem, eating in here? We could use my place if you want."

She thought about taking the opening he had offered, but if he had trouble in mind, he could strike as easily in his place as in hers.

"Mi casa es su casa." she said.

"Let me get the windows open, okay? It's gotten stuffy."

She raised the windows in both rooms, checking to be sure her surveillance gear was safely concealed behind the closed door of the bedroom closet, then deposited her purse on the coffee table by the sofa. She hated to be separated from her gun, but it wouldn't look natural to hold on to her purse while at home.

Anyway, it was within close reach.

"Now I'll get out some plates"-she nudged him aside to reach the cabinet-"you set'em up on the coffee table, and we'll chow down."

"Sounds like a plan." He seemed lighthearted, almost droll, which worried her because she knew it was an act.

Rummaging in the cabinet, she became aware of her deficiencies as a hostess, at least in these temporary quarters. She lacked napkins, china, glassware, and metal utensils, as well as any beverages other than bottled water.

"I'm afraid we'll have to dine picnic style," she told him.

"Styrofoam plates, plastic cups and forks, paper towels as place mats and napkins. And if you want anything to drink besides water, you'll have to grab it from your fridge. Sorry."

"Water's fine with me."

"I'll try a little of the pork and chicken if you don't mind." She spooned the meals onto the plates.

"I'm not a strict vegetarian. And why don't you take a little of the broccoli?" If he had tampered with the veggie portion, he might find a way to decline the offer.

"That'll be great," Hickle answered calmly.

Maybe the food was okay, then. She sat next to him on the sofa, balancing the picnic plate in her lap. For a few minutes there was nothing to say. Ordinarily Abby was a skilled mechanic when it came to fixing a stalled conversation. She knew how to lubricate the gears and recharge the battery and get things moving again.

Tonight her mind seemed frozen. She knew why. She was not in control of this encounter. She was not the only one keeping secrets this time.

She ate the meat dishes exclusively until she saw Hickle sampling the veggie meal. He seemed to have no reservations about eating it. She saw him chew and swallow. Her fear of poisoning receded. Even so, she wasn't very hungry.

"Anything on TV?" Hickle asked.

"I don't think so."

"You watch it much?"

"A little."

"Like what?"

"Nothing special. Sometimes one of those magazine shows, you know, like Dateline." She had never watched Dateline in her life, but she had the impression that it was on nearly every night, so it must be popular.

"How about you? You have any favorite shows?"

He hesitated.

"I like to watch the local news."

She was almost sure he was studying her reaction.

She played it cool, showing a slight frown of distaste.

"The news? Isn't that depressing?"

"I think it's good to, uh, stay informed-you know, about the community."

Yes, she thought, you're very civic-minded.

"But there's so much crime."

"Crime is part of life. Without people who break the rules, where would we be?"

"The Garden of Eden?"

"Maybe, but what's the point of living in paradise if you're not really living? Know what I mean?"

She speared a chunk of broccoli with her plastic fork.

"Tell me."

"Okay, here's the thing. Adam and Eve were only going through the motions, see. They were content to just exist. They didn't strive for anything. They never sought out their-well, their destiny."

"Do you believe in destiny?"

"Yes, I do."

"What is destiny, do you think?"

"Destiny…" Hickle drew a slow, thoughtful breath.

"Destiny is like what happened with Dante and Beatrice.

You know that story?"

"Not really."

"Dante became a great poet, but his destiny was set when he was nine.

That was when he saw a girl from afar, a girl his own age. Her name was Beatrice. He fell in love, dedicated his life to her. Years later, when he was in his forties and Beatrice was dead, he wrote an epic poem in tribute to her. She lives on through his art. She was his destiny, I think-even though they were never lovers, never even friends. Still, she was meant for him, and finally she was his, not in life, but in death."

"I see' Abby said softly.

He must have heard doubt in her tone.

"You don't agree with me, do you? You don't think it's destiny?"

"I think…" Abby calculated the risk of honesty, then looked directly at him.

"I think it sounds like a kind of madness, Raymond."

He stiffened but forced himself to smile.

"The kind of madness that breaks all the rules," he said evenly.

"So I guess we're back where we started."

"Crime, you mean." Abby looked away, breaking eye contact. It was not good to challenge him.

"Where there's crime, there's usually punishment."

"Some people aren't afraid of punishment."

"Maybe they should be."

He was silent, pensive. She forced herself to eat another few bites of her dinner. It had been a gamble to raise the issue of punishment. She had no idea how he would react. With violence, maybe, or simply by withdrawing into a sulk.

She thought she was ready for anything, but when he spoke, his question surprised her.

"Did you really come here from Riverside?" "Sure," she said, holding her voice steady.

"And you had a fiance who cheated on you?"

"Yes, I did." She didn't like being interrogated. She tried to turn the tables.

"Why would you ask?"

"Sometimes I have the feeling you're not what you seem."

Not good. How to respond? With a smile.

"Then what am I?"

He smiled also, but it was a smile without humor.

"An image. An illusion. Or maybe what I said the first time we met: an actress."

"I told you, I'm a girl trying to get her head together after a bad breakup. Nothing more complicated than that."

"Everything is more complicated than that." He studied her openly, his food forgotten. She knew he had more to say, and she waited for it.

"Do you know how it feels," he asked finally, "to want to believe in something… or someone… when you're not sure you can?"

She saw what looked like anguish in his face and almost pitied him.

"I know how it feels. But there are times when you've got to believe."

"Why?"

"Because relationships are built on trust." She thought of Travis when she said it, Travis with his stash of GPS.

Hickle shifted closer to her on the sofa. She could feel him trembling, but whether it was a signal of fear or rage or. some other feeling she couldn't guess.

"You trusted your fiance," he said, "and he lied to you."

"Not everybody lies."

"I think they do."

He leaned toward her, and she felt the heat coming off his body and knew his pulse was racing. He might be preparing to strike. She almost tensed in anticipation of a fight, but if she did, he would sense it.

"I think," Hickle said slowly, his voice dropping to a whisper!

"everybody lies all the time. We all put on an act. We hide from view." "Including you?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And me?"

"I think so, Abby."

"So you don't trust me." She put no judgment in the words.

"I'd like to, I really would."

"But you don't."

"Should I?"

