Never Fear (22 page)

“Gavin's office,” Harrison said.

I nodded. I hadn't thought of it before, but this was the most likely direction he would have run.

“The streets would have been empty at that time of night,” I said.

“Not entirely,” Harrison said.

I nodded. There had been a killer present.

Across Grand a sedan slammed to a stop with a screeching of brakes and a man in a dark business suit pounded on its hood and began yelling at the driver.

“Even if someone had been driving by they wouldn't have stopped,” I said. “Not for a shoeless man running down a deserted street in the middle of the night. They wouldn't have done any more than glance in his direction and look away.”

I sat for a moment trying as hard as I could to imagine the feel of the pavement on my brother's shoeless feet, the sound of his breathing as he ran north, but I couldn't.

I looked across the street. A homeless man stood in a doorway trying to escape the wind. His face, beard, and clothes were the same color as the dark stone of the building he stood next to.

“He would have been invisible,” I said.

Harrison was silent for a moment, his eyes focused on something across Grand.

“Maybe not to everything,” he said.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

He pointed across the street.

“The Standard Hotel,” I said.

“Look to the left of the building.”

The gate to the parking garage began to rise.

“The parking garage might have a security camera pointed out toward the street,” Harrison said.

I pulled across Grand and into the driveway of the garage below the hotel. On the ceiling of the sloping drive a camera pointed out toward the street. Harrison stared at it, calculating the angle and size of the lens.

“It might cover the nearest lane, maybe a little more,” he said.

“Enough to see the car that was following him?”

“It's a chance,” Harrison said.

“If he came this way, and hotel security has a tape . . .” I said.

Harrison stared at the camera for a moment. “That's a new camera. If the entire system is the same there wouldn't be a tape, it would be digital.”

“I still get pictures developed at the drugstore; you lost me,” I said.

“Images would be on a hard disk, not a tape. They can store endless amounts of data without recycling.”

“Meaning they would still have it.”

Harrison nodded.

The night captain of hotel security met us at the first level of the garage and walked us to the control room just beyond the laundry and employee locker rooms.

Harrison was right about the system—it was digital. The control room had a dozen monitors connected to cameras located throughout the hotel. The night captain pointed to the monitor showing the entrance to the garage.

“What night you interested in?” he asked.

I stared at the small monitor for a moment. A pedestrian walked by on the sidewalk, then the fleeting image of a car passed in an instant.

“Four nights ago, one o'clock on,” Harrison said.

The captain spoke Spanish to the man sitting at the controls and he typed in the commands.

“It'll come up on this monitor here,” the captain said, pointing to another screen.

The monitor flickered for a moment, then settled on the image of the empty street and the entrance to the garage. A time code in the corner of the frame counted out the minutes and seconds.

“Can you speed it up?” I asked.

The operator nodded and typed in another command. The minutes sped past like home video on fast-forward, though with no frame of reference, the image appeared static. Ten minutes in, a couple stopped directly in front of the camera and kissed, then walked on. A jogger passed three minutes later. A white sedan exited the garage and drove into the night, its taillights burning streaks of white into the image.

“What are you looking for?” the captain asked.

More seconds flashed by.

“Luck,” I said.

Twenty minutes passed unchanged. There was a blur of a car on the street at twenty-three minutes. Twenty-four, twenty-five. Another car.

“Stop,” Harrison said.

He stared intently at the monitor for a moment. “There was something.”

“I didn't see anything,” I said.

Harrison looked at the screen and nodded. “Take it back thirty seconds.”

The operator reversed it. Thirty, twenty, fifteen seconds.

“There,” Harrison said.

The operator shook his head. “I didn't see anything. ”

“I didn't, either,” I said.

The security captain nodded in agreement.

“Take it back another ten seconds, then play it forward at normal speed,” Harrison said.

The operator took it back and started it again.

“Can you freeze an image?”

“Yes.”

I stared at the empty image of the street, waiting for it to change, but it didn't.

“What did you see?” I asked.

Harrison leaned in toward the monitor. “There.”

I still missed it.

“Reverse it slowly.”

The operator reversed it.

“Freeze it,” Harrison said.

I looked at the monitor for a moment without seeing any change.

“The top of the screen,” Harrison said.

In the top right corner of the image were two dark shapes that at first were unrecognizable.

“Socks,” I whispered.

Harrison nodded. “He was crossing the street and ran through the corner of the image.”

I stared at the screen for a moment, then closed my eyes and I was there. His breathing would have been out of control, the asphalt jarring every bone in his body, but he didn't feel it. There was only escape, a voice in his head saying,
Run
. Until he saw the yellow sign glowing in the darkness and he thought of me.

“If he was being followed at this point, the car should pass within a minute, two at the most,” Harrison said.

I stared at the image of my brother's socks and couldn't escape the other horrible truth. Was our father running him down? A game of hide-and-seek, as if he were a child running through the backyard in his socks.

“Play it forward now, normal speed,” I said.

The operator hit play and John was gone in two steps. Thirty seconds passed with no car. Another ten, then twenty.

The headlight momentarily burned a white hole into the screen, then a white sedan cut across the top of the frame, only the left side visible.

“Back it up and freeze it when it's in frame,” Harrison said.

The operator reversed it until the car was centered across the top of the picture.

