Dangerous Games (13 page)

“What events?”

Abby lifted her gaze from the report. “Betrayal. You know the saying: Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. But when your friends turn out to be your enemies, what are you supposed to do then?”

“You tell me.”

“Keep everybody at a distance. Trust nobody. That’s my solution.”

“Doesn’t sound like much of a solution to me.”

“Well, it’s kept me alive so far.” Abby smiled, but there was sadness in it. “Our line of work isn’t exactly conducive to trust. Haven’t you ever been betrayed by someone you believed in?”

Tess couldn’t deny her an honest answer. “Yes.”

“Then you know the score.”

“I guess I do. But maybe I’ve handled it better than you.”

“Maybe you should run self-help seminars. There’s big money in them.” Abby returned her attention to the report.

So much for the heart-to-heart. Tess got back to business. “So Kolb talked rape, but didn’t plan on doing it.”

“Right.”

“Why is that?”

“He’s a control freak. Can’t allow himself to be driven by lust or any physical need. Always has to be in control of his body.”

“And the Rain Man…”

“Is a control freak too. He scripts the drama, stage-manages the situation. Plays with the authorities, yanks their chain, makes ’em dance.” Abby shut the folder and handed it back. “All done.”

Tess tucked it under her arm. “Speed-reader.”

“Salutatorian at Sierra Canyon High.”

“Not valedictorian?” As digs went, this one was pretty weak, but it was the best Tess could manage.

Abby shook her head. “Amy Malkovic beat me out by a tenth of a point on her GPA. Little snot. She never would’ve aced Trigonometry if she hadn’t bribed the teacher with cupcakes. I just saw a story on her in the alumni newsletter. She’s married to a chiropractor, drowning in rugrats, weighs more than a sumo wrestler. Revenge is sweet.”

“You sure you don’t envy her?”

Abby tilted her head quizzically. “What would I be envying, exactly?”

“Home, family, children. A normal life.”

“I’d go crazy living that way. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t know.”

“Ever been hitched?”

“No.”

Abby watched her. “But you were close.”

“How’d you know?”

“Saw it in your eyes. It ended badly.”

“Yes.”

“He cheated?”

“He died.” Tess’s voice was low.

Abby put a hand on Tess’s arm. “Sorry. I didn’t…”

“You didn’t know?” Tess almost smiled. “I guess there are some secrets you can’t read from body language. How about you?”

“How about me, what?”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Not even close.”

“No serious relationships?”

“I don’t necessarily make the best choices in that department. But who does?” She saw Tess’s face and added, “Oh. You do. Or you did—with him.”

“He was a good man.”

An uncomfortable silence stretched between them. Abby broke it by clapping her hands in a businesslike fashion.

“Well, what we’re interested in right now is a bad man—Mr. William Kolb. Thanks a mil for the sneak peek.”

“Was it worth it? Did you learn anything helpful?”

“Bits and pieces. Some possible connections between Kolb and the Rain Man—duct tape on the victims’ mouths, handcuffs, the way he covered the dashboard VIN with the ransom note. Then there’s stuff for me to look for—the carpet fibers, a Caymans connection. None of that is the main thing, though.”

“Then what is?”

“Nothing in here rules Kolb out. See, that was a possibility. There might be some detail that’d tell me I’m wasting my time looking at him.”

“You don’t think I would’ve caught a detail like that?”

“When you read the report, you weren’t looking for it. Besides, you don’t know Kolb. I do. Let’s say the postmortem on Paula Weissman had turned up taunting wounds—you know, nonfatal knife sticks. That would eliminate Kolb right there.”

“He’s not a sadist?”

“No—or at least, not that way. He could lose his cool, beat the hell out of somebody in a state of rage, but he wouldn’t go in for torture. It’s not the way his mind works. Same with rape, as we discussed. Or if the Rain Man was sending private messages to the police or the Bureau, then I’d know Kolb’s not our guy.”

“Why not? He sent messages to Madeleine.”

“You’ve answered your own question. He made that mistake before.”

“Offenders frequently repeat their mistakes.”

“Not Kolb.”

“He’s smart, then?”

“Street-smart. His IQ is probably nothing special—ten, maybe twenty points above average. But there are skills an IQ test can’t measure. And there’s one other thing that could’ve ruled him out. The Rain Man’s attitude toward women.”

