by Thomas Perry
She looked out her twelfth-floor window at the night sky. She would not have to contend with a bright moon tonight. It was growing, but it was still a thin crescent like a fingernail clipping. She gazed down at the cars on the freeway to judge the level of traffic to expect on her drive. It wouldn’t do to pull off a break-in and end up stalled in traffic. But the stream of cars was already beginning to thin out after the evening drive, and she wouldn’t be leaving for hours.
She opened her computer and double-checked the addresses of the two houses. She looked at the satellite view of each of them, then the street views, and then expanded to parallel streets and cross streets looking for obstacles and opportunities. She kept pulling outward until her view encompassed many acres of the most expensive real estate in Southern California.
What she needed to do was determine whether it would be possible tonight to pay a visit to these neighborhoods without being photographed or arrested. After some study, she believed it would be possible if she didn’t draw unusual attention to herself. Both neighborhoods seemed to have outlasted the sudden attention of the media, and the triple murder wasn’t the sort of crime that anybody else had to fear. There wouldn’t be police out watching for the next naked triple homicide.
Elle supposed that the police must be doing something to keep track of both husbands, but by now they were most likely working backward through phone and computer records, financial records, and interviews with friends and relatives. If anything was wired, bugged, or tracked, it would probably be the husband’s cars.
She turned her attention to Santo Teason. She checked IMDB and the online ghosts of the trade papers to get an idea of his career as a director. He had a long résumé as a director of television episodes and films that sounded minor, most of them in Europe. But he also had made six American movies that she hadn’t seen but were important enough to have Google entries of their own. He was supposedly signed to direct a feature remake of Robert Graves’s I, Claudius in Rome sometime this year. How the demise of Valerie McGee Teason would affect that was not yet being discussed online, but she guessed he would be in Los Angeles most of the time for the moment. He had three kids who had lost their mother.
13
When it was after midnight, Elle dressed in dark work clothes, took the elevator to the second floor, and then took the stairs to the first. At the end of the hall she came to a doorway that led outside to the courtyard by the pool, then circled the hotel to the front of the building where the parking attendants were stationed. Her gray Altima was at her feet in two minutes, and she was on her way to Beverly Hills.
David Mannon seemed to be the best bet for her first visit. He was a chef who owned and ran two restaurants. A restaurant was the sort of business that required attention. If you didn’t show up in person nearly every day you wouldn’t have one anymore. There was no notice online that either restaurant was temporarily closed, and the reservation lines were still live. It had been over a week since the murders, so there was a good chance he wasn’t still spending every night at home. Even if he was out, though, the two kids and whoever took care of them were likely to be there, so she would have to be cautious.
When she reached his address she drove past slowly. The house was behind an iron fence, set back on a lawn at the top of a slight rise. It had two stories, but the ceilings were high, so it seemed taller than that. There were no signs of police cars or other threats that she could see on the street. She parked a block away and walked back to the house.
She spent a few minutes studying and watching, trying to find a reason not to break in. She didn’t detect one, so she pulled a ski mask over her head, climbed the ivied wall at the edge of the property, dropped to the lawn, and sneaked into the shrubbery close to the house. She crouched there studying the parts of the house that had been hidden before—the ground near the foundation and then the space up under the eaves, where she spotted the first security camera.
Elle came up on it with her back nearly touching the side of the house to keep the camera aimed outward away from her. She followed the insulated wire that ran from it to the next camera and the next, until she reached a small circuit box attached to the side of the building. She elected to disconnect the wire from the box rather than disconnecting the box from the power, because she didn’t want to turn off all power to the place. Every alarm system she knew had a backup battery that sent an alarm signal if the AC power died. She stepped along the side of the house to the back, looking for more cameras and disconnecting them.
In a modern house belonging to a rich family there was no longer a way to be sure that the security cameras had all been disabled. Many systems had cameras in difficult-to-see places and even had some cameras in plain sight that were disguised to look like other things—light fixtures, doorbells, mailboxes. She carried a small can of automotive spray paint in case she needed to blind a camera lens.
She had noticed when she’d seen the house’s image on Google Street View that along the side of the foundation there were small horizontal windows, partially obscured behind low plants. There must be a basement. Elle put her face close to one of the windows, shone her flashlight in to verify her impression, and saw a laundry room with two washers and two dryers. She moved along the foundation from window to window. Through the next one was a folding and ironing room. A few windows farther on was a workshop. It had shelves of tools, lightbulbs of various types, transparent boxes of screws, nails, fasteners, and hinges, and a workbench with a vise. There were cans of paint that had been opened and re-shut, and she was sure that if she made it upstairs she would see those colors again on walls up there.
She suspected that the owners probably never went down to the basement. A man with a couple of restaurants didn’t have time to be a handyman too, and Anne Mannon had not struck Elle as much of a housewife. Judging from the photographs she seemed to have served the restaurants as a hostess.
