The Burglar

by Thomas Perry

  Elle got up and went to the much smaller gym at her new hotel, did a short workout with weights, ran on the beach for about a half hour, and then swam just outside the surf line for another half hour before she came back, showered, and went to the breakfast bar overlooking the ocean.

  When she returned to her room she went online and looked at the Santa Barbara News-Press.

  Harbormaster Dale Kraniak reported that the body of a male Caucasian about thirty to forty years old was found this morning floating in the harbor. The man appeared to have been stabbed in at least two places and slashed several times on the arms and hands.

  Santa Barbara Police spokesperson Sergeant Maureen Costa said, “At the moment we’re acting on the theory that this is a homicide, possibly in connection with robbery. There was no wallet or key or ID in his pockets. It’s possible that he was involved in an altercation aboard a boat, but his lungs contained no salt water, so he didn’t drown. He was dead when he entered the water.”

  According to Coast Guard rescue officer Calvin Slocum, the victim’s body had probably been in the water for several hours, and he could have drifted into the harbor from anywhere off the coast. The body was found afloat between two boats moored along the docks, where it had caught and remained.

  Elle clicked on several other news sources, but it was as though the news had stopped at the Santa Barbara County line. Tim’s death was a purely local story so far, an unknown stranger’s body found among all of those oceangoing sailboats and cruisers tied to the cleats on the long parallel docks.

  Tim had been at the restaurant north of Santa Barbara with her, but unless the paper or the television stations showed a picture of his face, there wasn’t much reason for a waiter to connect him with this story. She tried to remember being in the presence of anybody else, but she couldn’t. They had driven straight to the restaurant and then to the beach. They hadn’t even stopped at a gas station, because the Tesla didn’t use gas. She had looked for security equipment at the restaurant but had detected no surveillance cameras trained on the outdoor area, which consisted only of tables in a sheltered garden. Any cameras would have been inside, where there were things to protect.

  She was still puzzled and unsure about the entire experience. At the moment of the attack, she had not believed for the first fraction of a second that he could be trying to kill her. After that she had wondered if he was trying to make her pass out so he could rape her while she was unconscious, a crime she had read about a few times. And then she had realized he was trying too hard even for that and wondered if he had fallen into a crazy rage because she’d turned down his hotel invitation.

  Minutes later, when he had called out her real name, all possibilities dissolved but one. He knew who she was and he had brought her there to kill her. But why was he doing that?

  Killing her seemed to be pointless and irrational. She had been the one to find the camera in the triple murder, but she had turned it in already, and she’d seen nothing on the recording that the police hadn’t, except her own image. What threat could she represent to anyone now?

  She had thought about it many times since the morning she discovered the bodies and walked herself through everything she had seen. There was no clear picture of the killer with the silenced pistol. She could eliminate large groups—black men, Asian men, men who were very fat or tall or short—but she couldn’t say, “This is the one.” Tim Marshall had turned out to be a killer, but he hadn’t seemed to be the killer who had murdered the others. And he had not had a gun or silencer with him in the car or in his room.

  She had not noticed any car near Kavanagh’s house that looked suspicious on the morning of the discovery. And why would she have? The killing had taken place at least ten hours earlier. She had not seen anyone alive in or near Kavanagh’s house until the police arrived during her second visit. She had not found anything in the house, other than the recording, that told her anything.

  Somebody must have learned that a woman fitting her description and possessing a burglar’s habits had been in the house before the police got there. That much had to be true. Otherwise the two men and one woman would not have been out asking people who she was and, later, where she was. But there could have been other people besides the three who had done the same.

  Elle kept running through the possibilities. One was that they thought the girl burglar had come in, seen the bodies, and still had the single-mindedness to steal something from the house. It would have to be either valuable or incriminating to make the effort to find her worthwhile. Another was that they believed she had seen something that she had not—the killer, back to clean up the crime scene, couldn’t find something he was expecting and believed she had it.

  Maybe he thought she had seen him on her morning trip. No, she thought. Maybe she had. Maybe what he had done was this: killed the three the previous afternoon, gotten away unseen, spent an entire night sleeping or establishing an alibi, and then realized in the morning that there had been a camera running. If he then went back to the house and found the camera missing because she had taken it to her house to watch and copy, or if he arrived just as she was returning the camera to its tripod, what would he do? He would steal the camera himself. And then he would begin to hunt for her.

  She thought back to the newspaper stories. After the first few days there had been references to the way the bodies had been found. Had there been any direct mention of a recording? She would have to go back and reread the articles and interviews, but she didn’t think so. She had been assuming that the recording was in the hands of the cops. But what if the killer got there first and took it? He might have been in the house during her second trip. If he had been, he could have seen her. That was another thing she would have to find a way to investigate.

  Right now she had something new to look into, and she might have only today to do it. She checked out of the hotel after packing and wiping down the room. Elle got into her rented Honda and drove south on Interstate 405 and then switched to 55, the Newport Freeway, and reached Interstate 91, the Riverside Freeway, heading east.

