by Thomas Perry
“How do you figure this stuff out?”
“Hunting wild turkeys. You have to sit still and wait them out, because they don’t trust anything that moves. Everything is their enemy, because they’re delicious. I guess Boylan must think he is too.”
She smiled, but she knew Ed was partly serious. He had grown up moving around in the Appalachians. He wasn’t a hillbilly—nothing as natural and dignified as that. His people seemed to have evolved straight from apes to thieves. They had not settled anywhere, exactly, just stopped until each county got used up. They lived in places that sounded to her like dens—ramshackle structures they moved into on the edges of civilization, most of them abandoned after somebody went broke trying to farm land that was too rocky, steep, or tangled with stubborn woody plants. They made claims and settled in until something made them move on.
He told her he’d killed his first man in Kentucky when he was about eighteen. He started hunting as a young boy, and by that time he had killed just about every species in the region that could be eaten or exchanged for money except one. The client was a preacher who was in the habit of fooling around with a few of the wives in his congregation. One woman’s husband had found out and already placed his name on the agenda to speak at the next meeting of the elders. It was pretty clear that what he intended was to call the preacher out and disgrace him publicly. So Ed got his first job. He waited in the pasture for the man to go out to bring his dairy cows in for the evening milking, killed him, carried him far back into the forest, and buried him there.
Ed’s talent for stalking made him good at deception too. He knew it was time to leave the little town, but leaving right after his first victim vanished would have made him the major suspect. So he circulated the word that he was thinking of enlisting in the army. He took a bus to Louisville, went into a recruiting office and got brochures and applications and the business cards of the recruiting sergeants. Then he hung around the local bar that served underage boys and discussed his plan with his friends. He showed them the brochures, and asked the advice of a couple of older men who had been in wars. He even went to a medical clinic in the next little town to get a physical checkup. He asked the physician’s assistant to be sure to check him for problems that might keep him out of the army. By the time he left town there was nobody in the area who wasn’t familiar with the idea that Ed Hoyt was going to serve his country. On his last Sunday in town he went to church, and the preacher who had hired him to do the killing asked God to bless the brave Ed Hoyt.
As soon as Boylan drove past the restaurant, Ed Hoyt started the car, but he did nothing for a few seconds, just waited for Boylan to turn onto Lankershim Boulevard in one direction or the other. The way Boylan chose was left, and Ed and Nicole saw his car swing into the far lane and head north.
Ed waited. Then he pulled out behind a truck and went up Lankershim after Boylan. He kept behind the truck so Boylan couldn’t look back and see his car, but Ed could see a strip of open road to the left of the truck and a strip to the right. If Boylan’s brown SUV kept going straight, Ed didn’t need to see it. If it turned, Ed would know.
Boylan didn’t turn until he reached Oxnard Street. This time Ed saw him turn from two hundred yards behind. Ed went past Oxnard instead of following him. Ed saw Nicole’s surprise, and said, “This is where he’ll look behind him.” He spoke with perfect confidence and authority, so Nicole didn’t question why this was where Boylan would look. It just was.
Ed turned left at the next street and drove west parallel to Boylan but invisible to him. After a few blocks, Ed turned left again, and then right, and came out far behind Boylan. Ed said, “If he sees us now we’ll seem to be totally new to him. It’s just one of the stupid things about the human mind. Like when people are looking for somebody waiting to jump them, they look everywhere but up.”
“Thank the Lord for stupid things about the human mind. They pay the bills.”
“Amen.”
Ed merged into a line of cars, most of them wider and taller than their Camry, and stayed there for a time. When Boylan turned to the left and headed south again Ed followed. He was going to a lot of trouble to keep from being followed, but he wasn’t very good. When he crossed Ventura Boulevard into a zone of big houses built on low hills, they followed, but Ed slowed the car considerably. “Here’s where it starts to get hairy.”
Nicole could see what he meant. There were fewer places to turn now, and each turn led into a smaller road. Many of them wound into others, some stopped dead, and some of them even circled back. These roads were entirely residential, and had very few cars on them in the middle of the day.
Ed kept Boylan’s car far enough ahead of him so he could just catch a glimpse of it as it went around a curve, and then speed up to the curve and catch a taillight before the car disappeared again. After a few minutes Ed said, “Get out your phone and get it ready to take pictures.”
Nicole took out her cell phone. Just before the next curve, Ed slowed, opened his window, and listened. He let the car coast almost to the curve and stopped, then got out, but didn’t shut his door completely so it didn’t make a noise. He held out his hand, and Nicole handed him the phone through the open window.
A few minutes later Ed walked back around the curve, then got in and handed her the phone. He performed a three-point turn on the narrow road and started back the way they had come.
Nicole looked at the photo album in her phone. Ed had taken six pictures from different angles. All the shots showed a tall two-story white house on the top of a small rise in the land surrounded by a jungle of trees, overgrowth, and vine-choked brush. Boylan’s brown SUV was parked at the top of the steep driveway in the open garage. “That’s his house?”
“He went up to the door and opened it with a key,” Ed said. “He put his car in the garage.”
