Sure enough, the garage door on the east end of the house rolled up, and a black Cadillac Escalade cruised out.
Jane glassed the Caddy as it arrived at the foot of the sloped driveway, where a streetlamp revealed the shotgun cowboy behind the wheel. She expected him to turn downhill, toward the flats. He might have been worried about encountering police answering a report of gunfire, because he turned uphill.
She put aside the binoculars and slid low, until her eyes were just above the sill of the side window.
When the Escalade passed, the blonde in the passenger seat was blowing her nose in a Kleenex, probably groggy and dealing with the effects of chloroform. Most likely she entirely escaped the shotgun blasts, which had been aimed high while she was flat on the floor.
Jane waited until the Caddy was out of sight before she started the Ford and switched on the headlights and drove uphill. She heard distant sirens, but in the rearview mirror, she didn’t see any rotating beacons scattering cherry light into the night below.
10
* * *
NATHAN SILVERMAN was at the computer in his home office when the report came in from Los Angeles at 9:10.
A career in law enforcement ensured an appreciation for the strangeness of life and for the unpredictability of human beings. The majority of criminals were as predictable as the sunrise, in part due to their lack of imagination. But often enough, the most innocent-seeming, gentle people were capable of stunning outrages that no one could have seen coming.
Likewise, in moments of crisis, average men and women, though not conditioned for combat, displayed courage equal to the legendary acts of valor on all the battlefields of history. This better aspect of humanity kept Silverman from sliding into an incurable cynicism.
He expected Jane to be valiant, to act always with courage and honor. As yet, he had no evidence that she had done otherwise. But the events at the Santa Monica hotel were beyond merely troublesome. Why had she claimed to be conducting surveillance in a Bureau sting when she was on leave? Who was the woman on roller skates, and what had been in those two briefcases?
Accompanying the brief report were photos, stop-motion video images from the hotel-lobby security cameras. The quality wasn’t great—but good enough for him to identify Jane Hawk, even though she had cut and dyed her hair.
Mystified, Silverman emailed the SAC in the Los Angeles field office, requesting any pertinent video from other hotel cameras. In addition, if the park across the street was equipped with security video or if there were traffic cams in the area, he needed to know if they had captured the activity that had led to the skater fleeing across Ocean Avenue, as described by the doorman-valet.
The downpour that had begun at dinner continued unrelenting, although it was less threatening now than solemn, like the massed drums and the horses’ hooves of a funeral cortege.
Silverman called up the clearest photo of Jane. He framed her face and enlarged it to full screen. Clarity diminished, but he used a program that repeatedly doubled the pixels until her face resolved in detail. You could read determination in the set of her mouth, her clenched jaw. You might read anxiety as well. Maybe the third thing that he saw was imagined, inspired by the affection and admiration he felt for her, but he thought he saw desperation, the haunted look of someone who was hunted and heard the baying hounds drawing near.
11
* * *
DRIVING FROM SHERMAN OAKS to the motel in Tarzana, Jane went over every move she’d made at the Branwick house.
She had worn gloves. No prints.
There had been an alarm system, a keypad by the door. But no obvious security cameras. Just the basic door and window alerts.
The five rounds she had fired would be recovered by the CSI team. As soon as convenient, she would need to break down the pistol and dispose of the pieces, but not until she obtained a replacement.
At the Tarzana motel again, she got ice and a can of Coke from the vending-machine alcove.
In her room, the door locked for the night, she retrieved a maintenance kit from a suitcase and addressed the .45. Considering how few rounds she fired in the past three days, the weapon didn’t require cleaning, but considering what one bullet had done to the son of Richard and Berniece Branwick, Jane felt a need to clean it.
While she worked on the Heckler & Koch, she allowed herself to think about Jimmy Bob, how it went down with him, the inevitability of it once he’d thrown his pen in her face and lifted the chair to swing it and called out to the hulk to kill her.
During her career, she’d participated in ten investigations of mass and serial murders. Eight resolutions. Five cases wrapped with arrests involving no violence. In the sixth, another agent on the team took down a guy who killed little boys. The seventh was J. J. Crutchfield, collector of eyes, whom Jane shot in the leg. In the eighth case, she’d been in a tight place on a lonely farm—another agent dead—stalked by two sociopathic rapists and kill buddies; she killed both. No regrets. No guilt. Yet she couldn’t repress memories of how even evil men cried out to God or their mothers and wept like children when hollow-point rounds gouged away chunks of them.
Robert Branwick was her third kill, a creep, a criminal driven by greed and a taste for power. Yet he was also a human being with a past, raised by loving parents who regarded him with affection, grateful for the gift of their early retirement, because they had no clue how he really made his money. If he was physically repulsive, he couldn’t help that, and if he compensated with the ludicrous pretension of being a well-laid Casanova, he was not the only man to have an exaggerated sense of his appeal to women. Killing in self-defense wasn’t murder. Jane had no remorse about dropping the hacker, but to hold fast to her humanity, she must recognize his.
Investigative police work and soldiering were different worlds. In war, you often killed at such a distance that you never saw the faces of those who wished you dead and your country in ruins, and if in close combat you glimpsed their faces, you knew nothing of them.
To investigate a man, study him, and then be able to kill him, even to save the lives of innocents or in self-defense, required a stalwart sense of duty…and ensured moments of doubt. She didn’t doubt the rightness of what she’d done, but she sometimes doubted that she fully understood why she had the capacity to do it.
Robert Branwick had been raised by law-abiding people. Jane’s father was a wife murderer. Did nature or nurture matter more?
Whenever she allowed herself to brood about it, she believed there were two reasons that she had forsaken a career in music for one in law enforcement: as a rejection of her famous father and as atonement for her childhood cowardice in the weeks and months after her mother’s murder had been passed off as a suicide.
But if by nature she was more an heir of Cain than of Abel, it was also necessary to consider that she might have chosen her career as a way of legitimizing the violence of which she was capable.
The few times she raised this subject with Nick, he had said, Yeah, life is complicated, but if it wasn’t complicated, it would be a roller coaster on a flat track. Wouldn’t be a ride worth taking. And, yeah, we never fully know ourselves, but that means we’re mysterious enough to interest one another. And if we fully knew ourselves in this world, what reason would we have to still be here?
Finished cleaning the pistol, she put away the maintenance kit. She took five cartridges from her stash of ammunition and pressed them into the half-empty magazine.
She mixed Coke and vodka over ice.
She sat in bed. Switched on the TV.