Page 9 of Hero

He went down the hallway to the stairs, descended to the underground garage, cut across the empty space marked 8, walked between the electric eye and its beam projector, there to detect a car ready to leave, and watched the bars of the garage door swing upward out of his way. He kept his face turned away from the building so the security cameras wouldn’t get his image. He walked at a brisk pace until he reached his car.

By the time he was inside it and starting the engine, he knew where he had to go next. This young woman had been with Spengler-Nash for a while if they’d trusted her to protect big clients like the Pinskys. Anybody who knew much would know her troubles were not over. She was too smart to be at her condo. So where would she be?

Sealy drove to the address on Roe Street he had found for the Spengler house. It looked nearly the way the picture taken in the 1940s had looked, a two-story structure inspired by a 1920s architect’s idea of an early Spanish hacienda. It had a red clay half-pipe roof and white stucco walls arranged in a rectangle around a courtyard with a fountain and garden. The only windows he could see were on the second floor, andthey were a foot wide and a foot and a half high, too small for him to squeeze through. The picture he had seen of the inner courtyard side showed walkways along the first and second floors, with the doors to bedrooms along the walkways at intervals. He couldn’t tell from here if that was still true.

There was a long cobbled driveway that began on Roe Street and ran about three hundred feet up the lawn before it widened to a broad parking area, then continued along the side of the house to another paved area in front of a garage with five doors.

The part that surprised Sealy was that a house like this still existed. It was at least five acres in one of the most desirable parts of the city, all lawns and mature shade trees. He left his car around the nearest corner and walked across the lawns of two other large houses to get to the Spengler house. There was no fence or wall, probably because the empty land around it served as a security feature. If Spengler was expecting trouble, he would see it coming, and no burglar wanted to carry stolen goods the length of a football field to get it to his car. There were too many other houses that looked easier to rob.

He knew that he was trying to penetrate a place that was likely to be difficult and risky. The owner of a security company had no reason to live in a house that wasn’t thoroughly wired. He was almost certain to have all of the standard devices—security cameras, perimeter door and window alarms, glass-break detectors—and might even have some of the more troublesome stuff—dusk-to-dawn motion sensors to light up prowlers who approached the building, infrared body heat detectors, interior electric-eye beams across doorways, trap alarms wired into any interior door, pressure pad switches under carpets, big batteries and automatic generators that would kick in if he cut power to the system. None of this equipment was hard to get, andmost of it was probably not expensive if you already had installers on the payroll.

The first step was for Sealy to see what obstacles he could detect from outside the range of cameras. He kept his cap and mask on as he walked around the edge of the vast yard. He saw the security cameras set at regular intervals under the eaves of the house, a transmitter near the peak of the roof to send an alarm signal by cellular transmission to—where?—probably to both the cops and Spengler’s own security company. That meant Sealy couldn’t just cut some wires in the phone company circuit box and isolate the place. A minute later Sealy saw a second transmitter on a different section of roof, meaning an intruder prepared to take out one transmitter wouldn’t have time to disconnect the other in the fraction of a second it would take for it to report the state of the system, including the loss of the first transmitter.

Sealy was not a man who accepted obstacles as defeat. As he walked, he thought of ways to overcome them. Strong defenses could be made irrelevant by luring defenders outside the perimeter. Alarms could be circumvented, and houses could be entered through openings where alarms had not been installed.

The fact that this was an old house encouraged him. Air conditioning existed but wasn’t common in 1922, so Southern California families kept doors and windows closed in the mornings to hold the cool air in, and opened everything late in the day to cool the house again. Houses had open vents to prevent attics and kitchens from collecting heat, and windows were installed on opposite sides of rooms to let cross-breezes pass. He continued walking in a wide circle at the edge of the property, studying the house for vulnerabilities.

Sealy reached the big, rounded archway that served as entrance to the courtyard. He stood two hundred feet away, remaining stillfor a long time, staring through the opening. There were two trees in the courtyard that had grown much taller than the architect could have anticipated more than a hundred years ago. They were taller than the roof of the house, jutting up so the canopy of foliage must shade the house in daylight.

There was a high wrought-iron gate across the arch. It had hinges built into the left side of the portal and a frame with a latch and rings for a lock. He decided to stay away from this entrance for the moment. If Spengler was hiding the woman who worked for him here, he would be making it as hard as he could to get to the house. This entrance looked to Sealy like a trap, an obstacle that he could probably climb over, but while he was doing so, he would be in the open and in no position to defend himself from someone in the courtyard.

