Grave of Angels

by Michael Prescott

  “Um…yeah.” His self-esteem took a hit, but he rallied. “I suppose it is pretty obvious.”

  “But all you’d get via those methods is the name of the player’s ISP and a rough idea of his computer’s location.”

  “West LA. That’s what came up.”

  “West LA’s a big place. To zoom in any closer, you’d need the cooperation of the ISP. And they wouldn’t talk to you without a subpoena.”

  He fidgeted. “That’s where it gets a little dicey.”

  She got it. “You hacked into the ISP’s database.” Surprisingly, he thought he saw a hint of admiration in her face.

  “It wasn’t that hard. They left the back door open. Sloppy.”

  “So you found the subscriber who matches the IP address. What’s his name?”

  “I didn’t find a person, just a corporation. Consolidated Global Marketing, headquartered in the Cayman Islands. I was trying to run down some info on it—”

  “Don’t bother. It’s a shell.”

  “That’s what I figured. Which means—”

  “It means we’re dealing with serious people. People who know how to set up a dummy corporation in a foreign country to cover their tracks.”

  “That’s how I see it, yeah.”

  “Was there a local address?”

  “The account owner didn’t intend to leave one. All bills go to the Caymans. But…”

  “There were service calls.”

  “One, yeah.” Christ, she was sharp. “For a broadband hookup. Details were in the account history—including the address. It’s 24012 Cressley Drive, West LA. That’s a residential area in Westwood.”

  “Good enough.” She started to go, then turned back. “My office received an anonymous tip about this wager. You didn’t call it in, did you?”

  “Me? Shit no.”

  She nodded. “I didn’t think you were the public-spirited type.”

  He mustered a dozen stellar comebacks, but Kate Malick had already left.

  THE conversation with Skip Slater troubled Kate. She thought about it as she sped into Westwood.

  In the beginning she had been sincere in offering a hand to the men she’d met in her ministry.

  Background checks eliminated those with criminal records who weren’t legally allowed to carry firearms. Personal interviews culled the habitual drug users and the mentally ill. There remained a core of serious candidates.

  With a little cajoling, Barney became her partner. He trained the men, armed them, weeded out the incorrigibles.

  And she’d had a story to sell, the story of an ex-nun hiring men off the street. The media didn’t discover her by chance.

  Skip wasn’t wrong. She had used the men she hired. Probably, she hadn’t lived up to the highest ethical standard. But as she told Sam Brewer, she wasn’t a very good nun.

  She steered the Jag down Wilshire Boulevard and turned onto Cressley, then found the house and parked at the curb two doors down. The Baby Glock in its pocket holster went into the side pocket of her jacket. The holster was essential when carrying concealed; the Glock’s safety was part of the trigger and could be released by accident. It wouldn’t do to have a tube of lip gloss slide under the trigger guard and blow a hole in her thigh. Just another thing Barney had taught her.

  She stepped out of the car into the threatening dark. The Glock felt heavy in her jacket. The neighborhood was very still. It was rare for any part of LA to be this quiet, this empty, even after midnight.

  Westwood was an exclusive district of neat little homes with postage-stamp lawns lining the hilly streets like toy houses on folds of bunched-up carpet. Residences went for two million dollars and up, more than her father had earned in a lifetime. It was a neighborhood seemingly cloistered from the horror shows of barrio slayings and gang wars, but the separation was more cosmetic than real. The undergrowth of the urban jungle spread everywhere. Here it might be trimmed back by platoons of gardeners, but if you trod carefully, you could still feel it under your feet.

  As if in reminder, every house along the street advertised a burglar alarm system. At 24012 Cressley a red-and-white sign, mounted on a stake in the yard, read, PREMISES PROTECTED BY CARSON HOME SECURITY.

  Kate took a long look at the sign. She was familiar with every firm offering residential security services in Los Angeles. Carson Home Security was not one of them. The sign was a bluff.

