Hobart was sitting in his third car now. He had given away Whitley’s car, rented a car and kept it until he had driven to the fire, and now he had rented another. This one was a small SUV, a Lexus that was difficult to pin down as to color. It was a metallic shade and sometimes it looked gray to him and sometimes tan, so it almost seemed to fade into the road. He had chosen it because the windows were tinted, making a person inside into a dim silhouette.
Hobart had spent most of the early morning completing his preparations for Emily Kramer. He knew he should simply have killed her. It would have been so easy. He could have sat in the warm, dark corner of her back yard on a lawn chair and put a .308 bullet right through her head. She would have fallen in a heap like a marionette with cut strings. It would have been loud, but sleeping neighbors who heard a single shot seldom got up to investigate. Instead they lay still, barely breathing, waiting to hear the next pop: “Was that a shot? Shhh. Listen.” And Hobart would have driven up to Theodore Forrest’s place, collected his second two hundred thousand, and gone about his business.
No. He would not have gone about his business. He was so tired that each time the work got harder for him. That was probably why he couldn’t resist killing Whitley. It was definitely what had made him decide he wanted the information about Theodore Forrest. When he added the money he could get from Forrest to the amount he had already managed to keep over the years, he would have enough.
Hobart supposed he had not lived as cheaply as some people, but he had saved. When a job was finished, he would put most of the money away. At first he’d had the misguided hope that Valerie would forgive him for going to jail. When that hope was revealed to be idiotic, he had still kept saving. Money became more symbolic than practical. He needed to pile it up to overcome the feeling of futility and emptiness he had felt since the day of his arrest. He tried to make himself feel as though he had succeeded and gotten the money, instead of prison.
Hobart watched Emily Kramer walk to her Volvo. She had parked it across the street from the apartment complex. At this time of day, that was a pretty smart thing to do. She had a very short walk to and from the apartment building, all in the open under the windows of a dozen tenants in the building, and in plain sight of two dozen in neighboring buildings. She had made it nearly impossible for him to approach her. She was thinking clearly now, as though she knew she was in danger.
She was smarter and more self-reliant than he had imagined, and the discovery made him more certain than before that she had been trying to deceive him about the evidence. She had set the fires to get rid of him, and that meant that she was now preparing a move against Theodore Forrest. She must have sent Ray Hall, the man she was staying with, up north to talk to Forrest in person while she scurried around here, probably hiding copies of the evidence, closing bank accounts, making travel arrangements.
She was dressed up today. Her dark hair looked as though she’d had it professionally styled, even though he knew that was not something she could have done without his knowing. He couldn’t help thinking of the way she had looked naked, and it was a distraction that made him wish he had never done that to her. He was reluctant to harm that beautiful body, and he couldn’t avoid feeling a sexual attraction to her that wasn’t quite affection, but was appreciation. He couldn’t let it make him hesitant. Today was the day when he would need to be hard on her. He had to persuade her to relinquish the evidence, withdraw, and leave Forrest to him.
He watched the Volvo pull away from the curb and move up the street. Hobart could tell from the way she accelerated that Emily was jumpy and anxious, but he was sure she had not spotted him yet. A few times he had noticed that people he had been hired to kill seemed to sense that he was around. It didn’t matter if they had no rational reason to know that someone wanted them gone. It didn’t matter if they had never seen Hobart before or had no suspicion that he was anyone to fear. He had even seen them get nervous and ignore him to look over their shoulders for someone else. They clearly felt something wasn’t right, but they didn’t know who or what was wrong. Sometimes they would change their plans: stay longer at a party or a bar because they didn’t want to leave the light and the company, or come out of a movie theater and go back to the box office to buy a ticket for another film that was playing on a different screen.
Hobart waited until she had turned the first corner before he started the engine of the SUV and pulled out to follow her. At the corner, he let a few cars go past before he turned. He tailed her at a distance for a few minutes. It was easy to tell that she was not aware he might be the one. She was not making quick moves to force him to do anything noticeable. He stayed far behind her and followed her onto the Ventura Freeway.
After a couple of miles, she passed the interchange with the San Diego Freeway, but she didn’t turn. It occurred to Hobart that she might be driving north past Ventura all the way to the Central Valley to meet Forrest. The thought put a little hitch in his breathing. She shouldn’t try to go up there alone.
Theodore Forrest was rich, the most important member of a powerful family. If Emily Kramer went up there and tried to get Forrest to exchange his cash for her proof, Forrest was going to end up with the proof and the cash, and probably all that would be left of Emily was a couple of parts from her aging Volvo scrapped in a local junkyard. The Central Valley was his country, and she would never get near him. She would simply disappear at the hands of some hireling. It occurred to Hobart that he was the hireling. He had taken the job of killing Emily Kramer, but he hadn’t done it yet.
He watched her take the Westlake exit, and he felt relieved. When he came to it, he followed, and as he was coasting down the ramp he saw her turning right onto Westlake Boulevard. After a few minutes and a couple of turns, he came up with her in time to see her going to the door of a small brick-fronted house. As he passed, the door opened and a tall black man wearing jeans and a red T-shirt admitted her.
Hobart was sure it was the other detective, the man who had interrupted him when he had been trying to take Emily Kramer out of her house. He began to search for a good spot to park and wait.
He couldn’t let another night come and go before he had her.
29
Emily stepped in so quickly that Dewey Burns had to step backward to keep from being bumped. He closed the door.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I don’t know. Everything. I assume you know that the office and my house are gone?”
“Of course,” Dewey said. “Ray called Billy and me around four in the morning. There’s still the stuff we put in storage. It’s possible that we missed what we were looking for and it’s still hidden inside something.”
“If it was there, we missed it, all right. And if we look again, we’ll miss it again.”
“I’m not so sure. We moved all the records that we went through. I think we know which ones we can eliminate, but there are some that are still possible. We haven’t found anything yet, but it’s too early to say we won’t.”