Overfall (28 page)

There was just a ripple across Sam’s cool.

“And you came all the way out here to talk about it.”

Sam looked at her, saying nothing, knowing that there were many weak words and few that were strong. He could talk about his need for privacy and that would be nearly indistinguishable from whining. Reasoning would be obvious and trivial, for there would be no logic on this subject that hadn’t already occurred to her.

So he watched her. As he did he noticed the brown amber of her eyes, and the way she half smiled but without the usual confidence. Normally there was a great evocative force to her personality, but she was not using it. Instead she seemed like an accomplished but vulnerable woman. Once again her hair was studied chaos with even more curly ringlets. There was a softness about her that made him want to crush her in his arms and whisper things. He could imagine that she would giggle softly in his ear and tease him with her fingers.

Apparently on impulse she stepped forward and kissed him, tentatively at first, then a little harder. Sam responded, then stopped.

“So?”

“I suppose we should ... I know I kissed you yesterday and it was good. And this was better. But I’m thinking that until we get this figured out ...”

She kissed him again, her tongue like a butterfly, her lips firm. He let his arms stay around her for a long moment, then released her.

“That was just one for the road until you get it worked out,” she said.

“You’re an amazing woman.”

“And?”

“We’ve got to put your brother first. This ... kind of thing will slow us down.”

“I see.”

“What do you see?”

“That must be the right thing—keeping our relationship professional. It’s just that ...” She stopped and took a deep breath. “Well, of course I understand.” She gnawed on her lip. “I still expect you to accompany me to the studio party.” But she smiled when she said it so that he knew it was a tease and not a weight around his neck.

“I have been thinking about it. Maybe I could take you. Maybe you could say I was like the friendly security man or something. But it’s still a bad idea.”

“Shall I take that as a complete capitulation?” she joked.

“And might we add the little detail that you will never consider talking about me? I mean other than the security-man story at the party.”

She batted her eyes to tease him. “You are as safe with me as I am with you.” She kissed him on the cheek and ran her hand over his bicep. “So what were you going to tell me? Your tone suggested something important. You talk while I start on the granola.”

Using a mixture of oats and almond and walnut fragments, she ladled on some canola oil and some honey, spread it on a pan, and popped it into the hot oven to bake.

“You’ve been asking about my former love interest,” Sam said.

“I’m busted. Peter is a statesman and a snitch. But this can’t be what you were going to tell me.”

Sam paused and thought about how to approach it There was a tension in her body.

“To understand about our latest discovery you need to understand about my former love interest. And the death of my son.”

She had heard the tone of his voice change—her eyes showed it. She sat down. He joined her.

“It was an assignment. Suzanne King—you know enough about her, I assume?” She nodded. “Suzanne had a stalker. He was coming onto her property and taking pictures. Even intimate pictures. My son and I set a trap at her house to catch him. ...”

A droplet of sweat hit the yellow pad, slightly fuzzing the blue line on which it landed. Sunlight through ten-foot windows was broiling Sam alive, and the flak jacket under his shirt exacerbated the effect.

He pressed his eye to the camcorder that scanned the gardens, large veranda, and pool. The kidney-shaped Olympic-size swimming pool lay translucent blue—the South Seas hue created by tiny square ceramic tiles laid across its bottom.

Suzanne, who rarely consented to wear less than one-piece bathing attire in her movies, swam in a thong bikini, doing a slow crawl with perfect form, just as her father, now deceased, had taught her. The August sun beat on her tawny arms and glistened her splashes. Sam found her as beautiful as any woman ever created by God or gazed upon by man.

Sam’s son, Bud, moved along the terraced hillside among the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, myrica, sunflowers, japonica, and lilacs, looking for the same thing that now eluded Sam.

Every inch of Sam remained totally alert. Three feet away was the door to the veranda, cracked open. He had been very clear with Suzanne that there was an element of danger. Personally he didn’t like using this seminude swim as bait. For some time he had felt that Suzanne’s stalker was mentally deteriorating. It was evident in the notes sent by this strange left-handed peekaboo artist. The laws of testosterone, buttressed by the shoe size of the print in the garden, dictated that it was a man fond of composing his notes with letters clipped from magazines.

The intimate and candid pictures the stalker had taken of Suzanne, and thereafter shared with her and others on the Internet, were at once compelling in their beauty and composition and at the same time chilling. It was inconceivable that someone could get so close so frequently and remain undetected. There was no technology to be found, no miniature cameras or telescopic lenses, on the premises. Sam had been careful to search.

Judging from the angle of the sun apparent in the photographs, the stalker made his daylight forays around 2:00 in the afternoon. One picture had been shot through the louvers ventilating the dressing room in the poolhouse complex—a striking nude. Sam had received a disturbed look from Suzanne when he jokingly complimented her. Sam was always serious, but seldom acted that way except at moments of peak vulnerability for his clients; when they wept he tended to ease up on the dry humor.

