by Stuart Woods
Jon sighed. “Palmer’s prints didn’t match the one in the Millman guest house.”
“But they had to match!” Chris said, stunned.
“Not necessarily. We never knew for sure that the one print we found was Admirer’s. It could have been anybody’s—maid’s, real-estate agent’s, anybody’s.”
“What does this mean?”
“It means that I can’t prove that Parker is Admirer. Not yet, anyway.”
“Then you can’t arrest him?”
“No. Not until I have probable cause to do so.”
“Oh, no, no; it’s not over.”
“Not yet, I’m afraid.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“We’re going to have to wait until Parker makes a mistake, that’s all.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“Something that will connect him to Admirer directly.”
“How long will that take?”
“There’s no way of knowing,” Jon said. “In the meantime, we just have to be very, very careful. I’m going to start following Parker wherever he goes. If I can find out where he lives, that might help us.”
Danny spoke up. “I know where he lives.”
“How would you know that?” Jon asked.
“He lives at 1825 Little Canal Road in Venice. I followed him there this afternoon.”
“Danny,” Chris said, “you shouldn’t have done that.”
“Danny, I hope you weren’t thinking of doing something stupid,” Larsen said.
“I was thinking of doing something,” Danny said vehemently. “I don’t like it when people try to kill me. I learned a long time ago not to sit around waiting for people to hurt me.”
“Danny,” Jon said, “if you were entirely healthy, I’d put you up against just about anybody, but I don’t think you’re in any kind of shape to go picking fights with Parker.”
“I wasn’t going to pick a fight,” Danny said. “I was going to kill the sonofabitch.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve got a gun, too,” Larsen said.
“I certainly have,” Danny replied.
“Great, now everybody’s got a gun.”
Chris broke in. “Danny, will you let Jon handle this?”
“Like he’s handled it so far?” Danny asked.
“That’s not fair,” she said. “Jon has to operate within the law.”
“Well, I don’t,” Danny said.
“Danny, listen to me,” Jon said. “This situation is bad already, and if you go taking potshots at Parker, you could make it a lot worse. You have a nice life; don’t go screwing it up by getting yourself put in jail.”
“Are you going to put me in jail, Jon?”
“I could, and right now. Threatening to kill someone is against the law, and you could get two to five years for it. Now, I know you’re frustrated—God knows, I am, too. But you’re not going to be of any help to Chris if you start behaving stupidly.”
“He’s right, Danny,” Chris said. “Please promise me you won’t try anything like that.”
“Oh, all right,” Danny said. “I was just mad, I guess. I won’t hunt him down and kill him. But I promise you, if he tries anything else, I’ll defend myself.”
“That’s reasonable,” Jon said. “Just be sure the threat is real before you act on it.”
“Okay, but what are we going to do next? We can’t just sit around and wait for the guy to hurt Chris.”
“Well, he isn’t making any mistakes, so we’re just going to have to force an error.”
“And how do we do that?” Chris asked.
“Leave that to me,” Jon replied.
CHAPTER
39
Larsen found the street easily enough. It was just after 7:00 A.M., and the neighborhood had only begun to stir. A couple of doors from where he was parked, a woman came out on her front porch to collect the morning newspaper.
Larsen had already cruised the street twice to get a good look at the house. It was like a fortress. Venice, although efforts were being made to gentrify it, was still a high-crime neighborhood, with burglary being at the top of the list. Still, though he had seen a few security company signs in the neighborhood, nobody had gone to quite the same lengths as Parker to protect his property. Larsen couldn’t recall having seen any house, outside of south-central L.A. or Watts, that appeared so fortified.
Larsen sipped his coffee and resisted the temptation to read his newspaper. An all-news channel was on the radio, and that made up for the lack of something to do while he waited. He had always been an impatient surveillant, had hated the waiting game, and his years on the force had not mellowed him. He had to wait until almost eight-thirty before Parker’s gates suddenly swung open and the van backed into the street.
Larsen waited until Parker turned the corner before following. Anybody paranoid enough to have barbed wire around his house might keep an eye on his rearview mirror. He caught up on the stretch along the beach and checked his own mirror to see if the other member of his team was in place. He picked up the handheld CB radio and said, “Okay, change places.” Then he moved into the right-hand lane.
Danny passed him slowly in the shiny new BMW and took his place two cars behind Parker’s van. Larsen was driving his half-restored 1965 Mustang convertible with the top up. He reckoned he still had two hundred hours of work to do before the Mustang could take its place proudly beside the MG in his garage.
The rush-hour traffic made it easy to keep pace, because nobody could move very quickly. Larsen reckoned Parker would stop by his office before he went on his day’s rounds, and he was right.
When the gray van was in the Keyhole Security lot and Parker had gone inside, Larsen spoke into the radio again. “Okay, partner, back to the house. Follow me.”
“Gotcha,” Danny’s voice came back.
Larsen drove back to Venice slowly; he wanted the denizens of Little Canal Road to go to work before he did. He pulled over to the curb in the street behind Parker’s house and waved Danny alongside.
“Reporting for duty,” Danny said, saluting smartly.