“I’d say it’s a pretty damn negative attitude.”

“Obviously. But negative how? Anger—or contempt? See, anger is always based on fear. A guy is afraid of women, so he strikes out at them. That’s not Kolb. And it’s not the Rain Man, either. He doesn’t brutalize his victims. He doesn’t fixate on them.”

“Kolb fixated on Madeleine.”

“Madeleine pissed him off in a specific context—the traffic stop. That made it personal. Grabbing these women more or less at random—it’s business. If Kolb’s doing it, he’s not exorcising any demons. He’s just doing a job.”

“Dumping them in the storm sewers…”

“Exactly.
Dumping
them—like garbage.”

“Which is all they are to him.” Tess remembered making the same point to Crandall at the river.

Abby nodded. “And you don’t hate garbage. It’s just something to be gotten rid of. That’s how Kolb would see it. And it looks like that’s how the Rain Man sees it, too.”

“You’re drawing a lot of inferences from a pretty slender database.”

“I go with my gut. It hasn’t failed me—at least not often.”

“Okay…So when are you going to start?”

“First thing tomorrow.”

“How?”

“A little meet-and-greet. I’ll run into Kolb and renew old ties.”

“Any idea how you’ll accomplish that?”

“Don’t worry about strategy and tactics. I can handle that end. I’m a pro.”

“I don’t want you taking any unnecessary risks.”

“My whole job consists of unnecessary risks.” Abby grinned. “That’s what makes it fun.”

“Take care, anyway.”

“Always do. Night, Tess. And, hey—don’t lose any sleep over this, okay? Whatever happens, your fingerprints won’t be on it. You’ll be clean. I guarantee it.”

She walked away. Tess thought Abby might be right—but at the moment she didn’t feel clean.

10

Abby caught five hours’ sleep and woke to her alarm clock at five thirty A.M. She spent twenty minutes on tai chi exercises, then fixed a fruit smoothie in her blender. After showering, she donned a sensible ensemble of skirt and jacket, the sort of outfit an office worker would wear. An office worker—or Tess McCallum, maybe.

It had been a gamble, meeting Tess. But what the heck, everything in life was a gamble. She hadn’t placed too many bad bets so far, and even her mistakes hadn’t proven fatal.

Still, she was a little disappointed in Tess. She didn’t know exactly what she’d hoped for. Or maybe she did, and just didn’t want to admit it. Her job had plenty of perks, but it did get lonely sometimes, and it would be nice to find someone to shoot the breeze with, someone who understood….

She shook her head, dismissing the thought. Tess McCallum was no soul mate. She was uptight in a major way, even more so than might be expected in a
federale
. The whole dance they’d gone through, with Tess taking time to think it over and make her decision, had been a big joke. There never had been any decision to make. Of course Tess was going to go along. Anybody would. Anybody with brains, and from what Abby knew of the Mobius case, Tess was smarter than the average Eliot Ness wannabe. She’d saved the elites of the city, and done it alone.

Abby ran through a mental checklist. Gun in her purse, fully loaded. Cell phone, fully charged. ID in her wallet in the name of Abby Hollister, one of her several false identities, and the one she’d used when she met Kolb last year.

She was ready. She felt the familiar excitement of knowing the scoreboard was at zero and the game was about to begin.

None of this was new to her. She’d been doing this job a long time.

For the first two years of her career, she’d worked as a consultant to assorted private security firms across the country. Then the Kris Barwood case had come along, changing her life and nearly ending it. Afterward, she’d broken off her connections with the security outfits and relied on word-of-mouth recommendations to acquire new jobs. Luckily for her, nearly all of her clients were happy with her work, and it was surprising how many of them had a friend, relative, or colleague who needed similar services.

If anything, her workload had increased. In a good year she might handle fifteen cases. Over the seven years of her career, she had worked more than eighty jobs. She used to keep count. She didn’t anymore. It seemed like bad luck.

She made a good living, pulling in more money than she could spend. She had no complaints. Her only worry was what she would do when she got too old to do the work. Stalking stalkers was a young person’s racket. Her reflexes and her sharpness would decline over time.

