The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  The two women entered the frame first. They were typical of the women in the richest parts of Los Angeles. They were exceptionally well cared for, with bodies that had been exercised and trained like racehorses but barely fed, faces that were born pretty and then given surgical shaping and smoothing and correction beginning in the girls’ teens—noses had been straightened and narrowed, chins made tighter and more prominent, cheekbones sculptured. They were both too young for lifts and puffed lips and smoothed eyelids.

  Their hair and makeup were terrific, a sign that people came to their houses every morning to do both. One woman had long dark brown hair that swung when she turned her head as though it had weight. The other had hair the color and texture of corn silk. Both wore it straight. They held themselves with their heads close, conferring as though they knew that they complemented each other—the blonde made blonder by the dark hair of her friend, and the brunette made to seem more vivid.

  They stopped inside the door to glance back at the narrow hallway they’d just left, and there was a bit of giggling and whispering. “Beautiful skin,” the dark one said. “But so much of it.”

  “She’s a milkmaid,” said the blonde. “All the butter must add up.” “Why would a milkmaid be naked?”

  The blonde sang the line from Lullaby of Broadway: “The milkman’s on his way.”

  The man arrived three steps behind. “Not a milkmaid, a shepherdess,” he said. “It was a court fad, a costume for outdoor parties. The noble ladies would dress like peasant girls.”

  “This one isn’t dressed like anyone,” the brunette said. “You know, I think I saw this painting in France.”

  “Makes sense,” said the man. “The de la Vierne family had lent it to museums for sixty or seventy years before I bought it. I overpaid because the story charmed me. The model was the wife of a prominent nobleman who neglected her while he was sending ships to French colonies to trade. The painting was shown at court briefly and improved her social life.”

  “Oh,” said the blonde. “So at least she had a happy ending.”

  The man laughed. The brunette laughed too and gave him a playful slap on the arm. “You love that, don’t you?”

  “I already admitted it. And collectors love a painting with a story that’s a little bit naughty.”

  The blonde stepped ahead, trying to distract the man’s attention from the other woman. “Oh, Nick,” she said. “I just love these.” She swept her arm across the space to indicate all the nautical paintings. She completed the circle, turning her body all the way around, completing her twirl.

  Elle could see that her ploy had worked. Nick stepped close to her, took her hand, twirled her around a second time, and caught her by putting his hands on her thin waist like a ballet partner. With his height and grace he looked a bit like a dancer.

  The brunette was walking along the opposite wall staring at the paintings. She stopped and said, “This isn’t even American. This is a Turner. How the hell can you keep a Turner in your bedroom?”

  “How can you not?”

  “Don’t be cute, Nick,” she said. “You know what I mean. Cost. Risk. Insurance.”

  “There’s virtually no risk,” he said. “I don’t invite collectors into my bedroom, so nobody knows these are here. A sane person would keep them in a vault.”

  “That explains why you don’t,” the brunette said.

  “I was going to add that this house is like a vault. There’s a super-elaborate alarm system that’s monitored remotely. It comes with a squad of armed men, who will rush here at a moment’s notice. And as I said, I don’t tell people what’s here.”

  “Very wise. But not as wise as putting the paintings in a vault.”

  “I swear I never bring anyone in here that I don’t lust after.”

  The blonde sidestepped to place herself in front of Nick, smiling brightly. “Well, which one of us is it?”

  “Both,” he said.

  “Really?” She looked skeptical.

  “Well, look at you,” he said. “You’re like a perfect pair. You’re heart-stoppingly beautiful opposites. You’re best friends, close in almost every way. You could be close in every way. And of all the set we know socially, who would anyone rather fool around with than you?”

  “Now that’s a question,” said the brunette. “But there’s the little matter of husbands.”

  “Is that a problem to you?”

  “We each have one,” the blonde said.

  “I sure won’t tell them. And if you both want to play, neither will either of you. It’ll be our secret forever.”