“The front of the house doesn’t look too inviting,” Larsen said. “I’m going to see if I can work my way through here to the back. You go around the block and park three or four doors down from the house and watch the front. If you hear an alarm go off from the house, drive away. If a police car shows up on the block, somebody may have called the cops or I may have tripped a silent alarm, so say clearly, three times, ‘Security, security, security,’ and drive slowly away. If, on the other hand, Parker himself shows up, say ‘Mayday, mayday, mayday,’ and get the hell out of there. Got that?”
“Right.”
“Okay, go park your car.”
Danny drove away, and Larsen got out of the Mustang and locked it. You couldn’t be too careful in this neighborhood. Two houses down the street, more or less behind Parker’s house, was a boarded-up derelict bungalow, and he headed for that. The houses were spaced widely enough for him to walk between the derelict and the house next door, which didn’t look much better, and he was soon in the backyard. A narrow alley separated the rows of houses.
It was obvious which house was Parker’s, even from the rear. A chain-link fence enclosed the backyard, and the familiar razor wire snaked along the top of it. Larsen walked down the alley, stopped at Parker’s fence, and looked around. He could hear a television from somewhere, but he didn’t see anybody at the windows of the neighboring houses. He seemed to have the morning to himself. He grabbed an empty garbage can from a row in the alley and trotted along the narrow opening between the chain-link fence and the six-foot picket fence enclosing the yard next door. He put down the garbage can and, using the chain-link to steady himself, climbed on top of the can at a point where the fence met the house.
He was wearing an army field jacket left over from his days in the National Guard, and from one of its commodious pockets he took a zippered tool kit and removed a pair of wire cutters.
He snipped the razor wire at the end closest to the house and very carefully folded back a three-foot length of it, then donned gloves and hoisted himself to the top of the fence. As he did, he glanced at the roof of the house and noticed two skylights. Those might give him a point of entry, he thought, or at least let him have a look inside.
He climbed onto the roof and walked toward the nearest skylight, glad that he had worn sneakers, and examined the edges of the clear plastic. Inside, fixed to the wooden frame, he saw a narrow plastic box with a wire leading away from it. Parker seemed to take his own advice where burglar alarms were concerned.
Very few houses were impregnable, Larsen knew from four years on the burglary squad. There were two ways to deal with a house that was thoroughly wired: if you knew enough about alarms you might disable the equipment and operate at your leisure; or, if you were electronically illiterate, you could smash your way in and loot quickly, hoping to depart before the police arrived. Larsen well knew that his colleagues often did not arrive within the advertised two-minute time frame.
Larsen was not entirely unfamiliar with electronics, but he did not feel confident attacking an alarm system installed by an expert in his own house. Nor did he long for a few nerve-wracking minutes of search time while he wondered how close the local law was, and he certainly did not wish to have to explain to the LAPD why a Beverly Hills officer was present in the home of one of its taxpayers in his absence.
Given the circumstances, it seemed that his best hope was simply to get a look at the inside of the house from the outside, and the two skylights should be helpful. He cupped his hands around his eyes to cut the glare of the sun and peered down into the residence.
He found himself gazing into the uplifted eyes, some twelve feet below him, of the largest Rottweiler he had ever seen. The animal resembled more a small bull than a dog, and it was emitting a low rumble of a growl that he could feel in his fingertips against the skylight. Thanking heaven that he had not broken into the house, Larsen quickly surveyed the room, found it to be a sparsely equipped kitchen, then moved on to the next skylight.
The Rottweiler moved with him, following his footsteps across the roof. The dog was now in the living room, which contained a new-looking sofa and a very large television set, and little more. This was consistent with someone who had recently moved out of a furnished guest house.
By laying his cheek against the skylight, Larsen could see a corner of the bedroom, and against the wall was a Samsonite suitcase like the one he had seen on the bed of the Millman guest house.
Larsen was not sure what he had been hoping for—perhaps the Navajo rug or a wallful of photographs of Chris—but whatever it was, he hadn’t found it. While everything he saw was consistent with his matching of Admirer and Parker, he could see nothing that would establish the fact sufficiently to justify an arrest warrant. It was going to be necessary to look into the windows from the ground, particularly the garage, which he hoped would contain a red motorcycle. Taking care to first wipe any fingerprints off the skylights, he padded across the roof to the back of the house. He looked for a place where the gutter seemed strongly attached to the house, found it near the back door, and let himself dangle from the gutter for a moment before dropping the final six feet to the ground.
As he rose from a squat to his full height, he found himself facing the back door and, to the right of that, a good-sized picture window. He happened to be looking directly at the window as it exploded, sending glass everywhere, and, simultaneously, a piercing, whooping alarm went off and the Rottweiler sailed through the air into the backyard.
Larsen did not hesitate. He ran at the patch of fence from which he had removed the razor wire. The Rottweiler had landed off balance and rolled, giving Larsen just enough time to plant one foot against the fence and leap to the top. At that moment, the Rottweiler came for him.
He had one leg over the fence and was struggling to get the rest of his body over it when the dog left the ground, snapped its jaws loudly shut, and fell back, brought up short by the jean leg to which he held fast.
