Driving back to Los Angeles meant putting herself in the one place where her breakout of Jim Shelby wasn't a distant event rapidly fading into memory. She was going to a city where any police officer might be actively watching for her. It was also Daniel Martel's country, not hers. The Adirondack Mountains where she had ambushed Martel's men were part of her ancestral world. She had been there many times since she was a child, and it was a place where she felt comfortable. Southern California was not part of that world. It was a hot, inhospitable place for her at this time of year, when the sky would turn clear like a gigantic, unchanging blue bowl, and the temperature might rise to 110. Los Angeles was a single suburb eighty miles north to south, and a hundred east to west, and Martel probably knew it better than she ever could.
Hunting him would mean stalking him from a distance. She stopped at a hotel in Phoenix. She began by going out to buy a computer in an Apple store and then going back to her room to begin her search. She began with Google and moved quickly to the tools she had developed to help place her runners. She signed out and then signed back in as a corporation she had invented about ten years earlier to provide work histories for her clients. She performed searches on Lexis and Nexis. In Lexis she found deeds and mortgages, motor vehicle registrations, and personal legal histories. He had never been convicted of a crime, never even been arrested. But he did have property.
He had a house in Los Angeles. That struck her as revealing. When he had lived with Susan Shelby in Los Angeles, it wasn't at his house. He had made her rent an apartment and moved in with her. He must have been expecting to do something that would get him into trouble. He had probably never told her his real name.
He also had a condominium in Las Vegas, which was his official residence. That made sense to her. He had some kind of business as a cover for selling prescription drugs diverted from legal distribution channels, and he seemed to have quite a bit of money. Nevada had no state income tax. There was a Porsche Carrera registered in Nevada, and a Mercedes 735 registered in California.
She found the mortgage he had taken out to buy the house in Los Angeles, and she almost cried out in frustration. He'd had to give his Social Security number, but it had been blacked out. That number would have given her access to his credit reports and his financial records and eventually would have told her where he was.
She still didn't have him. She had used the computer to get specific bits about him, like stakes to drive in a circle around him, the beginning of a definition. But she had not found a picture of him, had no certainty about where he was. Each time he could have made a mistake and been caught, he had avoided it and escaped. He had been supernaturally careful and thorough about removing all traces of himself from the apartment in Los Angeles he had shared with Jim Shelby's wife. In the apartment the police had found no fingerprints, no DNA traces. He had been nowhere near the building where Jane had been held and tortured, and nowhere near the house where his men had held Sarah Shelby. The underlings Jane might have used to connect him with crimes were dead.
Jane spent some time organizing and studying the information she had found about him, then teased it to make it more useful. She used aerial maps and surface photographs to get pictures of his house and his condo and the streets on all sides of them. She got more aerial photos for each hour of the day or night, and signed into traffic cameras that were permanently trained on the major thoroughfares nearby.
She used the driver's license numbers to bring up replicas of his actual licenses so she could see his photographs. He had thick, dark hair; a smooth, unlined face; and large, light blue eyes. She wasn't surprised that he was handsome. He had gone to Austin with confidence that he would have no trouble meeting and manipulating a woman he only expected must exist-a pharmaceutical saleswoman who worked at the nearby company headquarters. According to the licenses, he was tall-six feet two inches-and he weighed 180 pounds. She could see from the photos that he was trim, with big shoulders and chest. It was a body acquired not by playing some game, but by consciously shaping with weights and repetitive exercises. His skin was evenly tanned. It had been done not by being outdoors in some active way, but more likely by using a tanning bed. He controlled his appearance like an actor.
She studied the pictures of his face until she was sure she could recognize it even if he added something to change his appearance-a beard, glasses, mustache, hair dye. Then she packed her clothes, computer, and guns into the car, and drove toward Los Angeles. All of the men he had sent after her had been carrying California driver's licenses.
Jane was heading for a city where she had committed the crime of the year. Before she left Phoenix, she stopped in a wig shop and bought three wigs. One was light brown with natural-looking highlights, one was darker brown with a hint of red, and one was short and blond. She knew from experience that she could get away with even light blond hair with her blue eyes, but the wig made her look very different. In another shop she bought two pairs of sunglasses, one that wrapped around her face, and one with big saucer-shaped dark lenses that made her face look small.
As she drove the last hundred miles to Los Angeles on Route 10, she thought about the ways of getting to Daniel Martel. When she reached Santa Monica she took her Camry to a Toyota dealer and told the service manager to do all of the checks, replacements, and maintenance it would take to make the car into one he would buy his daughter. When she picked it up a day later, she filled the tank and had the car washed and waxed. She knew that a dirty car caught people's attention in Los Angeles, and made it look as though the driver had just blown in from elsewhere.
She drove to the neighborhood in west Los Angeles where Daniel Martel's house was. She spent over an hour driving around the area before she swung past his address for the first time. His house was a two-story Spanish-style building with a red tile roof and a balcony with an ornate wrought-iron railing. She could see signs on the lawn for a security company, and a few decals on the lower windows and front door.
Jane returned to her hotel and laid out a set of dark clothes, a baseball cap, more of the surgical gloves she had used for cleaning, about fifty feet of the rope she had brought to the house in the Adirondacks, her folding knife, and her two identical Beretta M92 pistols.
At two a.m. Jane drove past Daniel Martel's house, parked a block away, and walked back to the house. She stepped around the outside, peering in windows. There was an alarm keypad that she could see beside the front door, but she could also see that the display said, "RDY": ready. It was not turned on. Did that mean he was at home, that he was in there waiting for her There were no lights on, and there was no car in the garage. She wondered if it meant that he had no fear of a break-in, or that he had known she would be coming but didn't want the security system to summon anyone. She decided it probably meant he wanted her to find her way in.
She continued around the house, looking inside. She knew she could break a window, reach a latch, and slip inside without worrying about the alarm going off. If he was gone, that would be safe, but she sensed something was wrong. She picked up a fallen branch from beneath a tree in the yard, cleaned it of twigs, tied her rope around it, stood to the side of the balcony, and threw it over both railings so it dangled free on the other side without hitting anything and making noise. She reached up and removed the stick, tied the two parts of the rope into a slipknot, tugged it to tighten it, and began to climb. As she did, she used her arms more than usual to save her right leg. When she was just below the balcony she reached up, clutched the edge, and pulled herself up to grasp the railing. She braced her left foot against the wall of the house, used the railing to climb up, and stepped over it onto the concrete surface of the balcony. Then she pulled the rope to bring the knot up to her, untied it, drew up the rest of the rope, and left it coiled on the balcony where it wouldn't be seen from below.