She turned her flashlight to study the nearest window. Each basement window was about two and a half feet wide and about a foot and a half high. Each was locked by a latch consisting of a metal lever with a short hook on the fulcrum end that slid under a metal holder. She moved to a corner so she could shine her light through one window and examine the inner wall set perpendicular to it. There were no wires running over the concrete to the basement windows. That meant the windows weren’t on the alarm system.
Elle moved from window to window trying to insert her knife’s blade between the frame and the pane, or to find a window that had not been properly latched from inside. In the end she had to use a length of the bare steel wire she had brought.
She bent the wire into a curve and inserted the tip between the metal rim of the window and the frame. She fed the curved wire inside and pushed until it came back out past the catch. Then she rotated the wire into a loop over the catch, twisted the wire around itself several times to tighten it, and then gave it a sharp jerk to the right to pull the catch free. When she saw the handle come up, she inserted the blade of her knife and pulled the window outward.
She knew that the size and shape of the windows had been selected on the assumption that an intruder couldn’t slither in. It was a tight fit even for Elle. She slid her feet in and lowered herself onto the workbench and then looked around her. For the moment she decided not to search for anything specific but to be alert for anything odd or out of place. Her general goal was to figure out whether David Mannon had killed his wife and her friends, and the evidence could be something she’d never anticipated.
She was pretty sure that the police had immediately searched both husbands’ houses for the gun and the silencer. But there were other things that might turn up, and she might be better at finding them than the police had been. If she could find signs that David had been spying on his wife, or searching her computer or phone, or recording her calls, or hiring other people to follow, tape, or investigate her, then Elle would know that he had mistrusted her. Anything, in fact, that showed he’d been pa
ying attention to her but not liking what he learned would make him a suspect.
Elle could see staircases at either end of the basement. She chose to climb the steps that were nearest to the rear of the house. They emerged in a hallway that was part of the kitchen complex. There was a walk-in pantry on one side and a set of six cupboards, each the size of a house door, on the other. She could see that the kitchen was large, about forty by twenty feet, with two eight-burner gas stoves, three big Sub-Zero refrigerators, two end-to-end islands separated only to produce a shortcut from one side to the other, and counters and sinks. Few restaurants anywhere had kitchens as well finished and equipped.
She opened a couple of the refrigerators to see if the kitchen was real or ornamental. The first one held champagne and white wines served chilled, so she wasn’t sure. But the others held perishable food: chickens, steaks, cheeses, eggs, vegetables.
Elle’s mental clock reminded her to move on. The dining room was about what she expected after the kitchen. There was a very long wooden table that looked as though it had been made from a plank cut from a giant tree. The chairs were the kind of design that artists rather than factories made, but she couldn’t identify which one had made these. They were in a modern Italian style that involved buttery leather over a chrome skeleton. The wall on her left had a long window with open shades, and the wall on the right had what looked like a panoramic color photograph. She turned her flashlight on it to verify that it was a photorealist painting.
The painting was a family scene on a white beach with a vast expanse of blue sea and tame surf. David was visible off to the right, barefoot, wearing white shorts, an untucked and half-buttoned blue-and-white short-sleeved shirt, and a hat that looked like an inverted bucket. The two blond kids were in the foreground, but the central figure was their mother, a laughing blond Anne running toward the viewer wearing a small red bikini. It was this bit of bright color that somehow made the rest of the picture work.
Elle hurried on. The house was obviously cleaned and cared for by servants, and she hadn’t either located them or determined that they weren’t the live-in variety. She thought about the decor of the house. Usually it was the wife who had the biggest opinion, and Anne’s taste was good. The house was full of things like the big beach mural that made the place more human and personal. Maybe the husband had commissioned the painting, but Elle had also noticed that if there had been a divorce it would have been possible to paint over one figure, the husband, without ruining the composition.
Superb photographs of the family were everywhere in the public areas of the house. Frames held the four Mannons on ski slopes, in sailboats, in antique speedboats with shiny varnished wood, on bikes in a redwood forest. Since the entire family was represented in each, Elle had to assume they had been staged and taken by a pro. Maybe the family had a talented photographer friend who always went with them on their vacations.
It seemed to Elle that everything in this house was too perfect, evidence of the family’s conspiracy to create an unreal impression on a visitor. It was as though Anne had been trying to get the kids into a fancy private school and known that admission really amounted to letting the family in. Look at how loving and wholesome we are. Here’s the doting, patient husband, and here are the smart, athletic, attractive kids. And everything about us says “money.” But above all, look at Mom. Won’t she be something buttonholing donors for the campus building fund?
If David had been the man with the pistol and the silencer, they were probably long gone. But if there was any evidence he wanted to keep close to him, it would be in the master suite, so Elle went upstairs.
She easily followed the flow of the house along the upstairs hallway past four nicely furnished but unoccupied bedroom-and-bath suites, and then the two bedroom suites of the kids, and then a playroom that had been updated and redone as a study room, and then an office. The kids were not in their rooms. She felt intense relief. David had taken them somewhere.
