Page 16 of Hero

They walked to the same gray car. He memorized the shape, height, and walk of the woman heading for the driver’s side, and when she opened her door and the dome light went on, her face. She had just eliminated herself in his guessing game. Justine Poole would not be the one to do the driving. The second woman got into the passenger seat. She looked about the right age, but she was the one who had said “Justine” upstairs. If it was her own name, she wouldn’t say it. The third got into the back seat, and she looked as though she could be more or less the right age too. She bent down and picked up something from the floor, put it on her lap and looked inside. It was about the size of a gym bag, but he couldn’t see it for long because she shut the door and the dome light went out. She was the one, he decided. The one who would need an overnight bag was the one who was staying with friends to be out of sight.

The car started and the driver pulled out of the entrance and turned right. Sealy hurried to get out before the iron gate could close and kept going across the street and down the alley, got into his car, and drove to the next corner, and then made the turn onto the street where the gray car had gone.

11

Sealy followed the car with the three women in it from a distance of about two hundred yards. At 5:15 in the morning the traffic was not heavy enough to hide in. It was still early enough so cars had their headlights on, and that would keep the women from getting a good view of the shape and color of his car, and his lights gave him a better view of theirs. There was a round decal in the lower center of the back window and another reflective one on the left rear bumper. Those would help him distinguish their car from any other small gray cars if he lost sight of it briefly.

He studied the back of the car with a vague notion of pulling up into the blind spot in the right rearside with his window open and firing a shot or two through the head of the woman in the back seat. This stretch of road wasn’t wide enough to make that maneuver, and he couldn’t see far enough ahead to predict a wider stretch.

He watched their car pass under a traffic signal just as it turned red. He slowed down and watched their car diminishing ahead as he completed his stop. He looked to both sides and didn’t see any approaching cars near enough to hit him, so he accelerated after them, and kept accelerating toget the women’s car in sight again. He didn’t see it, so he stepped harder on the gas pedal and watched for the gray car to separate itself from the stream of cars while it turned to the left or right. As long as it didn’t turn, he would catch it.

When the next traffic signal turned red ahead of him, he simply went through the intersection. His luck held, and a minute later he saw the women’s car veer into the left turn lane, its left taillight blinking. He slowed to keep from catching up. As soon as the woman made the left turn, he made a quick left at the corner before theirs where there was no traffic signal, sped to the first intersection, made a right turn there, pulled over, and waited on that short block with his headlights off until he saw the small gray car go past, and then followed.

It was only a few blocks later that the gray car swung into the parking lot behind an apartment building. He stopped a distance away, got into the back seat of his car, reached down, pulled his AR-15 rifle from under the black mat on the floor, lowered his window, rested the rifle on the door, and looked through the scope. He watched while the car parked. He leveled the crosshairs on the car. The driver passed through his crosshairs as she got out, but he knew she couldn’t be Justine Poole. The other two got out on the far side of the car. The woman in the front passenger seat stepped out from behind the car first, and he could have killed her too, but the woman he had come for wasn’t visible yet. He heard a sound through his open window: another car was approaching. He pulled the rifle back and lay on the back seat while he pressed the button to shut the window. He heard the car pass by, and raised his head just enough to see it going on down the street.

He sat up and saw the three women just entering the door of the apartment building. He reached for the rifle, then saw the door swingshut. He hid the rifle, put on his medical mask and his baseball cap, and walked up the sidewalk. It was 5:20 and the windows of the apartment building were all still dark. After about forty seconds he saw the windows of an apartment on the second floor light up. He took a picture of the side of the building so he would remember which apartment it was, and then went back to his car and drove off. He knew where she was staying, and he was sure he would remember her face, her walk, her blond hair.

It was barely seven in the morning when Justine Poole approached the last turn and could see her condominium building in Santa Monica. She saw a white van parked nearby with “NEWS 7” painted on the side, and this one had its mast raised. There was a man with a television camera aimed at a woman with a microphone. She was talking to someone, and after a moment Justine recognized it was her neighbor, Ally Grosvenor, because of her familiar black-and-turquoise jogging outfit. Justine supposed the reporters must have cornered her as she emerged from the building for her early morning run. Justine kept going around the block and parked her car on the street behind the building to keep out of their sight, used her key to get in the back gate near the dumpster, and went up the back stairs to get to her condo.

On the stairs it occurred to her that when the mast on one of those vans was up, it usually meant they were transmitting to their station. She opened her door and hurried across her living room to pick up the television remote control, press the power button, and push “7.” There was Ally Grosvenor. Justine turned up the sound to hear what she was saying.

