A Small Town

by Thomas Perry

  Mr. Grenville had made a significant fortune by selling what were called “notions” to sewing stores, supermarkets, and drugstore chains. When he had spoken with Becker, he had told him notions were things like needles, thread, buttons, zippers, snaps, pins, collar stays, and seam rippers needed for making minor repairs or alterations to clothes.

  These items were all very simple and cheap, and could be manufactured in any country on earth where people weren’t shooting one another at the moment. To Grenville, that was a meaningful distinction, because his specialty was buying out whole warehouses full of this type of merchandise in countries where there had been wars or disasters and the owners wanted to leave. If the situation was sufficiently dire, the owners would take not even a pittance, but the promise of a pittance to be paid later. He would make the deal and ship that day, and sometimes the owners would not get out alive to collect, so his profits could approach 100 percent.

  Mrs. Grenville—the former Star Macklin—was an attractive blond woman about thirty-five years old who was restless by nature. She had married Chet at twenty-two when he was fifty. She met a man at her tennis club during the first year of their marriage, and had met many more in many places since then. If Chet suspected, he had paid no attention, but a short time ago Star had announced that she was divorcing him and mentioned that she was expecting to take with her half of the money he’d made in a lifetime in the notions market. He had called his personal attorney and asked him to recommend a divorce specialist. His attorney had recommended Alan Becker. Chet had asked, “Is he a good lawyer?” and his attorney said, “You didn’t ask for a lawyer. You asked for a divorce specialist.”

  Becker had resolved their marital differences promptly and efficiently with a twelve-gauge Remington pump shotgun. What he had not noticed when he’d gone to visit Star was that Star had a visitor that afternoon, because the visitor’s car was parked out of sight in the section of the horse barn where the caretakers often parked stake trucks to unload hay. When she came down to answer the front door, the visitor, a young waiter named Darryl Mosher, was upstairs in the master bedroom. He had looked out the window and seen Becker doing his job. He’d made a great witness in Becker’s murder-for-hire trial.

  Today’s job showed that Becker had emerged from prison a changed man. He no longer used a shotgun, as he had in his early jobs. Now he carried a .38 revolver. He had come to this change after trying out a .45 Colt Commander for one of his first jobs after prison and having to crawl around afterward searching for the ejected casings. The .38 was not as powerful as the .45, and its power was a tap compared with that of a shotgun blast at four feet, but so far everyone he’d shot was dead, the revolver didn’t eject any brass, and that was sufficient.

  The woman he was going to see today was his favorite kind. Her husband was having an affair with a replacement for her that she didn’t know about, but the husband had sufficient foresight and knowledge of his wife to know that she would be angry when she found out. He knew that when she was angry, she could be vengeful and punitive. He was avoiding all that unpleasantness by hiring Becker early. She would not ruin her last moments with a lot of amateurish attempts to hide, run, call for help, or fight back. That would also make Becker’s day easier. She would die happy, secure in the belief that her husband still loved her, appreciated all her efforts and virtues, and wanted to stay with her until they both died of congestive heart failure at ninety-two.

  Becker found her at home, reading a book in the porch swing in her back garden. He came around the house, stepped up behind her, and fired his .38 pistol into the back of her head. He returned to his car smiling. He was wearing a baseball cap, a pair of shorts, white sneakers, and a yellow shirt. If anyone saw him, they didn’t think what they’d seen was a killer.

  Leah had her laptop on the table of her hotel room. Alan Becker’s name was now Michael R. Miller. He lived in a two-bedroom, two-bath apartment at 6122 West 54th Street. There were windows on the south side and on the east side. The other two sides were walls, one shared with another apartment. Leah had already checked to see if either that one or another was vacant or for rent, but they weren’t.

  Since he was on only the sixth floor, she might be able to get a shot at him through a window, but that would require finding a place that was nearby and a floor or two higher up so she could sight a rifle down into his unit. That was very unlikely. It was hard enough to find any apartment in New York, let alone one that was the perfect spot to shoot an escaped murderer.

  Leah was over her temporary disappointment that she had found only four new names and addresses at the Vargas’ shop. It would have been too much to expect that the Vargas ran tests or made mistakes on all twelve men’s identities. Leah had to feel lucky to have found any, let alone four. But she was determined that when she got into Becker’s apartment, the first things she would look for were contacts—names, addresses, numbers—he had for other men in New York or elsewhere. Any of them could easily be the new names of other escapees. But first she had to figure out how to get into Becker’s apartment.

  This time she would also have to take into account the competition. At the moment, the New York Police Department had forty thousand sworn officers, five thousand auxiliary cops, six thousand school cops, and fifteen thousand non-sworn employees. They also had eight helicopters, six thousand CCTV cameras, and an unknown number of license-plate readers, and probably all those numbers would climb by the end of the day. There were also outsize contingents of FBI, ATF, and other federal officers in the city. She did not want any tiny part of that army of righteousness to open a sleepy eye and notice her.

  She reviewed what she knew about Alan Becker.