“I would have liked to take a closer look.”
“The way things are going we may have to sometime.”
“Is that why you took pictures?”
“Yeah. If we need to come back here, it’ll probably be after dark. It’s good to know the layout so we don’t trip over something and get ourselves killed.”
13
Sid and Ronnie Abel took an evening flight to Houston and endured the hour-long cab ride from the airport to the city. They checked into their hotel and stayed in their room to review the information they had brought for the interview they’d scheduled for the morning.
The next morning shortly before ten they sat side by side at a table facing the wall of windows in the coffee shop on the bottom floor of their hotel. Houston was hot and humid today, as it had been every time they had been here. The sky was always a milky gray that somehow allowed a glare without showing any sun. After a few minutes, Sid said, “She doesn’t seem to be coming.”
“She’ll come.”
The window looked out on a paved area about a quarter mile across. There was a dry fountain at the near end of it, and there were several places on the flat concrete square with small roofs over them, but no shady places to sit. On each of the square’s sides was a huge building, broader than it was tall, with rows of identical windows that had been designed to let light into interior spaces, but to show nothing to the outside. The buildings were designed to face outward toward the surrounding streets, so there were no broad entrances, only a few man-size doors a few hundred feet apart leading onto the parched and empty square.
Sid said, “I’ve been looking out there for twenty minutes. I’ve seen exactly two people come out of any of those buildings.”
“I know,” Ronnie said. “They both came here to get something to drink. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a less hospitable landscape. At least deserts have plants and animals.”
“I still think she’s going to stand us up.”
“She won’t.”
“Want to bet?”
“Sure.”
“Then let’s bet something that will make it interesting.”
Ronnie
sat in silence, still staring out across the plaza.
“Well?” said Sid.
“I’m thinking about what you would consider interesting. I don’t want to bet that.” After a pause she said, “This place is something. It reminds me of one of those artificial cities that some tyrannical government built in the middle of the wilderness, and nobody ever moved in.”
“There are people in there, all right. I don’t blame them for not coming out in that heat,” Sid said. “But right now we’re probably looking at a lot of the people who operate the world’s oil industry. We just can’t see them behind that glass.”
“This could be her.”
Far across the vast, empty plaza, a tall, slim black woman in a dark blue suit walked along the center of the plaza toward the hotel. She made no attempt to skirt the plaza to place herself in the thin strip of shade from one of the buildings, just headed in a straight line directly toward them.
“You win,” Sid said. “I thought she’d stand us up.”
“Not when she can get rid of us with a ten-minute chat over a cup of coffee.”
“And maybe she figures there’s some slim chance that we’ll actually solve her husband’s murder.”
“I wouldn’t think that’s part of her calculations,” Ronnie said. “You read the stuff that Hemphill gave us. Remember what she said when they told her he was dead? ‘Too bad.’”
The woman’s strides were long and quick. When she reached the coffee shop door, the Abels both stood and went to greet her. “Mrs. Ballantine. This is Veronica Abel, and I’m Sid.”
The woman shook Ronnie’s hand, and then Sid’s. “Selena Stubbs,” she said. “I don’t use Ballantine anymore.” Her expression was not unfriendly, but she didn’t smile.
Ronnie said, “We’ve got a table over here. What can we get you to drink?”
Selena Stubbs’s eyes swept the room in a movement that most people would not have noticed. She was clearly gauging the potential of the coffee shop as a place for a quiet conversation. She rejected it. “Are you staying at the hotel?”
“Yes,” said Ronnie.
“Then let’s get some iced coffee and take it up to your room.”
Ronnie and Sid exchanged a quick glance, but all Selena Stubbs saw was Ronnie’s smile. “Of course,” Ronnie said, and Sid stepped to the counter where the barista was waiting.
Sid ordered the coffee, and then joined the women while they waited. He said, “We really appreciate your willingness to meet with us. We know you must be very busy.”
She looked at Sid, her eyes holding his. “If I had refused, would you have taken that as final and flown back to LA?”
Ronnie said, “Probably not.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
Sid returned to the counter, where the barista was putting the three plastic cups into an egg-carton tray. He paid and carried the tray. Selena Stubbs walked with the Abels to the elevators, and then rode one of them up with them. She kept her eyes in front of her, and not on their faces as a signal that she had no intention of chatting until they were upstairs. She followed Ronnie to the room, and waited while Sid unlocked the door and held it open.
They stepped inside and Sid let the door swing shut. The room was spacious. There was a couch, where Selena Stubbs and Ronnie sat. Ronnie took the coffee tray from Sid, who moved the coffee table a little closer to the couch, and then took the chair from the desk, turned it around, and sat.
Selena Stubbs said, “I was wondering how long it would take them to send detectives to talk to me here in Houston.”
“Nobody sent us,” Ronnie said. “If we gave you the impression that we’re police officers, then we’ve—”
“No, don’t worry,” said Selena Stubbs, holding up her hand. “But we should be open with each other, or this is a waste of time. I’m sure you learned what you could about me, and I looked you up too, and made a few inquiries. It’s true—you’re not cops. You’re not exactly not cops, either. You have an agency. You do what you always did. Only you don’t have to take orders anymore. Isn’t that right?”
