Page 10 of Hero

He found the bed with his knee, having already passed his hand over it without touching it. He stopped, left his knee touching the mattress so he could feel any movement, and listened, but nothing happened. He moved along the mattress clutching the knife. He would find the headboard and move his left hand slowly down from there so he could grasp a handful of her hair, jerk her head back, and bring the razor-sharp blade across her throat with his right. If her position made that impossible, he could drive the blade downward into the space under her rib cage and thrust it up to the fourth rib.

After three steps he touched the headboard. He moved his left hand downward farther and farther, and felt bare sheet. He moved the hand to the side, then down, and then ran both hands across the bed. It was empty. She wasn’t here. He felt rage, frustration, and then a deep uneasiness.

He had been primed and ready to kill anybody he met in the house, but hadn’t been prepared not to meet anyone. He had expected that the room where he’d find Justine Poole would be locked, and this one had been the first locked room he’d found. As he’d entered, his heart had been pounding and he could barely restrain his energy, but he had doneit. He took out his phone and used the faint light of the screen to verify that this room was empty, and noticed that the screen said 3:09A.M.He put it back in his pocket.

There would still be a couple more hours of darkness. He was realizing now that this house was an even worse place to do a job than he had expected, but he was well into it now. He’d eliminated about a dozen rooms, and there were only about two more in this main part of the building. If she wasn’t in one of them, she would have to be in one of the rooms on the walkways along the courtyard.

He grasped the door handle, turned it, and pulled. The handle turned easily, but the door didn’t swing inward. It didn’t budge. He pulled harder. He placed his left shoe against the wooden jamb to get the force of his leg and back into it, but the door was stuck. He couldn’t believe it. He began to sweat, and that made his gloves cling to his fingers. He pushed the door to loosen whatever was stuck, but that changed nothing. There must have been some malfunction in the old lock that had disconnected the knob’s shaft from the piece connected with the bolt, and left it locked.

He took out his phone again and knelt to examine the hinges. He used his knife to pry the pin that held the bottom hinge up and out. There were two more hinges, and a few minutes later, he had them out. The doors in this old Spanish house were not like modern doors. These were two inches of solid oak, fitted tightly, so Sealy understood the three hinges instead of two to hold the weight. He grasped the top and center hinges and pulled, trying to wrench open the door from the hinge side. The door didn’t move. Maybe he needed to turn the knob at the same time. He tried that, but it had no effect.

He moved to the window and clawed aside the blackout curtains that were keeping the darkness complete. The world was still dark, but he could make out some shapes. Outside the window was a ten-footmargin of sloping roof above the courtyard. He knew that if he triggered the alarm he would never be able to turn off the alarm system. All of the window frames were sure to be wired, but there was no piece of electronics on the ceiling above him, and that was where glass-break sensors were placed by installers. He put his face close to the glass, but couldn’t see any trace of the conductive tape that alarm companies used to wire the glass in windows, so the only live trigger was the frame. He went into the bathroom, found a pile of towels, picked one the right size, took it to the window, and stuffed it into the recessed area that held the window. Then he stepped up to it, raised his foot and delivered slow, hard pressure to the center of the window pane. The glass made a popping noise and buckled outward. Sealy crouched and listened for gunshots, voices, or footsteps. When none came, he used his phone screen to look at his foot and leg, but saw no blood or cuts. He waited a few seconds, then removed the towel to look at the window. The glass had fractured into large, jagged triangular pieces, so he spread the towel on the floor and lifted the pieces out of the frame onto the towel.

Outside in the garden, Spengler stood still and listened. This intruder was more troublesome than he’d expected. He had anticipated that he’d be like most of them, who would have resorted to trying to kick the door open or fire holes in it around the lock, and when neither worked, decide his only chance was to wait for the cops to open the door from the hallway on the idiotic theory that he could shoot his way out. Now Spengler heard noises that sounded like the man was clearing glass. This was not good. He had hoped the man would stay in that room until the police arrived. He clearly wasn’t going to do that. Spengler lookedaround him in the garden for anything he could use, but found nothing at first. Then he remembered the curtains. He opened the French door, stepped inside, and used his pocketknife to cut a length of the curtain cord. He stepped out again, coiling the cord. Now at least he would be able to hog-tie the man while he waited for the cops.

Upstairs, Sealy worked to pull out the small pieces of glass still stuck on the edges of the window by the hard, ancient putty. Then there was nothing left but the frame. He draped a second towel over the lower edge to protect him from any remaining glass, moved the only chair beside the window and crouched on it so he faced away from the window, extended one leg through the opening, then the other, then pushed off the chair to raise his upper body off the seat and walked on his hands to push the rest of him through the opening. Now he was on the roof feeling the cool night air, and it made him feel energized. He crawled a few feet to the side, then eased himself feetfirst down the sloping roof toward the edge. He had to get as low as he could. When he neared the edge he paused, keeping as much of his body in contact with the roof as possible. When he was ready, he turned so he was on his belly. He began his slow slide, moving an inch or two at a time. He felt his toes come off the roof, then his knees. Now his weight dragged him downward and he was trying to hold on to each of the ceramic half-pipes that made up the roof to slow himself. Then he was at his hips, with his feet and legs hanging. He needed to keep slowing his slide by pressing down on the roof, but he was still moving. He slid the last few inches and managed to slow his descent, then dropped. In the second of his fall, he saw there was nothing right beneath him,and prepared himself to try to land on his feet. He managed to absorb some of the shock and roll to the side like a parachutist, got up, and took two staggering steps.