"Of course you should. I'm trying to be your friend."

"What else are you?"

"Nothing else."

She saw the intensity building in his gaze.

"Who are you, really?" he whispered.

Her purse was on the coffee table, but to reach it she would have to spring forward, and with Hickle pressed against her, she wasn't sure she could.

"I'm your friend, Raymond." She knew he wasn't buying it.

"Just your friend." If he had any kind of weapon, she was dead.

"My friend."

"Yes." "I hope so," he said, leaning nearer, closing the distance between them, and he kissed her.

It was the briefest kiss, a gentle meeting of the lips, and Abby knew? it was unplanned, an act of impulse.

She did not resist or respond. Hickle was the one who pulled back in a violent recoil that upset the plate in his lap.

"Sorry," he mumbled.

"I shouldn't have-didn't mean to-" Abby didn't know whether to feel relieved or embarrassed, but she was suddenly sure he posed no immediate threat.

"It's okay, Raymond," she said soothingly.

"Forget about it. It's okay."

He looked away, his face flushed scarlet, and then he saw the multicolored stain painted on the sofa by his spilled chicken and pork.

"Uh oh," Abby said, following his gaze.

"Looks like it's wet cleanup time."

"I'll take care of it."

"We'll do it together. Wait here." She busied herself in the kitchen, wetting paper towels under a stream of tap water. When she returned to the sofa, she saw Hickle standing near the coffee table, nervously shifting his weight like a boy who had to go to the bathroom.

Whatever his intentions had been in coming here, kissing her had not been on the agenda.

He took the towels from her and blotted up the mess.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"Don't worry about it. The furniture's not even mine. Besides, it looks like you got rid of the stain."

"I think so." Hickle put down the towels and began edging toward the door.

"Guess I'd better be going. It's late."

"Only nine." Suddenly she didn't want him to go.

He'd reached out to her in his clumsy way. She wanted to explore the new path he'd opened for her.

"I'm kind of tired." He put his hand on the doorknob.

She tried stalling.

"There's some leftovers for you to take."

"You keep them. It'll make a good lunch." He fumbled the door open and stepped into the hall.

"Raymond, if you ever want to talk to me… about anything… drop by, okay?"

He didn't look back.

"I'll keep that in mind.

Thanks."

Then the door was shut and she was alone. Abby wished he hadn't fled.

There had been a chance for a dialogue, a breakthrough. It was an opportunity that might not present itself again.

Hickle stood unmoving in the hallway for a long time, thinking of one thing only.

He had kissed her. Kissed her mouth.

He hadn't meant to. Nor had he meant to ask most of the questions he'd asked. He'd simply been unable to stop himself. It was as if he'd been carried along on a current of energy that flowed between Abby and himself, with no willpower of his own, no self-control.

He let himself into his apartment, then paced the living room. After a while it occurred to him that he was hungry. He'd managed to eat only a few bites with Abby so near to him on the couch. In the kitchen he fried up some beans and ate them out of a bowl, washing them down with Coca-Cola. Eating calmed him.

He had made a fool of himself, but she hadn't seemed to mind. She had smiled kindly and offered to be there if he needed to talk. She had said she was his friend. He wished he could believe her. But the words from last night's e-mail message still scrolled through his memory: Her job is to get close to men like yourself, learn their secrets, and report what she finds.

He finished his meal, wandered into the bedroom, and sat on his bed, shoulders slumping. He still didn't know if Abby was his friend or his betrayer. But he could find out. It was easy now, as easy as the press of a button.

Hickle reached into his pants pocket and took out the item he had snatched from Abby's purse.

There had been other things in the purse, things he'd barely had time to notice in his brief, frantic rummaging.

A lightweight revolver-suspicious but not conclusive; in LA many women armed themselves. A wallet containing a driver's license that bore the name Abby Gallagher and an address in Riverside-it meant nothing; ID could be faked. A pair of small tools, their purpose unidentifiable.

The last item he'd found had been the one he wanted. He had slipped it into his pocket and backed away from the coffee table just before she emerged from the kitchen with the wet towels. He held it now in the palm of his hand.

A microcassette recorder with a tape inside, partially used. He touched Rewind, and the tape began to run back.

If she was keeping secrets, he would find them on the tape. Her ruminations and reminders, her notes to herself. All he had to do was listen.

The tape kept rewinding. It made a low hiss as it turned.

He wondered if he wanted to play it. Maybe he would be better off not knowing. If he could accept Abby as what she claimed to be, if he could put away all doubt and suspicion, wouldn't he be happier?

He weighed the tape recorder in his hand, as if weighing the choice it represented. Then his finger pressed the button marked Play.

From the small speaker came Abby's voice, faint as a whisper. Hickle stretched out on the bed, the tape recorder inches from his ear, and listened.

"Where is this going to lead?"

V V Howard Barwood paused in the act of pulling on his pants. He looked at Amanda, naked in bed.

"I told you," he said, "I intend for us to be together."

"When?"

"When Kris is out of the picture."

"I'm a cynical big-city gal, Howie. And I'm starting to wonder if that's ever going to happen."

"It'll happen." He tugged his pants up around his waist and fastened the buckle. He hated it when she called him Howie.

The bedside lamp was the only light in the room. It was fitted with a three-way reading bulb, but the two higher wattages had burned out, and only the lowest setting was still functional. The bulb cast a wan, sallow glow over half the bedroom, leaving the far corners in shadow.

"You know," Amanda went on as if he hadn't spoken, "I'm starting to sense a certain proclivity toward procrastination on your part. You've had months to tell her."

"There are other considerations."

"Such as?"

"The timing of certain financial transactions." It seemed safe to tell her that much.

"Sounds very mysterious," Amanda purred, "and disturbingly nonspecific."

"Let's just say we're not going to be poor."

"Was that ever an issue?"

"Poor is a relative term. Poor by my standards might be rich by somebody else's. We'll have all we need."

"And what will Kris have?"

Howard turned away.

"You don't have to worry about Kris."

He found his shirt and shrugged it on. He felt better when he was not bare-chested. As a younger man he had been proud of his muscular torso, but now his pecs were sagging and his abdomen had loosened as his waistline expanded. He was out of shape. He didn't like to look in the mirror anymore. Or maybe there were other reasons why he preferred not to look at himself.

