As the plane took off, Prescott reached into the pocket of his jacket for some chewing gum and found the crumpled piece of paper. He took it out and glanced at it. The hurried way he had scribbled the name and address of the hotel in Marina del Rey re-created the sick feeling of soured opportunities. This had been a big one, because the killer had believed he’d taken all the right precautions. The killer had been smart enough to disconnect the surveillance cameras in Prescott’s building and erase the tapes. But he had not known that the parking garage did not belong to Prescott’s landlord. The parking company operated its own surveillance system. Prescott had looked at the tape and seen the license number of the rented car. He had used it to get the credit card number, then gotten a list of other places the card had been used. He had gone to the hotel, and missed the killer. The only advantage he had now was that he knew the city where the plane ticket had been bought.
Prescott closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. He had been awake for the past two nights, and the long plane ride to New York City would give him a chance to get back his strength and alertness. He would need them soon: New York was just the first stop on the way to Buffalo.
He had always thought of Buffalo as a luckless town. The people were crazy for sports, and the teams always came from behind, made a superhuman effort, and reached second place. The big buildings downtown were graceful and even ornate, built sometime just before or after the place had reached its peak, around 1900. They were built by people who had been optimists—a reflection of an aesthetic that was a little bit out of date even then.
The forces of history had choked off the supply of money and left the office buildings half empty and the factories completely empty. Every time he had been there, he had found another civic advertising blitz announcing another local renaissance that he couldn’t quite locate. The last time he had been through, they had remodeled the airport. But it had the feel of public works in third-world countries that had been built out of civic ambition, and that he could imagine someday soon abandoned to the jungle.
If this killer lived in Buffalo, then the luck of the place must have gotten worse lately. Prescott knew the man had not been born there. His speech had no trace of the accent. Prescott supposed it wasn’t a bad place for a killer to live. Real estate was cheap. It was on the Canadian border, and not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania.
He took the telephone from the back of the seat in front of him and dialed the answering machine in his new office. He heard it rewind. There were two messages. He sat up straight, put his hand over his left ear to cut the noise, and listened, but this time it was not the voice of the killer.
“This is Daniel Millikan, and it’s four o’clock. I’ll be home in an hour, and I’ll be in all evening. If you don’t get me then, call me in the morning at the office.” Prescott listened to Millikan reciting the telephone numbers while he let the surprise wear off. He had not expected this. He hung up and dialed.
“Hello?”
“I got your message,” said Prescott. “What’s up?”
“The L.A. Times had an article about what happened at your office. You’re out of your mind.”
“Yeah, but I know it. Most of the others don’t.”
“Why do you do this?”
“Answer unpromising phone messages?”
“No,” said Millikan. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I know how to do seven or eight things,” said Prescott. “All the other ones cost money.”
“I want to call this whole thing off. It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have told Cushner how to get to you.”
“It’s okay,” Prescott said. “You don’t have to do anything else. Your part is over.”
“He’s killed two people just to scare you, and two more to get to you. Putting yourself out as the next victim isn’t a good idea this time. You know what he is.”
“Yeah, I know what he is. He’s not going to get hungry—he’s done enough of these so he may not need money for years. He isn’t going to make a mistake out of desperation. The only ways are to wait for him to get hit by a truck, or get him to come after me.” Prescott paused. “And he could be active for a long time. He’s young. Late twenties.”
“How do you know that? Voices can be deceptive.”
“When he came to my office I saw him in the flesh. Thanks for your concern, but I’ve got to go now, Danny. I’m on my way to New York.” Prescott disconnected and returned the telephone to the back of the seat, then lay back and closed his eyes. His mind ranged nervously in one direction, then another, keeping him from sleep.
He found himself remembering his first lesson about killers. He had seen someone while she was alive, and then seen her again after she wasn’t. Prescott had been twenty-four years old. He had just gotten out of the service, and had known little more than that he was glad it was over. When he could find no job that paid well or seemed likely to lead anywhere, he had answered an ad in the paper placed by the Emil Vargas Detective Agency. Vargas was lazy, and he was cunning. In his later years, he would hire two or three young men like Prescott, who were strong and tireless and naive, and allow them to put in the two thousand hours of work required for a detective’s license in California. He would pay them minimum wage, and accept every case that was offered, without quibbling about the difficulty or danger. When one of the apprentices quit or put in his two thousand hours, another would take his place.
When Pauline Davis had called, Vargas had answered the telephone, written down the name and address, and handed the paper to Prescott because he happened to be in Vargas’s line of sight, and giving it to anyone else would have required him to turn his head.
Prescott met Pauline Davis at a small apartment building on Victory Boulevard. She was in her thirties but looked like an ugly teenager, almost skeletally thin, with bad skin and bad teeth that made Prescott suspect she was an addict. Her clothes were the short shorts and loose, translucent blouses that had not been in style during his lifetime except among street hookers. She said she owned the apartment building and needed a skip trace done. A man named Steven Waltek had rented an apartment. Through bluff and evasion, he had managed to avoid paying her for six months, then disappeared. He owed her six thousand dollars, and she wanted papers served on him. Prescott could still hear her voice, see her talking—always a little too fast, with nervous, birdlike movements. When she turned her head to look for the rental agreement, it was like a twitch.
Prescott had listened politely, written everything down, then gone directly to the county clerk’s office to see who really owned the apartment building. To his surprise, the tax rolls said Pauline Davis did.
He began to search for Waltek. He visited the landscaping company Waltek had listed on his rental application as his employer. The owner told Prescott that Waltek worked as a trimmer, climbing the big, old trees with a set of spikes on his work shoes and a leather strap, then using a light chain saw to lop off unwanted limbs. He said Waltek had collected his last check a month ago and expressed some vague intention to move inland.
It took Prescott a week of telephone calls to pick up a trace of Waltek. Prescott always made the calls as Vargas had taught him, claiming to be a former employer who owed Waltek some money, or a friend of a friend who had been told to give him a letter. He found a tree service in Riverside where Waltek had applied for a job. There had been no openings, but they had kept his application because he was experienced at a kind of work that not everyone could—or would—do. When Prescott arrived in Riverside, he found that Waltek’s address was not in Riverside. It was on a rural road somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains. He drove for over an hour up narrow, winding roads, through tiny towns that seemed to exist for the benefit of people who came in other seasons—skiers in the winter, or campers in the summer—but never in the spring. The tall pine trees were shrouded in mist nearly to their tops, and on some of the low, shadowy rock slopes there were still half-melted streaks of dirty snow.