The room led into the bathroom, where a cool breeze was blowing through an inch-open window. A small puddle of water sat in the base of the shower and the faucet wasn’t leaking. So someone had had a shower recently. Probably left the window open to let the steam escape.
My cell rang, the chirping cutting through the silence. I holstered my gun beneath my arm and fished the phone out of my pocket.
“Yeah?” I said.
“It’s me,” came Romero’s voice. “Just got a call from tech. They went through the footage.”
“And?”
“Check it out. So it looks like all three left together last night around eleven o’clock. Then twenty minutes later, someone appears at the door. Black fatigues, ski mask. Average height. Average weight. No discernible features. The tech says it’s dark, so it’s hard to see anything. The guy starts working the lock. Gets it open, then starts carting tech gear out of the garage: computer, headset, cables. Two trips. Then he goes back in for one last trip. He’s in there for a few minutes. Then Nicholas Hartmann enters the picture. He goes inside. Thirty seconds later, the dude in the ski mask runs out.”
“Was he carrying anything? A gun, a skull?”
“No, nothing.”
“Shit. Not much to go on,” I said.
“Nah. Not really. But it rules out the girl for sure. If we can match Arnold to the size and frame of the guy . . .”
“All right. Not bad, Romero.”
“Oh, one last thing,” he said. “The tech guy said the image is interrupted by interference, about an hour after the guy runs off.”
“Interference? What kind of interference?”
“Don’t know. That’s all the guy said.”
I pushed my hair back. “Okay. You at the hospital yet?”
“On my way in now. I’ll let you know.”
“Keep in touch.” I hung up, then slid the cell back into my pocket.
I caught a reflection in the bathroom mirror. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. Enough to tell me someone was hiding behind the bathroom door. A man.
Was it Stuart Arnold? Or someone else?
My mind raced. If I pulled my gun, whoever it was would hear it. He would know I’d made him. If he had his own gun, he’d be out and firing rounds before I could even aim. I didn’t want a gunfight in a bathroom. That wouldn’t end well for me. My heart pounded in my chest. Adrenaline surged through my veins. What to do?
I gathered myself and walked out of the room. As I passed the door, I rammed my shoulder into it. I shoved with everything I had. There was a grunt. I shoved again, slamming the two-inch-thick piece of wood against whoever was there. The door cracked. Then it came back at me. With such brutal force it sent me wheeling back into the wall.
A hulking mass slammed the door shut. He was dressed in black fatigues: boots, jacket, cargo pants. The guy was a damn monster. Dark eyes focused on me from within his black ski mask, calm, and silent. His chest was heaving, his gloved fists were clenching, the leather was squeaking.
I reached for my Smith and he charged.
The guy’s shoulder hit me like a defensive lineman. The force took me off my feet and he ran me into the wall. My back hit hard and tiles shattered. My lungs compressed, forcing the air out of them and winding me.
He grabbed my hand with the Smith and slammed it against the ceramic tiles beside my face. On the second hit, the handgun flew out of my hand and clacked away out of sight.
I was still sucking in air but managed to swing my left elbow into the guy’s face. It hit somewhere in the center of his mask and there was a crunch. He grunted like a wild boar.
I jumped into him, charging his midsection, then lifted, except the guy weighed a ton. I barely got him off his feet, but the inch I managed was enough and we went down together.
Then shit got real messy, real quick.
Unarmed combat isn’t like in the movies, where fight scenes are choreographed, staged, so everything is aesthetically pleasing to the eye. The truth is, fighting is messy business, and it’s messy because there isn’t any distance in a real fight. Once the gap is gone, all the pretty stuff is over. Arms are locking, hands are grabbing, elbows are swinging, knees and legs are scrambling. When you match up a couple of big guys and you stick them in a small bathroom and throw them on the floor, shit starts to get real chaotic.
