Page 31 of Hero

Leo Sealy had been delighted with the television coverage of the people picketing Justine Poole’s building. The lawyers that Mr. Conger had hired had made it sound crazy that the authorities hadn’t already arrested her. He knew nothing about the parents and relatives Mr. Conger had recruited, or if they were even real, but they made good victims. They acted like anybody who had ever lost a kid. He guessed that the lawyers had persuaded them that they might even get some money from a lawsuit against Spengler-Nash, its liability insurance company, maybe even the city. Anything would do—that the police didn’t let the ambulanceteam onto the property fast enough, or that they’d concentrated on the three healthy robbers instead of the two shot ones. The city would do anything to settle instead of going to court, because so many people hated the police.

Sealy looked at his watch. It was about the time of day when Justine Poole must be used to getting home, so he figured she must be up by now. Whatever she was going to do next, she was going to be running out of clothes. That meant her first stop would be the place nobody else expected her to return to now, her condo.

Justine decided to sign onto the Lyft app with her old work phone instead of waiting for Joe to wake up and asking him for a ride to the police station. He already knew who she was, but that didn’t mean he had to know that she knew he knew. She didn’t want to have the Lyft driver pick her up at his place, because then there would be a record of the exact spot where they had picked her up, identified by her name and photograph.

She put Joe’s sheets and pillowcases into the washing machine and started it, and then wrote him a quick note. “Dear Joe, thank you for your hospitality and generosity.” She considered signing it “Justine,” to show him she knew, but she couldn’t think of a good reason for the impulse. What would she gain by letting him know she had caught him? She signed it “Anna.”

She hurried out and walked two long blocks down the hill to Mulholland, picked the place where the street sign for the next side street between canyons was, and summoned her Lyft car. When the driver’s face and vehicle came onto her phone, he was already three minutes away.

When the car arrived, she got in quickly and told the driver what he knew already, that she wanted to go to the airport. The driver was Eastern European and had skin about the shade of her grandmother’s, with a similar accent. It occurred to Justine that he could be a distant relative. The driver made his way onto the 405 freeway and headed south. He didn’t talk much during the trip, so she sensed she shouldn’t either. It was still very early, and she wondered if it was good for her because she could move quickly, or bad because she had no crowds to hide her. She knew that she was an innocent person who was thinking and behaving like a criminal, but she reminded herself that what the police were investigating her for was murder.

When they reached the Century Boulevard exit, she said, “Please turn right. I need to go to economy parking.”

He pulled up outside the lot entrance and let her off, so she said, “Thank you,” and as she walked away, gave him a twenty percent tip on her phone screen. The lot was filling up already and people there for morning flights were dragging rolling suitcases toward the shuttle bus pickup. She told herself that her car was close and she was not encumbered by luggage, but it took her longer to find it than she had expected. She got in at last and started the engine, drove to the exit kiosk, paid for her time with the Anna Kepka card, and headed toward her condominium. She needed clothes. She needed a plan for her upcoming police interrogation. She needed a lawyer.

Ben Spengler had hired various kinds of experts to give his agents basic instruction on various specialties every year—the capabilities of new weaponry that an assailant might use to attack a client; new scams they might use to track or record phone conversations or emails to learn locations, routes, or schedules; new devices for tracking cars without being seen; and real nut stuff like ways of blowing up a car.

It had already occurred to her that the person hired or assigned to murder her might be capable of using an explosive. Explosives were rarer and more vivid than gunshots and made a frightening noise that was capable of knocking bystanders off their feet or killing them with concussion. If the purpose was to obliterate her and scare other potential enemies, it was hard to beat a well-made antipersonnel bomb.

She had not thought of giving her car the sort of examination she had been trained to give it, and now she was speeding north on the 405 freeway. If she had missed something, it hadn’t been connected to the ignition circuit. She supposed there could still be a chance of an initiator that only fired after a wheel or fan had turned a set number of times, or of an accelerant ignited by the heat of the exhaust manifold, but neither seemed likely. She needed to think about things that were likely.

She needed a lawyer, but what lawyer was in his office at 6:22A.M.? She had been foolish to say she could be in police headquarters before ten. It made everything she had to do harder to fit in. She took the Olympic Boulevard exit and pulled into the parking lot of a supermarket, then used her phone to look up law firms. There was one named Ralph Zaragoza, who had a bunch of television commercials about car accidents and the wiles of insurance companies who didn’t want to “give you what you deserve.” There were a couple of guys she’d seen wearing ties and white shirts under leather biker jackets who specialized in motorcycle cases. Most of the other names might as well have been random lines of letters ending with either “& Assoc.” or “Esq.”

She thought about the cost of lawyers. She had heard they started around six hundred dollars an hour, so the kind she would need must be at least twelve hundred. She didn’t have serious savings or a job. As she was thinking about all of the obstacles that were lining up against her, she thought about the television news coverage. It had blown her identity,revealed the building where she lived, and shown her photograph while she had needed to stay out of sight.

The publicity had also done something else. It had made her problem into news. Maybe a big lawyer of the sort that appeared on television every third case would like to be on television again. She found the name of a law firm she remembered—Smallwood, De Kuyper & Fein. They had represented some clients of Spengler-Nash, and when the clients had talked, it had sounded to her as though they handled all kinds of legal issues.

She called the number. There was a recorded woman’s voice. “Law Offices.” Justine had forgotten that: they never seemed to say which law offices. “Business hours are nineA.M.to fiveP.M.Pacific time, Monday through Friday. If you would like to leave a message, wait for the tone.” Justine noticed that there had not been a promise to call back, but when she heard the tone, she spoke. “Hello. My name is Justine Poole. I’ve been asked to go to an interview at police headquarters at 100 Main this morning at tenA.M., and I need to find a defense attorney. The detective in charge is Sergeant Raymond Kunkel. My phone number is …” and she read it off the screen and ended with “Thank you.”

