Page 38 of Hero

“Then, gradually, people realized that these punishments—from lightning, plagues, wars, and all that—weren’t God’s justice accurately and precisely taking out the people who pissed God off. They weren’t targeted at all, they were random. Some of the worst people alive got every good thing. That was the beginning of the end of God-fearing. Since then, religion has dwindled down to making up excuses for why God doesn’t do what he was supposed to do. Now, with this in mind, what I want is to have people stay Conger-fearing. You see? If I’m just having people killed randomly, whether they’ve offended me or not, why should anybody bother to please me?”

Leo Sealy was speechless. Every reply that came to him seemed likely to be dangerous. Finally, he said, “I’ll do my best to get this done, Mr. Conger. It shouldn’t take much longer.”

Mr. Conger hung up.

Leo Sealy had been recording the local news channels on their daily schedules and fast-forwarding through them so he wouldn’t miss any tidbits that made it to the screen. He had also spent a couple of hours a day searching the internet sites. It was hard to be out hunting a target in likely parts of Justine Poole’s habitat without risking being photographed or leaving trace amounts of DNA or simply becoming familiar, so he relied even more heavily on electronic sources today. Two hours later he saw an internet mention of a news conference about Justine Poole.He clicked on the link and was sent to the front of a building with a lectern bristling with microphones but no human being, so he assumed he must be waiting for a live statement.

Then there was a man standing behind the lectern without walking there, so he knew it had been pre-recorded. There was a set of white letters identifying him as Attorney Aaron de Kuyper. He looked right for the job—expensive, well-fitted suit, sculpted haircut, slight tan that made his blue eyes stand out.

De Kuyper seemed utterly relaxed, as though he were welcoming guests he knew at a party. He listened to someone off camera for a moment and then said, “The police interviewed her today, and I understand it went according to protocol. The police have a highly legitimate need to investigate every violent fatality as fully as possible, so that justice will be served.”

“Is she cooperating with the police?”

“Of course she is,” he said. “She has been recognized by the media since the incident occurred for saving at least two lives in preventing a violent crime and for calling the police immediately. She also—and this hasn’t been said enough—stopped using deadly force immediately instead of applying it to three other suspects who were not a clear threat. The fact that she’s a heroine does not mean she has no responsibility to help further. I might also mention that her employer Benjamin Spengler has been murdered in an apparent reprisal for her incredibly brave act, and she has been the target of at least two separate attempts on her life, one of them just this morning. Since then she has shared some leads that the homicide detectives will be following up right now.”

“You don’t think there will be any charges against her?”

“I can’t imagine that police officers, who spend their careers risking their lives to save others in jeopardy, just as Justine Poole has, would beunable to interpret the facts in this case. She single-handedly saved two beloved and blameless citizens from five armed attackers.”

“We were told that you have a request for the press.”

“Yes. I’m here to ask that the press and the public be patient and give the police a chance to do their job without undue pressure. And also, that news organizations take into account the fact that Ms. Poole is still in grave danger. Any help you can give us in keeping her whereabouts and movements confidential will be essential and greatly appreciated.” He nodded and said, “Thank you,” and walked out of the view of the camera.

Sealy resumed his search. First, he looked for any sign that a news organization had reacted by releasing her location just because they resented the implication that they put her in danger and should stop reporting everything they knew. After a few minutes he saw that they hadn’t, but he kept open the possibility that they would and planned to keep checking.

The lawyer could be a lead—Aaron de Kuyper. The name seemed familiar. His Google entry identified him as a partner in Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein. That was where Sealy had heard it before. He turned his attention to the firm. The search engine picked up dozens of mentions in connection with court cases involving well-known names in Los Angeles and New York. The clients seemed to be roughly the sort of people that Spengler-Nash protected, and the cases tended to be rich people problems—big divorces and custody fights; contract disputes with music companies, studios, agents, producers, magazines, and publishers; and slander and abuse cases against ex-lovers. The overlap in clients had to be the connection that had given somebody like Justine Poole access to a firm like Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein. He supposed it was even possible that Spengler-Nash had a standing relationship with them.

What mattered was whether he could use the firm to find Justine Poole. A company like that would be smart enough to know that she needed to be hidden someplace. Where would they hide her?

He clicked on the first mention of the firm, looked at the article, then the second, the third, and on down the list. There were articles that stretched over about thirty years. He began to notice right away that often there would be a photograph of a client, or the client and a lawyer from the firm, in similar formats.

