Keeping Watch (29 page)

Allen was speechless, as if he'd just been fluently cursed to perdition by a parakeet. She saw it, but this time her smile was a wintry thing that belonged on a face decades older.

“Mr. Ellis, despite what the press would have us believe, bad kids are created, not born. When a teenager murders a child or shoots up a school, it isn't because he's innately wicked, it's because his parents are. I believe this in my bones. I even have the optimism to trust that James O'Connell is not too old to be saved from his father's influence. But that doesn't mean that I have to close my eyes to wickedness, or to pretend that I like a child I feel sorry and responsible for.”

“What . . . what didn't you like about the boy?” he demanded, but that was too strong for the teacher in Karin Rao, who hastened to correct him.

“I should say less ‘dislike' than ‘mistrust.' And even with that, it would be very difficult to explain why I do not. James simply made me uneasy. And when I had talked to his father, I began to understand why. Please, Mr. Ellis, if you are in any position to do so, get the boy some help. Before he hurts someone.

“And before you ask, no, he has not done so yet, not that I know.”

“But you think he could?” Allen asked, but she was turning away.

“I hope I'm wrong,” she said firmly. “Good night, Mr. Ellis.”

There was nothing he could do but say good night to the closed door. And, as he reached to shut off the pen-shaped tape recorder in his shirt pocket, to add under his breath, “But I would have sworn that Jamie liked you.”

He drove back to the motel without paying much attention to the streets. Twenty-four hours earlier, he'd arrived with the simple intention of pinning down O'Connell's location on August the twelfth, but since then he'd uncovered an unsuspected side to the man. He'd known O'Connell was a sadistic abuser, but now it was as if Allen had caught a glimpse of some creature in the undergrowth. A tiger—or a two-legged killer in black pajamas. He shook off the image and speeded up: too much imagination.

Back at the motel, an email from Alice gave him seven numbers, with no time restrictions or area code. He glanced at his watch, saw that it was barely ten-fifteen, and punched the digits into his cell phone. He got the notes and recording of a wrong number, so he hung up and tried it beginning with the local San Jose code. This time a woman said hello into his ear, with music and voices in the background.

“I'm sorry to call so late, but I was given this number by a friend—” he began.

The woman interrupted. “Is now good for you?”

“I . . . sure.”

“Fourth and Pine, there's a phone booth.”

“Sorry?” he said, but he was talking to a dead line. He sighed; too many years of this damned cloak-and-dagger stuff. He looked at the screen of his laptop, wondering if he was expected to memorize the number and consign the email to electronic oblivion, the modern equivalent of eating a secret message. But in the end he just shut down the connection before changing his dancing clothes for the dark jeans, navy sweatshirt, and soft-soled shoes he'd need later.

At Fourth and Pine there was indeed a phone booth, tacked up to the side wall of a huge furniture retailer. The phone was ringing as he pulled up, a lonesome tremor in the night. Yanking hard on his brake, he jumped out of the car and sprinted to the booth before it could stop.

He snatched the receiver up and said, “Have you been calling all this time, or did you see me drive up?”

“I knew how long it would take you to get there,” the mystery woman replied. She had a very nice voice—businesslike, but low enough to be sexy.

“So where am I going now?”

“Are you armed?”

“Why does everyone ask that?” Allen complained. “Do I look like someone who goes around with a gun in his belt?”

“Are you?”

“No, I'm not armed. So if you want me to shoot someone for you, you're out of luck. All I could do is rip off this damned receiver and beat them with it.”

“Don't do that, this is one of the few pay phones in the valley that still takes incoming calls. You see the sign for the liquor store?”

Allen looked down the street, then reversed to look the other way. “Yes.”

“Drive in that direction. Halfway between you and it, there's an alley with a white mailbox on the right. Come down that and park in the garage.”

The phone went dead again. Clearly, this woman had learned her social skills from Alice.