  She approached the house. The windows were dark; she didn’t see even the blue flicker of a television set. The attached garage was windowless—impossible to tell if a car was parked inside.

  She skirted a drift of azaleas and eased alongside the living room window, directing the long beam of her pocket flashlight through the glass.

  Coffee table strewn with magazines. Fireplace with a slate apron. Paintings of sailboats. No clutter, no homey touches. The room might have been a layout in a magazine.

  A mockingbird penetrated the silence, riffing on a medley of birdcalls.

  She ducked under the branches of a tree bristling with ripe fruit—oranges or lemons, she couldn’t tell in the darkness—and crept around to the side of the house. Curtains covered two windows. The third looked in on a bedroom. Nobody in bed. On the walls, more sailboat paintings, as forgettable as hotel room artwork.

  In a movie she would have had a set of burglar tools in her back pocket. Lacking these, she hunted around for a rock, wrapped her hand in her jacket sleeve, and smacked the bedroom window. The glass made a soft crunch. It tinkled on the carpet as she swept the window frame clear of shards. The mockingbird, now an abettor, covered the sounds of the break-in with its song.

  She hoisted herself up and in, her boots dropping onto a crackling scatter of glass. The sound reminded her of ice splitting. Thin ice—now there was a metaphor for a security consultant who’d just committed B&E.

  She listened for any stir of activity, heard nothing. But while the house might be empty now, someone had placed the bet from this address earlier tonight.

  Keeping the lights off, she used her flashlight to guide her.

  The lavatory was spotless except for a ring of hard water deposits in the toilet. It hadn’t been flushed recently. At the sink, she opened the tap and heard a burp of air before a dirty stream squirted out. The water had been standing in the pipes a long time.

  The bedroom closet was empty. Dust glazed the television in the den. Beside it sat a Blu-ray player and several stacks of DVDs. No unifying theme to the selections. It was as if somebody had gone to Blockbuster and bought up everything in sight. The books on the shelves looked like random pickings from a library sale.

  The kitchen stove was barely used, the drip pans beneath the burners unstained. The refrigerator was empty save for a half dozen gourmet frozen dinners. Only plastic plates and microwavable cookware in the pantry. On the counter, a coffeemaker and a stack of nested Styrofoam cups, the kind of thing she would expect to see in an office, not a home. But this wasn’t anyone’s home. She wasn’t sure what it was.

  The house was a blank, a cipher. Fake sign outside, weirdly immaculate decor inside. The company that owned it was a shell, and the house itself felt like one.

  She was leaving the kitchen when something stopped her. A smell so obvious and familiar she’d almost overlooked it. The smell of coffee.

  She lifted the carafe from the coffee maker and shone her flash through it. Beads of water crisscrossed the sides. Someone had brewed coffee and washed out the pot. Recently.

  Reaching into her jacket, she drew the Glock.

  She had yet to explore the back hallway. Her flashlight beam guided her past more sailboat paintings to an open door that led to a guest bedroom. The bed was made, the room tidy, but she had the sense that someone had occupied this space not long ago. It took her a moment to know why. No dust anywhere. The bedroom and adjoining bath had been wiped down.

  She checked the closet. Empty, but there was a square impression in the carpet, with smaller, deeper dents at two corners. A suitcas
e with legs or casters had rested there.

  Someone had holed up in this room, living out of a suitcase. They had chosen the rear of the house to minimize the risk of being seen from the street. They had covered their tracks when they’d left.

  If they’d left.

  Into the hall again, moving to the next door, half open. Easing inside, her flashlight revealing a home office. Swivel chair, double-pedestal desk, and on the desk a desktop computer in sleep mode connected to a broadband modem. The LEDs were green, the Internet connection active. The bet must have been placed from this machine.

  Her hand had moved to the keyboard when she saw a gleam of light through the crack of a door.

