Page 18 of Hero

Justine looked at the next few pictures. The man was white. His hair was light, but not light enough to be blond. It was straight and short. His face had a chiseled look, maybe partly because he was straining to see something in the parking garage. His eyebrows were drawn together and jaw muscles tight. He seemed to be in his midthirties to early forties, not a kid waiting to break a car window in a lot to steal something. He was too well dressed to be down on his luck and sleeping rough—creases inhis pants’ legs, a dark, well-fitted jacket, a baseball cap with no logo. She realized she might very well be looking at the man who had shot Ben Spengler to death two nights ago.

She wished Janice had sent the shots to the police too. They might recognize him or have his car on a license plate reader near Ben’s house. She was almost positive Janice hadn’t sent them, though. Sending them would bring the police back to Spengler-Nash asking more questions, and if Ben’s siblings learned she’d been in touch with Justine, she might be considered disloyal, and she’d lose her job too.

Justine looked at the pictures again to try to discern anything she could. One of the shots showed the man standing by the stairwell door. She knew that the doorway was seven feet, and he seemed to be about a foot shorter, but he was ducking his head, so he could be slightly taller than six feet when he stood up straight. He was trim, but not thin, with a flat belly and upper arms that looked thick.

In the end, what she could tell about him was all bad. He was ordinary looking for Los Angeles. He was mature but not old. He was in good physical condition and patient enough to stand for at least an hour or two doing reconnaissance. She kept thinking about him, looking at each of his pictures again and again, but there was a block between her and what she wanted to know. He might as well be a statue of a man. Nothing about who he was or what he was thinking could be gleaned from any of the pictures. She had a panicky feeling that she was letting herself waste time sitting in this hotel room while the day went by. She needed to put her phone down and get ready to use these pictures to start trying to find Ben’s killer. She went into the bathroom to take a shower.

She turned on the water, let it run long enough to adjust it so she wouldn’t get scalded, and stepped in to let the water soothe her. She found herself thinking about Justine Poole.

The name had happened near the beginning of her second summer at Spengler-Nash. Ben had begun her training for the part of the business that wasn’t done in an office. He had come to her desk and said, “I want you to think up a nom de guerre. Everybody here has to have one.”

“Why?”

“A bunch of reasons. It’s like an actor’s name, the right name for the image you want to project. Good ones are simple and comforting. They make clients remember you. If somebody wants to bitch about you, they only know a fake name. They’ll complain about Lisa La De Da or whoever. If the complaint sticks, we make up a new name for you. Sometimes female agents get noticed in the wrong way. You’re young and not as ugly as you could be, so you might get stalkers. You’re not completely incompetent so you’ll make an enemy or two. They want to come after Lisa La De Da? Let them. She’s gone, moved on.”

“I’m kind of used to being Anna Kepka.”

“Oh, and the other reason is that I told you to. Bring me a good name before end of shift. Write it down so we both spell it the same.”

The name she had invented was Justine Poole. It sounded like the name of a woman whose family had come from a place along the Thames, not the Volga or the Danube. It was short and easy to remember. When she had handed him the name he had nodded and typed it on a form in his computer.

Two days later he brought her the plastic identification card that said she was Justine Poole and showed a picture of her like the others all had. Eventually she had one that carried all of her professional information on it—the number of her concealed carry permit and the firearms she was authorized to carry—9 millimeter, .40 caliber, .45 caliber. It noted that she had completed a defensive driving certification, CPR and lifesaving certification, and martial arts training. That was all for the benefit ofclients, an easy way to reassure them that she was qualified. It also said she was a level 4 protection agent. There was no level 1, 2 or 3. After that he never called her anything but Justine Poole, and nobody else did either. Anna Kepka faded and became a bit of private history. Over the years she had used “Justine Poole” more and more often, so her real name got to be like an alias.

As she stood in the shower she thought about Anna Kepka. The surname was already a shortened version of her family’s name, an abridgment her grandmother had done so it would be easy for Americans to say and accept. Her grandmother had told her that Americans were impatient people who resented having to memorize long or difficult names from other languages, so she had decided not to irritate them. When Anna had asked her what the long version of the name had been, she’d said, “You’re an American too. Use your America name and be grateful. You’ll only need this one until you’re married and he gives you his nice new one anyway.”

14

Justine Poole’s filing cabinet had held the temporary white printout copy of the ownership papers for her car and a copy of its registration the night when Sealy had broken in. He had taken a picture of each. The car was a gray Honda Civic, and the license number was seven letters and numbers strung together, not a vanity plate or a tag that spelled a word or anything. He spent hours checking and rechecking Justine Poole’s condo building, but her car never appeared, and now it was so late he was sure she wasn’t coming. He was beginning to wonder if she had left town after all.

Sealy decided to use a skip tracer. He had also taken pictures of the copies she had made of both sides of two credit cards, so he had what he needed. Using skip tracers was tricky. They collected information about not only the people they traced, but also about the clients who hired them. Their fees were high, and presumably some clients skipped out on them, or tried to.

