At 8:50 P.M., after withdrawing six hundred dollars from a Wells Fargo ATM, they found an office complex in Lake Forest that provided a deserted parking lot in which they left the police cruiser. As far as they were able to tell, they abandoned the car without drawing attention to themselves.
Mottled sulfur yellow by the upwash of suburban light, rags of dark clouds unraveled across a sky in which an incomplete moon hung in a strange deformity—or so it seemed to Tanuja—as if the shadow that cloaked part of it was cast by a misshapen Earth. The stars appeared misplaced, arranged in no familiar constellations, and the concrete underfoot seemed to move ever so subtly. In a few minutes, they arrived at a major thoroughfare on which traffic flashed and growled, along which crowded a smorgasbord of fast-food restaurants and a riot of enterprises that included, half a block to their left, a motor inn that was part of a medium-priced national chain and, less than half a block to their right, a less polished motel.
Even from a distance, neither the brand name nor the generic option appealed as a refuge in which to spend the night, and in fact something about each seemed, if not sinister, at least foreboding. Tanuja assumed that this perceived menace was imaginary, a product of her anxiety and the disorientation that arose from being targeted for reasons unknown—until Sanjay said, “Even if we pay cash when we check in, I don’t like this. It feels wrong. There must be somewhere else we can go.”
21
From the funeral home in Orange, Jane Hawk drove south to a recently annexed portion of Newport Beach that featured several guard-gated enclaves of multimillion-dollar estates. One of these had belonged to Sara Holdsteck until her former husband, Simon Yegg, wrested it from her.
Jane parked at an all-night supermarket in an upscale shopping center. Carrying her leather tote bag, she set out on foot. The traffic whizzing past on the parkway to her left seemed like a sales-lot-in-motion for Mercedes, BMW, and Ferrari.
She walked perhaps a mile and a half along a sidewalk flanked by lush landscaping, encountering neither residences nor businesses, nor other pedestrians. There were only the imposing guardhouse gates fronting the exclusive communities and, between them, glimpses of the moon-washed canyon above which those mansions had been built.
Although the entrances appeared formidable, these communities were not surrounded by complete, uniform barriers. Each homeowner had built an enclosure—iron staves, glass panels, stone—compatible with the design of his house. Where the community’s common spaces met the canyon, there was either wrought-iron fencing or nothing at all; if the canyon slope was rugged and steep, it was assumed that thieves wouldn’t make the climb to burglarize a house when, should the job go wrong, the only hope of escape would be on foot.
Having left the sidewalk to proceed cautiously along the grassy crest of the canyon, guided by moonlight and, when the lunar lamp was insufficient, by a small flashlight that she hooded with one hand, Jane found an unfenced transit point between the canyon and one of the community’s common areas. Less than a minute later, she was on a sidewalk again, on a street behind the guardhouse gates.
She wasn’t concerned that she would be suspected of intrusion. There were more than 150 homes in the community; no single guard could be expected to recognize all the residents, not to mention houseguests. If the lone patrol car happened upon her, she would smile and wave and most likely earn a smile and a wave in return.
Thanks to Google Earth and Google Maps, she had familiarized herself with the layout of the looping streets. She needed only a few minutes to reach the Yegg residence.
The immense Mediterranean Revival–style house was clad in limestone, featured arched windows recessed in carved-limestone surrounds, and had an entrance sheltered by a dramatic portico with massive columns supporting an elaborately detailed entablature.
She approached the front door as though she belonged there. The windows were dark.
According to Sara Holdsteck, when Simon moved in prior to their wedding, he wanted no servants in the house on weeknights or weekends. Two housekeepers worked from eight till five, Monday through Friday. It was unlikely that he would have changed this routine.
With the exception of December, on the last Friday of each month, Simon played poker with four of his friends. The game moved from one of their houses to another on an agreed-upon schedule. In March, the card game occurred elsewhere than here.
Petra Quist, the hottie who currently lived with Simon, a twenty-six-year-old blonde with blue eyes, twenty years his junior, enjoyed a girls’ night out on the last Friday of the month. The photos on her Facebook page ranged from icky cute to nearly obscene and featured five other leggy, dressed-to-tease young women, her “wrecking crew,” with whom she went shopping and barhopping in a limousine. Judging by the photographs, their revelries weren’t hampered by a three-drink limit.
Jane pulled the trigger of the lock-release gun four times before the automatic pick threw all the pins to the shear line and the door opened. She stepped inside as the house alarm shrilled.
She had two minutes to enter the disarming code before the central station would summon the police.
When Sara had signed over the mortgage-free house to Simon, he’d made a point of telling her that he wasn’t going to change either the locks or the alarm code. Anytime you want, kitten, you come back and let yourself in and wait for me and shoot me ten times dead when I come home. Think you could do that, kitten? No, I don’t think so, either. You talk big, the self-made real-estate guru, but you’re just a big-mouthed bitch, a gutless pussy, a stupid skank who by dumb luck made some money. All you ever were was an okay piece of ass, and now you’re past your prime in that department, way past. If you go broke and have to sell your ass, kitten, you won’t get any business if you price it more than ten bucks. Sara remembered his abusive good-bye speech almost word for word, and though more than once she thought about doing what he had dared her to do, she knew that she would ruin her life if she killed him. Or, more likely, the invitation was a trap; he would be ready for her; and she, an armed trespasser, would be shot dead. Nevertheless, his insults still stung two years later—gutless, stupid, by dumb luck—and it was clear to Jane that Sara, in spite of her intelligence and fortitude, had internalized those words and could not bleach them from the stained self-image with which Simon had left her.
At the security-system keypad to the left of the front door, Jane entered the four numbers that Sara had given her and pressed the asterisk. The alarm fell silent. Yegg, the arrogant bastard, in fact had so little fear of his former wife that he’d kept his promise to raise no barriers to her return.
After resetting the perimeter alarm but not the interior motion detectors, Jane began to explore the grand house.
As reported in Petra Quist’s Facebook postings, the hottie and her crew “rocked the shit out of the club scene” on such nights as this. They didn’t stagger home until nearly midnight, and even then reluctantly. She was never later than that, however, because her “nuclear-powered love machine,” whom she identified only as Mr. Big, didn’t like to come home to an empty house. According to Sara, Simon returned from poker night between twelve-thirty and one o’clock.
Jane figured she had more than an hour to determine where and how she would incarcerate Petra Quist so that she could have some quality time alone with Mr. Big, who might not be so big by the time dawn came.
22