'And you've still held onto the religious aspect. even after seeing all the stuff on the street?'
'Oh, absolutely,' Norden said, nodding, her face serious. 'I accept Jesus Christ as my savior, and I believe that he will return soon and judge us and lead those who deserve it to eternal life.'
Harper checked the mirror again, and decided she wasn't joking.
Then Anna hung up the portable and said, 'Louis can't find a home address. There're five Richard Harnetts with unlisted phones in the two counties and they're scattered all over the place.'
'We've still got his office address,' Harper said. 'Let's take a look.' And over his shoulder, he said to Norden, 'Can we drop you somewhere?'
'Heck no. I wouldn't miss this for anything.'
On the way to Burbank, Harper made a quick turn down an alley, accelerated, and Anna said, 'What?' as they whipped past the backs of a row of small stores.
'Just checking,' Harper said, watching his mirror. 'We know he was tracking us.'
They came out of the alley, crossed a street, and went right back into the continuation of the alley. At the end, Harper took a left onto a deserted residential street, then a quick right. 'All right,' he said.
Bunny Films was on the second floor of a shabby fifties concrete-and-brick low-rise office building, with a narrow parking lot wrapped around the building. There was one car in the lot, but it carried an air of abandonment. No lights showed in the building.
'Come back tomorrow,' Harper said.
'Let's not rush off,' Anna said. 'Pull around behind the building. I want to check that door.'
'Felonies are a Bad Thing,' Harper said. 'I'm sure counselor Norden would agree.'
'I just want to look at the door,' Anna said. 'Maybe somebody's around, they'd let us in.'
'Ah, man,' Harper said, but when Anna asked, 'Who climbed over that fence and got shot at, who broke into that house, who.' he said, 'Okay, okay,' and pulled around back and into a parking space with a 'Reserved for Building Tenant' sign. Norden and Anna got out, and Norden said, 'Got shot at?' while Harper waited in the car, engine running.
'We've had a couple of problems,' Anna said. The door was locked: they could see the steel tongue between the door and the frame. 'Not very far in there,' Norden said, stooping to peer at the lock. 'It's sort of tilted up. I bet if you stuck a screwdriver or a tire iron in there, you could pry the door right open.'
'Back in a minute,' Anna said. At the car, she said, 'Hey, Jake, pop the trunk for a minute.'
'Why?'
'I want to look at your golf shoes. Pop the trunk.'
'Damn it, Anna.' But he popped the trunk, and the tool kit was there, in the trunk lid, just as she remembered from the last time she'd been in the trunk, a few seconds before she'd been attacked in the parking lot. She turned the hand screw on the tool-box cover, the cover dropped open. She selected a screwdriver, closed the trunk and walked back to the door.
'What do you think?' she asked Norden.
Norden cast a quick look around. A stream of cars was passing on the street, a half-dozen teenagers were lounging around a picnic table at a Foster's Freeze a hundred feet down the street. Norden said, 'Don't make any big moves and do it quick.'
Anna struck the end of the screwdriver in the gap between the door and the frame, put her weight against it, and when the tongue pulled out of the lock, Norden jerked the door open.
'Talk about irresponsible,' Norden said, looking at the door. 'I'm surprised the junkies haven't carried off the furniture.'
'Probably scared to,' Harper said. He'd killed the engine, and walked up behind them. 'We're right out in the open, probably nine people calling the cops right now.'
'Door was open,' Norden said.
'Yeah, right. Screwdriver marks all over it, and we've still got the screwdriver.' Harper pulled the door tight against the frame, took the screwdriver from Anna, pried the frame and door apart again, and popped the lock tongue back into place. 'When I was in uniform, we'd rattle doors, but we'd never try to get inside if the doors were locked,' he said.
No Bunny Films was listed on the directory, but they found a Harnett Enterprises on a row of painted steel mailboxes next to the front entrance. The number indicated an office on the second floor. They skipped the small elevator and climbed a dark, smoke-scented stairway, found a light switch for the second floor and followed a narrow hallway to the end. The office had only a number, but no other identification. An empty name-plate holder was screwed to the wall next to the door.
'Well, shit,' Harper said. 'Maybe he moved.'
'Maybe he just doesn't want people to know where he is,' Anna said. 'If this is his office, there's gotta be something inside with his home address.'
Harper looked up and down the hall, shook his head, put his back against the wall opposite the door, his foot next to the doorknob, and pushed. The lock ripped out of the door, and they were in.
'If the cops come, we're busted,' he said, flipping on the lights. 'Let's make it quick. And for Christ's sake, don't touch anything with your fingertips if you can help it.'
Harnett's office was one large room with a desk in the center, filing cabinets around the edge and a small sofa and easy chair combination on a faded Persian carpet in front of the only window. The window looked over the parking lot, and from there over a fence into a residential back yard. Something in the back yard may have interested Harnett, because a pair of 10 x 50 binoculars sat on the windowsill.
A door led off to the right. It was unlocked, and when Anna pulled it open, she found a closet with a raincoat, a box of shuts, a suit in a plastic wrapper, several rolls of Christmas gift-wrapping paper, a shoe-shine kit in a cardboard box, and two empty suitcases.
The main surface of his L-shaped desk was a heap of business paperenvelopes, faxes, trade magazines, clippingsthat flowed across, and in and out of two in and out boxes. The short leg of the L held a Gateway P5-90 tower computer and a Vivitron monitor, with cables to a Hewlett-Packard laser printer. A short butcher-block table held a Panasonic fax machine and a Canon copier. A large-screen TV sat in a wooden cabinet in the corner, and the lights of two different videotape players glowed from beneath it. The desk telephone had five buttons.
'Busy guy,' Anna said. A cup on his desk held a spray of yellow Dixon pencils like a bouquet, and Anna took them out and handed them to Harper and Norden. 'Move stuff with these.'
Anna and Harper used the pencils to probe the paper on the desk, and go through the Rolodex, while Norden explored the file cabinets. At one point, she said, 'Hmm,' looked around, found a box with a half-dozen reams of laser paper still in it, dumped the paper on the floor and carried the box to the file.
'What're you doing?' Harper asked.
'All kinds of correspondence,' Norden said, dumping paper into the box. 'Interesting stuff. I might be able to use it.'
Anna said, 'Look at this.' She'd gone back to the closet as Harper continued working through the desk with the pencils, and pulled out the two suitcases. They were empty, but they both had trip labels on them. 'Home addresses,' she said. 'Even phone numbers.'
As Anna copied the address, Norden opened a file cabinet full of videotapes, and another one stacked with skin magazines and a few old reels of 16mm film. 'Look at all this shit,' Norden said. 'Think of how many women are in this.'
'Let's go,' Anna said. 'We got what we need.'
'Been here too long,' Harper said.
'I'm taking the Rolodex, too,' Norden said. 'What a jerk.' She threw the Rolodex into the box full of correspondence and followed Harper to the door. Anna stopped, then turned around.
'C'mon,' Harper said.
'One minute.'
Anna went back, picked up a sheet of paper from the laser printer, went to the cabinet full of videotapes and started dumping piles of them on the floor. Then she chose a tape with one of the more elaborate labels, stuck it into the tape player, used Harnett's remote controls to turn on the TV and the player.