one containing her Lucy Mallone identification, the other her real documents.
'Huh. Looks like Lucy isn’t even your name. Is it, Amanda?' He smiled. 'So what have we got here? A lady traveling under an assumed name, with a professionally tricked-out belt buckle concealing a very high quality switchblade, carries a canister of liquid into the City of Angels. You know what I think you are, Amanda a.k.a. Lucy? I think you’re one of those bad people our government is always warning us about. I think…'
Abruptly his smile winked out.
'Forgive me. I got so wrapped up in my deductions-sherlockholmesing it, in James Joyce’s little neologism- that I almost lost sight of the main event. Let’s get to work, shall we?'
From a side pocket of his jacket, he removed a portable cassette player and hooked it up to the clock radio on the nightstand. He turned on the player. Faint music came from the radio’s cheap speaker. He kept the volume low, inaudible from adjacent rooms, but Pierce could hear the music well enough as it played inches from her ear.
'You like surf rock?' He nodded his head to the rhythm. 'It was born here, on the left coast.'
He smiled.
'Welcome to California.'
Pierce didn’t want to look at him. Didn’t want to think about what would happen next. Eyes shut, she listened to the music. She knew this song. The last song she would ever hear.
It was called 'Wipe Out.'
PART TWO
15
Tess was exhausted when she drove to her motel.
At two o’clock in the morning, the streets were not too busy, but the rush of traffic in LA never fully stopped. She took the 405 Freeway north into the San Fernando Valley, exiting at Ventura Boulevard.
Andrus had booked her into an extended-stay motel, the kind of place where relocated executives passed the time waiting for the moving company to arrive with their furniture. She couldn’t complain about the accommodations, but that term 'extended stay' bothered her. She wondered how long her stay would be-and how many victims Mobius would claim before he was stopped.
The room was well-appointed and quiet, and she didn’t spend much time there anyway. It was lonely, of course, but she was used to that. She’d been lonely for two years and six weeks.
After Paul Voorhees had become her partner, people had occasionally asked her what he was like. 'Centered,' she would say. People took this to mean 'focused,' but what she really meant was 'complete.'
She wasn’t sure she could describe exactly what she was getting at. Maybe that he wasn’t always reaching beyond himself for some kind of external validation or acceptance. He had nothing to prove, no one to impress.
In one respect, at least, he and Andrus were alike-neither of them had an I-love-me wall in his office. Andrus didn’t want the plaques and signed photos because he knew they would be seen as a sign of vanity and therefore weakness. Paul just didn’t want them, period. Andrus never took off his jacket because he had an image to maintain. Paul had no image. He was unconscious of the way he appeared to others. Tess had never seen him look in a mirror except to shave.
Federal agents were supposed to be tough. But too often they were tough on other people and easy on themselves. Paul took the opposite approach. He cut himself no slack, but he gave others the benefit of every doubt. Once, she was with him at a party when he patiently absorbed the sarcasm of a minor city bureaucrat who had applied to the bureau and had been rejected. It was only too obvious that the man resented Paul for succeeding where he had failed. Later Tess had asked Paul why he hadn’t just squashed the guy with a cool retort; it would have been easy, and the guy’d had it coming. Paul just shrugged and said there was already enough pain in the world. 'Why add to it?'
Answers like that had earned him the nickname 'Saint Paul,' but people used the term with affection, and when Paul eventually found out about it, he had a good laugh. Jokes at his expense never got him angry. Nothing angered him in any visible way except the mistreatment of the helpless. She’d seen him throw an IBM ThinkPad against a wall after visiting the scene of the rape and murder of a pregnant woman. But when he helped bring in the killer, he showed no emotion other than calm satisfaction.
Most feds got jaded, but Paul always seemed surprised by evil. 'What the hell was this guy thinking?' he would ask as he reviewed his case notes on another homicide or abduction. The question was more than a venting of frustration. He honestly didn’t understand how people could make the conscious choice to do wrong when there was the potential for so much good.
Saint Paul. The nickname fit him, and yet it was a cop-out, really. He was just a decent man, clearheaded, with a sense of right and wrong-a 'value system,' in the current jargon. It seemed obvious to him that if people just followed the rules and treated each other with kindness, everyone would be better off. Why didn’t more people see this? What the hell were they thinking?
She knew he’d been sad sometimes, worn down by the grief in the eyes of witnesses and victims, but what she preferred to remember were their hikes in the Rockies, the crisp air, the great silence, Paul’s face ruddy behind a plume of frosty breath, her gloved hand in his.
At 2:25 she pulled into the motel parking lot. Before leaving the car, she removed her Sig Sauer 9mm from her purse. The purse had been specially modified to hold the pistol and two spare magazines, a solution she had chosen when every other method of carrying a concealed weapon-shoulder rig, belt holster, trench coat pocket-had proven undesirably cumbersome.
When she got out of the car, she was holding the gun close to her side, her finger applying light pressure to the trigger. There was no reason to think Mobius knew where she was staying. Most likely he thought she was still in Denver. But she was taking no chances.
The motel was a two-story L-shaped building. Her room was number 14, on the ground floor. She had noticed that there was a break in the sequence of room numbers, with unlucky number 13 omitted. No one wanted to stay in room 13, apparently. Yet of course someone was staying there. She was staying there. They could put a 14 on her door, but the room would still be the thirteenth in line.
She didn’t care. She wasn’t superstitious. Even so, she wished she had been given a different room.
Still holding the gun against her right hip, she walked to the door and unlocked it. Her free hand found the wall switch and flipped it, turning on twin bedside lamps. She stood in the doorway, checking out the parts of the room she could see, then studying the image in the mirror to get a look at the rest. There was no movement, no sign of intrusion, nothing out of place.
Finally she entered. She ducked into the bathroom, emerged, checked the doorway again, then circled the living space. Nobody was there. She shut the door, locked it, threw the bolt, and even fastened the useless security chain, which could be broken by one quick kick.
She hadn’t checked her message machine in two days. She sat on the bed and dialed her home number. An electronic voice told her that she had seven messages.
One was her friend Donna asking where she was on Thursday night. 'We were supposed to have dinner, remember?' Tess hadn’t remembered. Although she carried an electronic organizer that listed all her appointments, she hadn’t looked at it once since her arrival in LA. It was as if her personal life had been put on hold until this case was cleared. Or maybe it was truer to say that her life had been on hold in Denver, and now, finally, she was free to take action.
There were a few more messages from friends calling to find out where she was, then a call from a guy in her apartment building-a successful attorney, she believed-who’d been showing an interest in her. He wanted to go out for coffee. She wondered what she would have said to that offer if she’d been home. Was it time to go out again? Time to take that kind of risk?
The last message was from the manager of her building, saying there was a UPS package waiting for her in the office. Tess knew what it was-a vintage edition of A Child’s Garden of Verses that she’d ordered from an online dealer in rare books. She had loved those poems once, and on impulse one night, alone and restless, she had