  The two women’s heads moved together again and they whispered and then laughed.

  Suddenly the brunette looked directly at the camera. “What’s that?”

  “It’s a camera, sweetie,” said Nick. “They’re going to be part of a show at the gallery I’m planning for fall, and there’s advertising, the catalog, the insurance, and so on. I was getting some shots when you arrived.”

  “Oh,” she said, and when she turned around she saw that her friend was unbuttoning. She faced her friend and began to do the same, each of them staring into the other’s eyes as though this were a contest to see who would lose her nerve first. Neither did.

  What Elle saw next on the recording brought back a long-buried memory. When she was barely fourteen, she had a crush on a boy named Pete Flynn. He was in two of her classes, and he was lively and funny, with sharp dark brown eyes and black hair. In fact, he had the same body as this man Nick—long and thin, with muscles like cables instead of bumps. But he had a way of looking at a girl that not only hinted that he was thinking improper thoughts, but actually made her wonder what, specifically, they were and begin imagining possibilities. By January, when the kids all came back to school from vacation, Elle had thought about him and acquired a different attitude. She hadn’t gained any sophistication, but she knew by then what she wanted. She wanted Pete Flynn all alone somewhere. It would have to be somewhere in his world, because “alone” wasn’t something that existed in hers, which was crowded with aunts and cousins.

  Elle was sure he would know the right place. Boys always seemed to know of places where they wouldn’t be found. After another week she took up staring at him too. She thought she’d better try to get some education and learn what was going to be expected of her.

  She went to her friend Becky Ransom’s house. Becky was an only child, and she had a great desktop computer with a screen about twenty-five inches across and a super-high-speed Wi-Fi system to feed it. Her father worked at two jobs and saved most of the money for Becky’s college fund. The computer figured into that somehow, as did Becky’s mother’s determination never to bother her when she might be studying or thinking.

  Elle and Becky found many websites that catered to their educational need. All they had to do was click on a box that said they were over eighteen and select from a list of titles that revealed very little to them. They spent a whole Saturday afternoon in Becky’s room watching these presentations, one after another—about six hours without stopping. Since then Elle had always been convinced that the experience delayed the loss of her virginity by at least a year and a half, and when that finally happened, she was extremely wary of any move that Jimmy de Luca, her very nice boyfriend, made.

  That Saturday afternoon of pornography with Becky was what this recording brought back to her. There was the same lack of real affection. They were performing. The three of them might just as well have been in an exercise class that emphasized repetitive motion. They were all adept at the parts they played, but there wasn’t any joy, not even much sincere lust. The women were very conscious of how they looked, so they tended to pose. There was some female moaning, but it seemed to Elle that it was the kind a person did to tell the man it was time to bring things to a conclusion.

  Nick had set himself a difficult task, and his strategy was to devote most of his attention to one woman for a few minutes and then the other, switching whenever he se
nsed it was time, like a person trying to start two fires and then keep them both burning. The result didn’t seem to be very satisfying to the women, but she supposed he had been counting on them to keep each other from getting bored.

  Things seemed to be building toward a culmination. Nick, who was paying attention to the blonde at the moment while she straddled the brunette, suddenly looked up. All he said was “Uh!” He seemed to see the gun and his expression changed to fear.

  The man remained in the doorway instead of stepping forward into the room, but the women looked in that direction and saw him too. The brunette arched her neck and must have been seeing him upside down.

  The blonde said, “How did you even know we were here?”

  The brunette covered her eyes and pleaded, “Don’t.”

  As the intruder’s arm rose, Elle noted that he was wearing black. Was that a black leather jacket? His silencer was about eight inches long, and it wasn’t homemade. The shots came quickly—one-two-three—and as the bullets hit first the man and then the blonde, they collapsed forward, pinning the brunette. The man shot her last, but the whole business took less than three seconds, and it didn’t seem to be in order of preference. To Elle it seemed a matter of efficiency, aiming high, then lowering the aim to the middle and then the bottom.