Outside, the siren of an emergency vehicle-police car, ambulance, fire engine-caterwauled down some nearby street. Sirens were a constant background noise in this neighborhood. Howard thought of the crash of the surf on the Malibu sand, the only noise he ever heard from the deck of the beach house, and briefly he wondered what he was doing in this place.

Well, it was a little late to be asking that question, wasn't it?

Already he had set in motion a chain of events that would free him from his marital obligations and his life in Malibu. At times he might regret the course he'd taken, but he could not undo what he had done.

There was no turning back.

"What?" Amanda asked.

He realized he had spoken the last thought aloud.

"Nothing," he said, buttoning his shirt.

"Okay, be secretive. It's irritating, but manly in a reserved, nineteenth-century sort of way."

She rolled onto her side, showing her back to him.

Tattooed above the left cheek of her buttocks was a red rose. Howard had been fascinated the first time he'd seen it. He had been with many women, but never one with a tattoo. It had seemed exotic and arousing.

Now he regarded it with indifference and the faintest touch of condescension. He wondered if he regarded Amanda herself the same way.

No, of course not. Where had that thought come from? He was serious about Amanda. She was exactly what he needed. She was young. She had energy, ambition, confidence. She talked fast and proposed a thousand ideas an hour. And she was-what was the word?-adventurous. Sexually adventurous, not to put too fine a point on it. She did things with enthusiasm, things Kris would have been reluctant or unwilling to do at all.

He remembered his first night with Amanda-how she had teased his pants down around his knees and taken him into her mouth, drawing him out to full extension with her tongue, and in that moment he had been twenty years old again, not a man in middle age with hair on his earlobes and a potbelly that left him winded when he climbed a flight of stairs.

Not that their whole relationship was about sex. Far from it. They had conversations. Take tonight, for instance.

He had talked with her for most of the evening over an anchovy pizza and a bottle of Merlot. Only afterward had they retreated into the bedroom for a different kind of intimacy. What he was doing with Amanda was no cheap fling. It was an affair of the heart. It had to be.

Yawning elaborately, Amanda slipped out of bed and brushed past him into the bathroom. She poured a glass of water and drank a long swallow before fussing with her hair. Unlike him, she had no problem with mirrors. He liked the trim economy of her body, her small breasts with their stiff nipples, her tight thighs and the tight space between them, a space he had grown to know well over the past six months.

He had met her during a visit to KPTI, months ago.

He had flirted, she'd responded. He was incapable of resisting temptation. Sometimes he told himself that Kris must have been familiar with his weakness, and if she had chosen to marry him anyway, she had known what was she getting into. As a rationalization it was not much good, but it was the best he could do.

The truth was that he had loved Kris once, but the feeling had ebbed.

He supposed she'd been right when she said that for him, a woman's novelty wore off and she became another discarded toy. But there were always more toys to be bought if a man had the money… and if his previous possessions didn't weigh him down.

"She suspects, you know," Amanda said from the bathroom.

Howard, who had been hunting for his shoes amid the tangled bedspread on the floor, looked up in bewilderment.

"What did you say?"

"She thinks you may be having an affair. She told me so."

The world seemed to freeze around him, or maybe it was simply that his breath froze in his chest.

"When?"

"Yesterday. It was True Confessions time, at least for her." Amanda smirked, then turned grave.

"I shouldn't find it funny. After all, she is my friend in some sense of the word."

She stood nude in the bathroom doorway, hips cocked, arms akimbo. Her collarbone stood out against the pallor of her skin. She was not as pretty as Kris, Howard thought irrelevantly. But she was young.

"Why didn't you tell me before now?" he asked.

An insouciant shrug.

"Slipped my mind."

"Well, what did she say, exactly?"

"She thinks you're fooling around. I promised her a heart-to-heart talk, but I didn't follow through. It would be like a cat playing with a mouse. There might be a certain sadistic pleasure in it, but it's not the sort of entertainment calculated to raise your self-esteem."

"No." His voice was flat.

"I guess not."

"I'm not saying she knows anything for sure. She has a hunch, that's all-feminine intuition or whatever.

Anyway, it's good, isn't it?"

Good. What a word for her to use.

"Is it?"

"It makes it easier for you to tell her about us." A frown pinched her face.

"You are going to tell her, aren't you, Howie?"

"At the appropriate time." He knew it sounded perfunctory, and that she would be angry.

She was.

"I sincerely hope you're not getting the proverbial cold feet. I've taken a serious risk, you know. Your wife has more clout with the station than I do. She's the bionic news babe the six-million-dollar girl. What I'm trying to say is, she could get me canned, and if I don't have anything to fall back on…"

He held up a placating hand.

"You'll have plenty to fall back on. And you won't be fired. It's not going to work out that way."

"So how is it going to work out?"

"For the best." Howard sighed, suddenly tired.

"By the way, you're not the only one who's taken a risk."

"No? What have you ever done, besides show up with a bulge in your trousers?"

"I've done more than you know. More than you need to know. Now where are my goddamned shoes?

I have to get-" Home, he almost said but caught himself.

"I have to get going."

The time was almost ten o'clock, and it would take him an hour to get to Malibu from here. Kris would arrive at the beach house around midnight, and he wanted to be there well before she arrived. It had been awkward the other night, when he had come home later than usual, and she had already been there.

She had asked him questions then-questions about his imaginary drive up the coast, and about how restless and agitated he seemed. Of course she suspected him. It was obvious now, though at the time he hadn't allowed himself to see it.

Well, it didn't matter. It was too late for her, no matter what she suspected. Things were moving quickly to a conclusion, and soon everything would be resolved once and for all.

He found the shoes in one of the dark corners the lamplight couldn't reach. When he bent to slip them on, involuntarily he grunted, an old-man noise. He hated making noises like that.

Amanda was his ticket to youth. Or if not Amanda, then some new companion, younger still and lacking any tattoos.

But not Kris. Kris was the past. Kris was a dead weight dragging him down.

He had to be rid of her. He would be.

Soon.

After Hickle left, Abby opened her bedroom closet.

The VCR and audio deck had been recording continually, but the TV was off, the audio console muted.