“It doesn't show the plate,” Harrison said.

Half of the passenger window was visible, but the reflected light made it impossible to see into the car.

“Can you tell what make it is?” I said.

Harrison shook his head.

“Looks like a Buick,” the captain said. "LeSabre, I think.”

The operator pointed to the corner of the windshield. “That's something.”

“Move in on it,” Harrison said.

The operator zoomed in on the windshield.

“Can you enhance it?” I asked.

The captain shook his head.

I stared at the corner of the windshield. There was something beyond it, a dull light shape in the darkness of the interior, but nothing more distinguishable than that.

“The best I can do is put it on disk,” the captain said.

“We can take it to Caltech,” Harrison said.

The image of my brother's socks on the pavement appeared again on the monitor.

“Would you like this image saved also?” the captain said.

I turned away and shook my head.

29

Andi James's address was a stark, gray, six-story warehouse three blocks from the river. There were no people on the streets here. No trendy bars. A small residential hotel sat on the corner a block away, its faded sign and red door looking like the grim make-believe of a Hopper painting.

We stepped out into the wind and crossed the street. The sound of a saxophone playing somewhere in the darkness drifted in and out with the gusts. James lived on the fourth floor. The windows in the building were all dark except for a few that flickered with dull light several floors up—candlelight.

“The wind took out the power,” Harrison said.

In the darkness a trash can rolling in the wind was gathering speed, coming right toward us, and then it stopped.

The entrance to the building was a heavy reinforced door with two glass panels. A two-by-four was stuck in the jamb, propping the door open. The security buzzer for each loft would have been knocked out by the power failure. There were sixteen lofts on each floor. James was in 414.

We stepped into the lobby and I turned on the flashlight. In the darkness I could hear muted voices from one of the lofts. The air held the odor of a homeless man who must have sought shelter from the wind.

We followed the wall down the center of the building to the stairs and started up. Somewhere above, a door opened and footsteps began falling on the metal stairs, coming down, getting louder. Then another door opened and the footsteps were gone. James's loft was in the northwest corner of the building overlooking the street, secured by a heavy industrial steel door.

“Unless she opens it, we're not getting in here,” Harrison said.

“If she had wanted to talk to us, she would have already,” I said. “She doesn't know who to trust.”

I took out my phone and dialed her number. From inside we heard her phone ringing. On the fifth ring a machine picked up. I recognized the voice as that of the woman I'd met in my brother's apartment.

“This is Lieutenant Delillo,” I said. “It's time we talk. I'll meet you at your loft in ten minutes.”

I hung up and Harrison leaned in close against the door and listened.

“Footsteps . . . I think you got her attention.”

Harrison stepped back as the lights of the building began to flicker on. On the other side of the door I heard the jangling of keys and then the dead bolt sliding in the lock. As the door opened James caught a glimpse of me and began to react.

“It's all right—” I started to say, but she was already rushing back into the loft in terror.

Harrison pushed the door the rest of the way open.

“I'm not here to hurt you,” I said, stepping inside.

A bank of windows lined the wall looking out to the north of downtown. In the flickering light I tried to locate her in the large open room but I couldn't.

“I need your help,” I said.

Harrison motioned to a door against the far wall. I stepped over.

“I can protect you,” I said.

From inside I could hear her rapid breathing—the cadence of fear.

“Who is that with you?” James said, barely managing to put words together.

“My partner.”

“How do I know?”

“You're the one who found Dana Courson dead, aren't you? And called me to set up that meeting so I would find her. You trusted me enough to call me. Trust me now.”

There was silence on the other side of the door, then it slowly swung open.

She stepped into the room as the lights stopped flickering and stayed on. From the look on her face I doubted she had slept more than ten minutes in the last four days. The same revolver I had seen at my brother's apartment was clenched in both hands at waist level.

Instinctively she looked around the room to make sure there wasn't another threat before stepping away from the security of the door. When she was satisfied that she was safe, she sat on the couch, placed the gun on the coffee table in front of her, and drew her legs in tight around her.

“How did you find me?” she finally asked.

“The Iliad Apartments. We traced you to Sloan.”

Panic began to rise again in her eyes.

“Had anyone else asked Sloan about me?”

I shook my head.

“Are you sure?” she demanded.

“Yes.”

The panic in her eyes began to pass.

“I need to know who you were working for.”

James took a breath and closed her eyes. “I think I was working for a killer.”

She opened her eyes and looked at me but couldn't hold contact. “I think people are dead because of what I did.”

“I need a name,” I said.

“I don't know. We never met. I never even talked to him, but from the way he wrote, the words he used, I think he was a cop.”

“How did you deliver information?”

“A Hotmail address. I sent the last information the day your brother died.”

“Have you tried it since then?”

She nodded. “It's gone. The account was closed.” She took a slow, ragged breath.

“Tell me about the job. Were you hired to follow my brother?” I asked.

James shook her head. “I was following Gavin.”

“The lawyer.”

She nodded.

“For how long?”

“A little over a week.”

Harrison looked at me. “The date of the last newspaper in the Iliad apartment would place it just before that.”

“You were following them the day they died?”

She nodded.

“Until the hospital. I lost John when he left.”

“You know who they saw the day they both died?”

James shook her head. “Just addresses of where they went.”