“The sliding door on our balcony was open, and the weirdest thing was that leaning on the balcony railing was the pole for the pool skimmer.” Justine was puzzled.

“For cleaning a swimming pool?” the reporter asked.

“Yes. You know—for getting leaves and things out. I woke up and saw it, and I asked my husband why he’d put it there. I mean, we didn’t have one of our own. The building pays a pool man for that.”

“And you think it had to do with somebody breaking into the building to come after your neighbor and choosing the wrong condominium?”

“What else could it be? Some criminal murdered her boss at the security company two nights ago. I understand Mr. Spengler joined her the other night after she saved Jerry Pinsky and his wife, but she was the heroine, the one who did it. I believe in coincidences like two people having the same birthday. I don’t believe this was just by chance.”

“And what did the police say when they came?”

“The manager let them in to do a welfare check, but Justine wasn’t home. I just hope she’s all right.”

The camera focus narrowed to stay on the reporter’s head and torso. “And that’s the way we all feel about Justine Poole. We hope she’s all right. Back to you, Martha.”

Justine turned off the television set and walked through her condominium, looking closely at everything. The living room was the way she’d left it. She always kept it neat because a small living space felt roomier if there was no clutter. The bathroom looked the same. Her office space seemed about as usual, with its surfaces clear of clutter and dust. She opened the drawers of her desk and her filing cabinet. They were less uniformly orderly than usual. When she had opened them to get her important documents the day after the Pinsky shoot-out, she had pawed through them in a hurry. She had known she shouldn’t leavethings like her passport, checkbook, and IDs if she wasn’t going to be staying here in her condo for a while, and she had taken bills with her so she wouldn’t be late paying them. She’d packed her overnight bag, thrown papers and some other things inside, slammed drawers shut, and gone. It was impossible to tell if anybody else had opened the drawers after she had. She looked through the drawers now to see if she’d missed anything, and noticed in the back the empty blue tax folders from the past three years. Then she saw the copies she’d made of some credit cards and other papers, pulled them out, and put them through the shredder, then closed the file drawer.

She went to the sliding door of her balcony and checked the latch. It was locked, but she couldn’t be sure whether it had always been locked, or if the police had locked it as a courtesy.

Her other rooms didn’t seem to have been disturbed—the furniture, coat closet, kitchen cabinets and drawers all seemed as usual. She went into her bedroom. The clothes closet looked the same. The clothes in the dresser were still neatly folded and in their places. She opened the drawer of the nightstand.

The flashlight was wrong. She always had it aimed at the back of the drawer, not the front, and as close to the bed as possible so she could roll over, open the drawer, and turn it on with her left thumb without fumbling around for it. She wanted it in her left hand, to keep her right, the dominant hand, free to defend herself.

She felt a chill. The flashlight had been taken out and put back. She was beginning to think about asking the cops to fingerprint it, but then realized that she couldn’t even be sure its rough, knurled surface would hold a print. And could one of the cops have picked it up? A cop looking around to see if a woman had been taken might use a flashlight to see if there were signs of a struggle—marks ona wall, tiny spots of blood, strands of long hair pulled out. But cops carried their own flashlights, so why would they open the drawer at all? She had to get out of here.

She emptied her overnight bag into the laundry basket and then repacked it, putting an envelope at the bottom with the important papers she’d taken with her when she’d packed to sleep at the office.

She went into the kitchen, put the perishables from her refrigerator that wouldn’t fit in the freezer into her trash bag, and added the shredded papers. She took a quarter cup of flour from the canister, returned to her bedroom, and tossed two pinches of the flour into the air to create a thin layer on the hardwood floor that would show footprints, and did the same for the floor just inside the sliding door from the balcony.

She went down the back stairs and out past the dumpster, where she left the trash bag, and kept going to her car. She started it and drove.

The killer had been in her condo. She needed to find another place where she would be out of sight for a while. She couldn’t stay with any of her friends from work. That would make finding her too easy for the killer. Even if he couldn’t get a list, he could follow each of them home and make his own list. When she was two miles from her condo she pulled over and called a hotel near the airport for a reservation. She had been inside it a couple of times with business clients who needed to meet with a foreign counterpart and had found it safe. That was all that mattered now.

12

Sealy woke up feeling eager. He made his breakfast, did some exercises, and then sent the digital images of the three women from his phone to his computer so he could enlarge and study them. He saw right away that the shots were as good as he had hoped.

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