Sealy moved so he could see the right side of the portal and looked at the windows of the row of rooms along the walkway on the left side. On the second floor one of the windows seemed to have a faint light behind it, from something like a plug-in night-light in the suite’s bathroom, or even the screen of a cell phone or tablet. Sealy’s heart began to beat faster and he felt the muscles of his arms and legs tightening on their own as he studied the walkway. The other windows were all dark. Maybe the light meant this was the bedroom Spengler had Justine Poole staying in, but maybe Spengler was only making it look that way so an intruder would climb the open steps to the second-floor walkway and make his way along it toward the room, while Spengler sat in some dark corner watching his progress through a rifle’s scope. Sealy decided to keep walking.

Sealy walked past the archway and saw no promising way of entering the building until he reached the common part of the house, directly opposite the arch. It contained the living room, dining room,kitchen, pantry, and probably other things. There was a wide brick chimney at this end, and Sealy stared at it from the same distance. He saw something that interested him. It was too far and the night was too dark to be sure.

He assumed he couldn’t prevent his image from being picked up on the security cameras. All he could do was to hope that nobody in the house was up at threeA.M.watching the monitors. Since he’d been here for a few minutes without a response from the police or Spengler-Nash, he decided to take the risk of moving closer. He adjusted his mask to be sure it covered as much of his face as possible, pulled his hat brim down, and bent low to advance. The chimney was wide and tall, and when it came down to the level of about six feet, it jutted out on both sides, presumably because the fireplace inside the building was large.

Sealy leaned closer and touched the brick structure. He had been right: set into the outside of the lower part of the chimney was a steel rectangle about three feet by two feet, with four wing fasteners to hold it in place over an opening. It was an access hatch so the fireplace could be cleaned from outside. Most of the ones he’d seen on modern houses had been only about one foot by one foot, but this chimney was older and larger, and the door was too. He tried moving the first wing fastener and found it was easy and silent, so he undid the others. He took out his pocketknife and ran the blade along the edges, inserted it, and opened the hatch. He was looking past a couple of logs resting on two andirons into a large space where a long couch and three armchairs were arranged around a Persian rug. He listened. There were no sounds—not an electronic shriek or the thud of a running footstep.

He had found a way into the Spengler house that had not been wired into the security system.

He’s in,Ben Spengler thought. The man had found the clean-out door in the chimney. Spengler had expected him to either try to get in through the garage, or remove one of the screens covering the vents that led into the space under the house, but the chimney clean-out was okay too. Spengler was at the desk in his master bedroom on the second floor looking at the security monitor, watching the shooter crawling out of the fireplace into the living room. In a moment the man would be directly beneath him.

This morning Spengler had been in the midst of talking Justine into sleeping at his house to stay safe when it had occurred to him that his impulse was misguided. Keeping her hidden was a necessary tactic for now, but adopting this as a strategy would make her less safe in the long run, because it kept her potential killer safe too. The best strategy wasn’t to keep the killer away. It was to meet his first attempt on her life and capture or kill him.

Spengler had realized right away that a killer would be sent out to find Justine. This year there had been a dramatic rise in follow-home robberies. He had assumed at first that they were the old kind, crimes of opportunity: a group of young guys see a couple at a restaurant wearing expensive jewelry and watches, or maybe driving an expensive car—Lamborghini, Ferrari, or Bentley—and follow them. But this one was different.

Jerry and Estelle Pinsky dressed simply. Young guys like the five robbers were unlikely to have recognized Jerry from his stand-up days forty years ago, and during his writer-producer days he’d been invisible. The car he drove wasn’t as fancy as the one they were driving to rob him. This crew of robbers weren’t on their own. They’d been working forsomebody. There was a boss behind this—somebody who could pick victims, fence stolen goods, and drain credit card accounts without getting cheated or caught—and he would want to be sure the bodyguard who had killed two of his men got killed too. That meant the man in Spengler’s living room right now was probably a pro. He had been good enough to get in. Now it was time for Ben Spengler to make sure he didn’t get out.

