The job would be tricky. At first she contemplated breaking in through his bedroom window via the fire escape. But surely he had locked the window before leaving for work, and she doubted she could defeat the window latch without leaving evidence of intrusion.
Better go in through the door.
After a breakfast of oatmeal, cinnamon toast, and a banana, she ran the shower, rinsing her hair in the thin, tepid stream. As Hickle had warned, hot water was scarce. She dressed in old jeans and a faded blouse.
She passed the time rereading the case file until after nine o'clock, when those tenants who had jobs were likely to have left for work, and the others had settled in for a day of soap operas and talk shows. Tool kit in hand, she stepped into the hall and looked around.
Every door on the fourth floor was closed. A neighbor peering through a peephole might catch her in the act of a break-in, but she was willing to chance it.
Before Hickle's door she set down the tool kit and took out an electric pick gun and a feather-touch, coil spring tension bar. The door was secured with a Kwikset pin-tumbler deadbolt lock. To turn the plug, it was necessary to free the pins, lifting them into the pin wells. She inserted the tension bar into the lower half of the keyway and the pick gun's blade into the upper half, then switched on the pick. It whirred like a dentist's drill until the row of pins popped free. The plug rotated under the pressure of the tension bar, and the deadbolt retracted with a metallic snick.
She stepped inside, shut the-door, and looked through the peephole, watching for any activity in the hall. There was none. Evidently the pick gun's motor'noise had aroused no concern.
Turning, she surveyed Hickle's apartment. The furniture was different from hers but of no better quality.
Although Hickle had lived in the building for years, he had not enlivened the decor with mementos or artworks or small, homey touches.
There were no paintings on the walls, no framed photos resting on end tables. The place was as nondescript as a motel room.
She crossed the living room and closed the Venetian blind, then turned on a light. The first thing she noticed was the VCR under the TV.
Hickle must have bought the VCR himself; unlike the TV, it had not been bolted down by the landlord. She found the all-purpose remote and turned on both devices, then reviewed the on-screen programming menu.
Hickle had set the VCR to tape Channel Eight every weekday from 6 to 6:30 p.m. and again from ten o'clock to eleven.
Kris Barwood's two daily newscasts.
She turned off the machines, then inspected the kitchen. The fridge was stocked with several large plastic containers of rice and beans, Hickle's dietary staple. She found no snacks, no dessert foods, not even any sugar. At least he couldn't use the Twinkie defense.
Before proceeding with the search, she took care of one more item of business in the living room. She installed a surveillance camera.
The camera was an inch wide by an inch deep, with a 3.6mm pinhole lens that resembled a pen's ball point.
The lens covered a ninety-degree field of view, and its light rating was .03 lux, permitting photography even in semidarkness. Soldered to the camera was an inch long UHF crystal-controlled color video transmitter that broadcast 420 lines of video resolution without shakiness or drift.
The transmitter had a range of three hundred feet and would send its signal through walls and any other obstruction except steel.
For extended use the unit had to be run off an external power supply.
Fortunately there was a smoke detector mounted above Hickle's sofa, hard-wired into the main current. She took the smoke detector apart and found room inside for the camera-transmitter package, which she wired to the AC. Before replacing the smoke detector on the wall, she aligned the camera lens with one of the pre punched holes in the cover.
The camera was not equipped with a microphone.
She considered installing an infinity transmitter in the base of Hickle's telephone-the device would pick up room noise along with both ends of his telephone conversations-but decided against it. Hickle, like many paranoids, might periodically inspect his phone for bugs.
Besides, it was unnecessary to monitor his phone calls. The only calls that mattered were the ones he made to Kris Barwood, and TPS was already recording and tracing those.
Still, she wanted some audio surveillance. Mrs. Finley had reported that Hickle sometimes shouted when alone. No doubt he also talked to himself at times.
Most people did.
'Even me,' Abby said, proving her point.
A simple hidden microphone would do the trick. She planted one inside the stove's ventilation hood. The microphone and its transmitter used less energy than the video camera and did not need to be hooked up to the main current. A single nine-volt battery would allow continuous transmission for more than a week.
The bedroom was next. Here was where Hickle truly lived, where he felt free to be himself. He had made the room a shrine to Kris Barwood. Her image was everywhere. The walls were papered with KPTI advertisements, photos of Kris from feature articles, and eight-by-ten glossies of Kris at various stages in her career.
'He really is her number one fan,' Abby whispered.
She snapped a series of still photos with a pocket camera.
She was disappointed that there was no computer in the room. Hickle had told Kris Barwood that he'd searched the Internet to obtain her home address. Presumably he had used a publicly available terminal. It seemed odd. Even on his income, he could surely afford a garage-sale computer. Maybe he was a technophobe or something.
The first thing she did was plant a second audio bug.
This one she taped to the underside of his nightstand drawer. If he talked in his sleep, she would know.
Then she began her search. In a cabinet she found rows of videotapes, each eight hours long and carefully labeled with five dates in chronological order.
Weekdays only. Kris's newscasts. The half-hour 6 p.m. show and the hour-long 10 p.m. edition added up to ninety minutes per day. Hickle recorded a week's worth of shows-seven and a half hours-on each tape. Thirty-six tapes in all. He'd been taping for roughly eight months, and by Abby's calculation he now had two hundred seventy hours of Kris Barwood.
And he was still taping her, still adding new shows to his collection.
Two rows of books took up the cabinet's lower shelf.
Some bore the labels of used book shops, while others were stamped 'LIBRARY.' The front row consisted of true-crime titles, many with photo sections. The photo pages were noticeably dog-eared. Hickle had spent time poring over black-and-white shots of stalkers escorted under guard after their arrest. Did he picture himself in the same circumstances, and if so, did the prospect bring him worry or satisfaction?
The second row leaned toward more practical subject matter, dealing mostly with the intricacies of finding confidential information in government archives or on the Internet. Blurbs on the dust jackets promised. You can track down anybody! Other books focused on tactics and strategy in guerrilla warfare. Passages concerned with the art of the ambush were copiously underlined.
The last few books, nestled in a corner, were of a different type. She brought them into the light and felt a chill run over the muscles of her back. They were Kris Barwood's high school yearbooks.
Abby looked at the most recent one, dated 1978. The senior class photos were in the front, in alphabetical order. Kris's picture was one of the first.
Kris at eighteen, a graduating senior. Her activities had included the school newspaper and the debate club. Her quotation was from Blaise Pascal: The heart has its reasons, which reason knows nothing of.
Hickle surely must have agreed with that.
She examined the other yearbooks, which collectively provided a detailed record of Kris's teenage years.