He got back in his car, found the alleyway, and drove down it to an open ground-floor parking area that held five other cars. He got out of his rental car, locked it, and waited for further instructions. On the other side of the garage, a rumbling started up, then stopped. Elevator doors parted.

Looking at the small, enclosed, brushed-steel cubicle, Allen began to wish he actually was armed.
That was Alice's email,
he told himself.
There's no reason to think this is some kind of a trap. Get in the elevator.

He did, in the end, step into the elevator, but it took an effort to allow the doors to slide shut without leaping forward to thrust his hands between them; he was sweating when they opened again at four, the top floor. He swallowed, and put his head out.

The high, featureless corridor could have been anything from legal offices to the service entrances of retail shops, completely institutional except for a peculiar five-foot-wide wrought-iron chandelier overhead, its ornate black vines and leaves studded with a dozen or so pointy bulbs. Two doors on this side of the corridor, the elevator and one with a knob; five metal doors on the other, all painted the same pale yellow as the walls and nothing to distinguish them, not even numbers. He straightened, stepped out, and allowed the elevator to close behind him, expecting one of the yellow doors to draw itself open as dramatically as the elevator had. They remained shut. With a mental shrug, he walked down the corridor to the one at the far right and grasped the knob; to his surprise, it turned unhindered.

He stepped into a dim, air-conditioned room the size of the first-floor parking garage, a combination of living space and high-tech dream. Two of the walls resembled a NASA control center: a mosaic of screens, printers, long metal desks with multiple hard drive towers, and assorted machines whose purposes he couldn't immediately identify. Half of them were on a raised platform, either to incorporate an original difference in the floor level or to provide electricity and ventilation for the machines. The platform had three ramps, one at either end and one in the center. The third wall seemed to be where the inhabitants ate and slept, with the only screened-off space in the entire area behind a full-length maroon leather sofa. Above the kitchen table was an enormous flat-screen television on which a network drama was playing—the source, he decided, of the noise he'd heard behind the woman's voice. The center of the giant room was an open expanse of polished wood, clear of furniture. As Allen stepped away from the door, he saw that all five entrances opened directly into the space. He also noticed that the doors were extremely solid-looking, and that the wall into which they were set, which from the other side had seemed to be everyday Sheetrock, was nearly as substantial as its doors. The locks on the doors themselves would have occupied a locksmith for hours.

“I don't like unwanted visitors,” said the low voice from behind him. He turned, and saw that it was low in more ways than pitch: Its owner, a slim, pale, blond woman in black jeans, orange turtleneck sweater, and bright yellow shoes, was seated in a wheeled chair more like a lunar landing module than a wheelchair. Allen wasn't even certain the woman was paraplegic—it could have been some mad techie's idea of a desk chair. “You're Allen?”

“I am.” He went forward and shook her hand, which was strong and cool. His eyes glanced across her legs, but he couldn't tell if they were useless or not.

“I'm Gina.”

“I can see why you're a little concerned about armed invaders,” Allen told her. There must have been nearly a million dollars' worth of hardware on display, to say nothing of the wheeled chair.

“It's also that the alarm system gets upset if it sees a gun. Takes me a while to calm it down again.”

“I didn't see a metal detector.”

“Built in to the elevator. It tells me you have a small multibladed work knife in your jeans and a metal pen in your T-shirt pocket.”

“Which means I can either fix your chair or write you a note,” he said, glad that he'd left the tape recorder in the car.

“Neither of which is necessary at the moment, but thanks for the offer. Alice said you need some information.”

“You're an information specialist.” Allen was feeling two steps behind the woman.

“Isn't that why you're here?” She sounded a little impatient.

“Maybe you could tell me why I'm here. Last I know, I asked Alice to get a newspaper friend of hers to fake me up an ID so I could ask questions. I take it you're not the
Mercury News
crime reporter?”

“I could be if you want,” she answered. “But only online.”

“You're a hacker?”

“Please, that's so passé,” she said, offended. “I'm a player.”