In searching for the stalker they had considered gardeners, housekeepers—anyone with regular access. They had all checked out negative.

At one end of the pool were small boulders and palms, at the other end marble statues of recent vintage amongst solid granite tables with blue and yellow parasols. To the far side of the pool, similar tables were placed under a massive pergola eighty feet long by fifteen wide and thick with vine-sprung leaves.

Hills the color of wheat were set off by an occasional dark-barked green-leafed oak—except in places like this estate, where gardeners used irrigation and soil amendments to defy the earth and climate. This ten-million-dollar home had been constructed on a natural bench carefully groomed with brick-fronted terraces in the Hollywood Hills.

Sam used his camera to scan the four-thousand-square-foot poolhouse annex, then swept up the hillside until he saw the boulders and palms on the far left. Monotonously he repeated the sweep, stopping every minute or so to look with his naked eye. It wasn’t enough to see the intruder; Sam had to capture his presence on film. That way the local police, who were at this point thoroughly buffaloed, could be convinced that they were looking for something more than one of Suzanne’s publicity stunts. Sam believed her. But even he was finding it taxing.

Normally he would farm out this sort of chase-’em-down job to someone like Shohei, or with a little more training from Shohei, perhaps his son, Bud. Usually his contracts were far more sophisticated than catching a clever stalker. But this fellow had so successfully eluded authorities and private detectives that Suzanne had finally persuaded Sam to solve her problem, paying his rather extraordinary fees.

More than anything else this stalker was patient, willing to wait weeks to get a single good photo. Last time, the final straw, he had photographed Suzanne painting her toenails in the bedroom. Carefully reviewing all the photos and the dates when they were apparently taken, Sam concluded that the man had a penchant for sneaking around the day before a full-moon night. Everything about this case was utterly bizarre. Sam knew they were dealing with a badly twisted mind, and it worried him.

He studied the buildings, the grounds, the pool, squinted, and did it again. Nothing.

The stalker seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing when to arrive. Suzanne, wanting to end it, thought the swim in the scanty suit, the day before a full moon, would make marvelous bait if the stalker had any means of observing it.

Sam had placed banks of infrared motion detectors and video cameras. Suzanne kept a dog, Grendel, making it seemingly impossible for a stranger to enter the grounds without triggering either a red blinking light on Sam’s control panel or a yapping dog alert.

But there was something Sam hadn’t figured out and he knew it. This guy had an edge that nobody understood.

Sam picked up the radio. “Bud, come back.” While he waited he made another sweep with the video.

Sam had hoped Bud would be drawn to a slightly more intellectual calling, but it was not to be. Bud liked the most literal side of fighting bad guys and there was no dissuading him. Close all their lives, Bud and Sam were inseparable. They both loved the daredevil stuff in their spare time and more often than not did it together.

Because he’d had longer to work at it, Sam was by most measures stronger than Bud, but at forty he was no longer faster. “Come back, Bud,” he spoke again into the microphone, slightly concerned. Nothing. Bud was normally back to him in three seconds. Maybe bad radio. Just then, Grendel the Doberman began an ugly bark in the dense garden behind the poolhouse.

“Bud, you out there? I need a comeback.”

A light turned red on Sam’s panel. Abruptly the dog went silent. Someone was in the garden. And the light indicated that someone was in the house. But that was impossible.

Suzanne swam, oblivious.

“Bud, you there?”

Damn.

Sam moved toward the door; time to get Suzanne out of the pool. Still nothing more from the dog. Before walking out the veranda door, he glanced back—no more lights were blinking on the control panel, so it was unlikely that whatever triggered the sensor was still in the house.

He slipped out the veranda door, holding the mike to the PA system.

“Suzanne,” he said.

She stopped swimming.

As if by magic, a man appeared, sitting on the roof of the poolhouse. He held a camera mounted on a crossbow. Sam swung the camcorder onto the pool-house roof and punched the police call button on the alarm pad. That done, he sprinted onto the veranda and down the six feet of steps.

“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” an amplified voice said.

Sam froze. The intruder was talking through the stereo system piped around the pool. If the gunman’s finger moved a fraction, Suzanne’s perfect body would be sliced with a four-bladed hunting bolt.

“Get out of the water, Suzanne,” the man said.

The intruder wore a mask, but at least two video cameras with separate feeds were capturing his image. They were also recording the voice unless he had somehow managed to disable the microphones.

Suzanne stopped at the edge of the pool, broadside to the intruder.

“Out now,” the man barked.

Suzanne didn’t move.

“Ten seconds and you’re a dead goddess. I suggest you move.”

Suzanne looked at Sam. He nodded. He needed time. Where was Bud?

“Take off the suit,” the man said. No doubt he was clicking pictures as he spoke. Suzanne didn’t move. “I said take it off.”