She turned on the monitor and speakers, then sat on the floor in a sloppy lotus position, resting her back against the bed, watching the monitor. She saw Hickle pace his living room before fixing a meal in the kitchen. She wondered if eating was a response to stress or if he simply hadn't had enough dinner.

He ate standing in the kitchen, almost out of camera range. When he was done, he left the cookware in the sink and went into the bedroom.

She checked her watch. It was 9:40. Kris's newscast would start in twenty minutes. She assumed he wouldn't miss it.

But he didn't emerge from the bedroom. The surveillance microphone picked up no sounds of activity.

She waited, feeling a new, prickling intimation of trouble.

Another glance at her watch. Nearly ten o'clock. Still no sign of him.

Strange. Ominous. If any part of his daily routine was sacrosanct, it was the ritual of watching Kris at six and ten.

"What's going on, Raymond?" she whispered.

"What are you up to?"

She increased the volume. Dimly she made out a sound, something low and regular and ongoing, hard to identify. A murmur.

Was he running an electric fan? She didn't remember seeing one.

Anyway, this sound had a different quality than a motor noise. It wavered, fluctuated.

She leaned close to the speakers, maxing out the volume, but the noise floor-the ambient hiss that was part of any acoustical environment-rose to a high, steady sizzle, and the murmuring sound was barely more distinct than before.

"He fastened on Kris because she represents his feminine ideal, what he calls the look. She exists in Hickle's mind as a mature, perfected version of Jill Dahlbeck, who was also a blue-eyed blonde. But this time he's chosen a woman unlike Jill in every other respect-a celebrity, married, rich, famous, older than he is. He wants her to be unattainable. He wants to pursue her and fail, because his humiliation will give him the excuse he needs to destroy her and destroy himself ", Supine on the bed, Hickle listened. Pain cramped his belly. Slowly he rolled on his side and contracted into a fetal curl.

"What is Kris Barwood to him, really? She's his fantasy lover, his dream wife, and not to get all Freudian about it, his mother too-an older authority figure who has a home and a husband. She represents all aspects of the female presence in the world, from erotic temptress to domestic companion to nurturing parent.

And she's big enough to play all these roles-larger than life, in fact.

Her face appears on TV sets, billboards, magazine covers. She's everywhere. She is Woman. Lashing out at her, Hickle will strike at the archetype of the other sex, the sex he hates and fears. No vive la difference for him."

Abby's voice, coolly analytical, dissecting him. No, vivisecting. That was when the surgery was performed on a living body. Sometimes it was done without anesthesia-nothing to deaden the pain.

"He has zero concern for Kris as a human being, because to him she's not a human being, only a symbol.

Hickle lives in a world of symbols and images and fantasies, connected to society only through the TV set and People magazine. I guess he's not much different from a lot of us these days, and I might even feel sorry for him if he didn't pose a measurable threat…"

Feel sorry for him. Feel sorry.

Who was she to say that, to pass judgment on him?

She was the one who ought to be ashamed of who she was and what she did.

She was the one who made up stories about a failed relationship and bumped into him in the laundry room and got him to talk about the TV news. She was the one who burrowed her way into other people's lives and poked around and uncovered secrets. She was a liar and a snitch and a sneak and a conniving little whore, and what she deserved what she deserved… The shotgun.

That was what she deserved, yes, the shotgun, absolutely.

Hickle sat up, ignoring the cassette as it continued to play She was a goddamned bitch. She had deceived him, manipulated him, served as a tool of his enemies, spied on him and reported to Kris. And she had done it so skillfully that if not for his friend Jackbnimble, he might never have known.

His anonymous informer hiding behind a nursery rhyme name was the only person he could trust, the only person who had been honest with him all along.

Every item of information Jack had passed on had proven true. Every word of advice had been sound.

And he had told Hickle what to do, hadn't he? Hadn't he?

First Abby, then Kris.

The two of them-dead.

Now, without further delay.

He got off the bed and unlocked his bedroom closet.

He took out his duffel bag and unzipped it, removing the shotgun. He checked to be sure it was loaded.

Blammo. No more Abby.

Blammo. No more Kris.

Everything would come to its proper end tonight.

He would win, and they would lose.

The tape kept playing, Abby's voice a whisper amid the folds of his bedspread, but he didn't need to hear it anymore.

To isolate the mystery noise, Abby first used the low pass filter on her audio deck to remove all frequencies higher than eight kilohertz. This cut off part of the hiss but not enough. She fiddled with the ten band graphic equalizer, pulling down the sliders on the higher frequencies while boosting the midrange tones.

She tried to minimize the hiss without losing the murmur. It was hard.

The two sounds were at similar frequencies. But as she made fine adjustments, the murmur came through a bit more sharply, and she identified it as a voice.

Was Hickle muttering to himself under his breath?

She didn't think so. Maybe he was listening to the radio, but she didn't recall seeing a radio in his bedroom.

Then she heard new noises. She paused, kneeling on the floor alongside the console, her ear close to the speakers.

Creak of the bed, thump of footsteps. A door opening.

Something being dragged briefly on the floor.

"What are you up to, Raymond?" she breathed.

Footsteps again. She glanced expectantly at the monitor, but he did not enter the living room.

Then a rattle of activity, a thump that was not a footfall… and silence except for the lingering room-tone hiss and, behind it, the murmuring sound that might have been a voice.

The frequency of the human voice falls mainly between 1.5 and 2.5 kilohertz. She boosted this range, rolling off the higher frequencies, and the background hiss dropped away, leaving the mystery sound isolated and distinct.

It was her own voice.

"… all depends on whether or not he has the nerve to follow through on what has been, until now, only a detailed fantasy of violent revenge The thoughts she'd dictated into her micro recorder Hickle must have taken the recorder, stolen it.

He was listening to the tape.

He knew everything.

Abby's gun was in her purse, and her purse was in the living room. She twisted upright, spun away from the closet-Too late.

Framed in her bedroom window was Hickle. On the fire escape, shotgun in his hands.

He swept the barrel toward her. She ducked behind the bed, denying him a clear shot, but she'd bought herself no more than a couple of seconds.

The window was open. He only had to punch through the screen and climb in.

Distantly it occurred to her that the last question on her mental checklist had been answered.

Would fear deter Hickle from taking action?

It would not.

Prone on the floor, she heard the crunch of the wire mesh, the rattle of the screen as it fell out of the frame.