“And I've had a long day,” he told her. “What do you know about Mark O'Connell, partner and very possibly only employee of a company called Revista?”

The chair pivoted and shot off to a nearby terminal, and Gina shifted programs, entered the name, and set to work, tossing information over her shoulder at him as it came up. “Juvenile record, sealed; one arrest at age nineteen for check forging, at age twenty-two he was investigated for a hit-and-run but it never went to trial. Parents died in a house fire when he was twenty-six, faulty wiring in some Christmas lights, left him a quarter of a million in property and life insurance. Police called out twice for domestic violence disputes, no charges. Wife committed suicide five years ago, shot herself with one of his guns while their kid was in the house.”

“That's not right,” Allen cut in. “The boy found her when he got home from school.”

“Says here he was in his bedroom. I can check on it, if you want.”

“If you don't mind.”

“Have to be tomorrow.”

“That's fine.” He couldn't see that it made any difference, but disparities in stories always raised red flags.

Her fingers flew some more, and the display onscreen changed again. “Owns his house, refinanced last year when the rates went down, never declared bankruptcy, still—” The computer gave a small bleep; she leaned forward to read the contents of an inserted box, then swiveled her head to look at him. “Does your man own a plane?”

“Yes, he does. Why?”

In answer, she picked up a small remote control from the long desk, and pointed it toward the living quarters. The big screen's shot of a war zone gave way to a news desk and two polished people with the stock expression denoting Personal Tragedy. She thumbed up the volume.

”—on his first flight since his son disappeared last May. Workers at the airfield told Channel Forty-seven that O'Connell had seemed in good spirits this morning, telling them that he was looking forward to flying again after all these weeks, and mentioning during the preflight check that it was the first time he'd been in the air since his son disappeared. His son, we were told, often accompanied his father, and in fact had done so the day before the boy mysteriously vanished on the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend. According to the FAA, the plane gave no signs of difficulties until it disappeared from the traffic controllers' screens at six thirty-seven this morning. The Coast Guard is searching the area for wreckage, but a spokesman said that, if the plane did go down in the place where it was last recorded, there are several hundred feet of water there, making it possible that the wreckage, and O'Connell's body, may never be found.”

The female anchor made some noises about how tragedy seemed to plague certain families, although it was obvious that she had her own stories pressing on her mind. Allen was thinking that it was a good thing he'd talked to Kluger and Karin Rao before the news got around, when Gina muted the television screen. They looked at each other in silence.

“Well,” Allen said. “That puts a somewhat different light on the matter.”

“Do you want me to continue digging around for O'Connell's history?”

“Oh yes, I certainly do. But I'm going to have to go. You don't need me, do you?” She gave him a look that said it all, and he nodded. “Can I call you on that same number tomorrow?”

“That number's gone. Just come by. Park where you did. Use the emergency phone in the other elevator to call up.”

She went back to her terminals, and Allen turned to go. However, faced with the unnecessarily rich choice of doors, he spoke again to Gina's back.

“Why do you have four doors more than you need?”

“Mind games,” she replied absently. “I like to see which one people choose.”

He let himself out the nearest one, and as the elevator opened, he glanced up at the wrought-iron monstrosity. He had no doubt that it was bristling with pinhole cameras; he also knew that, without a ladder, he'd never spot them. Of course, he couldn't blame Gina for being a little phobic about her visitors. And it wouldn't surprise him to find that the snug little elevator had been wired with a killer voltage, as well.

One thing about this job he would miss: You sure met some interesting people.

It was now after eleven o'clock, and although there was still traffic, the side streets were all but deserted. When he reached the freeway, Allen turned the car west, coming off at the same exit he'd first used back in May, when
deadboy
had been just a name on a screen. Now, he was the dark-eyed center of a growing enigma.