  She pushed open the door and entered another room not much larger than a walk-in closet. A row of video monitors stood on a folding table. The room lights were off, but the monitors were on, showing night scope images of rooms and hallways. Bedroom, kitchen, den—the interior of this house.

  There was a security system, after all. Hidden surveillance cameras had been watching her the whole time.

  On the floor by the table was a small suitcase. Behind her was its owner. She heard low breathing and started to turn.

  Something small and cold kissed her left ear. It was a metal circle, and it could have been an object as innocuous as a cigar tube, but she knew it was the muzzle of a gun.

  “Don’t move, Miss Malick,” said a man’s voice. “Don’t you fucking move.”

  KATE drew a breath. She focused on whom she was dealing with. If she could judge by his voice, he was older than she was. In his fifties, maybe. He sounded nervous, flustered. Not like a practiced criminal. Someone who’d been around a while but was new at this.

  And he knew her name.

  “Drop your gun.” The quaver in his voice worried her. Scared people did reckless things.

  She let the gun fall to the floor.

  “Kick it away.”

  The gun skated into a corner.

  “Give me the flash.”

  Raising her arm, she let him pluck the flashlight from her fingers.

  “God damn it,” he whispered, “what are you doing here?” She felt the hot exhalation of his breath on her ear.

  “Tracking you down.”

  “Me? What do you know about me?”

  “I know you placed an online bet on Chelsea Brewer’s life. And I know you’re working with Jack Swann.”

  “You can’t know that.” The flashlight wavered in his hand, the beam briefly slicing into her eye from the side and lighting up the blood vessels at the back of her retina. They flashed across her field of view, a webbed mosaic.

  “I know more than that. I know Swann is off the reservation. He’s working against you. He wants you caught.”

  “Bullshit. Why would you say that?”

  “Because he’s the one who tipped us off.”

  It was true. Had to be. She had worked it out at some point between leaving her car and entering this room. Worked it out without conscious deliberation.

  There couldn’t be many people who knew about the threat to Chelsea. Swann was one of the few. And he’d run from her at Stiletto. That was the key. Why had he fled? Because he couldn’t have a conversation with her. Couldn’t let her hear his voice. He was already planning to call her office later with the tip, and he didn’t know who’d be picking up the phone.

  “Tipped you off?” The man’s words came slowly. She could almost hear him thinking it through, solving it like a puzzle. “That doesn’t make sense. Swann works for me. He’s my employee—or at least, an independent contractor on my payroll.”

  Funny way for a gunman to put it. His vocabulary wasn’t street. He sounded white collar, a management type.

  “Looks like he’d rather go solo,” she said.

  “He hasn’t been fully paid yet. He has no incentive to get me out of the picture.”

  Incentive—another business term.

  “Did Swann tell you he has a prior association with Chelsea’s father?”

  A pause. “No. He didn’t tell me that.”

  She’d planted doubts. It was something.

  He exhaled another breath, tickling her earlobe. “You’re just trying to play us off against each other.”

  “I’m brainstorming. Work with me.”

  “I’m not letting you mess with my head.”

  “Was Swann supposed to kill Chelsea at the nightclub? Because he didn’t. He took her alive.”

  The breathing in her ear was ragged now. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “He created a diversion and spirited her out of there. He’s already called me to say Chelsea is unharmed.”

  “That…that wasn’t our arrangement.”

  “He’s playing you. He’s got his own plan, and he wants you taken out. He was hoping I’d do it for him.”

  “Then he miscalculated, didn’t he?”

  She had no answer to that.

  “All right,” he said, calmer now, as if a decision had been reached. “Now I want you to turn with me so we’re both facing the door.”

  “We going somewhere?”

  “Just do it, Miss Malick.”

  She managed the turn in a series of sideways steps, like a dance move. He pivoted behind her, remaining out of her sight. If he wouldn’t let her see his face, he might be planning to let her live. But she didn’t think so. She had a feeling how this was going to end.

  “Now, walk,” he said.

