The phone rang. It was Austin. "Gamay, are you and Paul all right?"
"We're fine," she said, laughing with relief. "Thanks for sending the taxi. But you're going to explain how you pulled this one off. This is something, even for the great Kurt Austin."
"Tell you about it later. See you tomorrow. I need you back here. Be ready to work."
A ladder was being lowered out of the chopper.
Ramirez signaled for Francesca to go first. She hesitated, then grabbed the lower rung and, as befitting a white goddess, began to climb into the sky from which she had descended ten years before.
Chapter 26
Sandy Wheeler was getting into her Honda Civic when the strange man approached and asked in accented English how to get to the Los Angeles Times advertising department. Instinctively she hugged her purse close to her body and glanced around. She was relieved to see other people in the newspaper's garage. She had grown up in L.A. and was used to freaks. But she was jumpy lately handling this crazy water story, and even the cute, pearl-handled .22-caliber pistol in her pocketbook wasn't totally reassuring. The stranger looked as if he could chew the barrel off her gun with his metal teeth.
Wheeler had the reporter's ability to take in people at a glance, and what she saw was someone who looked as if he played the bad guy for the WWF. He was her height and would have been taller if he had a neck. The dark green sweatsuit was a couple of sizes too small for a square, powerful body that looked as if it had been assembled from refrigerator parts. The roundish, grinning face framed by the Prussian-cut dirty blond hair re minded her of one of the monsters in Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Only uglier. But it was the eyes that got her. The irises were so black that the pupils were practically invisible.
After giving the man hurried directions, Sandy got into her car and instantly locked the doors. She didn't care how unfriendly the gesture looked. As she backed out of her space he seemed to be in no rush to go to the advertising department. He stood there staring at her with eyes as hard as marbles. She was in her thirties, with long chestnut hair, an athletic body from jogging and working out. Her nut-brown face was taut and angular but not unattractive, dominated by large sky-blue eyes. She was pretty enough to attract occasional attention from the odd characters who seemed to drop from the palm trees around town. She was street-smart and had gained a layer of emotional calluses working as a police reporter before being assigned to the investigative team. She didn't spook easily, but this creep gave her the shivers. It went beyond appearances. There was some thing of the grave about him.
She checked her rearview mirror and was surprised to see that the man had disappeared. Easy come, easy go, she thought. She scolded herself for letting him sneak up on her. Growing up in L.A., she had learned early on to be aware of her surroundings at all times. This damned water story had preoccupied her, taken the edge off her alertness. Cohen had promised only a couple more days before they ran the story. Not soon enough. She was getting sick of taking the file disks home. Cohen was positively paranoid about leaving them in the building. Every night he cleaned the files off the computer and put them on backup disks. In the mornings he would load them back on.
Not that Sandy blamed him for being paranoid. There was something special about this story. The team had talked Pulitzer prize. Cohen coordinated the work of the three reporters. Her area was the Mulholland Group and its mysterious president, Brynhild Sigurd. The other two reporters concentrated respectively on domestic acquisitions and international connections. They had access to an accountant and a lawyer. The secrecy was tighter than the Manhattan Project. The editor was aware of the story but not its scope. She sighed. The story would be out in a few days, and she could take that long vacation in Maui.
She swung out of the garage and headed to her condo in Culver City. She stopped off at a shopping plaza and picked up a bottle of California Zinfandel. Cohen was coming over later to talk about wrapping up loose ends, and she had promised to whip up a pot of penne. As she was paying the cashier she noticed someone standing in front of the window looking into the store. It was that damned metal-tooth creep, and he was smiling. This was no coincidence. The jerk must have followed her. She glared at him as she exited the store, then strode purposefully to ward her car. First she dug the pistol out of the purse and tucked it in her belt. Then she called Cohen on her cell phone. He had told her to report anything unusual. Cohen wasn't there, but she left a message on his recorder saying she was on her way home and that she thought she was being followed.
Starting the car, she pulled slowly out of the plaza, then gunned the engine and shot through an intersection just as the light changed to red. The cars behind her all stopped. She knew the neighborhood well and cut through a couple of motel parking lots, then down a side street in a circular route to her apartment. Her heart was beating rapidly as she drove, but her pulse slowed to normal when she pulled up in front of the sanctuary of the condominium building. She buzzed herself into the five story apartment building and took the elevator up to the fourth floor. She stepped out of the elevator and almost dropped her groceries in surprise. The creep was at the far end of the hallway. He stood there with that insane grin, staring at her. That did it. She put the bag on the floor, pulled her pistol from her belt, and pointed it at him.
"You come any nearer, and I'll blast your private parts off," she said.
He made no motion. If anything, the grin got wider.
She wondered how he had got there ahead of her. Of course. He must have known her address. While she was zigzagging in an attempt to lose him, he had simply driven directly to her apartment. That didn't explain how he had got into the building. The management was going to get an earful about the lack of security. Maybe she'd even do a story on it.
Still keeping the pistol leveled, she fumbled in her purse for her keys, opened the door, and quickly shut it. Safe at last. She put the pistol on a small table, snapped the deadbolt and chain lock, and put her eye to the peephole in the door. The creep was standing just outside, his face distorted even more grotesquely by the lens. He was holding her bag of groceries as if he were a delivery boy. The nerve of him. She swore lustily. She wasn't going to screw around with Cohen this time. A straight call to 91 1 to report she was being stalked. She suddenly had the odd feeling that she wasn't alone.
She turned from the door and stared with unbelieving eyes, frozen with fear.
The man with the metallic teeth was standing in her way. Impossible. He was out in the hall. Then the answer came to her in a flash
Twins.
The epiphany came too late. As she backed against the door he began to walk slowly toward her, his eyes glittering like black pearls.
Cohen sounded frantic on the phone.
"Joe, for Godsakes, I've been trying to reach you for an hour!" "Sorry, I was out," Zavala apologized. "What's wrong?" "Sandy's disappeared. The bastards have got her."
"Calm down for a minute," Zavala said evenly. "Tell me who Sandy is and these bastards you're talking about. Start from the beginning."
"Okay, okay," Cohen replied. There was a pause as he pulled himself together, and when he spoke again it was with his nor mal composure, although it was clear from the tenseness of his voice that panic lurked close to the surface.
"I went back to the paper. I just had a funny feeling. All our source material is missing. We kept it in a locked file. Empty."
"Who had access?"
"Just the members of the team. They're all solid. The only way someone could get them to open the files is if they had a gun at their head. Oh, God," Cohen said as the implication of his statement sank in.