The unidentified noises from his bedroom-she understood them now-rattle of the screen being removed, thump of the screen as it fell.

He had slipped through his window onto the fire escape.

Now he was climbing into her bedroom. She heard the rustle of his clothes.

Had to get past him, reach her revolver in the living room. If she left cover, he would kill her with one shot.

Okay, so crawl under the bed. She might have time to wriggle out the other side before he figured out where she'd gone.

Good plan, except the bed was too low-she couldn't squirm under it.

She was trapped, and he was coming, his footsteps vibrating through the floorboards.

Her only chance was to fight. She had been trained to respond to an attack from a position of disadvantage, and if her current circumstances didn't qualify as a position of disadvantage, nothing would.

As Hickle came around the bed, she sprang to her feet and ducked under the shotgun's barrel, then brought up her right arm with her hand closed to the second finger joint and aimed a straight blow at his larynx.

He dodged, she delivered a glancing strike to the side of his neck, and he stumbled back, raising the gun.

She snapped a kick at his right arm. It caught him near the elbow.

His fingers splayed. The shotgun fell.

Before he could pick it up-finish him.

She let out a yell of rage and drove her open palm at his face, but he darted sideways, the strike missed, and now she was off balance.

He seized her by the hair and flung her onto the bed, then dipped out of sight and came up with the shotgun in his hands.

She tried to scramble clear, but already he was on top of her, the shotgun muzzle in her face.

"They'll hear you," she gasped.

"Fire one shot and everybody in the building will hear."

The words had come out of nowhere, and she didn't think they had reached him.

There would be a flex of his index finger, and her life would be gone.

She braced for it.

He didn't shoot.

The shotgun withdrew a few inches.

She waited.

"That's a good point, Abby," Hickle said so softly that she could barely hear him above her roaring pulse.

"If that's your real name. Is it?"

"Yes."

"Good. That's one thing you didn't lie about."

"We have to talk, Raymond."

"So talk."

She licked her lips. She smelled lubricant on the shotgun's muzzle.

Absurdly it made her want to sneeze.

"Could you put that thing down? I think I'm allergic to it."

He took a step away from the bed, shifting his grip to hold the gun by the barrel, not the stock.

"Okay," she said.

"It looks like you found me out."

"Looks like."

"You're smart, Raymond. I underestimated you."

"Yes."

"Now that I know how smart you are, things will be different. I can be straight with you."

"Go ahead, tell me what's going on."

"I will. I'll tell you everything." She was starting to get matters under control. She'd had a bad moment there, but it had passed, and now she had options, possibilities.

She sat up, choosing her next words with care, and Hickle slammed down the shotgun on the back of her skull. 2B Abby fell off the bed and collapsed on the floor. She shuddered once, then did not move again.

"No more lies, whore," Hickle whispered.

He stood over her, wary of a trick. She could be playing possum, though he doubted it. The shotgun's butt stock had clipped her pretty good.

Even so, he kept a tight grip on the gun as he crouched beside her and peeled back one eyelid. Her eye was rolled up in the socket.

She was out cold. Breathing, though. Still alive. Well, not for long.

She'd been right about firing the shotgun in a crowded apartment building. Had he been thinking more clearly, he would have recognized the danger himself. But there were other ways to kill her. Cut her throat with a kitchen knife. Yes, that would do it. He was halfway out of the bedroom before he remembered that all her eating utensils were plastic.

Break her neck, then. He knelt and gripped her by the throat, tensing for a lethal twist of his wrists, but something in him recoiled from the hands-on intimacy of the act. There had to be another way.

Suffocation. He could smother her.

He turned toward the bed, reaching for a pillow, then stopped.

Beyond the bed was the closet, the door standing open, a cache of electronic gear inside. In the frenzy of his attack and its aftermath, he hadn't even noticed the stuff.

It seemed odd to have audiovisual equipment set up in a closet, and what was odder still was that the image on the TV screen was his own living room.

How could his living room be on TV?

Then he understood that he was looking at a closed circuit broadcast.

The TV must be receiving a signal from a camera Abby had planted.

But that meant she had been inside his apartment.

She had broken in, bugged the place. Then she had sat and watched him when he thought he was alone.

"Watched me," he breathed. It seemed horrible, obscene.

Stiffly he approached the closet. Beneath the TV was a VCR, recording the live video feed. Next to it, an audio console, tape reels turning.

When he'd talked to himself as. he often did, she must have recorded his voice. She knew his every thought. She hadn't simply invaded his life in the obvious ways. She had intruded on his most private moments, his solitude. She had watched and listened and recorded it all.

A new thought struck him. An awful thought. When exactly had she been in his apartment? Before or after he'd sneaked into the laundry room?

Because if it was after… Then she would have seen the thing he stole out of the washing machine. The white high-cut panties that had once been worn on her body. Her panties.

She would have seen them, would have known he'd taken them, would have guessed what he wanted them for.

Or maybe… maybe she didn't need to guess.

Maybe she had set up a camera in his bedroom as well.

Maybe it had an infrared lens, so she could watch him in the dark.

Had she watched him late last night, when he had taken those panties into his bed, when he had used them the way other men used pornographic pictures?

Had she seen that? Had she gotten it on tape?

Rage seized him.

He pawed at the VCR's Eject button, cracked open the cassette, pulled ribbons of tape off the spool in tangled handfuls.

Maybe she had recorded the sound effects too-the creaking of his mattress springs, the low shudders of his breath.

He wrenched loose the audiotape reels, unwinding them, spewing tape everywhere until the reels dropped from his shaking hands.

Useless. He'd accomplished nothing. Somebody could wind the tape back onto the spools and view the video, hear the sound.

Objectively he knew it didn't matter what anybody saw or heard. There was a good chance he would die in his assault on Kris. Even if he lived, he would be arrested, his guilt undeniable.

Still, he couldn't stand the thought of strangers having a window into his most personal moments.

Watching him like an exhibit at a sideshow. Laughing at his perversity.

Or worse, feeling sorry for him, feeling pity for the sick, lonely freak.

No. He would make sure that nobody ever saw or heard the tapes. He would get rid of the goddamned things, erase them or something.

But first he would remove the bugs she'd planted.

He couldn't let anybody see what she had done.