The door of the master suite was at the end of the hall. She could tell that the study and office had been placed to provide soundproofing between the kids’ areas and the parents’ area. She knew that people who owned restaurants were up late and probably slept late.
Elle had still found no bedrooms that might belong to servants. If there were any, they must be in a wing off the kitchen that she had missed or in a detached building behind the house.
As she moved to the master suite Elle had doubts. David might be somewhere with his kids, but there was no guarantee that he hadn’t left them with relatives and stayed here by himself. And David might be a decent man who had just lost both his wife and the illusions that had made him care about her, or he might be a serial killer who had murdered five people so far.
She knelt on the floor and crawled close to the door. She put her ear to the wooden surface but could not hear anything. She tried the knob and found that it turned. She pushed the door inward, staying low. She ventured to stand so she could see a bit in the dim light.
The huge bed was made; the room had been straightened and left with nothing out of place, and it was unoccupied. Elle checked the clock on the stand by the bed. It was 1:08 A.M. David could still be out at one of his restaurants, or he could have taken his kids somewhere to help them get past the first shock of their mother’s death, away from strangers’ prying questions. Either way, the best thing she could do was to begin exploring the master suite.
The first closet was full of men’s suits and sport coats on shaped wooden hangers, pants with their creases knife-sharp, the dress shirts starched and pressed and the informal ones soft or silky. He had more shoes than any man she’d ever met, and everything in the drawers had been folded by experts and stored in stacks. She ran her hands along the bottoms and backs of all the drawers but found nothing. When she had done a good search she moved on to the next closet.
This was even bigger. This was Anne’s closet. It appeared to have been gone over—looted, really. Every garment left was either new with tags still on it or encased in a dry cleaner’s plastic bag. Nothing in the closet had been worn. There was a clothes hamper, but there was nothing in it. If Elle could have come right after the murders, maybe she would have seen something, but not now.
Elle returned to the husband’s closet. His hamper had some dirty clothes in it. Anne’s clothes seemed to have been wrapped as evidence and moved somewhere as part of the investigation. The cops were probably having them, her car, and her other belongings checked for DNA and hairs and fibers. It was a logical thing to do to establish any ongoing relationships, and it made Elle feel better that the police were trying. And they would not have done anything like that except as part of a general search of the house that would have turned up anything obvious, like a gun with a silencer. She had never heard of cops doing that to a whole wardrobe, but what did Elle know about cops? Her life had been free of arrests.
There were two master bathrooms. She searched David’s bathroom and found only the usual things—soap, shampoo, shaving kit, deodorant, toothpaste, and electric toothbrush. Men seemed to be happiest when they owned nothing, and this was close. None of the things in Anne’s bathroom would seem suspicious at first glance either: bottles of expensive perfume, scented lotions, hair products, soaps. The towels were fluffy and new, and the bathrobes were either thick like the towels or silky and clingy. The mirrors were floor to ceiling except over the sink. The medicine cabinet had not been stripped of prescription medicines, but the only ones that didn’t have one of the kids’ names were the birth control pills.
Elle searched the usual sorts of hiding places—vents with scratches on the screws because they’d been unscrewed and opened, the backs of cupboards, the toilet tank, and the spaces under shelves, sinks, cabinets, and drawers. She found nothing.
She opened a drawer at the bottom of the vanity and found spares: extra brushes for Anne’s electric toothbrush, unopened mouthwash, toothpaste, tampons, a box of condoms that had been opened and from whi
ch a few of the individual packets had been removed. She turned on her flashlight. The label said CONTAINS NO LATEX. The expiration date was five years in the future.
Elle went back to the bedroom and looked in the nightstands on both sides. She opened every drawer and found no more condoms. She lay on the floor with her flashlight and looked under the bed. She had already searched both closets. There were no condoms anywhere else.
There was a noise. Elle judged it had come from the far end of the house where the kitchen was. She began to move. Her profession had taught her not to react the way other people did, which was to freeze and listen for the sound to be repeated to authenticate the noise, locate it, and interpret it. She was moving fast. There was no interpretation of the noise that would make staying where she was a wise idea. There was no need to waste time choosing directions either. There were stairways on both ends of the house, and she headed down the nearest one, off the bedroom hallway.
In a moment she was down the stairs to the basement. She had gone up the other stairway the first time, so when she arrived now she almost ran into the big pool table. She could just tell in the dim light that this area had been outfitted as a poolroom, with a set of cues in a frame on the wall above leather benches and a large light suspended above the table. The balls had been left out on the felt surface in the rack as though a game had been about to start. The cue ball was at the near end of the table, and as she ran past she snatched it up. Above her head she could hear heavy footsteps on the first floor. Someone seemed to be stalking through the house to find her.
She ducked into the maintenance room, climbed onto the workbench, and slithered out the window where she had entered. She pushed it shut, then moved out a few feet from the house. She reared back and threw the cue ball high above the roof, aiming it so that it would arc downward to hit just beyond the crest of the roof toward the back of the house.
