The library was a low brick building at the edge of a huge, tree-shaded park that stretched for blocks in three directions. Near the building, right on the corner where Magnolia Boulevard met Tujunga, there was a life-sized too-bright golden statue of Amelia Earhart holding, oddly, the disconnected propeller of her airplane. On wooden benches near her and at various spots in the park, derelicts and homeless people congregated or slept where the shade would protect them from the ferocious sunshine for a time. It would be easy to slip into one of those groups and sit with that tired, bent-over posture, then make his way slowly to his rented car parked a hundred yards from the freeway entrance on Tujunga.
If that way was blocked, there was a big high school a few blocks down Magnolia. Varney was sure he could move through a big campus like that without being an obvious outsider. He had learned a long time ago that it was easy to take advantage of people’s reluctance to stop a stranger and ask rude questions. It took them a long time to convince themselves that somebody should, then that nobody else would, and then to check around them to be sure they would be safe if the answer turned out to be unpleasant. By then he could be around the next corner and out the door on the other side of the building. He considered for a moment. Yes, the high school would be best. After all the news about shootings in schools, no cop would see a high school as a place a man like Varney would try to hide: it was too foolish.
Varney parked and went into the library. There was a sign beside the computers explaining the rules for use. He had to go to the reference desk to give his name, and that would only get him a half hour of computer time. He sighed, then walked off between two shelves of books to pretend to browse while he studied the reference desk and thought about unseen risks. He could perceive none. There was nobody else using the computers at the moment: the kids were in school, and everyone else seemed to be looking at books. He walked up to the desk, showed a bored librarian his stolen California driver’s license, and wrote the owner’s name on a sheet of paper. Two minutes later, Varney was on the Internet, reading an article about Prescott.
He sat in the old, cool building, half aware of the chattering on the other end of the room near the circulation desk. He knew it would suddenly go quiet if he had a problem. He read the article again. He had chosen the Los Angeles Times because it was Prescott’s hometown paper, and because it was still one of the big, fat papers that seemed to report on everything. Most of the papers in the country had shriveled over the years to tabloid size, and carried more short wire-service clips and syndicated columns than local news.
The title was “Five-Year Search Comes to an End.” It was about Prescott going after some guy named Spinoza who had been selling cocaine out of a house somewhere in L.A. County: Hawaiian Gardens? How the hell could they call a town that? The cops had raided the house, but the guy had already gotten out. He’d shot three little boys on the street nearby, because he knew three kids with holes in them would distract the cops. He had escaped and used his connections with his suppliers to hide in Mexico.
The reporter scored a lot of points against the L.A. police. Instead of getting the cooperation of the Mexican authorities, they had kept looking in Spinoza’s old L.A. haunts. Then the crush of an additional thousand murders a year moved the three little boys’ case into a kind of limbo: it was solved, just not closed. It was at that point that the neighborhood began collecting money and calling it the Three Boys Fund. By the fourth anniversary of the deaths, and with the help of large donations from a few rich businessmen, the neighborhood had collected enough money to hire their own hunter. They had asked around and kept hearing of Roy Prescott.
Varney looked up from the screen, his eyes moving across the circulation desk, a nearby window, and the doors while he thought. Prescott had already been well known five years ago. A bunch of poor, ignorant people in an apartment complex had heard of him from more than one source, and what they’d heard had convinced them to pay him to go after Spinoza.
He skipped down to the police spokesman’s statement: “We don’t approve of citizens seeking protection for their neighborhoods by giving money to men who may or may not be honest, or competent, and who, in any case, care nothing about the best interests of the community. In this instance, the issue was not even the safety of the neighborhood. It was revenge, pure and simple. As for Mr. Prescott, the district attorney’s office is studying his actions for possible prosecution, as, I believe, are officials in Matamoros, Mexico, and Browns-ville, Texas.”
Varney scrolled back up the column. Prescott had refused to answer any questions, but the story was clear. He had gone into Mexico alone, worked his way from person to person until he had found, not Spinoza, but Spinoza’s new route for moving in and out of the United States. He had waited for Spinoza near Brownsville, Texas, then caught him in Matamoros, Mexico. The details were missing, but the essentials were there: Spinoza was dead and Prescott was not.
Varney scrolled downward through the article, then returned to the opening display. Under the caption “Also in Today’s L.A. Times” was the title “Long Hunt Ends in Matamoros.” He clicked on the words and, in a moment, saw something forming on the screen that he had not dared to hope for: a photograph. His eyes jumped to it eagerly, then squinted in frustration. It was not very clear. The article said it had been taken by an American tourist in a car in Matamoros just after the shooting of Spinoza. There was a covered body lying in the street. Three uniformed men, all dark and about the same height, were leading a lone man toward a car. He was light-haired, a head taller than they were, and lean. He was walking away, but he had turned his head slightly to the side to look down at one of the policemen, so Varney could almost see a vague profile of the face, but not quite. Looking more closely at it only made the picture dissolve into the diagonal rows of tiny dots that composed it.
Varney’s half hour was up. He went back to the reference desk to sign out, then signed in on the next computer. He found other articles. There was one in the Denver Post. Prescott had followed some guy into the mountains in the spring and hunted him all summer through the resort towns. There was one in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that said he’d gotten himself arrested so he could look for a man in a parish jail. There was one in Minneapolis where he had beaten some serial killer to death with—his bare hands? No, there was something about a crowbar.
The police reactions could all have been written by the L.A. police spokesman. They hated him. Some implied that he had butted into a high-profile case just in time to get paid some outrageous fee when the police would have solved it anyway. All of them said something disparaging about his “methods.” He used excessive force, disregarded public safety, ignored the rights of suspects, paid bribes, or made threats to informants. It was all pretty much what the average police force did, but they didn’t care for having him do it too.
Varney looked up and studied the library again, waiting for a sign that he was still safe. He watched a group of children—two boys and two girls—get dragged into the entrance by a woman who was too openly irritated to be anything but their mother. That made him relax again. If the police were outside, they might not do anything overt, but the one thing they wouldn’t do was let a bunch of extra kids in the front door.
He signed off the Internet, stood up, and walked outside. He strolled across Magnolia Boulevard to the bigger section of the park as he re-examined Prescott’s remark. When Prescott had asked him if he had done any research, he had meant that if Varney thought Prescott was going to be able to have a squad of cops doing his bidding, then Varney didn’t know anything about Prescott. Now, why would he want Varney to know that? Was it because he wanted Varney to think that killing Prescott would be easier than he had imagined? Maybe all he had wanted was to have Varney stumble across the picture of him that was impossible to make out, and feel helpless. And whatever the police thought about Prescott, they would do just about anything to get the man who had left the two dead cops in the park.