I realized I was outmatched. This guy was bigger than I was. And stronger. He was pounding fists into my midsection like a jackhammer. I was fighting to keep off my back, ’cause if that happened, he’d start hammering his jackhammer fists into my face.
He had the strength of a bull. Once upon a time I had some strength of my own, but that was more than two years ago. I was outmatched, there was no doubt about it, and it was only a matter of time. He knew it, and I knew it. At some point I was going to lose.
A solid knee sunk into my gut. I’d already recovered once from being winded and the blow was devastating. A guttural sucking sound wheezed out of me and I lost control of the fight then and there. He had me. He could pummel me with his giant fists until I was mincemeat. But he didn’t do that. No, instead he moved for my pistol.
If I didn’t stop him, he’d end me. He’d fill me with my own damn bullets. The cop who was killed by his own gun.
Unable to breathe, barely able to move, I threw myself after him. I grabbed a leg, but he shook me off as if I were a five-year-old playing with his daddy. He picked up my Smith and turned.
Then he pistol-whipped me. The solid metal case cracked like a bolt of lightning against my skull. Like a shard of glass struck with a hammer. The striking pain overcame me and I toppled backward.
I couldn’t see straight. My vision had gone to shit. The giant behemoth stood over me, breathing hard, holding my handgun to his side. Water sprayed out from the broken faucet and rained down over me. Blood and water ran into my eyes.
He lifted the gun, and I got to see the darkness of the barrel. I’d seen it before, but not from this far away. They say you don’t hear the gun go off. The bullet is faster than the speed of sound. So you’re dead and you never even heard the click of the hammer against the bullet’s ass.
I didn’t.
Darkness crowded my vision and my world went blank.
FIVE
“Hey. Hey! You awake?”
A blurred world came into focus.
“Hey, you okay?” Officer Eyebrows was crouched over me.
I tried to sit but the sudden explosion of pain in my skull froze me in place. “Aargh!” I grabbed above my left temple, where I’d been pistol-whipped. My hair was wet through with water and blood and my skin was cold.
“Hold on.” Eyebrows jumped up, grabbed a hand towel and passed it to me.
I pressed it against my skull and winced. “Goddammit.”
Billy the Kid walked in. “Water’s off.”
“What happened?” asked Eyebrows.
“Got my ass kicked, that’s what.” I tried to get to my feet, but the pain was excruciating. Eyebrows grabbed an elbow and I braced myself against the wall. I got to my feet and my head whirled with agony and dizziness. The room was spinning. My head was pounding. I thought I was gonna puke.
“We should get you to the hospital,” he said.
“Did you see which way he went?”
“Must’ve gone out the window,” he said. “Don’t know how long you’d been out. He could’ve left a while ago.”
I stumbled into the bedroom and slumped on the end of the bed.
“What happened?” Eyebrows asked for a second time.
I told him and gave him a description of the guy. He got on the radio and called it in.
I looked back into the bathroom. Looked like a demolition site.
“You want me to call for an ambulance or something?” asked the kid.
“No,” I told him. “Go out and look for him. He would’ve had an escape route, probably had a car waiting. Knock on some doors. See if anyone saw anything.” Blood dripped down the side
of my face and I pressed the towel harder to the cut. “Shit, he’s got my gun.”
“You mean this one?” asked Eyebrows. The 4506 was in his hand.
“Yeah. That’s it.” I took it off him.
“I’m calling an ambulance,” he said, reaching for his radio again.
“No. I’ve done head trauma before. I’m all right.” I wasn’t vomiting. Yet.
“You might need stitches,” said the kid.
“I’m fine,” I said, eyeing him firmly. I began checking my gun. No discernible damage. Round was still in the chamber and the mag was full. Hadn’t been fired. “Go out there and look for him, dammit. I’ll write up a report later.”
The two cops looked at each other, then Eyebrows shrugged. “All right. Whatever.” Then they started for the door.