A few years ago, after he’d been told about the skip tracers, Sealy had used a false identity to incorporate a company, listed the business as anemployment service, and begun paying a monthly fee to be a regular client of a skip tracer. Since then, he had used their services only a few times for his real business, but more often just had them locate random strangers so a survey of the subjects of his searches didn’t all lead to people who were now dead. He also wanted to keep the volume of searches high enough to justify the fees he was paying. Nothing would make the skip tracers curious faster than noticing that a client was wasting his money on their services.

He typed his account number into the rectangle over the screen and waited. The site recognized it and bloomed into its full-color home page. He clicked on “New Search” and filled in all of the things he knew about Justine Poole. She was a woman who lived a neat, orderly life, so he wasn’t surprised that she only had one card in each category. She wasn’t the kind who applied for every credit card that had a new come-on offer.

He supplied the information he had gotten from Justine Poole’s Visa and Mastercard backup copies the night he had been in her condo. This was the part that had always made the high fees worth paying. Skip tracers had twenty-four-hour instant access to information that ordinary people simply couldn’t get. They could get purchase histories for the people they were tracing, and because credit transactions occurred in seconds, the information was fresh.

He kept the site open while he made a cup of coffee. A few seconds later the tracer site produced an entry on her Mastercard. This was one for a Mobil gas station on La Cienega Boulevard, forty-six dollars and seventy-two cents—about half a tank. It figured that she was a person who never let her tank get below half full.

The next charge was for the Aero-Won Hotel on Century Boulevard. It was a hundred dollars even. He began to feel excited. Thatwas the charge that hotels put on a card at check-in to be sure the card was real, current, and had unused credit. When a person checked out, they deleted the hundred and put in the actual cost, which was almost never a round number. If the skip-tracing site was up to the minute—and why shouldn’t a computerized system be?—then she had not checked out yet.

He typed in the name “Aero-Won Hotel” and looked at the web site. The hotel was right near the airport, which explained the name. She could practically walk to the terminal. Sealy had not put away the equipment he had laid out for his canceled early-morning trip to the three women’s apartment building. It took him only a few minutes to put it all into big black trash bags and carry it to his car.

After seeing the photographs of the man in the garage, Justine knew she could be in trouble, and she suspected her situation was deteriorating. It had taken about ten minutes after Ally Grosvenor’s first interview for her condo building to be recognized and the address to appear on the internet. Now her photograph was out there too. She looked in her wallet and found the business card from the police officer who had been the main interviewer when she and Ben were taken to the police station after the shooting. His name was Sergeant Rodriguez. She considered calling him to ask if she could get some help, but she already knew that would backfire.

The police department was understaffed and too busy to be even marginally useful for protection. The profession she’d been in since college was based on the common knowledge that the department’s motto “To Serve and Protect” was mostly aspirational. The most thecops could do for her was send a car past her condominium building a couple of times a day. And asking the police for help would be giving them permission to keep checking that she was in one place and not moving around, which was the opposite of what she would have to do if she wanted to stay alive.

Justine put away her two phones and began to pack. Whatever she was going to do, she had better get started. In minutes she had collected her belongings, packed them in practical order in her suitcase, and checked out of the hotel. She was in the lobby on her way to the parking lot when she saw him.

She was looking at him through the thick and reflective surface of a glass door, so she wondered if she had imagined this was the same man. She decided that she had not made a mistake. She had stared at his picture too many times, and he was close, just driving past the main entrance toward the parking lot beyond.

He had a BMW—black, like most of them were—and he pulled into the small strip of spaces reserved for the cars of people who were just checking in, then got out and started walking toward the front entrance.

Justine clutched her bag and hurried to the elevator, rode it to the second floor, then hurried along the hallway to descend the next staircase to the first-floor hallway and slip out the side door to the large rear parking lot. She had parked her car near the back of the building when she’d arrived because she hadn’t wanted it or herself to be visible from the street. She got into her gray Honda, drove along the rear of the lot to the exit, and headed away from the airport.

She drove to the new economy parking garage on 94th Street, took a ticket from the dispenser, and parked on the third level. She locked her bag in the trunk, went down the stairs, and walked quickly to the shuttlepickup spot at the southeast corner of the first level, where she boarded a shuttle bus that was just filling up with travelers.

When Justine had traveled by air with a client, most of the time Spengler-Nash assigned a second bodyguard to drive them to the right terminal, but she had occasionally driven the client to one of the terminals herself, dropped them at the curb, parked in the economy parking garage, taken the shuttle back to the same terminal, and rejoined them in one of the airlines’ VIP lounges to wait to board their flight. She had judged that this complicated route—driving to the airport, then doubling back, disappearing into a garage that held four thousand cars, and returning in a crowded bus identical to every other bus—would be very difficult for an enemy to follow. That difficulty was what she needed now.

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