Chapter 26

Allen drove past the guardhouse at the entrance to O'Connell's development, relieved to see the guard sitting with his feet up reading a book, looking too relaxed for a man who'd had a stream of police investigators coming and going through his gates. The cops would come, of that Allen was certain, but it looked as though they had decided to wait to see what the Coast Guard turned up in the morning.

The hills behind the community were still undeveloped, although that would not last for long, given the history of Silicon Valley's transformation out of the vast plum and apricot orchards Allen remembered from his youth. He drove past the end of the development's ten-foot-tall cement-block walls, which aside from their height presented no great challenge to intruders, and pulled into the lesser road he'd discovered in May. It was a fire road originally, now used as access to a property higher up; by the accumulated dust on the gate's padlock, his visits back in May had been the last time anyone had driven through here. The padlock sprang open, and Allen got the gate closed and his car around the next turn before another vehicle passed by.

He stood outside the car, feeling the night. The engine ticked gently; the sing of crickets started up again. A dog barked, but it was a long way off, no threat. The air was still, and as he'd expected, the full moon along with the valley's light pollution gave resolution to the hillside. He checked to make sure his cell phone was off, then zipped it into the waist pack with the rest of his equipment. He daubed his cheeks and forehead with greasepaint, and when his eyes were adapted to the light, he started up the deer path that followed the high walls.

Half a mile along he came to the pair of innocent-looking branches he'd left at the base of the tree that had held his receiver. Wedged together against the concrete blocks, they made a step high enough to boost him to the wall's top. There he paused, resting on his elbows, until he was satisfied that he wasn't about to drop down on top of a roaming dog or a gathering of teenagers engaged in one or more illicit activities.

Lights burned in the O'Connell house, one in the television room (where the curtains were closed) and the other upstairs. Back in May, he'd found that those two lights were hooked up to clocks; if they went off soon—the ground floor at eleven-thirty, the upstairs room ten minutes later—he'd take it as an indication that the house was empty. He settled his back against a tree in the yard, breathing in the rich smells of cut grass (the other gardening service no doubt had been happy to see the end of the cheap intruder) and an evening barbecue that mingled with the dry chaparral odors spilling off the hill behind him. A bat worked the sky over the lawn; on the other side of the wall, coyotes yelped.

The lower light went off, and at eleven-forty, the upper. He got to his feet, slipped on a pair of gossamer latex gloves, and passed like a night animal over the well-watered lawn to the house.

In May, he'd been put off by the aggressive alarm system, and satisfied himself with planting his bugs on the outside of the windows. Tonight, he would see how far he could get. He badly wanted to do a reconnaissance of the inside of the beast's lair, needed a feel for exactly what the boy had been living with. He had no idea how he was going to get through the security alarm, could only hope that his mentor in the art of burglary could help guide him through it. Jamie would of course know the code, but the last thing Allen wanted was to ask the boy. Besides, O'Connell might well have changed it after his son disappeared. In any case, Allen had to try to bypass it.

But the alarm was not on.

Allen frowned at the box, searching for a trick. The alarm had to be on—in the two weeks in May that he'd had the house under surveillance, he had never seen O'Connell go any farther than the mailbox without locking the house up. And Mrs. Mendez did not have the code: Allen had seen her sheltering from the rain one morning until her boss came to let her in. When O'Connell was out of town, Mrs. Mendez stayed in the house with Jamie, having groceries delivered; when O'Connell was home, she slept at her own house ten miles away.

But the system's light was shining green for off, not red for armed.

Moving without a sound, his senses at high alert, Allen crept up to the house's back door. He felt for the knob, and was somewhat relieved to find it locked. He eased open the zip of his waist pack and bent to work.

The dead bolt was sturdy, but nowhere near as complicated as some he'd coaxed open. When he tried the knob again, the door obligingly opened into the mudroom and its kitchen beyond, with no sign of a hidden alarm having been triggered. Still, he left the bolt unlocked, and took a spoon from the sink to wedge between the door and its jamb, an impromptu alarm.