  The murder he had been imprisoned for was that of the wife of a rich guy in San Antonio. Before that he’d killed the wife of a real estate developer in Seattle. He’d used a twelve-gauge shotgun that time, and there had been several similar killings with similar weapons before that. The FBI were convinced he had been making a business out of killing the wives of men in ugly divorces for some time. It was possible he would be out of money and doing it again. If he’d been paying the rent on a decent apartment in that part of Manhattan for two years, he was doing something lucrative.

  She made a visit to the neighborhood near his current address, staying far away from his building so she wouldn’t be picked up on a security camera.

  It was a nice place. For a fugitive, it was worth putting out a little extra money to live in a better neighborhood. Being a victim of petty street crime could be dangerous. Even a criminal was better off in a neighborhood where nobody would rob him or pick his pocket or steal his car or start a fight.

  Becker was smart, but smartness had its limits. He was up in that apartment today not knowing there was a cop walking around outside his apartment building waiting to kill him. She had found her way to this apartment through no mistake he had made, no miscalculation or rash action. It was just a bad break.

  The next question she had was when she should take him. The answer was obvious. One day. No longer. Surprises and advantages were temporary, like ice cream. They had to be enjoyed quickly or they melted away.

  The next afternoon at five o’clock, a white van arrived behind the building and parked in an improvised parking space with its blinkers on. A tall, thin figure wearing wraparound sunglasses and the jeans, hard hat, hooded sweatshirt, and green reflective vest of a workman went to the van’s back door, put on gloves, lifted out a stepladder and a black canvas tool kit, and walked into the building carrying them. The new arrival went up the back stairway nearest to the door and climbed to the sixth floor. The sunglasses, hood, and hard hat blocked any cameras’ view of the face beneath them.

  On the sixth floor, the new arrival set the ladder under the first surveillance camera in the ceiling and climbed up. In a second, the outer surface of the camera’s clear protective shield had a sticker pasted over it that read, “CAMERA UPGRADE PROJECT” in big letters and “PLEASE BE PATIENT”
beneath it. From the hallway, the sticker was not noticeable because the outer side was the same dark gray as the tinted plastic, but it was white on the inside and perfectly legible on the building’s security monitor. The sticker limited the camera’s entire field of vision to its printed message.

  Within seconds, the tall, thin worker was down the ladder and moving it up the hall to the next surveillance camera. There were eight small camera domes mounted along the ceilings of the sixth floor, and they were all covered within a minute or two.

  Leah leaned the ladder against the wall so it would be out of the way, took her tool bag, and walked to the door of Michael R. Miller’s apartment. She set the bag on the floor, knocked on the door, and knelt beside the bag as though she were retrieving a tool.

  She waited for a minute and then knocked on the door again, this time harder. Nobody came to the door. Finally, she studied the lock on the door, picked a bump key from her ring of them, inserted it into the lock, turned it as far as possible, hit the door with her shoulder, turned the key when the pins jumped, and unlocked the door.

  Leah went to the place where she’d left her ladder, brought it with the tool bag inside the apartment, leaned it against the wall, and then closed and locked the door. She took her silenced pistol out of the tool bag and turned to look into the apartment.

  She passed the long curtains at the first set of tall windows, then moved rapidly from room to room, clearing each one as she reached it, looking for the man who now called himself Michael Miller. As she moved through the apartment, she took care not to leave any unexamined rooms behind her. Nobody was in either bedroom or hiding in the closets, the bathrooms, or the kitchen.

  Leah made it all the way to the far end of the apartment, where there was a living room with a second set of tall windows that looked out over the street and the buildings nearby. The windows and the long curtains were the same size as the ones she had seen when she’d entered the apartment, but the first set had been closed. Something about that bothered her. She wondered if what she felt was just the basic human desire for balance and symmetry. That would be unspeakably fussy and stupid. The man who lived here wasn’t an interior decorator. He was somebody men paid to kill their wives.

  What was bothering her wasn’t the pettiness of the discrepancy between the windows; it was that she hadn’t looked closely enough at the windows as she had passed them. She was drawn back toward them now. She would take one look and then come back to begin searching his papers for the names and locations of the other killers.

  As she moved through the kitchen, she heard something that made her stop because she couldn’t identify it, and it seemed to have come from inside the apartment. It had sounded like something heavy rolling on wheels for a moment. She followed the sound toward the door and saw that one of the curtains across from the entry had been opened a few inches, and that what she had thought was simply a tall set of windows included a sliding glass door, which had now been pushed aside. Visible beyond the window was a balcony.

  Her eyes turned away from the balcony toward the front door just in time to see the doorknob turn a half inch, as though a hand had just released it. He had to be on the other side of it, just moving off. He had been on the balcony when she’d come in, and she had walked right past the sliding door and missed him.

  Leah stepped into the hallway and looked both ways. He was not visible, and she couldn’t hear him. She clutched her pistol under her left arm in her hooded sweatshirt and began to advance. She walked quietly along the sixth-floor hallway, pausing for a second or two at each door to listen and to look at the fish-eye lens in the door to see if it showed light from the windows of the apartment or was darkened by the eye of Alan Becker looking out.