He confirmed that Abby was still unconscious, then returned to his apartment via the fire escape. He searched his living room first. The TV camera's vantage point had clearly shown that it was stationed above the couch. He pried loose the smoke detector and found a lens and transmitter, but no microphone.

He stomped the camera under his heel and scanned the room for a microphone's likely hiding place. The telephone? He turned the phone upside down, saw what might be a bug of some kind, and battered the phone to pieces against the kitchen counter.

There could be other bugs in the room. He peered behind the couch, behind the TV, in his kitchen cabinets, in the refrigerator. He didn't even know what he was looking for. An eavesdropping device might be in front of his face and he wouldn't recognize it. The tricky little bitch might have planted a dozen microphones or a hundred. He had no way to know.

He stumbled into the bedroom. Had she planted a mike in here too, or had she listened through the shared wall with a stethoscope? And what about that second camera? There could be a hidden lens peering at him through a pinhole in one of his pictures of Kris.

He tore down the pictures. No camera. No microphone.

There had to be something. She wouldn't have bugged one room and not the other. He must have overlooked it. He searched under the bed, behind the nightstand. He unscrewed the base of his table lamp.

Nothing.

"Where is it? Where did you hide it, you whore?"

His voice was an octave higher than normal.

Given a day or two, he could find everything she'd planted. But he didn't have a day or even an hour. He had to strike against Kris tonight. Delay would wreck his chances. When Abby failed to report, her colleagues would know something was wrong. They would come after him. Even if he evaded arrest, Kris would be protected behind additional layers of security, and he would never be able to reach her.

It was nearly ten-thirty. Kris would leave the KPTI studios in an hour or so. She would arrive home after midnight. He had to be there when her car pulled into the driveway of the beach house. To stay on schedule, he must leave soon. But he hadn't debugged his apartment.

He hadn't erased the tapes.

"There's no time." Hickle spun in circles. He couldn't undo all that Abby had done. But neither could he leave it for the police to find.

Destroy it, then. Destroy it all-everything in both apartments-every trace of it.

"All right," he whispered, regaining some measure of self-control as a plan took shape in his mind.

"All right, yes, it'll work, it'll be fine."

Before leaving his apartment, he gathered all the items he would need for that night's work, both there and in Malibu. He removed his duffel bag from the closet and stuffed his rifle inside. With its scope and laser sighting system, the HK 770 had been a costly investment, and he intended to have it with him as a backup should the shotgun fail.

What else was required? Extra ammo for both firearms. A flashlight. A jacket-the night was cool. He shrugged on his navy blue windbreaker.

The dark color would provide camouflage.

And the padlock and chain that had secured the closet. He took those with him, along with the duffel.

He left his apartment, climbing through the window, never looking back.

The TV monitor in Abby's bedroom was now a sheet of static. Abby remained unconscious. Hickle nudged her with his foot. She didn't stir.

He knelt by her for a minute or two, then turned his attention to the bedroom windows. The screen had been ruined by his forced entry, but the glass pane was intact. He closed and locked the window, then sealed the living room window as well.

The apartment was now airtight. Crouching, he checked the furnace's pilot light and saw its blue flame.

Now for the hard part. Muscles straining, he wrestled the oven away from the kitchen wall until he heard a metallic pop and a hiss of gas.

The coupling on the gas inlet pipe had ruptured. Gas was flooding in from the main supply line. It smelled like rotten eggs.

The gas was a bomb. The pilot light was the fuse.

When the gas reached critical concentration… "Blammo," Hickle whispered.

Half the fourth floor would be obliterated. Abby's apartment and his own place next door and, with luck, nosy Mrs.

"Finley in apartment 422-all gone in a white-hot explosive flash. He had wanted to erase the tapes. This was one way to do it. As a bonus, he would erase all vestiges of his former life… and, oh yes, Abby too.

He added his shotgun to the duffel and headed into the hall, shutting Abby's door behind him. Quickly to the elevator, then down to the lobby and across the parking lot, running hard.

One thought galvanized him as he ran. He was doing this, really doing it. After months of delay he'd found his nerve.

Hickle stashed the duffel on the passenger seat of his VW, slipped behind the wheel, keyed the ignition.

The dashboard clock glowed 10:59.

At this very moment the late news on Channel Eight was ending, and Kris Bar-wood would be signing off for the last time.

Ty ris saw Travis across the soundstage as she and Matt Dale wrapped up the ten o'clock news.

Travis had not come to KPTI in months. His presence rattled her, and she stumbled during her closing remarks. Matt saved her with a joke, allowing both of them to beam smiles at Camera One while the theme music came up and the set faded to black.

"You okay?" Matt asked, removing the Telex from his ear.

"Got distracted. It appears I have a visitor."

Matt followed her gaze.

"That's the TPS guy, isn't it?" After the furor surrounding the Devin Corbal case, Travis was recognizable to any media person in LA.

"The very same."

"He seems to be putting the'personal' back in personal protection."

"Maybe that should be his slogan." Kris got up from behind the curvilinear shell of the desk.

"I'd better find out what he wants. See you Monday."

"Have a nice weekend."

She wished she could. Somehow she found it unlikely.

Quickly she made her way past the cameras, away from the small set with its video wall and its photographic backdrop of LA at night, complete with artificial city lights that glittered like stardust. Lit with klieg lights and photographed through a layer of diffusion, the set was a magical island, but up close it was cheap, almost tacky. The desk was a false front, the swivel chairs were uncomfortable, and the backdrop had been torn and hastily repaired, leaving a ragged seam like a fault line. At full power the lights were harsh and hot, though the studio itself was cold in deference to the balky equipment that cluttered the floor.

Travis smiled at her as she approached. That smile worried her. It seemed calculated to convey reassurance.

"What's up?" she asked guardedly.

"I thought I'd ride along with you tonight in one of our staff cars."

"What's wrong with my car?"

"If you don't mind, I'd like you to use our vehicle right now. I chose a Town Car from our fleet-same model as yours."

"If it's the same, why can't we take mine?"

"This car has added features." Travis paused until a pair of stagehands had sauntered past.

"Bullet-resistant glass, armor plating, the works."

"Why exactly do I need this extra level of protection?

Because Hickle varied his routine by not calling today?"

"That's part of it."

