The Bricklayer

THIRTY-TWO

VAIL SLEPT LESS THAN TWO HOURS AND THEN FITFULLY, AWAKENING at the sound of any vehicle passing by in the covered garage. He got out of the car and walked down to the street, where he watched the traffic for fifteen minutes from a shadowed doorway. When he was satisfied that there was no longer a search being conducted in the neighborhood, he went to his car and drove out.
When he finally found himself a safe distance from the hotel, he pulled over. After turning on the laptop again, he waited while his e-mails downloaded.
There were only three of them. He found the Bureau of Prison’s report and opened it. It was almost twenty pages long and contained a lot of boilerplate because of the extensive records that are necessary in a federal institution due to lawsuits. He scanned it quickly until his eyes landed on the name Benjamin Charles Lavolet, a known associate of Victor James Radek. He had been serving a fifteen-year sentence for narcotics distribution and was paroled just a month before the first Pentad murder in Los Angeles. His last known address was 1414 Sistine Lane, apartment 2W, in Los Angeles. Vail located it on a map Web site and saw that it was about half a mile from the Spring Street house. The factory on Keller Street was about a mile away. The building being refurbished on Seventh was less than a ten-minute drive.
Vail pulled back into traffic. The sun was starting to set. The air smelled like rain and the temperature had dropped a couple of degrees. It would be a good time to set up on the apartment. Since the report didn’t have a phone number for Lavolet, and since he could no longer call the FBI office to get one, Vail had only two options: The first was to try to get into the apartment, which, if Tye and Radek were there, could be disastrous. The other was to surveil it and see if any lights came on once it got dark.
The building had four units and two of them already had lights on when he got there. Benny’s windows—assuming that 2W was the westernmost apartment on the second floor—showed no signs of life. He waited another half hour and still the unit remained dark.
Deciding to read the Bureau of Prisons report in full to see if there were any more associates of Radek in the area, Vail opened the laptop and turned it on. He took notes in case there were others who might have since moved to the L.A. area. But, as far as known addresses, Lavolet’s was the only one. Vail was about to shut off the computer when suddenly it beeped. It was an incoming message—from Tye Delson.
It was a streaming video of her. But it couldn’t be from her cell phone, because Radek had smashed it, plus there was no sound. Then he remembered her PDA. He had e-mailed some information to it for the search warrant at the steam laundry.
The angle of the image indicated that it was being taken by her, possibly from down at her side. It was shooting up at her face. A piece of duct tape was securely across her mouth, a second across her eyes. Somehow she had managed to pull up one corner, enough to have limited vision out of one eye. A trickle of blood from her nose had dried on her upper lip. The exposed eye was wide with fear, but Vail thought he detected something else—rage. If her condition wasn’t disturbing enough, Vail could see a thin slice of her shoulder and chest. She appeared to be naked.
Then she pulled the device down behind her back as it flickered on and off indicating the battery was low. He saw the unmistakable double strand of a handcuff around one wrist, and then a chain with a padlock that hung from it and was attached by a second lock to a heavy radiator. On the floor was her purse, its contents scattered. Radek must not have known about her PDA, if he even knew what one was.
The camera moved to the window and showed the surrounding neighborhood. The image flickered again, this time the black screen lasting a second or two. An ornate two-story building seemed to be the target of her effort. It was distinctive and apparently the best clue she could offer as to her whereabouts. The screen went black, and Vail feared that the battery was finally dead. He waited a few interminable seconds but there was no more.
It started to rain. He turned on the wipers and let their rhythm hypnotize him for a moment. Then he closed his eyes tightly, trying to recall every detail of the building. It was more Victorian than anything else, but with some possible French influence. The architectural details were so elaborately overdesigned that he judged the structure to be at least a hundred years old. But how did you find a list of hundred-year-old buildings in Los Angeles, if he was even right about the age? Then suddenly it occurred to him that he had seen the building somewhere before, not from that angle, but from street level, maybe the day Bertok was killed. The windows were unusual, projecting out from the building face at least two feet and complex in their detail. They were bordered with stone pillars, the crowns of which were semicircles capped with triangles. He hadn’t been to that many places in Los Angeles, so hopefully it was retrievable from wherever it was hiding in his memory.
Undoubtedly, someone with a better-educated eye than Vail would have been able to narrow down the architecture, someone who would have made a mental note the moment he first saw it and remembered its location. But Vail was the only one who had seen the video stream, and now that image was permanently gone. If he was right and the building was a hundred years old, it would most likely be around other old buildings. He thought about the house on Spring Street. One of the buildings next to it, not the scrap yard, but the one on the other side, had “Est. 1883” painted on a wall. That was certainly a century old, and the neighborhood had a mix of residential and commercial properties. He made a U-turn and sped off toward Spring Street.
Once he arrived at the house, Vail got out and scanned the neighborhood. He didn’t see anything resembling the ornate two-story building. But the day he thought he had seen it, he and Kate had set up a block away. He drove to the spot, turned the car around, and pulled to the curb.
After getting out, he slowly turned in all directions. Then, in the distance, he spotted it. It was illuminated in the rain by a halo caused by the streetlights. He put the car in gear and sped toward it. When he got closer, he started driving cautiously, searching the surrounding buildings from which Tye’s PDA could have sent the stream.
The rain was coming down harder now, making his recollection of the video even more difficult. When he got a little closer, he climbed out of the car, ignoring the downpour. There was only one building that it could have been shot from. It was a small three-story hotel, the kind that was popular at the turn of the twentieth century, a bar on the first floor and fewer than ten rooms on the second and third floors.