  Elle had never attempted any burglaries in Riverside, San Bernardino, or Kern County, or any other inland areas, so she would have to be cautious. There were rich people in the inland cities, but she had not studied them, so she had never tried to rob them. There were probably heirs to the giant citrus farms that had once dominated the area between Pomona and Riverside, or to the mines full of unglamorous minerals that were in the deserts. There were also vast new car and truck dealerships, hotels and restaurants that must be making serious money, but inland was too alien for her to feel safe there. The politicians these people kept electing were permanently stalled in the nineteenth century and notoriously mean. There were more gun stores than the visible population would seem to be able to support.

  She would never have considered going where she was going in any other circumstances. As of this morning, the police had not yet figured out who the victim found in Santa Barbara Harbor—her victim—was. They therefore had no idea where he had lived, so this was her time. She had to do it now, before they found out.

  She had not known Tim Marshall when she had checked into the Universal Hilton. As she saw things now, he must have been searching hotels and watching for her to turn up. Apparently he was a hit man, and hit men worked in many different ways, but this way was not one that had occurred to her. Some of them worked for a commercial entrepreneur—a drug dealer, a car theft broker, a loan shark—and killed competitors and snitches. Others worked for some organized crime figure and killed people he considered his enemies. She knew there had been a few who had offered a murder service and got referrals through surface figures—lawyers, bartenders, bail bondsmen. It was possible this was what Tim Marshall had been. Maybe one of the husbands had wanted his wife killed, and knew somebody who knew somebody. Both the movie business and the restaurant business had in the past proved attractive to fringe characters.

  When she’d met Tim sh
e had been suspicious of him. He was so handsome, and the persona he had assumed was calculated to send the signals that made women interested. He was tall and strong, but extremely attentive and gentlemanly and sensitive to what a woman was thinking. He observed a woman and listened to what she said. And after that he provided proof that he had taken it seriously, absorbed it, and acted on it.

  What she had suspected was that he was a confidence man who preyed on women. She assumed he wanted either her money or easy access to her body or both. Yes, definitely both, which had not only brought her a slight tingle of pride and erotic speculation, but also pushed more frightening things out of her consciousness. Even though she believed a killer was hunting her, the idea that the killer might be Tim never entered her mind.

  And he had gotten her interested, just as he would have if he were either an actual handsome Canadian horse trainer or a handsome con man. She had been pretty thoroughly seduced, she admitted. In Santa Barbara she had refused to check into a hotel on the beach because she had a job to do. She had been planning to come back to Los Angeles that night to break into Santo Teason’s house, and that was what she’d intended to do.

  She had guessed wrong about him. He had been maneuvering her into a quiet, dark spot where he could murder her silently and put her body in the ocean. She had never suspected it. At the moment when he had slipped the cord over her head and pulled it tight, she had been turning toward him to be kissed.

  He had misunderstood her too. He had no idea she had a razor-sharp knife under her short dress, specifically one she could pull out and open with one hand. He had taken her to a beach in the dark, but that meant he didn’t see her movement or the knife until it had nicked his femoral artery. He hadn’t even imagined there was anything a person half his size could do to resist him, let alone hurt him, so he hadn’t tried hard enough to disable her.

  She had been able to outrun him, partly because she was a habitual runner and he wasn’t, but also because he was already weakening from loss of blood. When she slashed his hands and arms to keep him from grasping her, that opened new wounds and increased the blood flow. She had gotten into this predicament by stupidity and survived it by luck. She couldn’t help remembering her grandmother shaking her head about Elle’s mother. “She was so pretty, just like a little angel. But she was so stupid.” So was her daughter, Elle thought. And she didn’t even get the looks.

  When Elle crossed into Riverside County she used the app on her cell phone to bring up the female voice that told her how to get to the address on Paul Wolcott’s driver’s license. She followed the directions until she heard, “In five hundred feet your destination will be on your right,” and then turned off the app.

  The place was an apartment complex from another era. The buildings were two stories with gray clapboards and bright white trim. The upper units each had a white wooden staircase at an end of the building, so there were only four apartments in each building.

  Elle coasted slowly past the complex searching for security cameras. When she was sure she had perceived the pattern that determined their placement she drove on and parked at a restaurant some distance away on a larger, busier parallel street.

  She had dinner, paid the check, used the restroom to change into her unisex night burglary clothes, walked out the door to the car, and pulled past the rear of the building. Elle knew that most security cameras were not good for picking up clear pictures in the dark and that the ones with night vision, though brighter, were full of flashes, bleeding images, and distortion, so she wanted to wait for full darkness before she went back to the apartment complex. She parked her car in a part of the mall that included a popular Mexican restaurant, a bar, and several larger stores and businesses to ensure that there would be plenty of foot traffic and then set off.

  She walked to the apartment complex and studied it as she passed. She verified that the A and B apartments were on the ground and the C and D apartments were on the second floor. She found the correct building number and the D unit, went up the stairs, used the key from Tim Marshall’s suitcase to get in, and quietly closed the door behind her.