Spengler watched the man’s progress on the monitor. Yes, he was definitely a pro. He took his time, crawling across the big carpet, gently touching the few feet ahead of him first to be sure there wasn’t a pressure pad under it. He took the most direct route to get to the bare hardwood floor before he stood up and walked along the wall. He was clearly searching for electric eye transmitters and receptors on the walls, trying to identify them before he passed between a pair, interrupted the beam, and set off an alarm. There were a few installed in the walls and plastered over except for the lenses, but Spengler had kept those alarm circuits disarmed for the night to keep this intruder moving in the direction he wanted him to go.

Spengler had two cameras trained on the staircase, and he watched the man ascend. The man set his feet on the space between the stair runner carpet and the wall, which avoided any pressure pads underneath, and kept his weight on the side of the step that was most firmly anchored and least often used, so it didn’t creak.

Spengler decided it was time to move, before the man reached the upstairs hall. He turned off the monitor and walked along the hall to the old servants’ staircase, a narrow series of steps on the other end of the house from the main staircase, designed so domestic workers could come up and down without being noticed. He went down two steps and waited.

About a minute later the man reached the upstairs hall. Spengler knew enough not to come out of the stairwell to look, but he could listen. The man was walking along the corridor trying the knob of each door. He would turn the knob, push the door open, probably only enough to see the bed, and close it again. As Spengler had predicted, he must be searching for the one where Justine was sleeping, thinking that she would be behind the door that was locked. He reminded Spengler of a nonhuman predator—or maybe a half-human beast—sniffing its way through the house, trying to smell fear in the air to find its next kill. The image brought Spengler a chill along the back of his neck, and he gave his head a little shake to clear it.

He heard the killer reach the room with the locked door, which was only a few feet from the stairwell where he was crouching. Spengler listened more intently, and heard the sound of the door’s slight bump against the jamb when the doorknob wouldn’t turn, and then fabric sliding an inch or two on the hardwood floor as the killer knelt, and the faint hiss of the man’s breathing, almost a purr to comfort himself while he prepared to pick the lock.

Spengler felt an overwhelming urge to take a step out of the stairwell and shoot the man. As he thought about this man, he couldn’t help feeling rage: the man was so eager to kill Justine, that brave young woman, in her sleep. Spengler wanted to shoot, but he knew that shooting even an armed intruder like this killer from behind would strike the police as very questionable, particularly after Justine’s shooting. He had to try to make a citizen’s arrest before he did anything else. He also knew that if he waited it would never be this easy again. This was when he had planned to make his move. In a few more seconds the shooter would make the pins in the lock line up, turn the knob, open the door, then step inside.

Probably he would close the door behind him. It would prevent any defender of Justine’s from seeing where he was at a glance, and muffle the sounds of her death if he made it close enough to cut instead of firing. Spengler heard the click. He heard a shuffling sound as the man rose to his feet, and then the same faint sliding of metal against metal as the doorknob turned. The door swung open, and then it closed. Spengler let three seconds pass while he listened for the man to emerge, then took the last step up into the hall and two steps to the door.

He reached up to slide the deadbolt he had installed near the top of the door to the locked position. He had known the killer would arrive in darkness, and would almost certainly not see a bolt above his eye level anyway. He pulled from his pocket the six-inch spike and inserted it into the hole he had drilled in the jamb near the bottom of the door, and then inserted the second spike into the hole he had drilled on the hinge side of the door. The killer was locked in the room.

Spengler turned, stepped into the servants’ stairwell, and closed the door to muffle the sounds he would make while he descended the steps. He reached the hall by the kitchen, and then headed into the dining room. He opened the French door and went outside into the courtyard garden. He took his phone out of his pocket and pressed 911. When the emergency operator came on, he said in a deliberate but quiet voice, “My name is Benjamin Spengler, and I’m outside my house at 567 Roe Street. An armed man has broken into my house and is in the upstairs hallway searching the bedrooms. Please send police. I can’t speak any longer or he’ll hear me.” He ended the call. He nodded to himself as he put the phone away. Let the cops handle the rest of this. They deserved the credit.

Leo Sealy stood by the door and counted while he strained his eyes in the dark room trying to make out what was in it before he went deeper into it. The room was the most profound darkness he’d been in since he’d arrived. He couldn’t hear the sleeper’s breathing, so he couldn’t use it to find the bed. He guessed the quiet sleep-breaths meant he had probably not accidentally entered a man’s room. He decided he had waited long enough for his eyes to adjust and they hadn’t, so he started to move, taking small, slow steps toward the space where he thought the bed would be, moving his hands back and forth ahead of him to detect obstacles.

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