The house felt empty—certainly there were no sounds, no snores or distant television. Still, he would check all its rooms, just in case his instincts were wrong. The street lamp at the end of the drive gave sufficient light, even when the drapes were drawn, for him to make his way through the front rooms without a flashlight.

Next to the kitchen was a breakfast room, followed by a formal dining room with long, shiny wood table and a display of crystal and china behind glass doors. Then a hallway between the front door and a wooden staircase, across which Allen found a room with drapes heavy enough to cut off all outside light. His narrow flash played across a formal living room furnished with the sorts of tautly upholstered chairs that no one ever sat on, a shelf unit filled with leather-bound and probably never-read books, and a collection of small naked female figurines arranged across the fireplace mantel and on display shelves. He went back out into the hallway, then to the room at the back of the ground floor, at whose window he had placed his sole camera. The television room had comfortable-looking leather sofas and reclining chairs. Behind a rollaway screen was the television that he'd known was there, having spent hours watching people stare at a point just below his spying lens. The screen was nearly as big as Gina's, and next to it was a sleek sound system with enough controls to keep an engineer entertained, its speakers the size of small refrigerators. One end of the room was a wet bar, with a long mirror behind it, a dozen shapes of glasses, and a collection of alcohol more extensive than a lot of commercial bars Allen had been in. All the booze was top of the line. There was no shotgun under the bar.

Back in the hallway, the intruder silently opened the three remaining doors that clustered under the rising stairway. One room contained a toilet and hand basin, tiled in gilt and mirror; the next was a closet with vacuum cleaner, coats, and a tangle of shoes. The third opened onto the kitchen; just inside it was the room used by Mrs. Mendez on her nights here, small, furnished with a narrow bed and set of drawers, the closet holding little more than slippers, an elderly raincoat, and a few changes of clothing. The room was windowless, and had its own toilet and shower. Allen left the servant's quarters and went back down the hallway.

The oak stairway was solid and did not creak under his weight. To the left of the stairs was O'Connell's bedroom: king-sized four-poster bed with a cover of unbleached raw silk, a lot of expensive clothes in the closet, a lot of expensive marble in the bathroom, and an assortment of designer colognes by the sink. Allen stuck his head into the walk-in closet, but nobody leapt out at him from its cedar-scented interior. The next door opened onto an empty storage space, duplicating the shape of the servant's bedroom below it. It had been wallpapered at one time, but the paper looked as though shelves had once been mounted to the walls, since removed. The floor was dented and stained, but the only things in it were a carton of Christmas decorations and a massive cast-iron tree stand.

The next door stood open, or so Allen thought until he got close up to it and found the door missing altogether. This, then, must be Jamie's room. What had the boy said? That his father “took the door off” in October as punishment for illicit reading; looking at the jamb, Allen gave a silent whistle and revised his picture of a man with a Phillips head screwdriver. A crowbar, maybe, or a fireman's axe. Allen wouldn't have been surprised to hear that a bear had gone after it—the frame was gouged, split, still raw-looking ten months after the event: Absolute rage had ripped the door bodily from its hinges. Allen could only imagine what the eleven-year-old child cowering inside the room could have been thinking, hearing that storm of fury literally beating down the door as it came after him. As for what must have happened once the door was down—Allen drew back, to look at the next room.

The door to the bathroom was missing, too, although that had come down more gently, leaving only the screw holes. Walking back to stand at the entrance to the father's bedroom, Allen saw that from there, both toilet and shower were fully exposed, and the only part of Jamie's bedroom not immediately visible was the desk to the left of the door; four steps forward, and that came into view as well. The sole privacy Jamie would have had was if the steam built up on the clear glass shower doors. Allen had a mental image of a pale, skinny, self-conscious adolescent scurrying into the exposed shower, or standing at the toilet in an agony of humiliation lest the housekeeper or his father happen by. Allen pushed that image away.

