Final Sins (9 page)

Abby didn’t like to be slowed down by a heavy meal before a job. She fixed herself a small salad of mango, pineapple, and banana, and ate while standing on her balcony overlooking rush hour on Wilshire. She found the sight oddly soothing. The endless tide of traffic reminded her of the procession of waves to the shore.

She showered and changed into an outfit that, she hoped, combined a certain art-house sophistication with more than a hint of sexual availability. It also matched her purse, the one with the special compartment for her .38. She checked the gun: fully loaded.

Her purse held other secrets, among them a tiny vial of white pills—Rohypnol, the date-rape drug. It was illegal in the U.S., but she never let little things like criminal statutes get in her way. The newer version of Rohypnol had been designed to turn blue when it dissolved, tipping off a potential victim. Luckily for her, the older kind was still available on the black market. It dissolved clear.

She selected her fake ID for the evening from among several possibilities. The wallet, complete with driver’s license and credit cards, went into her purse also.

She felt the itchiness that usually came over her at the start of an assignment. She was glad to feel it. After so many jobs, she sometimes worried she was losing her edge. A slight case of the jitters reassured her that her head was still in the game.

Tonight she might have more reason than usual to be nervous. It was rare for a stalker to intercept his quarry’s phone calls. If this guy was doing so, he was a cut above the average in terms of smarts and resources. She would have to watch herself.

But then, she always did.

At seven thirty she left the condo and descended to the garage, where she got into the Hyundai, her undercover car. She joined the ocean of traffic, which seemed hardly diminished, and drove east, with the dying sunset in her rearview mirror.

Her route took her to the junction of Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard. She turned onto Santa Monica, then hooked east on Melrose. The cobalt blue immensity of the Pacific Design Center, known to locals as the Blue Whale, passed on her left. The building, crowded with the showrooms of interior designers, was a fun place to go for a stroll. There were lots of neat getaways in West Hollywood—
WeHo
to residents—a chic community that blended the upscale lifestyle of West L.A. with the funkiness of Hollywood proper. Its largely gay population had earned it the nickname Boys’ Town. She smiled, thinking of a onetime
WeHo
gym called the Sports Connection, which had been so popular with gay cruisers that it became known as the Sports Erection. Although Bally had bought the establishment a few years ago and changed the name, the tag still stuck, at least for folks with long memories.

To an outsider, L.A. was a shapeless sprawl, but to those in the know it was a complicated mosaic of neighborhoods, each one distinctive in its special shops or eateries or back streets. There were specialty bookstores and revival movie houses, sidewalk cafes and mom-and-pop diners, and assorted other treasures—but only for those who knew where to look. After more than a decade in this town, she knew it as well as any cabdriver. At times the city felt almost like an extension of herself, its landscaped gardens and graffiti-scarred walls mirroring her changing moods.

She arrived at the art gallery just after eight p.m. It was doubtful that Faust’s stalker would be here quite so early, but, as was the case in the coffee shop, she wanted to be first to arrive so she could scope out the territory.

By now the sun was gone, and the promised full moon had yet to emerge. She parked at the curb and walked to the gallery, her purse slung over her shoulder.

The Unblinking I was exactly the sort of place its name suggested, a self-consciously chic storefront operation selling overpriced
objets
d’art to self-consciously chic customers. Tonight’s opening had drawn a decent-size crowd comprised equally of men and women. The men could be neatly divided into two categories, the shaggy and the bald, with the shaggy holding a slight numerical advantage. The women were mostly clones of Elise
Vangarten
—too thin, too pale, too waiflike. Some of the waifs were pushing sixty, but they still had that anorexic, concentration-camp look.

At the door each customer was offered a booklet on “creative holography” and a tiny plastic cup of red wine. Abby was no connoisseur, but even she knew the stuff was cheap. It tasted like grape juice that had been left out on the counter too long.

Out of habit she noted the gallery’s layout. She was like a seasoned traveler who always checked for the exit nearest her hotel room. The gallery was built in the shape of the letter L, with the long arm running parallel to the street and the short arm extending behind the building as an alcove. There was just one story, although a door marked BASEMENT indicated some sort of room belowground. A couple of security guards observed the customers unobtrusively. There were no visible cameras, but she did see motion detectors, which would be used only when the gallery was closed.

As Faust had told her, tonight’s exhibit featured the works of Piers Hoagland, who had evidently received glowing write-ups in a variety of publications, including the
L.A. Times
. Having read the
Times
’s
art critics, Abby knew there was no manifestation of psychopathy masquerading as creativity that they would not endorse. She expected no less from Hoagland, and he did not disappoint.

The long arm of the L was broken up by movable partitions into several inner rooms, each exhibiting a dozen or more of Hoagland’s artworks. People who hadn’t seen holograms usually pictured them like the three-dimensional images in science-fiction movies—animated, multicolored figures in the round, floating in space. The reality was slightly more prosaic. Hoagland’s holograms were somewhat flatter than the Hollywood version. Like the picture on a liquid crystal display, they could be seen only from certain viewing angles. Images snapped into view out of nowhere as she got within range. One moment there was nothing to see; the next, a seemingly tangible object was projecting into the air before her face. Parts of the images did seem to extend a few inches—even a foot or more—into space, but even the protruding parts were tethered to the vertical plane of the holographic plate.

And the colors were mostly limited to one or two primary hues. There was something unappealing, almost sickly, about the vivid boxes of pure red and pure green, standing out like the square panels of a comic strip.

