The Shadow Hunter

by Michael Prescott

  Abby’s purse. She’d dropped it as she ran.

  No, wait. Too obvious.

  She hadn’t dropped the purse. She’d thrown it there to mislead him into thinking she’d gone down, when actually—

  She’d gone up.

  Ambush.

  Hugging the doorway, he aimed the rifle straight overhead and fired twice, gambling that she was in the doorway directly above him, leaning out to take her shot.

  A cry, a clatter of metal on metal—Abby’s .38, clanging on the steel staircase. He’d nailed her.

  He burst onto the landing and took the steps two at a time to the tenth floor, expecting to see Abby’s fallen body, but she wasn’t there.

  His flash swept the area and found no blood spatter.

  He hadn’t scored a hit after all. But she’d lost her weapon. She was disarmed, defenseless. She was finished.

  Travis proceeded down the dark hallway at a run. The game was nearly over. The tenth floor would be the killing ground.

  59

  Abby had liked to believe she was lucky, but that was before Travis saw through her ambush and literally shot the gun out of her hands. She didn’t think she’d been hit, but the gun was lost, and now she was out of options and almost out of time.

  She ran along a tenth-floor corridor, away from the stairwell into a wider hall that fed into an open floor plan occupying the front half of the building. Bands of plate glass stretched from floor to ceiling along the far wall. Through the windows came the glow of streetlights, starlight, the luminous haze of the city. The light allowed her to orient herself and to dimly see the space around her. When the tower was finished, where she stood would be a large work area partitioned into cubicles. Now it was an open expanse of concrete floor without walls or furnishings.

  Nowhere to hide. She ran toward the windows, seeking light. Dying might be a little easier in the light.

  In the corridor behind her, there were footsteps, charging hard.

  She reached the windows. Past the glass lay Wilshire Boulevard and her condo building. By one of these windows Hickle had waited for the long-distance kill that had never come. Waited with the rifle in his hands, the rifle Travis was carrying now.

  Ahead was a worktable, indistinct in the gloom.

  Hickle must have dragged it near the window to have a place to sit. She’d found his firing site.

  “Abby!”

  Travis, bursting into the room, the flashlight attached to his rifle like a bayonet, the beam stabbing the darkness as he pivoted from side to side.

  He hadn’t spotted her yet. She ducked low and kept running, thinking she could use the worktable for cover, buy herself a few more seconds.

  The beam swept toward her, rippling across the broad sheets of glass. She dropped to her knees and crawled under the worktable to hide.

  The flashlight probing, licking the room’s far corners, then drifting back to alight on the table and illuminate her small, huddled shape.

  “You’re dead, you bitch,” Travis breathed, his voice eerie in the dark, and he was coming her way.

  She scrambled out from beneath the table and collided with something shapeless and heavy on the floor.

  Hickle’s duffel bag. Not empty. Something was inside.

  He had used the rifle in the stairwell. But the shotgun was his weapon of choice at close range. Why hadn’t he used it? Because he’d left it here—left it in the bag.

  Her shaking hands unzipped the flap, touched the sleekness of the shotgun’s barrel.

  Travis sprinting. Light expanding at her back.

  She jerked the long gun free of the bag, braced the butt against her chest and spun in a crouch, pumping the action once. Her finger groped for the trigger, and the flashlight found her.

  She couldn’t see Travis, only the blinding glare. It was easier that way.

  She fired at the light.

  The recoil upset her precarious balance, blowing her backward onto her tailbone. The room spun in curlicues of yellow glare. She thought she was suffering some extreme onset of vertigo, then realized that what she saw was only the smeared beam of the flashlight as it spun with the rifle across the concrete floor.

  The gun and the flashlight attached to it came to rest against a wall, by chance casting the beam at Travis, sprawled limp on the floor.

  Abby knew he was dead even without taking a close look. She had fired at him from six feet away. The shotgun shell had cut him almost in half. She couldn’t see his features and didn’t want to. She imagined that the last look on his face had been one of surprise.

  He had never thought he could lose to anyone and certainly not to her. He was her mentor, after all, and she was only the gifted protégée.

  She got to her feet, leaving the shotgun where it had fallen after she fired. She didn’t need it any longer. There were no more bad guys to kill.

  Her first step was shaky, and she almost sank to her knees before steadying herself. On her way out of the room she stooped to pry the flashlight free of the rifle. Its beam guided her to the stairwell. On the stairs below the ninth floor she found her purse with her cell phone inside.

  She took out the phone and sat on the steps, taking a moment to compose herself before calling Wyatt at the Hollywood station.

  “Hickle’s dead,” she said when he came on the line. “And somebody else too. But I’m okay. I just wanted you to know.”

  “Abby, what the hell are you talking about? Where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter where I am. I’ll be calling nine-one-one after I’m through talking to you. Everything will be taken care of. But you have to stay out of it, all right? I mean completely out. Don’t visit me, don’t call me, at least for a while. I don’t want your friend Detective Cahill putting things together—and he will, if anybody connects you with me.”

  “You still haven’t told me what happened.”

  “Do you promise to keep your distance?”

  “Yes, damn it, I promise. Now what’s going on?”