The next room along was a guest room that looked as if it had been furnished from a display and never actually used. Then came the last room, sharing a wall with O'Connell's bedroom. The bug Allen had planted against the dining room window, directly beneath this room, had cut out regularly. He'd thought it was a glitch, something that happened with depressing regularity to complex electronics, but seeing the two inches of solid oak and electronic keypad on this upstairs room, he began to suspect that the cause had been the automatic cutout he'd wired into the bugs, triggered by the occasional sweep of an antisurveillance device. For this last room was, without a doubt, O'Connell's home study. Unlike the house alarm, the keypad on this room was armed and active. Allen sighed, and took the cell phone out of his waist pack.

Allen always found it amusing that, although most of the contacts provided by Alice were women (no surprise there), most of the assistance he had developed on his own came from men. It made sense, he just wasn't sure why. At any rate, this particular contact was someone he'd almost literally bumped into on a job, Allen going into a house one night to plant his devices, the other a dark shape on his way out. Fortunately, the dark shape didn't turn out to be a crackhead carrying a gun; more fortunate yet, the startling situation had, after a tense moment, tickled the man's sense of humor. He'd begun by whispering to Allen that if it was the contents of the safe he was after, there hadn't been that much to begin with. When Allen assured the burglar that he was welcome to the safe, Dave had become curious. He'd stuck around to watch Allen plant his miniature cameras in the living room, the study, and the hallway outside the bedrooms (the inhabitants of the house sleeping all the while). He'd even reset the alarm for Allen when he was finished. Afterward they'd retired to a nearby bar for a couple of beers, and—well, Allen had acquired a new mentor. If anyone could lead him through the intricacies of the O'Connell security system, it was Dave. And since he'd suspected he might need some help with the house, he'd taken the precaution of giving Dave the O'Connell name and address a couple of days before, so he could research the system.

Dave answered with a growl, although Allen knew he'd been awake. Dave was a nocturnal creature even when he wasn't on a job.

“Got an electronic keypad for you,” was Allen's greeting, and he gave the man what details he could see of it. “Internal,” he added.

“How'd you get through the outside one?” Dave asked.

“It wasn't set.”

“Trusting citizens,” he grunted. “God bless 'em.”

Allen didn't think there was any point in distracting Dave with the fact that O'Connell might not be your everyday trusting citizen. It would only worry him.

“Try these,” Dave told him, and began producing a list of four-digit numbers for Allen to try punching into the pad. Fortunately, the pad was not one of those that freeze up after a set number of unsuccessful tries, or Allen would not have had a chance. They tried the O'Connell Social Security number—last four numbers, first four, first and last pairs—and the birth dates of the man himself, his wife, and Jamie. They tried turning the numbers backwards, they tried elements of the man's driver's license number, they tried his wedding anniversary and the date of his mother's birth. Twenty minutes later, Dave was beginning to run out of ideas, and neither of them had to say that the longer they stayed on the air, the greater the risk of some idiot with a scanner tuning in.

“You sure you don't want to bash it down?” he asked hopefully.

“It's two inches of hardwood here, I'd need a jackhammer. You got any more?”

“A few, and after that I'll just have to talk you through surgery.” This was a thing Dave hated, since his skills were closely linked with his own fingertips. He read off the address of the Revista office, the Revista phone number, and a number that appeared a lot on the O'Connell phone bills to George Howard, whom Allen had pegged as the bodybuilder assistant. Dave's voice was wearing thin when he gave Allen the suggestion “Try eleven-sixteen.”

The light went green. “Christ, that did it. What the hell is eleven-sixteen?” Allen asked, straightening to ease his aching spine.

“That's the day his wife committed suicide,” Dave told him flatly.

Allen's gloved hand froze on the doorknob. “His wife's death?”

“Weird, huh? But it's open?”

“It's open. Thanks. I'll be talking to you.”

Allen turned off the phone and zipped it into his waist pack. What could it mean, to use the date your wife had shot her brains out as the security code on your private office?