"What's the rest?"

"Abby's found out a few things. I can't go into detail right now."

Travis placed a hand on her arm, lowering his voice.

"There's a chance he may be close to taking action."

"There's a nice euphemism. Trying to kill me is what you mean."

"It could be a false alarm. Anyway, Steve Drury will be driving, and I'll ride in the back with you. The detail posted at the house has been put on alert. The guards at the Reserve's gatehouse have been notified, as well as the KPTI security staff. Every precaution is being taken. You'll be fine, Kris. You'll be fine."

He was still touching her arm. Gently she pulled away. She didn't want his reassurances. He found it easy to be calm. Dealing with threats was his job. He reduced the problem to a set of procedures, an action plan. He enjoyed it. To her it was only a nightmare without logic or clarity, offering no escape.

She looked back at the set. From a distance its magic was intact. At this moment she wanted only to return to her fake desk under the lights and continue reading off the Teleprompter and smiling into the cameras.

She felt safe there, enclosed in a protective circle, doing what she did best. But the show was over, and all she could do was go away into the dark and hope Travis and his people kept her safe.

"Okay." She felt Travis deserved a smile for his kindness, but she couldn't summon one.

"Let me scrub this makeup off. I'll meet you in my office. You know where it is."

"Kris-I'm sorry about this. We could be wrong in our assessment, but we can't take the risk." She said she understood. And she did. The rational part of her understood perfectly well, but there was another part of her, less sober and composed, that wanted to scream that it was unfair and she was tired and why couldn't Hickle leave her alone and harass somebody else?

In the dressing room she bent over the sink, removing her makeup with a towel. When she was done, she studied herself in the mirror. The face she saw was beautiful and haughty and scared. It was not her face.

Her face never showed fear, and this one did.

Hickle had stolen everything from her now. Her peace of mind, her daily routine, her comfort, perhaps her marriage. Even the face in the mirror wasn't her own anymore.

There was nothing left for him to take-except her life.

Howard parked in the garage of the beach house at 11:15, later than he'd expected, because before leaving the bungalow he had decided to smooth things over with Amanda, a process that had taken some time and further disarranged the bed sheets.

But things had worked out all right. He had beaten Kris home by at least a half hour.

He walked around to the guest cottage, where he was met by the two TPS staff officers on duty. Their names were Pfeiffer and Mahoney, though he never could recall which was which. The men seemed unusually alert tonight. Even as they greeted him, they were scanning the darkness on the far side of Malibu Reserve Drive.

"Anything wrong?" Howard asked.

They assured him the situation was normal. He didn't find their protestations entirely convincing. Something was up. His suspicion was confirmed when one of them mentioned that Kris would be arriving in a TPS staff car tonight.

"A staff car? Why?"

"Routine precaution," Pfeiffer or Mahoney said.

"If it's routine, why haven't you done it before now?"

"It's just standard procedure," his partner, who was either Mahoney or Pfeiffer, replied. Both men kept their gazes fixed on the shadowy foliage across the road.

His answer was no answer at all. It was, in fact, just another way of saying the same thing. Howard thought of pointing this out but decided against it.

Kris was Travis's client. The TPS people would tell her whatever she demanded to know. They rarely extended the same courtesy to him.

He said good night to Pfeiffer and Mahoney, then proceeded down the garden path to the house. Courtney opened the door for him as he climbed the steps.

She must have heard the TPS agents buzz him in.

'"Evening, Mr. Barwood."

He acknowledged the housekeeper with a nod, noticing how she backed away when he stepped into the foyer. Courtney had been keeping her distance from him since the day, several months ago, when he'd reached out in the game room to stroke the dark sheet of her hair. It had been an impulse on his part, stupid and thoughtless. She had recoiled and started to cry, and he'd felt bad, but not so bad that he hadn't resorted to threats to ensure that she kept quiet about the incident, particularly where Mrs. Barwood was concerned.

Now he wondered if she had kept quiet after all.

Maybe she had said something to Kris. Maybe that was why Kris now suspected his affair.

Courtney shut the door.

"How was your ride?" she asked.

"Terrific. I went all the way to Santa Barbara. That car hypnotizes me." He said it as jauntily as he could, but she merely murmured,

"Sounds like fun."

She didn't believe him. She knew he hadn't been out cruising the coast road. She could guess what he'd been up to. And so could Kris.

It was obvious now.

Perhaps, to a more perceptive man, it would have been obvious all along.

"I think I'll unwind out on the deck," Howard said.

"It's a beautiful night."

"Sure is." She seemed relieved to be rid of him.

He walked to the rear of the house, thinking he'd been insane to think he could fool either his housekeeper or his wife. Women had a sixth sense about these things. They could tell when a man was fooling around, the way dogs could sense an earthquake before it hit. It was uncanny, the way women's minds worked. They should all be detectives and fortunetellers and shrinks.

Still, Kris hadn't guessed all his secrets, had she?

Hickle had sped from freeway to freeway, taking the 101 to the 110 to the 10, in a desperate rush for the coastline. Now he was traveling through West LA on the Santa Monica Freeway, the gas pedal on the floor, the needle of the Rabbit's speedometer pinned at eighty-five.

Time was his enemy. He had to be in position outside the beach house by 11:50 at the latest.

He checked the dashboard clock. The readout glowed 11:21. He was still four miles from Pacific Coast Highway. It was going to be tight.

He pulled around a slower car, passing illegally in the right-hand lane, not giving a damn, and then in his rearview mirror he saw the blue-red sparkle of a light bar CHP unit. After him.

Disaster.

He could not afford a speeding ticket. Simply being pulled over would take five or ten minutes, costing him any chance of reaching Malibu in time. Worse, the cops might want to know what was inside the duffel bag. Possession of the guns was legal, but he was sure the authorities would find an excuse to hold him for questioning-and while they did, a report would come in about an explosion at his address.

No.

He had failed at everything he'd ever tried. But tonight he would not accept defeat. Tonight nothing would stop him. Tonight, just this once, he would win.

Hickle accelerated, veering from lane to lane, whipping around slower traffic. The CHP car accelerated in pursuit, and an amplified voice came over a loudspeaker, giving orders that he didn't even hear.

"Fuck you," he breathed. He had taken orders all his life. He had submitted meekly to the demands of carwash proprietors and supermarket managers and Mr.