  She let her head fall back against the cold concrete wall. “It’s nothing, Vic, really.” She sighed. “Just another day at the office.”

  She ended the call before he could ask her anything more.

  60

  Paramedics delivered Abby to UCLA Medical Center, where she was checked for injuries and released. There were two detectives waiting for her outside the examination room. They asked her to accompany them to the West LA station. She was relieved to learn that neither of them was named Cahill.

  The first interview was brief. She was too tired to give more than a bare recitation of the facts, carefully edited. But she gave the detectives a present—the tape in her microcassette recorder. It was a fresh tape, which she had loaded immediately before Travis’s arrival in Westwood; it contained his confession and nothing else.

  The police allowed her to leave by 8 A.M. She had not seen her condo in daylight for a week. She slept until two in the afternoon, then fixed a meal. At three the guards in the lobby said two men from the LAPD were here to see her.

  This time she gave the detectives the full story, staying close to the truth but not too close. Fatigue made lying easy; it was as if her body was too worn out to register any of the usual discomfort that a lie detector or a trained observer could catch.

  “Travis hired me to move in next door to Hickle. I was there to track his movements, make note of when he came and went. We wanted to get a feel for his daily routine. That was what I was told, anyway. But in fact, I was being set up. Travis told Hickle I was spying on him, and it drove Hickle over the edge. He tried to kill Kris. After he failed, Travis gave him my home address in Westwood. I guess you know what happened after that.”

  They asked what had led her inside the office building. She said she had begun to suspect Travis. Suspecting an ambush, she’d checked out her neighborhood and found evidence of illegal entry to the office tower. She’d thought Hickle might be inside.

  “That’s when you should have calle
d the police,” the older of the two detectives said in an almost fatherly tone.

  “I wasn’t sure Travis was guilty. I wanted proof. I wanted it on tape.”

  The younger detective, less sympathetic, pointed out that her words on tape and the condition of Howard Barwood’s gun, recovered from Travis’s body, served as evidence that she had broken into Barwood’s Culver City bungalow and tampered with his property.

  Abby admitted to this. “If Mr. Barwood wants to press charges against me, he’s entitled.” She allowed herself a sweet smile, aimed mainly at the older cop. “Think he will?”

  “Considering that you’ve cleared him on multiple felony counts, ma’am, I think he’ll give you the damn gun if you ask for it, and the bungalow too.”

  The younger detective wouldn’t give up. “On the tape Travis seems to hold you responsible for the death of Devin Corbal. What have you got to say about that?”

  “Travis hired me to follow Sheila Rogers, Corbal’s stalker, and report her movements. That particular night, I lost her. I didn’t know where she had gone, and so I wasn’t able to give Travis’s men a heads-up when she entered Lizard Maiden, the club where Corbal was hanging out. Travis never forgave me for it.”

  “But you weren’t actually present at the scene of Corbal’s death?” the younger detective asked.

  “No.”

  “Suppose we were to round up some of the people who were in the club that night and show them your photo. What do you think they’d say?”

  “Probably that the club was crowded and dark, and it’s been four months since the incident, and under the circumstances their memories aren’t likely to be reliable. That’s what a defense attorney would say, don’t you think?”

  The younger detective had no answer to that. He and his partner departed shortly afterward. Before they left, Abby made them promise that her name would be kept out of the media.

  They returned twice in the next two days, asking her to fill in details. At first Abby thought they were leading her on, pretending to believe her version of events while preparing charges against her, either in the Travis shooting or in the Corbal affair. Eventually she realized that the truth was somewhat different. They didn’t entirely believe her, but they had no clear idea of how badly she had misled them, and they didn’t particularly care.

  On Wednesday morning, they paid their last visit and informed her that they were closing the case. Her identity had not been made public. “There was a close call,” the younger cop said. By now he was friendlier. He had grown to like her, at least a little. “Channel Eight got hold of your name through a departmental leak. They were set to run with it, but the story got killed. I think we can guess who did you that favor.”

  “Probably not Amanda Gilbert.”

  “Amanda Gilbert is no longer with the station. But Kris Barwood’s still there.”

  All of the following day, Abby lazed around, listening to soft music and fixing simple meals. She did a little redecorating. After some deliberation she took down her print of The Peaceable Kingdom and put it in her closet. It no longer amused her to see the lion snuggle up to the lamb.

  On Friday morning she drove to Travis’s house.

  She parked her Miata a block away and walked to the house, lugging a light backpack. Outside the house she waited a few minutes until a Lincoln Town Car arrived, Kris at the wheel. She was driving again—no need for a bodyguard now.

  “Abby,” Kris said when she got out of the sedan, “I just want to say—I mean, I know everything you did for me—well, maybe not everything, but enough…”

  “It’s okay, Kris.”

  “Thank you. That’s what I’m trying to say. Thank you so much.”

  Abby smiled. “You may not quite understand this, but all the things I did—I didn’t do them for you. I did them for me. No gratitude is required.”

  “You have it anyway. So why did you call me out here?”

  “There’s something in Paul’s house you need to see. And something I need to see, also.”

