Gridlock: A Ryan Lock Novel (8 page)

Standing in the middle of Kevin’s room, he wished she had just told him about her brother from the get-go. He guessed, however, that to live the life she did, Raven had built defense upon defense around herself, and didn’t see the need to explain or justify her decisions. The stalker’s intrusion must have made things doubly difficult.

Lock closed the door softly on Superman, and walked into Raven’s bedroom. Here, the style was decidedly feminine. The bed was a California King with crisp white Egyptian sheets. In fact, pretty much everything in the room was white, including the walk-in wardrobe next to the en-suite. With a change to the wardrobe’s door, it would make an ideal panic room, even though there was barely space for Raven, Kevin and whichever bodyguard was on duty at the time. But it would only have to hold them safely for an hour at most. Even if the stalker was in the house, an hour was more than enough time for the LAPD SWAT team to move in and take him out.

Pulling out his cell phone, Lock made a call, arranging for someone to come round and replace the door.

He took another look around the closet. All of her clothes were arranged neatly on hangers or in drawers, and many items still had the plastic dry-cleaner wrappings covering them. Replacing the door would be a messy business. Some of this stuff would have to be moved into another room.

Lock heard footsteps behind him and looked over his shoulder to see Raven come into the bedroom.

‘Kevin seems to be hitting it off with your partner,’ she said.

Lock smiled. Everyone got on with Ty. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to need to clear this closet out so we can make it into a panic room.’

Raven looked nervous. ‘I thought I was paying you guys so it wouldn’t come to that.’

‘We already know that your stalker is violent and determined. We need to plan for every eventuality.’

Raven hesitated, then nodded reluctantly.

‘You want to help me clear it? Maybe move it into a spare room?’ he asked her.

‘Sure.’

Stepping past him into the closet, she scooped up a half-dozen outfits from the rail and dumped them on her bed. ‘I kind of need to go through this stuff anyway. Get rid of some of it.’

She stepped back into the closet, then looked away from the rail, where she’d just removed a bunch of clothes, to Lock. ‘Is this someone’s idea of a joke?’ she asked, her violet eyes cloudy, her face taut with fear.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I’m talking about this,’ she said.

Lock noticed that her voice was shaking, as she passed him a short black designer dress. A note was pinned to the front. Neatly etched in printed letters was a short message.

I thought you’d look nice in this.

12

The cops were back. Not in the same numbers that they’d been when Raven had discovered Cindy Canyon’s body in the trunk of her car – a dress with a handwritten note didn’t have quite the same pulling power as a headless corpse – but they were back just the same. A forensic tech removed the dress and note for further examination while a couple of detectives spoke to Raven in her bedroom. Lock let them get on with it.

Feeling uneasy, he went downstairs to check on Ty and Kevin. The discovery of the dress took things to a whole new level. For starters it meant that someone had been inside the house. Worse, there was no sign of a previous break-in, and no evidence of their presence, apart from the dress and the note. The police had already checked the doors for signs of someone picking the lock, but there were none of the telltale scratch marks left by an amateur. If that method had been used it had been used by someone who knew what they were doing.

Ty glanced at Lock from the couch.

‘How’s everything upstairs?’

‘All good,’ Lock said, aware of Kevin’s presence.

Ty clapped a hand on Kevin’s shoulder. ‘See? I told you, K-Lo, nothing to worry about.’

Kevin retreated into his TV show. It was impossible to know how much of this he was taking in but Lock guessed it was more than he was letting on.

Lock hadn’t been around someone with Down’s syndrome for any length of time before. In some instances they might have the mental age of someone much younger. At seventeen, Kevin came off like a nine-year-old, but anyone who knew anything about nine-year-olds was aware that they were far from dumb, and they picked up on stuff. In many ways they could be far more perceptive than adults or, at the very least, more willing to share their perceptions.

The front-door bell rang and Lock went to answer it, leaving Ty with Kevin. He was hoping it was the locksmith. The dress and the attendant note meant that changing the locks and improvising a safe room were priorities if they were to stay where they were.

Outside, Stanner, from the LAPD’s Threat Management Unit, stood sweating, his curly hair glistening in the afternoon sun. Lock opened the door.

‘Sure as hell doesn’t feel like late fall,’ Stanner said.