  “I want to know where we’re going.”

  “Just…walk.”

  The slow deliberation of his words told her what was coming next. Her heart kicked up. She couldn’t move. It wasn’t stubbornness or brave resistance. Her body simply wouldn’t function.

  He didn’t repeat the order, just pushed her forward into the home office, then into the hall. Flashlight bobbing by her left ear. Gun nudging her neck.

  She knew the cliché that in a crisis everything slowed down, but it wasn’t working that way for her. If anything, time moved faster than normal, slipping away like a greasy rope that kept squirming out of her grasp. She needed more time and she had too little.

  Her perceptions had narrowed to tunnel vision, tunnel hearing. She saw only the blur of her boots carrying her forward across the hallway’s carpeted floor, heard only his breathing, rapid and shallow.

  A throw of the dice, she thought. This may all come down to a throw of the dice.

  Ten feet down the hall was a door with a polished brass knob, so shiny she could see blurred fragments of her reflection when the flashlight beam focused on it.

  “Open it,” he said. The gun bit into the hollow at the base of her skull.

  She grasped the knob. It rotated easily, the latch uncoupling. She let the door swing inward. The hinges were clean and new and made no sound.

  Before her a flight of stairs plunged into gloom. A cellar.

  She got it now. He was taking her into a windowless room below ground, where the pistol’s report would be muffled. It was a warm night. The neighbors would have the AC on, windows closed. They wouldn’t hear a thing.

  “Light switch on your right,” he said. “Flip it up.”

  She groped for the switch and found it, then wagged her index finger against the plate without touching the toggle. “Nothing’s happening,” she said. “Bulb must be dead.”

  She worried he might reach past her and try the switch himself, but with the gun in one hand and the flashlight in the other, he couldn’t do it. He stood there breathing hard, his respiration fanning her left ear, hot and steady like a pulse.

  “Just go down.” He beamed the flash at the stairs. “We can see okay.”

  She took a step onto the staircase. Wood creaked.

  “You can just run away,” she said. “If you do, I can’t stop you.”

  “You can ID me.”

  “How? I haven’t seen you.”

  “You’ve heard my voice. Move.”

  Another step.

  “I ca
n’t identify you that way.”

  “There are other ways.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Who else knows you’re here?”

  It took her a second to see the question’s implications. The house concerned him. He could be identified through the house. “Several people,” she said, descending once more.

  He thought about that. “You could be lying. You came here alone. You could have found the place on your own.”

  “I found it through the bet you placed. I couldn’t do it solo. I’m not a computer whiz. If the house is a problem for you, killing me isn’t going to solve it.”

  “It may buy me some time.”

  “You’re not a murderer.”

  He released a tense little laugh. “I never used to be. But here’s a tip for you, Miss Malick. Family is everything. A man can do things he never dreamed of when his family is involved.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Family is everything. That’s all.”

  They were more than halfway down the stairs. There was no getting through to him. No communication. He was not reachable.

  Had to fight, then. Her only option. Risk it all on one throw.

  Now.

  She twisted toward the railing and grabbed him by the shirt. A yell of surprise and anger, a stumble, and he nearly lost his balance on the stairs. But somehow he kept his footing as he swung onto the steps directly opposite her.

  The gun came up, angled at her face. She ducked and threw herself at his midsection and the gun went off, a crash of noise above her head. She wrapped her arms around his legs and kicked out from the railing, and his knees buckled.

  He pitched headlong into the dark, the flashlight flying free and winking out. The gun went off again, another roar and a muzzle flash, purple in the blackness, the shot aimed at nothing, just a reflex of his trigger finger. Then she was sprinting up the stairs, taking them two at a time, crouching low to make a smaller target.

  She reached the doorway and darted into the hall just as the gun boomed a third time. Clatter of footsteps. He had recovered. He was giving chase.

  She ran into the surveillance room, snatched up her gun, and pivoted, ready to fire, but he wasn’t there.