Sid said, “Nobody pays for something he’s already getting for free, so we tend to get hired to do things the cops aren’t doing. Your husband’s employer hired us to take a second look at his murder.”
“Ex-husband,” Selena Stubbs said. “And I agreed to meet you because otherwise you would try to reach me at home. I have two kids—girls—aged six and eight. I wanted to spare them this kind of conversation.”
“We have no intention of upsetting anyone,” Ronnie said. “We just want to ask a few questions about your ex-husband, and try to understand what happened to him.”
“Now I’m shocked,” said Selena Stubbs. “Even you? Is there really any mystery about what happened to him? A black man shot execution style and his body stuffed into a sewer? Come on.”
“Some kind of racial motivation is a possibility, but we can’t make assumptions,” Sid said. “We’d like to find out who did it. If we knew more about Mr. Ballantine, maybe we could.”
“Okay. I’ll pretend the world is different than it is. Ask what you want.”
Sid said, “We’ve been piecing together the early stages of the police investigation. Detective Kapp, the officer who spoke to you at the time, died in an accident after a few months on the case. A very good detective named Miguel Fuentes has taken over. But nothing new has come up in months. And nobody seems to have been able to tell the police much about Mr. Ballantine.”
“Maybe that should tell you something,” said Selena.
“That’s why we thought we had better start over with you,” Sid said. “You would know the most.”
“All right. Ask.”
Ronnie said, “How did you meet?”
“In grad school at Berkeley. We both enrolled in the PhD program in chemistry,” Selena said. “The day the university got our applications we were destined to be thrown together constantly—two black chemistry grad students the same age, et cetera. I’m sure you can imagine. You want to get along with everybody, but the minute you walk into the lab that first Monday, you see the person who looks like you, and he’s looking at you the same way.”
“You were attracted to him right away?” said Sid.
“Not at all. Seeing him there was a disappointment. Having him around seemed limiting, as though we had to be connected. It was more that way than usual, because we were the only black students in that class,” she said. “It wasn’t that I didn’t like him. Have you seen his picture?”
“Yes,” said Ronnie. “He was very handsome.”
“Yes, he was,” said Selena. “And he was very bright and very nice. At the time I resisted that information. He seemed too good. I had come straight from the University of Texas. I was in a new town where I knew nobody, and I wasn’t sure I trusted my own judgment. I kept thinking this must be what an arranged marriage would feel like. The other person is shoved right in your face, and there’s a little part of you that says, ‘Hold on. I didn’t get asked about this.’ So I was cordial, but I kept him at a distance. When other men asked me out, I dated them.”
“How did he react to that?” asked Ronnie. “Did it make him more interested?”
“I don’t think so. He went out with other people too. When we finally got together, it was unexpected. We had been colleagues for a while, and we enjoyed being together, but always with other friends. One afternoon all the other regulars were either busy or went home early, and by default, the evening turned into a date. After that it was always a date.”
“And when did you get married?” Ronnie asked.
“Just over two years into graduate school. We had both finished our course work, and passed the qualifying exams. We had already begun our own research for our doctoral dissertations. We knew we’d be working long hours in different labs for years, but we had more control over which hours those would be, so marriage started to make more sense.”
Sid said, “I assume the marriage seemed good at f
irst?”
Selena Stubbs shrugged. “It was a good marriage. We were about as happy as you can be, given the nerves and the exhaustion, and the uncertainty. We were not only in competition with the other graduate students for the grades, the grants, the jobs, but we were in competition with each other, too. But we both got through that phase of it, still loving each other. We defended our dissertations in the spring of the fifth year, and graduated together in June.”
“Wow,” said Ronnie. “You must have felt like the smartest people in the world that day.”
“I’m afraid not even the smartest in town. Everybody was smart, and in a university town, you’re never likely to be the smartest. But we were pretty pleased with ourselves.”
“You had a problem, though, right?” Sid said. “You both needed jobs in the same field at the same time.”
“It was more complicated than that. Our specialties were very different. James had studied complex compounds that affected the metabolisms of muscle cells. Pharmaceutical companies were after him, but he loved universities, and wanted to teach and continue his research in the academic world, so he applied for assistant professorships.”
“And you?” said Sid.
“That was what made things complicated.” She looked out the window at the giant oil company buildings bordering the square. “My field was oil. My interest was in petrochemicals, and I’d published research on the molecular signifiers in upper strata that indicate the presence of oil below. Companies were flying recruiters to me as soon as my dissertation was filed.”
Ronnie and Sid had both noticed that Selena tended to keep her eyes on Ronnie, and to address her answers to her. Ronnie was capable of projecting a soft, motherly sympathy when she wanted to set a witness at ease. They exchanged a glance, and then Sid leaned back and turned his body slightly away from Selena Stubbs. Ronnie leaned toward her to look straight into her eyes.
“What happened?” Ronnie’s big blue eyes were wide with interest.