He could read the sign now—“The Lindbergh Hotel.” There were four windows on each of the upper floors that were a possibility. Vail closed his eyes and tried to remember the angle of the video to figure out whether it was from the second or third floor, but then decided he couldn’t chance being wrong.
A few doors down from the hotel, he pulled crookedly to the curb on the same side of the street and jumped out. No longer having a handgun, he went to the trunk and took out the shotgun. The rain was now a good thing, he decided; it had chased everyone indoors. He loaded the magazine with double-aught buck shells, filling one jacket pocket with deer slugs and the other with more double-aught. He held the weapon down at his side as inconspicuously as possible.
Immediately next door to the bar was the hotel’s door. Vail tried it but it was locked with a thick metal plate, ensuring that even if he’d had a Halligan, it would have been difficult to open discreetly. That left going into the bar. A dangerous thing with a shotgun in hand.
The bar was small and dingy. Only four customers were inside, all of them sitting at the bar and looking comfortable. They had to be regulars. Vail knew that as long as he didn’t interfere with their drinking, they wouldn’t cause any problems. The bartender, an overweight but strong-looking man with greasy hair and acne scars, alerted and squared himself defensively once he saw Vail enter with the shotgun. Vail could read his streetwise eyes—he knew that Vail was some sort of cop and this was not a robbery. But for him, cops were usually as much trouble as criminals. Vail walked up to him. “You have four rooms facing the street.” Vail took a wet mug shot out his pocket and dropped it on the bar.
The bartender prided himself on not cooperating with the police, but something in Vail’s eyes told him not to push it too far.
“Who are you?”
“You know who I am.”
“I’m going to need to see a badge.”
With his left hand, Vail held up the shotgun by the cocking grip and gave it a quick up-and-down jerk, jacking a round into the chamber convincingly. “Which room?”
“Three C. There’s only two rented on that side; the other one’s a Korean family on the second floor.”
“The key.” The bartender went to a drawer below the cash register and took out a ring of keys. He started to take one off when Vail said, “The master, the one that opens the door to the street.” The bartender took a small ring from his pocket and pulled a key off of it.
Vail turned to go. “You’d better call the police.”
“And tell them what?”
“There’s been a murder.”
Vail slid the key into the front door of the hotel, and it turned with a worn ease. He closed it slowly behind him to keep from making any noise and started up the stairs two at a time. The rain was still coming down hard and he hoped that it would muffle his movement up the stairs. The narrow hallway on the third floor didn’t have any windows. A single low-wattage bulb cast the corridor in a dusty yellow light. Vail walked along the wall trying not to step on any squeaky floorboards, but there were too many of them. Hopefully they couldn’t be heard inside the room.
When he got to 3C, he stood outside listening. When he didn’t hear anything, he leaned his ear against the door and listened again. Still nothing. Standing to the side, he worked the master key into the lock slowly and started to turn it. A half-dozen shots exploded through the door.
From the way the window was positioned in the video, Vail knew Tye had to be in a different room. Without getting in front of the door, he extended the shotgun to arm’s length and fired three rounds back through the door, slightly altering the direction of each. Then he heard the unmistakable sound of a body hitting the floor. He tried the key again, but something had hit the lock and jammed it, probably one of the bullets fired at him. Moving in front of the door, he jumped up and toward it, using his momentum and weight as he kicked at the lock. The door broke open but only a foot or so. Vail could see a man’s motionless hand on the floor through the narrow opening, his body now blocking the door. Vail pushed in far enough to squeeze through. Victor Radek had taken one of the shotgun blasts in the chest, a black automatic still in his hand.
“Tye!” Vail yelled.
In response, he heard a cry. He went into the bedroom and found her still chained to the radiator, her PDA in her hand. When she saw him, tears from the eye that was not taped began streaming down her cheek. She was completely naked and curled up to hide herself as best she could. Vail ripped a sheet off the bed and wrapped her in it. As he started to take the tape off of her, they could hear sirens in the distance.
Vail checked the handcuffs. “Do you know where the key is?”
“I never saw one. But after he taped my mouth and eyes, he jingled a key ring in front of my face, and asked, ‘Do you know what that sound is? It’s the sound of freedom.’ It’s got to be on him.”
“I’ll be right back. You’ll be all right—he’s dead.” She nodded, trying not to cry. He tucked the sheet around her a little more tightly to make sure it wouldn’t come off. “I’ll just be a second.” In the other room, he rolled the body over and searched the pockets. Aside from a wad of hundred-dollar bills, the only thing Vail found was the key ring. It had six keys on it, none of which were for handcuffs.
Two LAPD officers burst into the room and pointed their guns at Vail. He told them he was FBI and was allowed to ease his credentials out slowly. Taking one of their handcuff keys, Vail went back in the bedroom and freed her, and then he helped her onto the bed. He collected her clothes from around the room. When he saw she was shaking, he sat down next to her, and she collapsed into his arms. She cried for a few minutes and then straightened up.
“I’m okay, I’m okay,” she said.
“You know it’s all right if you’re not.”
“It’s just the relief that’s it over, that’s all. I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, but we’re still going to the hospital to be sure.”
She hesitated a moment. “We have to go—for legal reasons.”
“Legal?”
“In case there’s any question, either with L.A. or the FBI, about your having to shoot that animal.”
“I don’t understand,” Vail said.
Slowly, as if each word brought new pain, she said, “We have to go to the hospital”—she looked down at her hands—“so they can do a rape kit.”
Vail tightened his arms around her, and she began to sob uncontrollably.