She pulled onto Olympic Boulevard and then back onto the 405. Talking about the interview had reminded her that she was still wearing two-day-old jeans, a tank top, and running shoes. There were no clothing stores she knew about that opened before ten. She thought her situation through again. There might very well be a plan to arrest her this morning, complete with a perp walk in handcuffs. In any case, they would be planning to intimidate and overwhelm her with their questions, trying to get her to say something stupid or get her locked into a story that included misleading statements. She knew that was the waythe game was played whether they knew she was innocent or thought she was guilty, because it put her in their power.

It was foolish to be in this predicament. If she’d thought clearly about this day, which she’d known must be coming, she should have started looking for a lawyer right away. Clothes were a lesser issue, but they made an impression. She had a really nice blue pantsuit that had been bought for her by Spengler-Nash so she could appear to be one of the accountants and executives accompanying Giancarlo Scrimante, the head of the Scrimante Milano fashion company, while he was in LA on business. It was hanging in her closet in a suit bag right now.

She had decided it would be worth taking the chance of going there if she was careful and efficient, but her decision had been made in the absence of other options. She drove into her neighborhood at 7:20. It was no longer very early, and each second things could get worse in many ways. She had to meet Kunkel in Homicide Special, which probably wasn’t a place she could just walk right into, and before that she would have to get ready here and face the serious and unpredictable downtown morning traffic. It was also late enough now so that many people in her building would already be up and about, so sneaking in and out unseen might be hard to do.

Justine couldn’t ignore everything she knew about moving in safety. She cruised the neighborhood searching for signs of trouble—the man who had been stalking her, the car he had been driving, any sort of parked vehicle that kept its driver shielded from view, like a car with too-dark tinted windows. She didn’t see any, so she parked her car a block away from the back of her building and walked toward it.

She kept her eyes up, scanning, the way she had while she was working. This was the same, only today the life she was trying to preserve was hers.

Leo Sealy was afraid that it might be too late in the morning to catch her. If she had been planning on coming to her condo, she should have been here by now. In the past hour he had seen at least a half dozen people from her building emerging to go to work or whatever else they did in the morning. Maybe she had come in the night, gotten what she wanted, and left before he’d arrived.

He was ready to get back into his car and drive toward the police station. Today was almost certain to be the first day of her interrogation, given the public pressure Mr. Conger had been manufacturing. His best move was probably to see if he could get a space on an upper floor of a parking structure near the station so he could be ready when she walked out of the station later.

He decided that before he moved on, he should first drive past the underground parking entrance of her condo building and see if she had somehow driven in past him and was still inside.

Mr. Conger had called Sealy late last night to make sure he had seen the convincing stink his lawyers had raised on television, making the police look as though they’d been coddling a pretty girl who protected the rich. Sealy had been effusive. He had said Mr. Conger was a genius. Of course, he’d had to say that. Mr. Conger had already paid him a lot of money and intended to pay him more. The truth was that Mr. Conger really was a shrewd man and his idea had been a reasonably good one, probably because he knew that the people who ran the city were susceptible to that kind of pressure. The elected officials—the DA, the mayor, the city council—would have the police chief, their hireling, order his cops to get the investigation of Justine Poole started.

Still, he’d learned that Justine Poole was smart too. She had spent a lot of her working life with people who had thrived by making ordinary people like them. She had to know that she was pretty and appealing, and she was probably expert at seeming small and unoffending. Anywhere she went in front of a lens was going to be good for her, if she had a chance to present herself well. He was puzzled, though. He really had expected her to show up this morning. The place for her to get the right clothes, makeup, and everything to look the way she wanted to had to be at home.

He conceded that he must have missed her move, which he had hoped would be the one that killed her. He walked toward his car, clicked the key fob to unlock the driver’s side door, turned his head to be sure he wasn’t about to swing the door open just as some noiseless car was about to pass by him, and saw Justine Poole.

She was walking on the lawn skirting the side wall of her building. She looked as though she had come around the back and was taking the shortest route to the front entrance. Sealy reached behind his back to move the pistol he had in his belt under the front of his shirt so he could keep his hand on it, and began to run.

He knew he had at most a few steps before she would see him, because motion was what the human eye had evolved to notice first. He loped with long steps, hoping to fool her for a few seconds into assuming he was just someone jogging for exercise, but as soon as her eyes flicked to him, they didn’t leave him, and she didn’t hesitate. She pushed off and dashed for the front door.

Sealy sprinted to get to the door ahead of her. She was much closer to it, and he hated himself for having turned away from the building to walk to his car. If he had waited a little longer, he would have seen her sooner and had a few extra steps on her. He could see that she wasmuch faster than he had assumed, and she was going to win the footrace unless he stopped her. He tightened his grip on the pistol as he ran, tugged it out of his belt, and ran the next few steps with it in sight. He couldn’t assume he would be able to hit her from eighty feet away while she was running across his field of vision, but he was ready now and in seconds she would have to stop and turn her back to unlock the front door and slip inside.

He had to get as close to her as he could, so he ran hard with his head up and his airway straight, pumping his arms and making his fastest strides. He saw her take the last two strides with her arm stretched toward the door. She grabbed the door handle to stop her momentum and poked four numbers into the keypad quickly, hitting them with all four fingers of her free hand. She was already swinging the door open when Sealy stopped and fired.

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