She plugged in the last piece of equipment, using what was labeled as a “utility power outlet” instead of the time-honored cigarette lighter, and flicked on the tiny LCD screen on the palmtop.
It had taken some trial and error in the dead of night, and some real skills, to enter Santoro’s offices and set up the video feed, but she was patient and thorough, not to mention careful. Lucia had given her a solid two-month course in electronic bugging and breaking and entering…apparently, all useful skills taught by government agencies with three letters. Jazz had been a good student.
She watched as Santoro’s tiny little video figure crossed to his desk with a full coffee cup in his hand, exchanged some words with his assistant—indistinct in Jazz’s earpiece—and began to open up his mail. All very normal. This was going to be another of Borden’s “your presence prevents it” things, she already knew it. They’d had two before the debacle with Wendy Blankenship, besides the near-drive-by back in K.C. while she’d been recovering. One of them had been an all-night stakeout in a Denny’s, watching a waitress who hadn’t done anything but yawn, give bad service and drop a plate of food. The other hadn’t been that exciting.
I shouldn’t be doing this. Then again, this would bring in cash, and Jazz was in favor of that. She’d never been a small-business owner before. Having people like Pansy depending on her for rent money made her nervous and greedy.
Santoro’s phone rang. He had a conversation about an upcoming film he was producing, and against her will, Jazz thought that was kind of cool, because they were talking about casting actors she actually recognized. The assistant came and went, bringing him stacks of correspondence once the incoming mail had been disposed of. Santoro had a pair of lungs on him, and from the language he used talking to an MGM executive, he had a pair of brass balls, too. Jazz found herself liking the guy. He called his wife and talked with her, and it sounded nice, too. Comfortable. The kind of conversation adults had who could bicker a little about what color the new refrigerator was going to be, and whether or not the kids needed summer camp or not, but still end with a love you that sounded heartfelt.
She never had conversations like that. Her arguments always felt so damn important…even when they weren’t.
Santoro seemed like a good guy. Someone you’d want for a friend. Which told her something about Borden, too—because, not only was he friends with somebody warm and generous like this, he cared. Borden had a decent heart.
Around an hour and a half later, the assistant broke into his routine to remind him he had some kind of set visit, which marked the end of the administrative portion of the day, and Jazz gulped down the last of her coffee as Santoro tidied up and prepared to depart.
Apart from having heard half of a conversation—the wrong half, unfortunately—with Johnny Depp, she hadn’t accomplished a damn thing, really. She hadn’t spotted a single person tailing him, watching the office or home, or any suspicious activity whatsoever.
She picked up the still camera and shot a couple of angles of his car while she was waiting for him to emerge from the building.
Her cell phone rang. She flipped it open without taking her eyes from the entrance.
“Anything happening?” Borden. She actually felt a little electric tingle at the sound of his voice, caught sight of herself in the rearview mirror and realized that she was smiling. That kind of smile. She wiped it off her face and glared at her reflection, as if it was to blame.
“Not a damn thing,” she said. “Your friend’s doing fine.”
“That’s good.” He sounded relieved. “How about you?”
“Not a damn thing happening to me, either,” she said, “except that I’m about to OD on caffeine. You know the biggest problem about stakeouts without a partner?”
“No conversation?”
“No bathroom breaks,” she said. “Gets pretty difficult.”
“I can imagine.”
“You at the office?” Because he’d have to be, it was almost noon in New York.
“No. I was in court earlier. I have the rest of the day off.”
“Do you ever work, Counselor? All I ever see you do is stroll around your office looking sharp, taking meetings, and fly around bugging the hell out of me.”
“It’s a filthy job, but the compensation’s pretty good,” he said blandly. “So I look sharp, eh?”
“Don’t get cocky.”
“Wouldn’t think of it.”
She checked the monitor. Santoro’s office was empty, except for his assistant cleaning up the coffee cup and restraightening piles of paper. He hadn’t come out of the front door yet.
“I’m going to have to go,” she said to Borden.
“Anything wrong?”
“No,” she said. “Go help a corporation hide its ill-gotten gains in an offshore account or something. I’ll call later.”
Maybe Santoro had stopped off at the bathroom. Hell, she was starting to regret the second cup….
Another full minute passed. No Santoro. No activity in his office.
Jazz drummed her fingers on the steering wheel again, this time more from nerves than any enjoyment of the pop jingle on the radio. She watched the digits crawl on her clock.
He was taking way too long.
“Dammit,” she whispered, and got out of the car. She grabbed her still camera—nothing odd about a tourist with a camera in L.A. — stuck her collapsible baton in her back pocket, covered by the windbreaker she threw on, and moved quickly toward Santoro’s office building.
She kept expecting him to pop out at any moment, as she got closer, but all remained quiet. Something tingled at the base of her spine, like a gun pressed close. She walked faster, took the three short steps up to the glass doors and walked in.
No security in the lobby. There was a desk, but it was empty. She checked the elevators. Nothing was moving. Santoro’s office was on the fourth floor, and both elevators were on the ground. If he’d come out here, he’d have walked out the front. There weren’t any other places for him to have gone.
Except for the stairs.
Jazz cracked the door to the stairwell and listened, and heard a dull scuffling noise. Grunts of effort.
She shoved the camera in a pocket, grabbed the baton and snapped it out to its full length as she ran up. She took the steps three at a time, feeling the burn in her thighs and a sharp twinge in her side, but if she was right, there wasn’t time to take it any easier.
She burst around the third-floor landing and saw, on the flat halfway point to the fourth floor, Lowell Santoro being strangled.
He was still alive, barely—face congested dull purple, eyes bulging, mouth open and tongue protruding. Fingers still scrabbling weakly for the cord around his throat that had dug in so deep she couldn’t even see it. The cord was all that was holding him upright.
Jazz yelled—she didn’t even know what—and the sound bounced and echoed sharply from the concrete all around her.
The man standing behind Santoro, both gloved hands twisting a black rope, met her eyes. She didn’t know him, but she knew the type—something missing in the eyes, a kind of animal vacancy that marked a bad life and a worse end coming. He was tall, blond, California-pretty, with an off-kilter nose that had seen somebody’s fist close up in the not-too-distant past.
He let go of Santoro and let him pitch forward, right into Jazz as she bounded up toward him. Santoro’s weight—she didn’t dare think, dead weight—bowled her over, and the world became a confusing, hurting blur as they fell. Jazz landed flat on her back, Santoro half-crushing her, and saw California Guy heading back up the stairs, fast.