She looked at Sam. He nodded again, his eyes trying to pick out Bud. Suzanne’s shaking hands reached behind her to untie her top. As she moved her hands and turned to the side, Bud came flying over the peak of the poolhouse roof and sent his body like a missile at the back of the intruder. The man’s neck snapped with such a pop that Sam heard it from several yards away. The man rolled down the roof, hit the concrete, and moved in ugly spasms. Suzanne screamed and ran, trying for the short way around the pool to the house, thereby actually moving toward the poolhouse and the quivering body.

Sam drew his .357 magnum and walked forward, his eyes never leaving the man on the ground. Suzanne began yelling crazy, hysterical screams all over again; a second man stood in the poolhouse door, just ten feet from her, with a pistol leveled at her chest.

“Nobody move,” the man said, “except you.” He spoke to Suzanne. “Come over here to Papa.” like the first man, he had a dark plastic mask hiding his face.

Suzanne just shook.

Grabbing her around the neck, the man dragged Suzanne back toward the poolhouse where Bud still stood on the roof, at least twenty feet away.

“Put down your guns and come down here or I blow her brains out.”

Sam’s mind was whirling. What stalker would risk this? And how could there be two men? Something was dead wrong. Whatever the case, if the guy was a sexual psychopath, Suzanne was likely dead if he got her alone—anywhere. If he was only pretending to be a sex nut, anything was possible.

Sam started walking, trying to will Bud to ignore the gunman and retreat over the roof to strike again.

Instead, Bud dropped from the poolhouse roof to the patio.

That was wrong, son.

“Stop there,” the stalker said to Bud.

Thirty feet from Sam the intruder had a chokehold on Suzanne and his gun to her head. He began walking Suzanne the last few feet to the poolhouse. Sam couldn’t let that happen. Bud was closer but could do nothing. For a second the intruder released Suzanne to open the poolhouse door. Suzanne started to bolt, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. Bud vaulted a patio table toward the pair, and the gunman fired, hitting Bud square in the chest. A second shot fired from the hip caught Bud in the head.

Before Sam’s eyes his son thrashed and shook. Somehow the gunman’s first shot at Sam missed.

Sam leaped to the side behind a garden boulder. Bullets spat against the stone.

The sounds of Bud’s shaky breath all but paralyzed him. A sorrow so deep that it took power from his legs displaced his rage; he couldn’t turn the emotional corner. Sam stared at the ground, knowing that the maniac was dragging Suzanne to some insane torture. He forced himself to move, to peek around the boulder at his convulsing son.

The door to the poolhouse was now closed. Sam sprinted recklessly to his boy. There was a thumb-sized bloody hole above his right eye. He propped Bud’s head in his hand and devoured the bloody face with his eyes. For Sam there was no face like this in all the world and never would be again. For the briefest moment there was a flicker of recognition in Bud’s eyes; then he was gone.

With nothing more than grief and duty in his heart, Sam marched to the poolhouse door. The large workout area was empty and undisturbed. Out the back door Sam saw nothing. All he could think was that his initial suspicion had been correct: These guys knew something he didn’t. They must have had a way into the compound. If they didn’t glide on a parasail, maybe there was an underground passage. Suzanne had not mentioned tunnels when asked directly about them, but this property had been in use for years. Just yesterday he had learned that somewhere in the immediate area of the estate, there had been a silver mine.

The poolhouse had a large mechanical room. Once it had stored coal for a 1930s-style furnace. He would start there.

Sam ran down the hall past the showers and into the large game room. To the right he remembered one door. He found two. The first opened into a large storage closet. Nothing inside. The second led to the mechanical room, whose ancient concrete floor, uneven and tilted in some areas, held a cast-iron cover Sam didn’t recall seeing.

Careless.

He pointed the .357 at the cover and lifted it clear. Nothing but a four-foot-deep hole. Jumping down, he looked around at a big earthen pit blackened with coal remnants.

The chamber was bounded on four corners with old concrete stub walls. Disgusted, he climbed out, thinking he’d better search the whole building fast. As he made for the door a swatch of black fiber caught his eye. Clothing. It had been trapped under a concrete chunk that was part of the fractured floor. The cement block wouldn’t budge when he used his fingers. He went to the room’s workbench, pulled down a pry bar, and tried again.

It came up. Beneath the wooden frame on which the jagged piece of concrete had rested was a black hole, a tunnel. Returning to the workbench, Sam found a light, shined it down inside.

Jesus.

He estimated a ten-foot drop; a ladder hung in place. These guys had done a lot of work.

First Sam hung into the shaft upside down with light and pistol. It had the smell of dead air, fetid with the cycle of living and dying. On the floor of the shaft lay fresh loose earth from their recent excavation under the poolhouse. Although the shaft went in two directions, all the footprints came and went away from the direction of the swimming pool and toward the nearest property boundary. His eye followed the footprints to a bend in the shaft some forty feet from the hole.

He turned and climbed down the ladder in the conventional manner. Obviously he was descending into one of the old silver mine tunnels. There wasn’t time to be cautious. Once on the floor of the tunnel, he ran with the tracks.