“That’ll be fine.” Tim set down his things and counted twelve hundreds on the desk between them. “I assume this will cover the first and last months and the security deposit. Fair?”
“Fairer than springtime. I’ll get the paperwork together-we can deal with it later.” Joshua slid out from behind the desk as Tim gathered up his possessions. “I’ll show you the apartment.”
“The key’s fine. I can’t imagine the place has got too many bells and whistles that need explaining.”
“No, no, it doesn’t.” Joshua cocked his head. “What happened to your eye?”
“I walked into a door.”
Joshua returned Tim’s gentle smile, then grabbed a key from a pegboard hook behind him and offered it across his desk. “You’re in 407.”
Tim shifted his shirts so he could take the key. “Thank you.”
Joshua leaned back in his chair, knocking the John Ritter frame askew. He adjusted it quickly, then stopped, embarrassed. A can of shaving cream fell from Tim’s unzipped bag and rolled across the floor. Weighed down with his things, Tim made no move to pick it up.
Joshua smiled sadly at him. “It wasn’t supposed to work out like this, was it?”
“No,” Tim said. “I suppose not.”
•The key fit a Schlage single-cylinder knob lock. There was no dead bolt, but Tim didn’t mind, since the door was solid-core with a steel frame.
The square of the room had a single large window that overlooked a fire-escape platform, bright red and yellow Japanese signs, and a busy street. Aside from a few worn patches, the carpet was in surprisingly good shape, and the alcove kitchen came equipped with a narrow refrigerator and chipped green tile. All in all, the place was bare and a touch depressing, but clean. Tim hung his four shirts in the closet and dropped his bag on the floor. He removed his Sig from the back of his pants and placed it on the kitchen counter, then pulled a small tool kit from his bag.
With a few twists of a Phillips-head screwdriver, he removed the entire doorknob. He drew out the Schlage cylinder from its housing and replaced it with a Medeco-another item he’d scrounged up at Kay’s salvage yard. Because of their six tumblers and the uneven spacing, angled cuts, and altered depth of the keys, Medecos were Tim’s locks of choice. Virtually impossible to pick. The new cylinder came with only a single key, which Tim slipped into his pocket.
Next he connected his PowerBook to the Nokia and accessed the Internet through his home account. He’d leave the apartment’s phone jack dormant, thereby avoiding any records linked to a landline and an address. He was not surprised to see that his password no longer worked at the Department of Justice Web site, but he wouldn’t have used the site extensively anyway, as he knew that all traffic was closely monitored and recorded. Instead he ran Rayner’s name through a Google search and came up with a smattering of articles and promotional Web sites for Rayner’s books and research.
In clicking around he discovered that Rayner had grown up in Los Angeles, gone to college at Princeton, and received his Ph. D. in psychology from UCLA. He’d been involved in a number of progressive experiments, for which he’d been widely praised and criticized. In one of them, a group dynamics study he’d run with students at UCLA over spring break in 1978, he’d separated his subjects into hostages and captors. The pseudo captors had grown so identified with their roles that they’d begun abusing the hostages, both emotionally and physically, and the study had been called off amid a storm of controversy.
Rayner’s son, Spenser, was murdered in 1986, his body dumped off Highway 5. The FBI, monitoring a truck-stop pay phone as part of a mob sting, inadvertently recorded a panicked trucker, Willie McCabe, describing the murder to his brother in the course of seeking advice on whether he should turn himself in. The wiretap warrant, of course, did not extend to McCabe, so his incriminating comments were deemed inadmissible in court.
It occurred to Tim that Rayner had strong secondary motivations for not now focusing his vigilante energies on McCabe-having his son’s killer on the loose elevated his cause and gave it a sales hook. Plus, Rayner, and his connection with McCabe, was too public. He’d be a leading suspect in the event of foul play.
After McCabe’s case was dismissed, Rayner had begun to focus on the legal aspects of social psychology. One journalist went so far as to refer to him as a constitutional expert. Rayner and his wife, like an alarming majority of couples who lose a child, split within the first year after their son’s death. Tim couldn’t deny the sense of distress provoked by the possibility of his and Dray’s bolstering the divorce statistic further.
Rayner had really come into his own after his son’s death, publishing his first bestseller-a social-psychology study packaged as a self-help book. Tim found a review in Psychology Today bemoaning the fact that Rayner’s books had grown thinner and more anecdotal each time out. It certainly hadn’t hurt his sales. Another article stated that Rayner had become less involved with his teaching, though it did not make clear whether that had been his decision or the university’s. He was now an adjunct professor who taught two occasional yet wildly popular undergraduate courses.
Tim logged on to the Boston Globe Web site next and ran a check on Franklin Dumone. He was not surprised to find that in his thirty-one years on the job, Dumone had been an extremely capable detective, then sergeant. Because of the arrest record of the Major Crimes Unit under his tenure, Dumone had grown to become something of a local legend. He’d retired after he’d arrived home one evening to find his wife beaten and strangled. Her alleged killer had been someone who’d just gotten out of a fifteen-year stint in the pen; Dumone had been his original arresting officer, catching up to him with a still-alive five-year-old girl in the trunk of his car. The killer’s prison sentence, like so many others, had merely provided time for notions of revenge to evolve.
The Detroit Free Press’s Web archives housed only a few articles involving the Masterson twins, most of them fluff pieces on twins or siblings in law enforcement. They’d been top-notch dicks and solid operators within their specialty units but had maintained a fairly low media profile until their sister’s rigor mortis-ed body had been found pressed into the sand beneath the Santa Monica Pier. She’d moved to L.A. just a few weeks previous. In interviews Robert and Mitchell were quite outspoken about their belief that the Santa Monica police had handled the investigation incompetently. When her accused killer’s case was dismissed after evidence was tainted by sloppy chain of custody, their responses grew even more vitriolic. The fuel behind their antagonism toward L.A., which they’d expressed so vehemently at Rayner’s, was glaringly evident.
Another burst of newspaper articles followed several months later, when they won a $2 million settlement against a tabloid for going to press with illegally obtained-and gruesome-crime-scene photos.
Tim called trusted contacts at six different government agencies and had them each run a member of the Commission. The background checks came back clean-no wants, no warrants, no past felony charges, no one currently under investigation. He was amused to find that Ananberg had been arrested during high school on a marijuana-possession charge. Because of his technological prowess, the Stork had been accepted into the FBI despite his failure to meet physical qualifications. Deteriorating health had forced him into an early retirement eight years ago, at the age of thirty-six. A buddy at the IRS told Tim that Rayner had paid seven figures in federal taxes each year for the past decade.
No one, aside from Tim, was currently married-that would leave matters less complicated. Dumone, the Stork, and the twins had no current addresses, which didn’t surprise Tim. Like him, they’d dug themselves in somewhere, safe and protected, before embarking on a project like the Commission.