Lock stepped outside, waving towards the inside of the house. ‘We’re trying to keep as much of this from the kid as possible.’

‘I got you,’ Stanner said.

At that moment a van bearing the logo Valley Locksmiths drove up, and Lock gestured for the guy to pull into the drive before turning his attention back to Stanner.

Stanner combed his hair with his fingers. It sprang right back into place. ‘So, it looks like someone’s been inside the house,’ he said.

It was revealing that Stanner framed it as a statement rather than a question. ‘Sure does,’ said Lock, noncommittal. ‘But the question is, when are they coming back?’

‘You think they will?’ Stanner asked.

Lock didn’t buy Stanner’s doubt. He was doing what smart cops did sometimes, playing dumb.

‘He’s fixated,’ Lock said. ‘And determined. And he’s upping the stakes.’

Stanner made another futile pass at his hair. ‘We do have one lead.’

‘What happened to procedure?’

‘There’s some things I might not be able to share, but this is something I think you should know,’ said Stanner. ‘Her last appearance at the club out in Arizona. The guy who tried to get to her when she was on stage. She told you about that, right?’

‘You pick him up?’

‘Not yet. But we will. We have a name. I can’t give it to you right now.’

‘There’s only one thing that bothers me about it being him,’ Lock ventured.

‘And what’s that?’

‘There was also a guy in the parking lot who threatened her, but she told me he looked taller.’

Stanner shrugged. ‘It was dark. She was scared.’

‘So you think they might be the same guy?’

‘It’s all we have right now.’

Lock had to concede that it made some sort of sense. The guy in the parking lot could have transitioned from his fantasy to making contact with her, and he’d certainly been around to plant Cindy’s body in Raven’s car. And he supposed that the dress could have been put in Raven’s closet at any time in the past week without her necessarily noticing it, though how the culprit had managed to get into her house without leaving any other trace was anyone’s guess.

So that was the case for the prosecution. But the case for the defense was even more compelling. Lock was no profiler, but if you started from the point of view that criminal profiling, like close-protection work, boiled down to the rigorous application of common sense, then the guy was a million miles away from the person behind all this.

For a start, the person who had killed Cindy Canyon, then planted her head in a newspaper vending machine and her body in the trunk of Raven’s car, was extremely accomplished at what he was doing. He was methodical, a planner. Bat-shit crazy but bright. Trying to assault Raven in a packed strip joint was none of those things. And if he’d been in the parking lot, why hadn’t he hidden inside the car and abducted her there and then?

No, the real perpetrator was getting off on the terror and uncertainty that he was leaving in his wake. The torso and the dress were clear demonstrations that he could and would do what he wanted, when he wanted. More than anything, he was focused on demonstrating that he was in control, that all anyone else could do was react.

A pencil-thin middle-aged man had got out of the locksmith’s van and was opening the rear of the vehicle. He took out a tool box, then walked over to where they were standing. ‘So, what do you want changed out?’ he asked.

Lock glanced back towards the house. ‘Everything.’

13

It took three of them to move the panic-room door up the stairs and into Raven’s bedroom. Composed of a solid core with internal steel framing and non-removable hinge pins, it must have weighed close to two hundred pounds. By the time Lock, Ty and the locksmith had wrestled it to the landing they were soaked with sweat.

Lock walked back downstairs. Kevin was on the couch watching cartoons. Raven was on her cell phone, pacing the length of the house.

‘What do you mean your insurance won’t cover me?… Then let me speak to Jimmy… Okay, well, tell him to call me back.’

She terminated the call with a jab of her thumb. ‘Assholes.’

Lock waited for her to finish her tantrum. He didn’t ask what the call was about. If she wanted to share, he figured, she would. ‘I guess this isn’t a good time to give you this,’ he said, handing her the invoice for the newly delivered panic-room door.

She took the piece of paper and scanned it. ‘Three thousand bucks? For a door?’

‘That’s actually pretty cheap. I negotiated a fairly hefty discount. These things can go for as much as twenty grand. Short notice like this, I was kind of amazed that the guy negotiated at all. We got lucky.’

Raven went back into the living room and slumped into a chair, the invoice still in her hand. She rubbed at her temples with her thumbs. ‘The phone call. It was the club I was supposed to dance at later this week, pulling the plug.’ She had lowered her voice. Between the hammering from upstairs and the blaring television, Lock doubted that Kevin could hear what they were saying, but Raven wasn’t taking any chances.