There were a number of pictures he recognized as taken in the corridors of the Superior Court building right outside the courtroom doors and a few in the sunken patio outside the front entrance of the Foltz Criminal Courts building. A few had been taken in front of a large building with double glass doors. It wasn’t any of the court buildings he’d seen in Los Angeles. Around the double doors was a façade that looked like mirror-polished black marble, and courthouses didn’t look like that. The later photographs were in color, so he could see that the door handles and frames were polished brass. He assumed it must be the building where Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein had its offices. He kept looking, moving to the next and the next, trying to find a caption or identifying feature. There were old photographs, but there were also ones from no more than a year ago, some apparently stills clipped from the footage of some celebrity show.

Finally, he reached a differently angled photograph about fifteen years old showing the actress Sally Walstrop coming out of the brass-framed doors with a man in a suit. The caption said, “Sally Walstrop, shown yesterday with her attorney Davis Fein, makes her first appearance since she left Sumpter Ricks five weeks ago. Moments later, Mr. Fein announced her record divorce settlement.” About six feet above the door and to the right were five numerals, 22764.

That was a very high number. Even Los Angeles didn’t have an unlimited number of streets with 22,764 lots. That was roughly 227 blocks. He thought of Parthenia in Northridge; Sunset; Hollywood Boulevard; Wilshire, which ran all the way to the ocean; Ventura Boulevard, which ran the length of the San Fernando Valley; La Cienega, which ran from Sunset south to the airport; San Fernando, which ran from the old mission to beyond Pasadena; and maybe Vermont and Normandie. He would start with those. He used Google Maps to take a look at what was located at number 22,764 on each of those streets. As he thought of other long streets he inserted those into the list.

Sealy found it. What he found was 22764 Sixth Street, Le Chateau d’Or.

Sealy had to pause and think. He knew that he had made errors on this job. He had relied too much on Mr. Conger’s delight at the death of Benjamin Spengler to keep him content for a long time. He had been too confident in his own abilities and the woman’s lack of them. He had been sure he could go about his job by putting himself in the vicinity of Justine Poole and assuming he’d be able to kill her. Those errors had caused him to diminish his options. He couldn’t afford to kill any more bystanders. He couldn’t afford to act on impulse, taking off after the woman like a dog after a rabbit. But most importantly, he could no longer afford to keep Mr. Conger waiting.

Every bit of new information he was able to tease out of the random bits of trivia in the air was a precious thing. It was also ephemeral. It was true right at this moment, but it would change, which meant it was already on the way to changing. This particular bit was tantalizing, because Justine Poole would have no way of guessing what he already knew. What Sealy now knew was that in the past, when Smallwood, de Kuyper & Fein had a client who needed to be kept out of sight, they put her in the Chateau d’Or.

25

Justine was asleep and in her dream she was in her grandmother’s house in Eastern Europe. Her grandmother had never said where it was, and somehow young Anna had accepted her dismissal of the question—that it didn’t matter because there had been several countries, all about the same—dark, poor, cold, muddy, and dangerous, and all of those houses had stopped existing long ago. Her grandmother never spoke about how she’d made her way across fortified borders, mountains, forests, and oceans, but she had. When Anna asked if she’d ever wished to fly back for a visit, she gave a bitter laugh, like a snort. The Anna in the dream knew all of this because Anna the dreamer did.

There had been one place that Anna had constructed in her mind from details in her grandmother’s stories. She was there now—the big leather chair stuffed with horsehair, the Persian rug, the paintings on the wall that had been hanging so long that the men and women in them looked like they lived in a shadow.

Her grandmother was speaking. “Don’t let yourself be sent to prison.”

The little girl who was Anna, not yet Justine, didn’t reply because patience and attention were respectful and keeping her grandmother talking was like not startling a bird that landed on her shoulder.

“The people who guard you are in prison too. They’re only free at night when they sleep. And they get worse and worse locked up, just like you do. You get through a day and you think, ‘That wasn’t so bad. I can get through it again.’ Then it’s worse, but you do.”

Anna didn’t know how she knew that her grandmother had been imprisoned. She knew it, though. It was just a fact, like the scratch on the table, there before Anna was born.

Grandmother said, “You do one thing and it bothers you for a while, but then you don’t think about it very often, and then not at all. Life is more powerful than any of the living.”

---