They glanced up.
"If Karen knew she was in danger," Cavanaugh said, "she might have chosen a name for Prescott that meant something to me and led me to him."
"You?" an agent asked.
"She had every reason to expect I'd go after anybody who hurt her."
"You and she were that close?"
"Her brother and I were in Delta Force together. He bled to death in my arms."
The group became silent, sobered.
Cavanaugh scanned the list. "His name was…" Cavanaugh tapped his index finger on a name. "Ben."
Rutherford came over and stared at the name he indicated. "Benjamin Kramer."
"The Carmel Highlands." Cavanaugh remembered steering onto a road that led to the Highlands and asking Prescott the significance of the name. "It's a small community of houses on a bluff above the ocean," Prescott had said matter-of-factly. The bastard lives there, Cavanaugh thought. Without knowing it, I was close to Prescott's home.
"How strongly do you believe there's a connection?" Rutherford sounded like he wanted desperately to believe. "It could be a coincidence."
"I didn't notice it at the start because Ben never used the formal version of his name. He was always just Ben. But Prescott has a thing about nicknames. He insisted that his first name was Daniel, not Dan, and when he created the Joshua Carter identity, he was firm to the staff at the exercise club that his name was Joshua, not Josh. On this list, some people used abbreviations to identify themselves-Sam, Steve. In contrast, Benjamin seems awfully formal."
"What about the last name 'Kramer'?" an FBI agent asked.
"Before Karen had the car accident that put her in a wheelchair, she was engaged to a guy named Kramer. As soon as the creep found out Karen was permanently crippled, he broke the engagement. Ben said the only good thing about Karen's accident was it kept Kramer from marrying her."
"Let's find out where this address is. Who's familiar with the Highlands?" Rutherford asked.
"My aunt lives down there." A female detective grabbed a phone.
Rutherford turned toward another detective. "Does your department have detailed maps of the communities around here?"
"A computer program and a satellite image from the Internet."
"Let's get a precise location of the house."
A phone rang. As a detective answered it, Cavanaugh hoped but also dreaded that this time the call would be from the hospital, but it turned out to be about another matter.
Someone put a CD-ROM disc into a computer. A layout of the few streets in the Carmel Highlands appeared on the screen. The detective typed the address. "There. At the end of this ridge. Directly over the ocean." A magnified satellite image showed the tops of homes, the patterns of vegetation, and the contours of streets. The detective zoomed in on the property they wanted to know about.
"A big lot," Cavanaugh said.
"In the Highlands, some of them are an acre and more."
"Sprawling house."
"Compared to the shadows these other houses give off, it looks like it has only one level."
The female detective finished talking to her aunt and set down the phone. "Everybody knows everybody down there. When this guy moved in, she took him a fruit basket to welcome him. He was overweight. Gruff. Said he was dieting. Couldn't eat fruit because of the fructose in it. That's the word he used-fructose. The few times she's seen him since then, he'd slimmed down. Shaved his head. Grew a goatee. She says she can see through the trees to his house. The lights are on."
"At one-thirty in the morning?" an FBI agent asked.
"Maybe he leaves them on when he's not home."
"Or he could be packing," Rutherford said, grabbing a phone, "in which case, there isn't much time to trap him."
7
On edge from tension and lack of sleep, Cavanaugh stood behind one of the three police cars that formed a barricade at the entrance to the dark street. Increasingly worried about Jamie, he'd phoned the hospital before he'd arrived, but there had still been no word about her condition. Next to him, Rutherford and his team used night-vision binoculars to scan the handful of shadowy, widely separated houses and then concentrated on the one at the end of the block. Perched on a bluff, its low-sprawling profile would have been silhouetted against the whitecaps of the ocean if not for the numerous outdoor lights that glared around the house's perimeter. Several of the windows were illuminated also.
"I still don't see any shadows moving behind the curtains," an agent said.
"Maybe Prescott's gone, and the lights are supposed to make us believe he's there," someone else said.
Despite dry clothes, Cavanaugh crossed his arms over his chest, trying to generate warmth, continuing to feel the chill of what had happened to Jamie-and another chilclass="underline" fear. "You don't see movement because it's not in Prescott's nature to go near windows."
Movement attracted his attention, figures emerging from trees and shadows, policemen escorting a family up the street toward the protection of the barricade. Wakened with a phone call, warned not to turn on their lights, they had been directed to leave their house via a back door, where the heavily armed officers had been waiting.
"Is that the last of them?" Rutherford asked.
"Six houses. Six families. All clear," a detective told him.
Behind the barricade, next to an open van, equipment made scraping sounds as shadowy black-clad figures put on two-way-radio gear, equipment belts, armored vests, night-vision goggles, and helmets, ten members of a SWAT team looking like starship troopers while they checked their pistols and assault rifles.
Rutherford went over to them. Cavanaugh followed.
On the far side of the van, a middle-aged male civilian, one of Prescott's neighbors, showed the SWAT commander a diagram he'd made of the interior of Prescott's house. The muted red flashlight the commander used to study it couldn't be seen beyond the van.
"How recently were you in there?" the commander asked.
"Five weeks ago. Just before the previous owner moved. Jay and I were very close. It's a damned shame he got sick."
"Any construction work since then? Workmen showing up? That sort of thing?"
"None that I saw."
"Okay, so we've got a living room past the front door," the commander said. "Media room, spare bedroom, and bathroom to the right. To the left, the kitchen, two more bedrooms and bathrooms. A home office. Friggin' big house. These are French doors leading off the living room?"
"Yes. There's a terrace in back. A waist-high wall looks over the cliff to the water."
"What's this area in back of the garage?"
"Laundry room."
"And this next to it?"
"A darkroom. Jay and I like-" The man became more somber and corrected himself. "Liked to take photographs, until Jay got sick."
The commander showed the diagram to his team and explained the procedures they would use to enter. When there weren't any questions, he nodded to Rutherford. "Ready when you are."
"I need to emphasize we want him alive," Rutherford said.
So the government intends to make a deal with him, Cavanaugh thought.
"Is he armed?"
"To the best of our knowledge, he has an AR-15 converted to full automatic. He also has probably more than one 9-millimeter pistol."
"If he fires at us…"
"You have tear gas. You have flash-bangs. If you absolutely need to defend yourselves, do your best to wound him."
"He also has a Kevlar vest," Cavanaugh said.