But she was thirty-three, and obsolescence was a long way off—at least a hundred more cases, she estimated. A hundred opportunities to get herself killed.

She locked the door of her one-bedroom condo and rode the elevator to the underground garage. Her building, in pricey Westwood, offered its residents impeccable taste and impenetrable security, a combination that more than justified her outrageous mortgage payments.

At the garage level she got off and walked right past her Miata, a car that was too flashy for undercover work. For years she’d used an ancient secondhand Dodge Colt until it finally broke down. Now she had an almost equally decrepit Honda Civic, a ten-year-old hatchback that had logged 110,000 miles, along the way acquiring a dent in the side panel, rips in the upholstery, and a broken latch on the glove box. She’d bought the car for twelve hundred bucks and then had the engine substantially rebuilt, ensuring that the Civic wouldn’t fail her if she needed to make a quick getaway. Just because it looked like a piece of junk didn’t mean it had to perform that way.

The Civic had an additional advantage over her Mazda. It was registered to Abby Hollister, not Abby Sinclair, at the address she used as a blind. If anyone ran the tags, it was the Hollister alias that would come back, while her real name and address would never show up. Her life was a set of Chinese boxes, and she didn’t want anyone looking too deep inside.

She kept the Civic out of sight in a corner of the garage, paying an extra two hundred dollars a month for the space. The other residents, if they ever noticed the car, no doubt assumed that it belonged to a janitor on the building staff or to someone’s private housekeeper.

Abby drove out of the garage as the sun was rising and hooked onto Wilshire Boulevard, eastbound. Her route took her through Beverly Hills, past Park La Brea and Hancock Park, and then into Koreatown, one of her favorite neighborhoods. Koreatown was nothing special during the day, but at night it was Disneyland, Vegas, and Rio all rolled into one. She often cruised the Asian clubs, frequently the only Caucasian in attendance, and it was like jetting off to the other side of the world. How many American cities offered this kind of ambience?

That was why she loved this town, the crazy energy of it, the mad mélange of different cultures and languages served up in a big tossed salad of ethnic neighborhoods. Some people, frowning, compared LA to a science-fiction dystopia. “It’s turning into
Blade Runner
here,” they’d say. Abby didn’t care. She’d seen
Blade Runner
four times. She thought it was cool.

The streets of Koreatown were quiet now, in the pink dawn, and there was no fun to be had—only a rendezvous with William Kolb.

Kolb’s previous address had been a rented two-bedroom in Mar Vista; he’d given up the apartment during his incarceration. Once released, he’d set up residence in a less-than-desirable area of the mid-Wilshire district, a fact she’d learned via an Internet service that provided unlisted addresses and other personal information for a fee.

The same service had informed her that Kolb owned a 1992 Oldsmobile Ciera, a used car he’d bought in November. When he’d been a cop, he’d driven a new Ford Crown Victoria, the kind of heavy, rear-wheel-drive vehicle that cops preferred, but he must have sold it to cover court costs.

She’d also learned his present employment—security guard at a supermarket. She knew this not from the Internet service, but from discreetly tailing Kolb two mornings in a row. That, of course, was a couple of days before she’d gotten the phone call from Madeleine Grant or met Tess McCallum.

It had been prudent to let them both think she’d been pulled back into the case last night. The truth was, she’d identified Kolb as a possible suspect on Saturday night, the night of Paula Weissman’s kidnapping, when one of her cop contacts quoted her the text of Paula’s ransom note. That night she’d obtained Kolb’s address. On Sunday morning and again on Monday, she’d staked out his building. Each day he’d driven to the offices of the security firm and emerged wearing a guard’s uniform, which he must keep in a locker on the premises. From there he drove to the supermarket, where his shift started at eight A.M. His working hours were probably eight to four thirty, assuming a half hour for lunch. She hadn’t checked back to follow him after work on either day. There had been no rain in the forecast, and so she’d had no reason to worry about his after-hours activities.

Tonight there would be rain. If Kolb was the Rain Man, he would make his move.

Logically, if he’d already netted two mil from the Weissman case, he had no good reason to continue busting his hump on guard duty. But Abby figured he would hold on to the job simply to avoid any suspicious alteration of his routine. He was smart enough to think that way. Paranoid enough, too.