I took a few deep breaths, then pushed up off the mattress. Got my land legs. Then moved into the bathroom and stared at myself in the broken mirror. My face was pale, eyes dark and sunken, face unshaven, long dirty hair wet with blood. I turned the tap on. No water. I toweled my hair, careful to avoid the cut above my temple, then wiped the blood from my face, and when I’d finished, the towel was wet and stained scarlet.
I went downstairs and raided Stuart’s medicine cabinet for painkillers. I found a bottle of aspirin. I turned the kitchen tap to wash a few down. No water. I swallowed them dry, turned on the TV, and left.
The daylight burned my eyeballs and ratcheted up my headache from severe to god-awful excruciating. I fished my shades out of the top pocket of my jacket. Broken. I threw them away and climbed into the Road Runner.
My cell rang.
“Yeah?” I said, my voice croaky.
“It’s me, Chris.”
“Don’t talk so loud,” I said. “You speak with Daniels?”
“Good and bad news.”
“Spit it out, Chris, I ain’t in the mood.”
“The good news is she’s okay. Minor shock. Bad news is she was good enough to be released. She’s not here.”
“You are fu—” I cut off as shards of glass splintered through my skull. I grimaced.
“I know, I know. I’m going over to her house now.”
“No. I’ll go speak to her. You go over to Hartmann’s place. He might have a girlfriend or someone. Break the news.”
“Okay, Blake.”
“And take a look around while you’re there. See if the place has been raided. Look for a little white flower with yellow whatever they’re called. Sternums, stanums. There was one at Stuart’s place and one in the garage. Don’t know if it means anything.”
“Got it.”
“And text me Daniels’s address, dammit.”
I hung up, dropped the cell on the passenger seat. I wanted to go to sleep. It probably wasn’t a good sign. I wasn’t seeing the insides of my stomach yet, but I was pretty sure driving was a bad idea.
I looked down and realized my fingers were trembling. The adrenaline kick had worn off and I felt jittery and nauseous and like I’d been hit by a damn truck. Jesus. I hadn’t had my ass kicked since elementary school. The guy had me. I should be dead right now.
CSU should be getting ready to stick the thermometer up my ass.
Who was he? Had he killed Nicholas Hartmann? I thought back to what Romero had said about the guy on the tape. Black fatigues, ski mask. The description was the same. Only Romero had said average height and average weight. The guy in the bathroom was neither. No, they weren’t the same guy.
What had he been looking for?
I shook my head, and pain bounced around like a ball bearing inside my brain. I took in a long breath. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Then I did it again.
I thought about the state of Arnold’s room. I had been piecing something together . . . before Romero had called. Before I’d had my ass kicked.
There was water in the base of the shower, clothes pulled out of the wardrobe.
Stuart had run. But why? There’s usually two reasons someone runs. They’re guilty of something and they don’t want to get caught. Or they’re scared. Which one was he?
I pictured the scene. Arnold taking a shower. He gets out, hears Elise’s message on his computer. Starts panicking. Thinks he might be next. Rushes into the bedroom and starts stuffing clothes into a bag. Then runs out the door, forgetting to turn the heat lamp off. Maybe he took whatever pet he had in there with him.
Shortly after he departs the townhouse, someone comes looking for him. Starts going through his stuff. Opens drawers. Then hears someone coming up the steps and hides behind the bathroom door.
My phone beeped on the seat beside me. Message received.
I opened it.
It was Elise Daniels’s address.
I started the engine. It was rumbling. Thumping, even. Thump, thump, thump. I’d spent a fortune on the stainless steel twin three-inch system. It made the V-8 sound like an evil laugh coming up from the depths of hell. It was my favorite sound in the entire world. And all I wanted right now was for it to shut the fuck up.
I put the transmission into drive and pulled off the curb, thinking about the knock at my door. Thinking how I should never answer the damn thing ever again.
SIX
Elise Daniels lived in Los Gatos in the Lexington Hills, on her own private gravel road. I pulled off Summit Road and wound up through the trees, heading toward the peak of the hill I was climbing.