Zachareas of Zack's Donut Shack. He had been quiet and punctual and reliable, and he had never talked back. Well,"he was talking back now, talking back to the whole goddamned world.

The cops were trying to keep up as he skidded from lane to lane, but they had to worry about the safety of other drivers, and he had no worries at all. The dome light shrank in his rearview mirror, and directly ahead he saw an off-ramp.

Swerving into the exit lane, cutting off traffic with a blare of horns, Hickle veered onto the surface streets.

The cops would want to follow, but when he'd last seen them, they'd been in the fast lane, and he doubted they could cut over to the exit in time.

Even if they did, they wouldn't find him. He was too smart to travel in a straight line. He detoured down side streets, swung through residential neighborhoods, drove along alleys, until he was sure the patrol car had been left behind.

Her first awareness was of pain.

Blinking, Abby raised her head, then shut her eyes against new agony.

It throbbed from the back of her skull to the bridge of her nose. It pulsed behind her eyes.

"Man," she muttered, "this is one bad hangover."

The words came out raspy and blurred. Her tongue was an immense cotton wad blocking her throat.

She was sprawled on the floor alongside her bedroom bureau, and there was a bad smell in the air, a smell like two dozen kinds of garbage blended together on a hot day, a smell like a swamp. She'd been knocked out-couldn't remember how. Her last memory was of Hickle.

Looming over her, the shotgun in his hand.

Had he shot her? She didn't think so. She wasn't aware of any holes in her body, but somehow he'd rendered her unconscious and left her here.

And that sour, brackish smell… Gas. The apartment was filling with gas.

Natural gas had no smell of its own, but the gas company added an odor ant as a warning agent in the event of a gas leak. Gas leaks could be dangerous, could be fatal. Any spark or open flame could ignite an explosion.

Open flame. The furnace pilot light.

She saw it then-exactly what Hickle had planned for her.

What she had to do was obvious. Open the windows, shut off the gas.

Simple, except she couldn't move. Every muscle in her body had gone slack. Her pulse was rapid and faint. Swooning ripples of dizziness ballooned through her head.

She tried to prop herself up, but her arms would not support her, and she collapsed, gasping. There was no air to breathe, only the swamp stench. Natural gas was an enemy of respiration. It inhibited the blood's ability to carry oxygen. The more she inhaled, the more labored and irregular her breathing would become. Her muscles, starved of oxygen, would lose all remaining strength. Her awareness would flicker and fade out.

Well, no. She doubted she would last that long. The explosion would kill her first.

"That's me," she groaned.

"Always looking on the bright side."

The longer she waited, the weaker she would get.

She had to take action now, had to raise the bedroom window, draw some air into this death trap. But she couldn't stand. All right, crawl.

The window was only six feet away. A baby could crawl that far.

She started to roll onto her belly. Something stopped her-a tug of resistance. Her left ankle had been fastened to a leg of the bureau by the chain and padlock from Hickle's bedroom closet. He'd anchored her in place so that even if she regained consciousness, she couldn't escape.

Nice touch, but the joke was on him. She knew the combination. Bending at the waist, she reached the padlock and lined up the numbers, then tugged on the shackle.

The padlock didn't open.

But it had to. Unless… Hickle had changed the combination.

Abby shut her eyes.

"I take it back, Raymond. Looks like the joke's on me."

The greatest danger, Hickle knew, was that the cops had read his license plate during the chase. If they had, his plate number and a description of his Volkswagen would already have been radioed to other CHP units and to LAPD and Santa Monica PD patrol cars. He could outrun one car but not a dozen.

He reached Ocean Avenue and turned north into heavy traffic, typical on a Friday night. Bikers and low-riders surrounded him. Rough crowd, the sort that drew a lot of cops on patrol. He scanned the sea of car roofs for a light bar Couldn't see one, but that didn't mean police units weren't out there-maybe behind him-maybe closing in.

Panic started his heart racing. He thought he might throw up.

The traffic thinned a little as he entered a better neighborhood. On his left was the park on the palisades, busy with tourists and teenagers. Hotels and restaurants and condominium towers rose on his right. It occurred to him that soon, even if things went exactly as planned, he would be either dead or in custody.

He would never again walk in a park or eat at a restaurant. He would not see the moon, which hovered over the ocean beyond the palisades, unless he saw it through the barred window of a cell.

But if he lived, he would see Kris in his memory. She would be with him every day, bloodied and torn, his victim, his sacrifice. Every time he closed his eyes, he would see her. He would give up the moon for that.

And if he didn't survive… With death came immortality. He would be remembered.

His name, his face, would be known. He, not Kris, would be on the covers of magazines. He, not Kris, would stare out at a world of television viewers from a million picture tubes. And who could say?

Maybe there was a life after this one, when all destinies were fulfilled. If so, he would be with her forever, as he deserved.

But only if he killed her first. To do that, he had to get to Malibu, and time was ticking down.

Ahead was the incline to the coast highway. He eased into the turn lane, then got stuck behind a line of cars at a red light. A minute of waiting followed. He was helpless. If a patrol unit spotted him now, there was nothing he could do except go down shooting.

Finally the stoplight cycled to a green arrow. He followed the traffic downhill, breathing hard, his chest heaving with strain. There was sweat on his face, sweat pasting his shirt to his armpits and his underpants to his crotch. He smelled bad. But he'd made it at least this far.

He pulled into the fast lane, racing between the pale cliffs and the sea. Fear of attracting attention competed with the need to make up lost time. Urgency won.

Hickle accelerated-sixty-five miles per hour, seventy, seventy-five-breaking the speed limit as he hugged the curving shoreline of Santa Monica Bay on his way to Malibu.

Okay, think, Abby Think.

Plan A had proven unsuccessful. Time to go to Plan B-if there was a Plan B, other than just lying here till the whole place went kaboom.

She shook her head, rejecting pessimism. There was always a Plan B, and if that failed, a Plan C and D and so on through the alphabet for as long as she lasted.

Never give up, that was the spirit.

Plan B was to try variant combinations based on Kris's birthdate-August 18, 1959. Abby moved the four cams to 0859, 1859, 5918, 5908. No luck.

How about Hickle's birthday? Travis had told her. It was October