Larsen had both hands on the top pipe of the fence and one leg over it, but hanging from his leg was at least a hundred and seventy-five pounds of squirming, thrashing beast, which was not about to let go. Larsen felt himself slipping back into the yard.
He had no doubt that if he allowed the dog’s feet to touch the ground, the animal would use the opportunity to connect with Larsen’s leg instead of his trousers, and would then eat his way upward.
With one enormous effort, Larsen managed to get an arm over the fence and grip it from the other side. This gave him a moment’s purchase that allowed him to begin swinging his leg. In a weird kind of rhythm with the whooping alarm, he got the tenacious dog swinging through an arc, and, straining to increase the animal’s velocity, he managed to strike the side of the house with the dog’s body.
The dog grunted and let go. Larsen, with his remaining strength, got his body over the fence and dropped. He struck a patch of weeds on his back, knocking the breath out of him, and then the Rottweiler flung himself at the fence, his teeth inches from Larsen’s face. Larsen was very grateful that the fence was more resilient than the picture window.
He struggled to his feet, using the garbage can for support, and shuffled as quickly as he could toward his car. The dog followed him along the fence, making awful beast noises, while Larsen struggled to get breath into his body. As he crossed the alley, he heard a distant, crackling voice from his breast saying, “Security, security, security,” then, “Mayday, mayday, mayday.”
Larsen reached his car with his keys in his hand, but he did not need them to open the door. The driver-side window had been smashed, and the radio was gone. He immediately regretted that he had not yet found the time to install an alarm in the car.
He started the Mustang and, sucking in deep breaths, drove as slowly away as the adrenaline pumping through his veins would let him.
CHAPTER
40
Larsen was driving back along the beach when his radio crackled again. “Buy you a cup of coffee, boss?”
“I could use it,” Larsen said into the radio.
“I’m at the Beach Diner; I’ll order you a cup.”
Larsen looked up and saw the diner, with Danny’s black car parked outside. He pulled into the parking lot and found Danny sitting in a booth with two cups of coffee.
“Sounded like all hell broke loose,” Danny said. “I expected to be bailing you out by now.”
“All hell is a fair description,” Larsen said, exhibiting his mangled jeans.
“You shouldn’t wear such good jeans,” Danny said. “A cheaper pair would have torn away.”
“I’ll consider that the next time I do some second-story work,” Larsen said. “By the way, did I hear you broadcast both warning signals?”
“You sure did. When the alarm went off I started driving, and as I came around the corner the cops passed me going the other way, and a second later, the gray van went by, too. I can see how the cops might have been in the neighborhood, but how did Parker get there so fast?”
“His alarm system warned his office, and he probably has a car phone. He must have been nearby.”
“He’ll know someone has broken in now, and he’ll suspect you.”
“Maybe not; that neighborhood has more than its share of burglars. By the time I got back to my car the radio was gone.”
“This has not been a profitable day,” Danny said.
“I wouldn’t say that.” Larsen told him what he had seen in the house. “Everything there reinforces Parker as Admirer, even if it isn’t enough for a bust.”
“Is it always so tedious, being a cop? Isn’t it ever easy to arrest somebody?”
“Very often it is. Mostly we deal with repeat offenders, and they can be easy to trace. Also, we get a lot of convictions on information from informants. Parker is the toughest kind of perp—no record, which means nothing is known about him, and very br
ight. And, if he fits the usual stalker profile, he has the advantage of believing that what he is doing is perfectly all right. He has nothing to feel guilty about.”
“You mean he’s crazy?”
“Not in the sense you mean. Look at Parker—he’s a functioning, even successful member of society, has his own business. Not only that, he’s a trusted member of society. He’s in and out of people’s homes all the time. It would be tough to get a jury to convict him on anything but the most damning evidence. Certainly he’s warped in some way. I wouldn’t want to live his personal life.”
“Such as it is. You think he does anything in his off time except bug Chris?”
“Probably not, and he does it even while he’s working. Remember, a lot of what’s happened to Chris has occurred during business hours. His work takes him all over, and he can come and go as he pleases. He also has skills that help him: he can bug a telephone, wire a house, disable a car, scan police radio frequencies. So far, he’s anticipated me every step of the way, except maybe this morning. And I have a feeling that anybody who’s as paranoid as he is isn’t going to think that an ordinary burglar set off his alarm this morning.”
“In that case, shouldn’t you be worried?” Danny asked.
“Oh, I don’t think he’ll come after me.”
“Why not? He doesn’t seem to give a damn what the police think of him, and you’ve invited him to look over your house—that was a smart move—you’ve made it easy for him.”
Larsen felt himself blushing. “I guess it wasn’t the smartest move to let him in my house, but I wanted his prints badly, and I got them.”
“A lot of good it did you.”
Larsen blushed again. “You’re sounding more and more like the chief of detectives.”
“I don’t mean to be critical, Jon, I’m just trying to figure out what we can do about this guy, short of taking him somewhere and putting a bullet in his head.”
“Put that thought out of your mind,” Larsen said.
“Look, I know we’re not going to do that, but I still like thinking about it.”