  Kris looked at the yellow police ribbon strung across the driveway. “It’s illegal to violate a crime scene, you know.”

  “So we’re Thelma and Louise, breaking all the rules. Come on.”

  Nobody saw them when they ducked under the ribbon and headed to the front door. Abby had brought her locksmith tools in the backpack. It was easy enough to get inside and equally easy to disable Travis’s alarm system; she had watched him punch in the code on numerous occasions. She didn’t bother wearing gloves; the police had already been here.

  “How are things in your life?” she asked Kris as they headed down the hall to the rear of the house.

  “Improving. I’ve filed for divorce.”

  “I assumed you would.”

  “Howard may not have tried to kill me, but he did plan to steal me blind, and he’s hopelessly unfaithful. I can do better.”

  “No argument here.” She led Kris into the master bedroom. The bureau drawers had been opened and emptied, the walk-in closet cleaned out, but as Abby had expected, the Scientific Investigation Division technicians had overlooked the TV set. On casual inspection it would never have been identified as a safe.

  She tapped the combination into the remote control. The front of the TV swung ajar, revealing the array of compact disks. The first one that interested her was the Barwood disk. She handed it to Kris.

  “Your life story is on there,” she said, “and Howard’s too. The assets he tried to hide from you—you’ll find some leads in tracking them down. Get a good accountant on the case.”

  Kris handled the disk in its plastic sleeve. “Travis had been investigating our background?”

  “Not just yours. Everybody’s. Including mine.”

  Abby found the disk with her name on it. “This is what I wanted to see.”

  The other item in her backpack was a portable computer. She switched it on and loaded the disk labeled “SINCLAIR, ABIGAIL.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t look at this,” Kris said as Abby began navigating through the data.

  “Don’t be shy. We have no secrets from each other. Travis tried to use us both. It’s only fair that we see what he was up to.”

  The disk contained dozens of scanned articles on the Corbal case. Travis had obsessively collected them. He seemed to feed his frustrations on every insult and innuendo directed at TPS.

  The articles held little interest for Abby. She was looking for photos. She found them in a folder marked “JPEG,” a standard photo-compression format. When she opened the folder, dozens of thumbnail images appeared in a checkerboard pattern.

  Images of her.

  There she was, leaving the lobby of the Wilshire Royal to go for a walk. There she was, dining at a coffee shop in Westwood Village. There, visiting a park in Beverly Hills. There, playing tennis on a Sunday afternoon. And more: washing her car, shopping at a mall, strolling on Santa Monica Pier, hiking in Will Rogers Park. Standing on the balcony of her condo—a shot taken from the office tower across the street, the same vantage point Hickle had chosen.

  No wonder Travis had been able to guide Hickle to the tower. He had been there himself. Watching her. Photographing her, just as Hickle had snapped Polaroids of Kris jogging on the beach.

  “He was stalking you,” Kris whispered. “Like Hickle stalked me.”

  Abby nodded. She was not surprised. Travis had said he’d been watching her on the night when he tried to drown her in the Jacuzzi. She’d had the feeling it wasn’t the first time his obsessive hatred had drawn him close.

  He had taken photos with a long lens, probably using a digital camera, then had simply stored the images on the CD. His private collection. She remembered the dozens of photos of Kris that Hickle had cut out of magazines and newspapers and tacked to his bedroom walls. Travis had been doing much the same thing, driven by the same compulsion.

  “He could have taken a shot at you whenever he liked,” Kris said. “When you were on the balcony…or walking i
n the park…”

  “I’m sure he was tempted more than once. But he was cautious by nature. He was waiting for his best opportunity. He was biding his time.”

  “Like Hickle,” Kris breathed.

  ‘They were more alike than different, it appears.”

  “But why? Why did he hate you so much?”

  “Because I failed him. He had trained me, mentored me, and then I made one mistake and nearly cost him everything he had. This house with the canyon view, his office suite in Century City, his glamorous friends, the A-list parties—he saw it all slipping away, and he blamed me.”

  Kris shook her head slowly. “We both know how to pick ’em, don’t we?”

  “Maybe next time our luck will be better.” Abby smiled. “It can’t get much worse.”

  Before leaving, Abby gathered up the remaining CDs, dumping them into a plastic garbage bag. She took them with her when she said good-bye to Kris outside the house.

  “Thanks for keeping my name out of the news,” Abby said.

  “It’s the least I can do. And I mean that literally. Thanks, Abby. And…take care, will you?”

  “I always do. It’s how I’ve stayed alive this long.”

  On her way home Abby stopped in an alley in West Hollywood and buried the bag at the bottom of a trash bin. There were secrets on those disks no one had any right to see.

  That evening she took a walk in Westwood Village, window-shopping aimlessly. When she saw the bar that served good piña coladas, she went inside. The piña colada remained her one weakness. At least she liked to think it was her only one.

  She sat at the bar, the glass raised to her lips, thinking of Travis and his secrets.

  “Buy you a drink?”

  She looked up. It was Wyatt, off duty, in street clothes. He slid onto the stool next to hers and ordered a beer.

  “This is the second time you’ve encountered me here,” Abby said with a slow smile. “You’re not stalking me, are you?”