  She heard a steel door open around the next corner and hurried in that direction. She stepped out past the corner into the next hallway. She had turned two corners, so this area was exactly opposite the stairwell she had used to reach Michael R. Miller’s apartment. She went toward the stairwell on the new hall, opened the door, and saw him.

  The man going down the stairway was wearing an open long-sleeved yellow shirt in a coarse-grained tropical fabric, a pair of sunglasses, and white tennis shorts. His feet were in sandals, and his skin was shiny from sunscreen. She knew he was Becker. She also knew what had happened. He had been sunbathing on the balcony beyond the sliding door, which was hidden by the closed curtains. She had walked past, thinking it was just a big window, but he had heard his door opening and knew of the arrival of an enemy. He had waited until the intruder was out of sight at the other end of the apartment and run for the door. Did he have a gun? If he did, it must be stuck in his waistband behind his back.

  She came down the stairs fast and caught up just as he arrived on the fifth-floor landing. He was reaching behind him, and she knew he was grasping for the weapon under his shirttail.

  Leah stepped to the side behind him, and her left hand grasped Becker’s wrist and held it down behind his back. Her right hand snatched her own silenced pistol from under her arm, brought it up, and fired it into the back of his head. As his body began to collapse, she shot him once more in the head, then released his arm and let him fall.

  She turned and climbed back up to the sixth floor. She kept walking to his apartment, picked up the ladder and tool bag, and went down the opposite stairwell she had taken to get up to the sixth floor.

  She put her equipment in the van and drove out of the city and up the Hudson. As soon as she was heading north, she took off her hard hat, the vest, hooded sweatshirt, and jacket. When it was fully dark, she passed a series of small towns where she could dump the ladder, tool kit, and work clothes. Then she drove to the airport car rental and returned the van. She took a cab to her hotel, showered, and dressed for dinner. Then she went down to the hotel’s restaurant.

  It was late, so she was able to get a table in a corner of the dining room where she could think without being distracted by nearby diners. At this hour they were mostly couples who spoke quietly and paid attention only to each other.

  It was time to go to California. Leah had just murdered enough people in the state of New York to qualify as a serial killer, and California was as far from New York as she could go without getting wet. She had addresses in California for three fugitives that she’d found in the Varga family’s workshop. She had a California driver’s license with Martin Ortega’s picture on it, and a new name and an address in the San Fernando Valley. She also had one with Paul Duquesne’s picture and one with Matt Bysantski’s. She was lucky that California had changed the design of its licenses, and so they had become harder to make than they’d been the last time Leah had seen one. They’d always had two pictures of the driver and some bears that appeared under UV light. Now they had a gold miner on the right, poppies on the lower left, and under UV light was a third picture of the driver with his birthday printed on it, and pictures of a bear with a star on him, Coit Tower, and a few other sights. Every one of them had probably been a trial to the Vargas and a gift to Leah Hawkins.

  19

  When Paul Duquesne walked along the sun-warmed pavement of Wilshire Boulevard near his office in Hollywood, he seemed overcharged with energy. There was an elasticity to his step, a comfortable rolling from the heel to the toe, ending in a push from the ball of the foot that propelled him about six inches farther than the steps of the other people on the street. He was straight-backed and hard-bellied, so his suit coat hung perfectly from his squared shoulders. The long days at Danbury and then Weldonville he had spent in motion. In the slow times he did push-ups on the floor and pull-ups on the bars or hanging from the upper bunk. When he saw inmates doing something he didn’t know, he would try it—Brazilian jujitsu, Krav Maga, tai chi, yoga, Pilates, anything. He divided the single hour of outdoor time each day into running and weightlifting.

  For a while during his first year, inmates tested him. He had the look and the speech of someone raised as a rich kid. They guessed he had spent hi
s youth playing tennis and swimming and riding horses, not fighting or scrambling for survival. There were some ugly one-on-one and two-on-one fights. He acquitted himself about average—not afraid to fight and not falling apart when he’d been hit. What had made his reputation was not the fights but the ensuing peace. As soon as a fight was broken up and everyone was caught, they were put in punishment for a few weeks. When they all got beyond the fight, he didn’t forget it. He waited for his chance and killed his opponent.

  One of them was stabbed, a sharpened toothbrush thrust up under his rib cage into his heart. The second victim was choked out and then drowned in a mop bucket. The third had his throat slashed with something that left cuts clean as a razor’s, but was never found.

  After these incidents, other inmates began to reinterpret the fact that Paul Duquesne was from a wealthy family. They decided the money should have been a warning. The rich protected themselves and each other, even if their efforts had to be blatant and obvious. If they had let this one be caught, convicted, and sent to prison for life, he must be a kind of throwback who frightened even them.

  Duquesne made a few allies over time—selected them, really. They were men whom other inmates feared. There were rumors that he kept their loyalty by having his family send money to support their wives and children. There were observations that made this theory seem accurate. He didn’t talk to his companions much. They would simply be around while he followed his routines—passing from place to place, reading books from the prison library, exercising, and practicing his skills. During an especially long stay in solitary confinement, he taught himself to walk on his hands like a circus performer. After that he would spend time each day in his cell walking upside down. His arm muscles grew strong and thick.