He heard a calm, quiet voice behind him. “I’ve been waiting for you. Toss your gun on the ground. Ten feet will do.” As Sealy took the revolver out of his left pocket and tossed it, he ended up facing the man. It was not possible to see him because he was somewhere in the deep shadows under the overhanging section of roof.

The man said, “Good. Lie down with your arms away from your sides.” Sealy bent his knees as though to lower himself to the ground.

The phone in the man’s shirt pocket came to life. There was a buzz that seemed loud in the night silence, and the screen lit up.

Leo Sealy dived to the side, pulled his semiautomatic pistol out of his right jacket pocket in midair, and fired at the lighted screen. There was a muzzle flash from the man’s own gun, but the aim was high. Sealy hit the ground, fired three more rapid shots where the muzzle flash had been, and saw the man was on the ground too. He fired once more at the prone figure, and saw the man’s head jerk an inch. He realized the man had probably already been dead, because he had not even tried to move. He was dead now, anyway.

Sealy hadn’t forgotten Justine Poole, and he knew where she must be. He sprang to his feet, ran the rest of the way to the stairs and took them three at a time, ran along the walkway, crouched, and peered in the window. There was a lump under the covers of the bed, so he fired through the glass. The lump didn’t move. He went to the door and tested the knob. It gave. It was an open door, but this time maybe it was Justine Poole’s trap. He went inside low and ready to fire, but he saw no woman to kill. He kept going into the bathroom and saw he had been right. There was a plug-in night-light.

The gunfire had started the clock. Time was going by, so he had to keep moving. He pivoted on his heel, hurried to the window, and scanned the other windows overlooking the courtyard. No door had opened, no window showed light or motion. He left the room and trotted back along the walkway, staying low and moving fast as though he were under fire. Justine Poole could have been hiding in a different room and now be somewhere on the grounds aiming at him.

As he ran across the courtyard to snatch up his revolver, he came near the body again. He had heard no sound on his run, so he dared to squat beside it for a second and use the light from the screen of his cell phone to look at the man’s face. It was streaked with blood from his first shot, and the last had left an entry wound hidden by the hair, but he recognized the man. On an impulse he took a photograph with his phone. He looked at the screen and saw it was 4:21A.M.He had to get moving again. He jumped to his feet and ran to the arched opening of the courtyard, climbed the gate, and dropped to the outer side.

His car was far away. He ran toward it, crossing the vast lawn of the house, then sprinted along the stone wall of the next house, which had a two-foot apron of concrete outside it that gave him a clear path. After that he veered outward to stay as far from the houses as he could. The owners of these houses had probably heard the shots. They also probably had live-in servants. He couldn’t afford to have any of them see him. He had just killed Benjamin Spengler.

7

Justine woke at twelve minutes to six, when the police arrived at the Spengler-Nash office. She heard men talking, but didn’t recognize the voices. She got up from the couch, pulled two of the blinds on Ben’s office window apart, and saw two large male cops in suits. She had never seen police in the building before. She knew cops had been here a few times in the past nine years, when they’d come to talk to bodyguards who had reported something or had been in altercations to protect a client, but she hadn’t been present.

Then she heard someone say her name. It confirmed her fear that she was the subject of the visit. She couldn’t take the chance that she would miss something she needed to know, or worse, have them interrupt her when she was getting dressed, so she quickly slipped off her sweatpants and T-shirt and put on her Spengler-Nash outfit. It wasn’t a uniform, because uniforms had insignia and names on them. Her term for it—outfit—was more accurate. It was just a pair of tight black pants and a tailored jacket of the same synthetic fabric that had two inner pockets designed to conceal a small handgun close to the body.

She opened the door and walked toward her desk, which was near the spot where the two police officers were talking to three of the night men, who were sitting in desk chairs with their bodies leaning forward. Two of them—Baker and Harris—had their heads in their hands. She couldn’t identify what was going on, but Decker turned and saw her. “Justine,” he said. “We just got really bad news.”

Baker said, “The worst.”

She felt light-headed for a half second and found herself holding the back of a chair. “What happened?” she said. “Is somebody hurt?”

Decker said, “It’s Ben. The police found him at his house.”

“Found him?”

“Mr. Spengler is dead,” one of the cops said.

Justine looked at the officer, and he began to grow blurry, which meant the tears were starting. Of course a cop would tell her straight out. Cops were all trained to know the best way was just to spit it out and not make things into a guessing game. “How?” Her face was wet. She used her palms to smear the tears off to the sides.

“He was shot. Forensics and homicide people are there now. He had a gun, and it’s been fired. That’s about all we know yet.”

Justine shook her head. “Really bad news” didn’t cover this. There were no words for this.

“Do any of you have any idea why this would happen now?”

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