Lighting in the exhibit rooms was low, and all windows had been blacked out. The holograms showed up clearly once they came into the viewer’s range. The largest plates, measuring three by four feet, were suspended from the ceiling. Smaller plates were mounted on black pylons that stood around the room at irregular intervals, or on small black pedestals. Above each installation was a ceiling
minispotlight
, the fifty-watt halogen bulb adjusted at a forty-five-degree angle to light the plate from the front and properly diffract the image.

All that Abby knew about holograms was that they were created by projecting a laser beam over the subject, and displayed by shining another ray of light on—or through—the resulting photographic plate. By some alchemy known only to physics buffs, the original object was reconstructed as a three-dimensional image, hauntingly real, encouraging the viewer to reach out and touch, but mocking these efforts with its insubstantiality.

According to the booklet, these were reflection holograms, viewable in ordinary incandescent light from a small light source. They were more practical for exhibition purposes than the older transmission holograms, which could be viewed only with the aid of a laser. They were suitable for home display, and were available for sale.

Abby wasn’t going to be making any purchases tonight. She had no idea who would see Piers Hoagland’s artwork as a decorative touch.

Hoagland’s principal motif was decay. He liked images of things that had been alive and now were not. Some of his subjects were harmless enough—fallen leaves rotting in a pile, fruit moldering in a cobwebbed bowl.

When he turned his attention to more advanced life-forms, things took a disturbing turn. A series of holograms addressed the subject of
roadkill
. Mangled and flattened squirrels, chipmunks, and possums hung in the air like ghosts. In one case the hologram had been artfully layered so that as the viewer moved past it, the dead animal dissolved through stages of putrescence, ending as a scatter of bones.

As she passed an artfully composed image of a garbage dump, a skeletal hand blinked in and out of sight. She had to shift back and forth until she saw it clearly. It was a single image embedded in the hologram, visible from just one angle. A subliminal effect.

The bone fingers seemed to be rising from the mound of refuse, clawing for the light.

Then there were the skulls. Abby found them in the alcove that constituted the base of the L—a long series of human skulls receding down both sides of the room like images in a hall of mirrors. Here the lighting was especially dim, the effect far more hallucinatory.

These images—if they
were
images—did not appear to be bound to the plane of any holographic plate. They did not merely extend into space from a flat background. They hung in space, connected to nothing, life-size, glowing in different shades of red, blue, and green.

She moved through the room. As she got closer to the nearest display, she understood what she was seeing. Each skull hovered inside a clear cylinder, and the cylinder was mounted on a black table that blended with the darkness. A low-wattage bulb shone down upon the cylinder from the ceiling.

The booklet, readable in the glow of her penlight, explained that these were cylinder-format holograms. The holographic plate, instead of being laminated onto a flat surface, was attached to a transparent cylinder. When illuminated from above, the plate focused an image in the center of the cylinder, an image that could be viewed from any angle.

She walked around the nearest skull, which, like the rest, floated at eye level. She could see it from front, sides, and back—even the crown of the head, if she stood on tiptoe.

The other skulls passed by as she made a circuit of the room. She’d assumed Hoagland had used the same skull over and over, but no, each was different, with its own peculiarities of wear and structure. Only the eyes were the same—or the eye sockets, rather. Dark ovoid holes that seemed to stare back at her as if taking her measure.

She was glad to get out of the skull room. She retraced her steps, holding her little cup of cheap wine and pretending to inspect the exhibited masterpieces, but actually looking for Faust’s stalker. Of course, she had never laid eyes on him, and her clients had provided a description that was only marginally more helpful than a Rorschach inkblot. Even so, she would know him when she saw him.

He would be the other person in the gallery who was pretending to look at the so-called art, while actually scanning the crowd.

Finally she stopped in the exhibition room nearest the foyer, where Piers Hoagland himself was holding court before a rapt throng of
culturati
.

“Holography,” he was saying in a voice clipped with a German accent, “is a metaphor for reality. The hologram is an image, but possessing the three-dimensional properties of the tangible. An illusion, yet seemingly real. Just as reality, in turn, is only a shared illusion, or perhaps I should say a shared
delusion
. An image collectively agreed on, ostensibly authentic, yet receding into mists and vapors when we approach too near.”

Abby surveyed the audience and saw one person who didn’t belong. A man alone, who was only pretending to listen, while actually watching the entrance.

Her man, of course.

Faust and Elise were right. He
was
nondescript. Average height, average build, hair neither dark nor light, no distinguishing facial marks. And he had none of the squirrelly energy she usually saw in these guys. He was calm and controlled, even as he awaited his quarry’s arrival.

He wore a charcoal blazer and an open-collared shirt. Though she saw no bulge of a firearm beneath the jacket, it was a safe bet he was armed. He might be wearing an ankle holster.

She estimated his age as mid- to late forties. A little old for a stalker. Most of them developed their obsession earlier in life.

Abby joined the group, standing near the man. She waited for an opportunity to initiate contact.

“The world,” Hoagland was saying, “is a projection, a false front, what your writer Melville called a pasteboard mask. ‘If man will strike,’ he wrote, ‘strike through the mask.’”

Abby tuned him out and studied Faust’s stalker on the periphery of her vision. The guy was edging closer to her. She forced herself to look away. She couldn’t risk letting him sense her scrutiny.

The vibe she got from him was slightly worrisome. She couldn’t put her finger on it, but she was now certain, with no room for doubt, that this was no ordinary nutcase. This was a man with experience, with skills. A pro, maybe. Could be a PI, a bounty hunter, a hit man ...

“You look skeptical.” A voice in her ear. His voice. He had come up alongside her so stealthily that she hadn’t noticed his proximity.