The Road Runner’s hard suspension thumped over potholes, each jolt pounding into my head like a jackhammer. I drove past the open timber gates and into the white gravel driveway, crunching beneath the tires as I pulled around in front of her house. The tires bit into the gravel and I killed the engine.
I looked up at the house.
It was a big house. Some kind of white contemporary mansion with Japanese-style influences. I thought it would have sat better in a snowy Japanese mountain setting. It was the kind of house an architect builds to show off his skills to potential clients. She had money, no doubt about that.
I climbed out and ambled up to the entrance, pressed the buzzer. I held my badge up to the camera above the oversized stained bamboo door. A long moment later, there was a soft click and it opened without a sound.
Elise Daniels looked like a bird, fallen from its nest as she reflexively hid behind the door. Her mousy-brown shoulder-length hair was thin and straight, parted in the middle, and her large copper eyes were bloodshot and raw. The kind of eyes you get when you’ve got no more tears left to cry. She wore a green summer dress, despite the cold, and the straps sat off her body from where her collarbones stuck out from below her neckline.
“Elise Daniels, I’m Detective Gamble.”
“I was expecting someone to come,” she said quietly. “Please, come in.”
She led me through to the back of the house, over white marble tiles and up a flight of floating wooden steps, the same bamboo as the door. We stepped into a vast modern living space and kitchen area.
The rear wall of the living space was entirely glass. Behind it was a Japanese rock garden, and beyond that, a million trees, and a view all the way down to Silicon Valley.
“That’s quite a view you’ve got here,” I said.
“Thank you.” Elise walked into the kitchen with small, timid barefoot steps. “Do you want a drink, Detective?”
“Sure.”
“What would you like?”
I wanted to say “the strongest thing you got.” Instead I said, “Got any club soda?”
“I’ve got mineral water, but it’s almost the same thing.”
“That’ll do.”
She pulled two tall glasses from the cupboard, then she held one glass at a time into the cavity on the fridge door. Ice clinked into each one. Then she took a bottle out from another cupboard, splashed it into her glass, and finished with a dash of mineral water and a squeeze of lime. She had done it before.
She filled my glass with mineral water.
“What are you drinking?” I
asked.
“Vodka and mineral water,” she said, padding over to me. “I like it with lime juice and ice.”
I nodded as I took the glass. “It’s warm in here,” I said, looking around.
“Underfloor heating,” she said.
I drank the mineral water. All of it. It was refreshing, and the aspirin was kicking in, dulling the edges of the glass splinters in my head. I breathed out a sigh, placing the glass on the countertop.
“Oh, your head.” Elise looked away, placing a hand over her mouth. “You have . . .”
“Huh?” I touched it and my fingers came away bloody. “Oh. You got some paper towel or something?”
She handed me a few sheets and I pressed them against the wound.
“After this morning, I . . .”
“I’m sorry about Nicholas,” I said. “That you had to find him like that. It must’ve been difficult.”
“Yes. Have you found whoever did it?”
“No,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Anything from the camera?”
“Someone dressed in black clothes. Ski mask. Probably male. It was dark, so not much I’m afraid, but it’s a start.”
She bit her thumbnail and looked around.
“I have some questions for you,” I said.
Everything about Elise told me she was fighting to keep herself together. A porcelain doll with hairline fractures, growing more fragile by the second. It was in her eyes. The way they moved like a frightened animal, sharp and quick.
“Let’s go sit down,” I said, as much for my benefit as hers.
A minimalist white three-seater couch faced a long black chaise, like the kind you’d find in a shrink’s office. They both sat on a gray furry rug with a bamboo coffee table between them. There was no TV in the room. With the view, there really wasn’t need for one.
I sunk back into the minimalist couch, still pressing the paper towel to my head. The couch was comfortable. Comfortable enough for a long, deep sleep. I had to fight to keep my eyes open.
Beyond the Spectrum Page 3