  He turned away from the bed without checking to be sure they were all dead. She saw a bit of black shoulder and nothing more. It was odd to Elle that he didn’t seem to have noticed the camera on its tripod. He never really came into the room, so maybe he hadn’t seen it. Or maybe he did not fear a recording, but Elle couldn’t think of a reason he wouldn’t.

  The next phase of the recording involved a lot of time. Elle watched for a while to see if the man would come back, but he didn’t. She sped up the playback. In quickened time, the unmoving tableau was shown in waning light and then darkness. There was a fixture in the garden that was on a light-sensitive switch, so at nightfall it turned on, and the unmoving figures were visible in the light coming in through the open window, their permanent stillness silhouetted on the bed. Dawn came again and the artificial light went out.

  Elle stopped the playback and sent it forward at standard speed, then cautiously sped it up again. When she caught a glimpse of her own foot stepping into the doorway, she slowed to normal speed again.

  So far, only the toes of her running shoes were visible in the doorway in profile. It crossed her mind that a diligent cop could identify the brand and ask the manufacturer for the names of places where those shoes were sold. But Elle had been working, and therefore everything on her was a costume. The shoes were high quality and expensive, but thousands of spoiled young women in Los Angeles had a pair like them, and she’d had hers for a year.

  She caught an instant in which the bill of her baseball cap showed in the doorway, but not her face, and then nothing more for a while. And then a bizarre figure entered the room, a small human being who was carrying a painting over his or her head like a shield. The camera couldn’t catch a face. The person moved close and the camera caught a hand reaching toward it. The image swept to the side and focused on a wall with other ship paintings on it. Then the screen went black.

  3

  She set the camera aside and read more about it on the website. The Sony Handycam AX33 4K flash memory camcorder was a nice piece of equipment for $800. It had a 128-gigabyte memory card, 18.9 megapixels “for gripping detail.” It far exceeded HD resolution. She could attest to that. It had image stabilization. She could attest to that too. She was sure she had missed absolutely no gripping detail of the recording and that she could have identified any of the bodies from a randomly selected square inch of skin. She stared at the page for a long time, but she wasn’t really thinking about the camera. She was thinking about what to do next.

  If she was a good person she would take the camera to the police. If she was a bad person she would take the 128-gigabyte memory card out, destroy it, and sell the camera in another city with all of her other stolen goods. Elle was both good in intention and bad at carrying out good intentions, so she had to do some thinking.

  She felt a sincere sympathy for the people who had been murdered. Nick was a self-serving, smug, predatory manipulator who had induced two women to do things he knew they would regret and probably would have regretted by the end of the day. But he was certainly better than the man who had stepped into his house and shot him in the face. And even though the two women had come to the house in the middle of the previous afternoon very much ready to betray their husbands—the very fancy and uncomfortable underthings they were both wearing when they’d arrived proved it—they seemed to have no intention of doing anyone any serious harm and probably had nothing to gain from it. They were obviously both rich already. The Prada Saffiano Cuir purse the blonde had carried was worth about $2,500, and her friend’s Fendi Kan shoulder bag was around $3,500. The Omega Seamaster Aqua the blonde had on her wrist was around $12,000, and the Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso Ultra Thin strapped to the brunette could be anywhere from $13,000 to $45,000 depending on extras.

  Elle had studied the women’s faces as they looked up and were shot. Neither of them had shown or said anything to prove to Elle that the shooter was either one’s husband. The blonde had asked how he’d known they were here, which seemed to indicate that he was looking for both of them, not one. Elle had to apply the same test to the women as to the man. Were they worse than the man who had dropped by to shoot them in the face?

  Elle decided that the police must receive the camera containing a recording of the murder. The recording would not include the footage of Elle Stowell showing up to burglarize the house. Since she was the last sight to appear on the memory card, all she had to do was erase herself.

