They’d had an almost-relationship last year. He’d saved her life, and she’d saved his ass. In the process she’d learned more about him than she should have. Which would have been a problem even if she hadn’t been a DA for the City of Los Angeles.
They blinked at each other.
She shifted, straining under Peter’s weight.
“Want me to take him?” Evan asked.
There was a time when that would have been normal.
“No,” she said. “Thanks. I got him.”
They rode up to her floor in silence. Remembering the traces of blood beneath his nails, Evan curled his hands into loose fists. He caught the faintest whiff of lemongrass — the scent of Mia’s lotion.
Peter’s cheek was smooshed into a half pout, his blond hair stuck up on one side, his lips blue with lollipop residue. When the doors parted with an arthritic rattle, Peter lifted his head sleepily. The smile touched his charcoal eyes first, then his mouth.
“Hi, Evan Smoak.” His voice, even raspier than usual. Before Evan could answer, the boy’s lids drooped shut again.
Mia carried him out, and Evan watched them walk up the corridor until the closing elevator doors wiped them from view.
4
Clean as a Scalpel
When Evan turned the key, the lock to Condo 21A unbolted with a clank, various security bars releasing within the steel door concealed behind the homey wood-paneled façade. As Jack used to say, Ball bearings within ball bearings.
Evan muted the alarm and walked to the kitchen area. He passed the living wall, a drip-fed vertical garden that sprouted mint and sage, parsley and chamomile. The pleasing scent and splash of green were the sole aspects of the corner penthouse that could be described as cheerful.
The floor plan was largely open, seven thousand square feet of poured concrete split by workout stations, sitting areas, a freestanding fireplace, and a steel staircase that twisted up to a loft. Countless safeguards hid inside the sleek, modern space. The windows and sliding glass doors that turned two walls into a city panorama? Bullet-resistant Lexan armed with shatter-detection software. The periwinkle retractable sunscreens? Woven titanium armor. The quartz-rock-layered balconies cupping the sides of the condo? Secondary alarms rigged to detect the audio signature of an unwelcome guest’s boots compressing the stones.
Evan slipped around the island to the Sub-Zero. Nestled among the ice cubes, a fat bottle of Karlsson’s Gold beckoned. The handcrafted Swedish vodka, comprising seven kinds of potatoes, was uniquely made, distilled a single time through a copper-lined still. Evan poured a few fingers into a rocks glass over a spherical ice cube and garnished the drink with a single twist of ground pepper from a stainless-steel mill.
Clean as a scalpel up front. Hint of mineral on the finish. Lingering bite of pepper.
Perfect.
Evan walked to the fireplace, fired up the pyre of cedar logs, then peeled off his mission clothes and fed them to the flames. With the rocks glass dangling at his side, he padded naked across the vast space and down the brief hall, passing the spot where his dear departed nineteenth-century katana used to hang. The bare wall hooks reminded him that he’d recently won an online bid for a replacement samurai sword, one that dated back to the Early Edo period. The shipment was due to arrive soon from the Seki auction house.
He stepped through his bedroom into the bathroom and tapped the frosted-glass shower door, which recessed into the wall on silent tracks. Turning the water up as hot as he could stand, he ducked into the stream. He scrubbed. The water ran dark, a crimson swirl circling the drain.
It took a wire brush and some effort to get his fingernails clean.
After drying off he headed into the bedroom and dressed in the same outfit he’d worn before. Dark jeans, gray V-necked T-shirt. Before turning away from the dresser, he hesitated over the bottom drawer.
Emotion came up under his skin, a flush of heat.
He tugged the drawer open and used his thumbnail to lift the false bottom.
Beneath, a blue flannel shirt, blackened with old blood.
Jack’s blood.
There wasn’t a night in the past eight years that Evan didn’t turn off the light, close his eyes, and watch Jack bleed out in his arms.
Evan shut the drawer and rose, trying to dissipate the tightness in his chest. He sat on his bed, a Maglev that literally floated two feet off the floor, the slab held airborne by neodymium rare-earth magnets. Closing his eyes, suspended between floor and ceiling, he focused on his breathing, dropped inside his body, felt the weight of his bones inside his flesh. It usually helped him find tranquillity.
But not tonight.
Images strobed through the darkness behind his eyelids. Hector Contrell’s shoulders jerking back as if yanked by strings. Ink pooling in the hollow of his neck, a punctuation mark for the FUCK YOU tattoo. Those mighty legs collapsing, a slow-motion avalanche crumble. The mess on the floor upstairs around the mattress — residue-stained Styrofoam ramen bowls, empty burrito wrappers, crumpled protein packets. The rib cage of the house, bare studs scrolling by as Evan crept inside. The hall telescoping out like some Kubrickian horror, each empty doorframe replaced by another and another.
Evan’s eyes flew open.
No doors. Which meant no door handles. That was what had been nagging at him. The house was open to the world, fluttering tarps in place of walls.
No locked area for the kidnapped girls.
The logistics of moving them around the world were complicated. There had to be a holding area somewhere off premises.
Which meant the possibility existed that another young woman remained in it.
Evan hopped off the bed and moved back into the bathroom, stepping into the shower. He squeezed the lever handle for the hot water, and a moment later came a faint click. The lever, keyed to his palm print, doubled as a doorknob. He turned it the wrong way, and a door, disguised by the tile pattern of the shower wall, swung inward.
He stepped into the Vault.
Four hundred asymmetrical square feet crowded by the underbelly of the public stairs to the roof, the walled-off storage space served as Evan’s armory and ops center. From the weapon lockers to the sheet-metal desk burdened with monitors, servers, and cables, it contained all the tools of his trade. The screens displayed pirated security feeds of Castle Heights. Every hallway, every stairwell, every access door.
He breathed in the smell of damp concrete, dropped into his chair, and rolled to the L-shaped desk to access the law-enforcement databases. All the major criminal and civil records, forensic files, and ballistics registers — anything that the local police could dig up on the Panasonic Toughbook laptops wired into their patrol cars — Evan could access.
His training had consisted of learning a little bit about everything from people who knew everything about something. He was hardly an expert hacker, but he’d broken into a few cruisers and uploaded a piece of reverse SSH code into their laptops — a back door for him to get into the system anytime he beckoned.
He beckoned now, searching Contrell’s known associates, past residences, former cellmates. Nothing raised a red flag. A few hours later, the watered-down vodka sat forgotten beside the mouse pad, pepper grinds floating like ash.
Through the DMV site, Evan grabbed the license-plate number of Contrell’s Buick Enclave. Another series of backstage maneuvers got him into the vehicle’s GPS records. He printed out the data captures — longitudes and latitudes listed in an endless scroll.
As the LaserJet spit out page after page, he started breaking down the pauses between the Enclave’s movements.