  She was in a living room with a couch, two matching easy chairs, a television set, and a wide, low coffee table. She made sure all the blinds were closed before she turned on her flashlight. On the table were copies of Entertainment Weekly, Sports Illustrated, a magazine called Horseman, and another called Trainer. There were also copies of Canadian Living, Maclean’s, and Westworld Alberta. This was certainly the right place. Tim Marshall was Paul Wolcott.

  She ventured into the kitchen, where things seemed mostly clean. She guessed that when he wasn’t traveling he had made coffee in the morning, poured liquor in the evening, and eaten nearly all of his meals in nearby restaurants.

  The bedroom was an unpleasant surprise. It had been closed up while Paul Wolcott had been in Los Angeles being Tim Marshall, and the room smelled like him. Her nose was able to distinguish a familiar scent contained in a deodorant and also a musky smell that she had not noticed consciously on him but was absolutely Tim Marshall. She traced the smell to a laundry basket by his closet that held a full load of dirty clothes. The smell made her feel his presence, and it scared and confused her. She spent a few seconds seeing him again on the beach in the moonlight calling out to her to come closer so he could kill her with his hands.

  Elle shuddered and then banished the feeling. She was in his bedroom, the place where she knew the secrets would be. She began to find things. There was a .45 ACP Smith & Wesson pistol and a box of fifty rounds for it. There was a .380 with three full magazines. She also found a .308 rifle with a scope. But she found no silencer, and neither pistol had any modification like a threaded barrel to accommodate one. If he’d owned anything like that he had it hidden somewhere else. She spent a half hour looking in more and more obscure places for secrets, checking the air vents, the stuffing in the couch and chairs, and the upper- and undersides of every drawer, cabinet, and cupboard, then trying to find hollowed-out appliances, loose boards, and packages in the refrigerator and the freezer.

  She exhausted those possibilities and turned to the search for paper. She went through every bill, receipt, check register, account record. She would lay it out under the intense beam of the flashlight, take a shot of it with her phone, and set it aside. Then she would go for the next pile.

  Paul Wolcott had earned some money at his trade. His checking account at Bank of America always had over $200,000 in it. The monthly statement made it clear that the money deposited was from something called the Wolcott Trust, or it was cash in irregular sums, all below $5,000. He made it look as though he were paying himself from investments, with small but regular infusions of cash from something—maybe gambling. She couldn’t tell if it was a system to hide the payer or to explain how a man who never worked stayed solvent.

  She found stock and bond mutual funds amounting to a few hundred thousand dollars. She took phone photographs of all the reports and put them back. She stayed about three hours in the apartment, always wearing the hat and surgical gloves. She knew that this was her final visit here, because the police would find out who the body in Santa Barbara was before very long. But she found nothing like what she’d hoped for. She had wanted to turn up something that illuminated the unseen and organized the chaotic, but she simply didn’t.

  Before she left, she looked around a final time. She had not perfectly preserved the order of Paul Wolcott’s apartment, but the place didn’t look as though it had been tossed. And Paul Wolcott would not be back to detect the small differences in his arrangement.

  She looked out every window to be sure there was nobody waiting out there, exited and locked the door, and went down the stairs. The walk to the car was a bit farther than Elle liked, but she hadn’t dared to risk having her rental car’s license plates on a surveillance recording.

  She had walked about a hundred yards from the apartment when she saw a black SUV approach from the other direction. She stepped t
o the corner of the nearest building and turned back to watch. Two doors opened and men got out. They were both tall and moved as though they were in good shape. The two men hurried up the stairs to Paul Wolcott’s apartment. Another figure got out of the backseat and stepped to the driver’s-side door. This one was lighter and thinner—a woman? The person opened the door and the dome light came on again. It was the tall blond woman, the one who had been with the two men searching the bars for Elle Stowell.

  The woman backed the SUV up over the curb and almost to the bottom step of the stairs. The men stationed themselves on the stairs and began handing things down to the woman, who stood in the back door of the SUV and placed them inside the cargo bay formed by folding the backseats down.

  Elle could tell they weren’t trying to preserve the order or condition of the things they loaded. They were trying to remove everything. They had a roll of big black plastic trash bags, and that was how most of Paul Wolcott’s belongings arrived in the SUV. In about fifteen minutes the three climbed back into the SUV, drove gingerly down over the curb to the street, and turned toward the freeway entrance. She knew exactly where they were going. And she knew, once and for all, that they weren’t cops.

  17

  On the way home Elle stopped at an all-night pharmacy and bought a fine-point indelible pen, a padded mailing envelope, and a sheet of stamps. All were packaged, so she didn’t worry about fingerprints or DNA.

  At five A.M. Elle reached her house in Van Nuys. She took all the precautions, looking for the wrong cars parked in the wrong places, any changes in the way she had left her window blinds and curtains, and any signs of a break-in. There seemed to be nothing that she hadn’t seen before. She checked the electric meter to see if the wheel was turning at its usual glacial pace or if things were turned on that she hadn’t left that way. When she was satisfied, she unlocked the door and stepped in.