  She copied the recording from the memory card on to her laptop computer. Of course the computer wasn’t hers in the legal sense, but she had it in her possession and used it frequently. She checked the copy for accuracy, visual clarity, and completeness. Then she transferred three copies to thumb drives. She hid one drive in a spot she considered safest—taped inside the hollow pole holding the set of heavy curtains in the living room. The others she put inside a jar of turmeric and returned the jar to the spice rack that slid like a drawer into the space beside the cupboard over the stove. She was a professional at finding valuables hidden in houses, so she was good at hiding them too. She needed to retain copies of the full version in case she was arrested and charged, to prove that she had arrived in the bedroom of the house many hours after the murders.

  Next she returned her attention to the camera. She ran the recording back to the point where she’d arrived and erased everything after that. Now the tape looked to her as though it went along with all the fooling around from start to finish, a night of rigor mortis, and then a blank nothing. This was something she could feel comfortable placing in the hands of the police.

  She looked at her watch, wiped the camera thoroughly, and put it into her fanny pack. This was a triple murder. The police might not find her DNA in the house, because she had worn latex gloves and hadn’t hung around long after she’d arrived. She felt no guilt about removing the camera from its tripod, taking it home, and manipulating the recording, because she knew from the recording that the killer had never touched the camera. No evidence was lost.

  Elle drove back to Beverly Hills. She had spent hours learning about the camera, playing the recording back, and editing. It was nearly nine A.M. already. But she had hope that the bodies had not yet been found, because there were still no police cars parked at the house. Nick didn’t strike her as a person who punched a time clock. He had mentioned a show “in the gallery,” and that business didn’t usually take place early in the morning. If he wasn’t at work by nine, people probably wouldn’t get worried right away and investigate. The blond woman hadn’t thought anybody had known where she and her friend were, so people probably wouldn’t be looking for them at Nick’s house.

  She drove past the house and di
dn’t see any cars in the driveway or the cobblestone turnaround beyond the hedges. She left her car up the road and around the bend, then approached the house as a jogger again.

  She had come to suspect that on her earlier visit she had skillfully avoided setting off an alarm system that wasn’t even engaged. Most people didn’t turn their alarm systems on while they were awake at home, and she sensed that Nick was one of them. On the tape, he had run downstairs to let the two women in, but she hadn’t heard any beeps from a control pad. And later the killer had apparently come in the door without setting anything off, even though Nick had claimed to have a sophisticated alarm system. And since then there had been nobody alive to turn the system on again. She would have seen or heard any such person on the recording.

  As she ran toward the house she hoped that if any neighbors had been up and seen her run before, they would have gone out by now. This was a neighborhood where “out” would probably mean riding horses or playing golf or driving up or down the coast to do something social. If people saw her now, they wouldn’t be able to add much information except to contradict the other reports of when the mystery girl liked to run.

  She went to the back, climbed up on the roof, crawled into the attic as before, tiptoed to the trapdoor, opened it, and listened. When she’d done this before she’d thought of the silence as absence, emptiness. Now it was dead silence. She lowered the steps and climbed down. Then she walked to the bedroom. The bodies were still there, unmoved. She fitted the camera to the tripod and looked through the viewfinder to aim the camera at the bed. She adjusted the aim slightly upward so she could crawl back to the doorway without being filmed, tightened it there, and turned the camera on.

  In spite of her recently acquired rationality, Elle was tempted to stop and look around. She knew that the women’s bodies wore some very expensive jewelry, but the idea of taking it was disgusting to her. It was also a good way to get caught. She was far too intelligent to take any art, but she would at least like to see the rest of the swag that she was too smart to take. The dealer’s markup on one of those paintings would translate into a lot of simple, unpretentious money. But she reminded herself that this was the scene of a triple murder. It involved rich and beautiful people having scandalous sex. And now, thanks to Elle, it once again featured a recording. The police would be all over this place, so the best thing to do was go without touching anything else.