She leaned forward in the chair, visibly stressed. ‘Will they take a credit card?’

Lock perched next to her. ‘Listen, I’ll get it out of my ten. You can pay me when this guy’s caught and you start working again.’

Raven turned her head towards him, her violet eyes hard and dark. ‘I can pay my own way,’ she said, getting up and stalking out of the room.

Lock sighed. He’d broken one of his own rules by assuming too much familiarity. That was a bad idea with any client. It was an extra-bad idea with someone like Raven, who fought so hard to retain control and keep people at a distance.

In less than a minute she was back. ‘I’ll cover the invoice. It’s not a problem. I don’t need your charity.’

‘It wasn’t charity. Someone who charges the kind of money I do doesn’t have much interest in charity.’

‘Me either,’ she said, her voice softer and more placatory. ‘Now, seeing as I’m paying you so much, can you give me a ride to pick up mail? Plus I need to get some groceries. All I managed to eat earlier was some cereal and I’m starving.’

Lock smiled. It seemed she had forgiven him. ‘Give me a second. I need to check on the locksmith and the guys fitting the panic-room door before we leave.’

‘Sure,’ Raven said. ‘I have to get changed anyway. I won’t be long.’

He walked into the living room where Ty was now watching Kevin, who in turn was watching TV. ‘Can you keep an eye on things while I’m gone? I have to run a few errands.’

Ty barely looked up. ‘Okay, brother. We’ll hold the fort here. Won’t we, Kev?’

Kevin glanced round. ‘Yeah,’ he said, and went back to his show.

‘Kev’s been telling me about this little hottie he’s been seeing.’

Kevin’s face broke into a wide grin. ‘She’s my bitch. Isn’t she, Ty?’

Lock shot Ty a look.

‘Dude, you might not want your sister or Wendy to hear you using that word,’ Ty said.

Kevin looked puzzled. ‘You used it.’

‘Yeah, Ty, you use it all the time,’ Lock said, laughing.

‘I know. But I shouldn’t. It’s disrespectful.’

Kevin’s head cocked to one side as he thought this over. ‘Okay. So I won’t say it again.’ Once more he went back to his show.

If Kevin was troubled by all these changes, he didn’t seem to be showing it. Lock wondered if Raven had overplayed the effect that relocating temporarily would have on him.

The sound of footsteps on the stairs made him turn around. She was wearing boot-cut jeans, a plain black T-shirt and a pair of sneakers. She had removed any last vestiges of makeup and her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, which emphasized her natural beauty. He caught Ty staring at her, slack-jawed.

She smiled hesitantly at Lock. ‘I heard you talking to Ty earlier about blending into the background. It’s not exactly what I’m used to doing but I thought now might be a good time to give it a try.’

The way she looked, Lock wasn’t sure she was capable of disappearing into the background. ‘Ready?’ he said, after a moment.

She nodded, and turned to Kevin. ‘Best behaviour, okay?’

‘Sure,’ Kevin grumbled.

She walked over and gave him a hug, then followed Lock, who was standing by the front door. ‘Now I’m ready.’

14

The remaining photographers camped outside the house kept a respectful distance as Lock emerged into the bright sunshine with Raven. News of his confrontation with Raul, the paparazzo who’d pursued them on the freeway, had spread. They got off a few shots but left it at that, and Lock used the Range Rover’s powerful engine to quickly lose the one photographer who made a half-hearted attempt at following them.

The place where Raven directed her business mail was a small drop-in store in a nearby strip mall. The drive took less than ten minutes and passed in silence, which didn’t surprise him. She had probably experienced more white-hot fear over the past forty-eight hours than many people did in a lifetime. A narrowly avoided assault or rape in a parking lot and a body in the trunk of the car were bad enough – single events that might well lead to a rippling anxiety capable of overwhelming a human being’s ability to function. But, Lock guessed, what was really spooking Raven now was the knowledge that someone had been inside her home. Burglary was seen by the law as a crime against property. In reality, it was far more than that. The intruder had gifted the dress but stolen any shred of her belief in her home as a sanctuary. It would take a long time for that to return, if it ever did.