She realized that he was watching her in the mirrored closet doors. “Are we talking the future of freedom?” she countered. “Do we want to stop the enslavement of millions of people, the deaths of millions more? Shenneck is Emory Wayne Udell writ large.”
The name of his sister’s murderer clearly stung Dougal. “I’m not saying torture is never justifiable. I’m just wondering…are you sure you’re capable of that?”
Meeting the stare of his reflection, she said, “There was a time I wouldn’t have been capable. But then I went to Aspasia. To put a stop to that horror…I can do just about anything.”
4
* * *
FROM THE PHONE in the living room of his suite, Silverman called the front desk and secured his accommodations for another night, this time using his Bureau credit card. His intuition told him that whatever those two briefcases had contained, whatever Jane’s reasons for engaging with Vinyl and Robert Branwick, her business hadn’t concluded when Branwick lay dead on his kitchen floor. More likely than not, she was still in the San Fernando Valley or at least somewhere in greater Los Angeles. Silverman wanted to be here when the quarry surfaced.
As he was about to go out for a late breakfast or early lunch, his smartphone rang.
It was John Harrow. “You remember last night, Sherman Oaks, in that kitchen, a pen on the floor, notepad on the table?”
“I saw the notepad, not the pen.”
“The lab found indented writing—actually printing—on the top page of the pad. Odds are, it was Branwick doing the printing. He pressed hard with the pen, the way a man will if he’s under duress.”
“With a gun to his head.”
“Yeah. The actual page he printed on can’t be found, so it was probably taken away by whoever he printed it for.”
The lab would have employed oblique lighting to visualize the indented words on the notepad, would have photographed them and subjected the photographic image to enhancement.
“First,” Harrow said, “there’s a word or name—Aspasia.” He spelled it. “Under that, there’s a name—William Sterling Overton.”
“Why does that sound familiar?”
“He’s a hotshot lawyer, a shakedown artist, master-of-the-universe type. Turns out, he’s on our list of people doing business with Branwick when Branwick was Jimmy Radburn. We’d been building a case against him before this blow-up. We’ve got enough to get a search warrant, which we’re doing now that the Vinyl situation has gone critical. Get this, the judge giving it to us is signing it in church. Sure, it’s Sunday, but did you know judges went to church?”
“I’d heard it rumored about a few.”
“Overton lives in Beverly Hills. You’re already there, and I’m on my way. Pick you up at your hotel?”
“I’ll be waiting out front,” Silverman said.
5
* * *
WHEN JANE HAD DONE as much damage as she could to Dougal’s hair, she retreated to her room while he dispensed with his beard using the electric razor that she had bought.
As she waited for him, she studied the Google Earth photos of Gee Zee Ranch, looking for an error in their plan.
After a while, Dougal called ahead to say that he would be knocking at her door and preferred not to be shot.
When he entered the room, his hair was an acceptable version of the everywhichway cut that the motel clerk, Chloe, had sported when, on Friday morning, Jane had asked her to check Star Spotter or Just Spotted to see if William Overton was in town. No one would ask Dougal for the name of his barber, but in this age when imaginative hairstyles of all kinds were in vogue, he wouldn’t draw attention.
Gone were the camouflage pants. He had gotten a pair of jeans from his duffel bag. Instead of a checkered-flannel shirt, he wore a blue crewneck sweater. He still stood in lace-up butt-kicker boots, and he wore the shiny-black quilted-nylon jacket to conceal the two-holster shoulder rig, but he no longer had a freak-of-the-day look that would cause people to take phone video for sharing on YouTube.
“Handsome,” she said. “Kind of a punky John Wayne.”
In truth, without the beard, he looked at least a decade older than forty-eight, and he had a doleful quality. He smiled at her compliment, but his face was not enlivened, and in fact the smile itself was sad. Almost forty years of grief and settled sorrow had worked upon the flesh and bone, and a single smile—perhaps even ten thousand of them—could not erase the engraved melancholy.
“Don’t blow smoke at me,” Dougal said. “I look like I was sewn together in a lab, brought to life by lightning. Let’s check out of here and get lunch. Then we’ll see a man about a helicopter.”
6
* * *
STANDING IN FRONT of the hotel, waiting for Harrow, Nathan Silverman didn’t understand himself.
He kept thinking about what Ancel Hawk had told him in Texas: So they come into her home, and they promise to rape and kill Travis if she doesn’t drop it. That confirmed Gladys Chang’s contention that Jane wanted to sell the house fast, below value, because she was afraid for her son. Then there was the implied threat in Booth Hendrickson’s chatter at the Austin airport. Until a short while ago, Silverman had remained convinced that whatever her situation, Jane must be a victim, not a victimizer.
How had one phone call from Randolph Kohl of Homeland Security caused him to accept that Jane was guilty of a series of crimes? Yes, Kohl had a good reputation. But Silverman didn’t change his opinion of anyone based on unverified secondhand information.
Yet he had at once called John Harrow and put the relentless machinery of the Bureau into gear against Jane. Why?
There was also the disturbing fact that he couldn’t recall with what detail Kohl had supported the charges against the woman.
As the traffic rushed past him on Wilshire Boulevard, Silverman was overcome by nausea. He was disoriented, as if he had stepped out of the hotel expecting another city a thousand miles from Beverly Hills. He put one hand against a nearby lamppost to steady himself.
He had felt something akin to this in Texas, standing on the porch of the Hawk house, looking out at an enormous flatness of wild grass under a sky so big it seemed that up and down were about to reverse, that he would fall away from the earth into the heavens.
In that instance, there had been a reason for what he felt: the unfamiliar vista so vast that it fostered in him a recognition of how small he was in the scheme of things. But in this case, he was in his element, city all around him, traffic humming. There seemed to be no external cause for his distress.
The nausea and disorientation passed quickly. He lowered his hand from the lamppost.
Perhaps he should not have put so much credence in Gladys Chang’s claim that Jane feared for her son. After all, the Realtor was a stranger to him. He had been charmed by her; but he had no reason to believe that she was a keen observer of people.
And Ancel Hawk was not merely a stranger to Silverman but almost an alien, hailing as he did from the plains, a world far different from Washington and Alexandria and Quantico. Besides, Ancel only knew what Jane told him. He could not verify her story. She had lied to the hotel manager in Santa Monica, claiming to be an agent on a case, and surely she had lied to Branwick and his crew, because lies and deception were their coin and currency. So if she was lying to some, there was no reason to think she wouldn’t lie to all, to her father-in-law and to Silverman as easily as to a hotel manager.
The indignation he’d felt earlier, the piercing disappointment in Jane, welled in him once more, sharper and more acidic, corroding his mood, shading his every memory of her with darker colors.
John Harrow pulled to the curb in a Bureau sedan. Silverman got in the passenger seat and shut the door.
“Ramos and Hubbert will meet us at the house with the warrant.”
Silverman knew Ramos and Hubbert. “Good. If she forced Branwick to give her Overton’s name at gunpoint, we better expect the worst.”
Harrow seemed surprised. “You’ve made the leap that it was her at Branwick’s house?”
“I hope I’m wrong,” Silverman said. “But I doubt it.”
7
* * *