everything. I didn’t just meet Ellen in class and take her out to dinner once. I got to be very close to her, spent a couple of months watching her and listening to everything she said and turning it over and over in my mind. Then I spent a year afterward double-checking to figure out what went wrong. You’re investigating her? Well, I already did: she’s not somebody who commits insurance fraud.”
Stillman sighed. “Maybe. Do you at least agree with me that the next thing we ought to do is find her?”
“Yes,” said Walker. “But I don’t know how to do that.”
“I’ve got somebody working on it. After it gets dark, we’ll go to see him.”
9
Stillman stopped the car on a dark street in the flat outer reaches of the Santa Clarita Valley, just under the wall of jagged mountains that rose up implausibly to the north. To the left, across the street, was a high school athletic field with wooden bleachers behind an eight-foot chain-link fence, and beyond it a blacktop parking lot the size of a staging area for an armored division. Walker squinted into the darkness and made out that it had a metal post with a basketball backboard every hundred feet. Along the right side of the street was a row of nearly identical one-story houses that were darkened as though they had been hastily evacuated in advance of some natural disaster. “Nobody seems to be home,” said Walker.
“They’re in there all right,” said Stillman. “They just go to bed early.”
“The whole neighborhood?”
“Most of them have to drive all the way back into town in the morning to work. The rest have to get out of here by seven, before the kids arrive. The road gets clogged with buses and car pools and jaywalking teenagers.” Stillman got out of the car and waited for Walker, who lingered at the door and stared around him.
“What are you looking at?”
“Just trying to be sure you’re not cleverly trying to attract the attention of somebody who wants to break my skull, the way you did last night.”
“I explained about that,” said Stillman. “I just wanted to verify a theory I had. What point would there be in doing it again? Come on.”
Walker started up the sidewalk to the nearest house, but Stillman tapped his shoulder. “Not in there.”
“Then which one is it?”
“You can’t see it from here. It’s down the end of the street and across the basketball courts.”
“Why park so far away?”
“It’s a nice night. Southern California is a lot better at night than San Francisco, don’t you think? The air drifts in and stays put. It’s around all day getting heated up and lived in, so you’re kind of attached to it by nightfall. It’s a friendly arrangement.”
“Why do you always park in some screwy place and then walk?”
“I told you, it’s a nice night,” Stillman answered. Then he muttered, “Besides, it’s a habit.”
“Why does that not seem to be an adequate answer?” asked Walker.
“I didn’t say there wasn’t a reason for the habit,” Stillman admitted. “I told you we’re going to see a guy who works for me.”
“That was what you said.”
“Well,” said Stillman, “he doesn’t always work for me. That means that at other times he has to work for other people, right?”
“What other people?”
“Well, now, that is the sticky part, isn’t it?” Stillman said. “If he went around telling me things like that, he would probably tell other people who I was and what he did for me.”
Walker looked at Stillman uneasily, then turned his head to survey the deserted neighborhood. “You park far away from his house because his other customers are criminals. Is that it?”
“Not necessarily,” Stillman said. “I’m just respecting the great void in information I have. It’s always a good idea. Constantine Gochay is the guy we’re going to see. I use him for skip-tracing and similar dull, sedentary occupations that clash with my temperament. I save myself aggravation by hiring the best.”
“He’s the best?”
“Right. If I hire Gochay, I save money on the plane tickets I would have bought to places where somebody was six weeks ago. The problem with hiring the best is that everybody wants the best. A word like ‘everybody’ takes in a lot of people with a wide range of behavior patterns. It could, as you no doubt astutely surmise, include corporate headhunters trying to get background information on some job candidate, or the regular kind of headhunters. It could also include some of the strange, tropical flowerings of certain federal agencies that have been known to retain employees with names like ‘Black Luigi’ or ‘The Poison Dwarf.’ Do we want to meet them? No. Do we want them to see our car? No.”
They were across the dark blacktop forest of basketball hoops, walking up a road that seemed to have no sidewalks or street lamps. The houses on this road were new, most of them set back on sloping lawns and obscured by high fences and thick hedges. Stillman grasped Walker’s arm and pulled him through a gate set into a vine-covered wall. Walker’s feet detected a stone walkway up the front lawn. The house looked as dark as the others, but Stillman walked to the front door and rang the bell.
A moment later, a young woman with close-cropped red hair and very white skin appeared. She wore blue jeans and a gray sweater that hung to the middle of her thighs. Her glasses reflected the yellow bug light above the porch, so she seemed to Walker to be staring at him with the wide, disinterested eyes of a cat. “Go on in,” she ordered. “He’s expecting you.” Her accent sounded foreign to Walker, but it was so faint that he could not identify it beyond the conjecture that the continent must be Europe, and her appearance argued for the north.
She held the door, so they had to sidestep in to get around her, and Walker was too hesitant to do anything but mistime it. There was a second when she leaned forward to check the street while he was still moving in and they came together, Walker’s chest fleetingly brushed by her breasts. The woman’s sharp green eyes flashed dangerously up at him in deep annoyance and then clouded not in exoneration but mere dismissal. He mumbled, “Excuse me,” and followed Stillman’s back as it disappeared into an open doorway at the other end of the big room.
He passed a huge projection television screen that held an image of a woman’s face a foot and a half wide with enormous lips and teeth, smiling about something the stereo speakers said was “scandalizing Hollywood.” He heard the young woman behind him, flopping down on a couch.
He stepped to the doorway to find Stillman and another man already staring expectantly at him. The other man was taller and thinner than Stillman, with black curly hair in ringlets that made him look like the bust of a Roman emperor. He nodded at Walker, then turned away, his eyes focusing on Stillman for a half-second before they moved to his work table.
The room was like a disordered and confused repair shop, the floor tangled with bundles of power cords and surge suppressors, the tables around the walls crowded with computers and screens, most of them with no keyboards. Printed papers were on the floor and laid in overlapping stacks, with some tossed in the empty boxes the paper had come in.
“Ellen Snyder . . . Ellen Snyder,” Gochay muttered as he looked at various pieces of paper, then put them back. He turned and squinted, then stepped to a table, tossed several sheets off the top of a pile, and snatched up a few more that had been on the bottom. Then he led Stillman and Walker through another open doorway into a narrow, dim hall that seemed to encircle the work room. He opened a door on the other side of the hall and led them inside.
The room appeared to have been transported here from somewhere in the Middle East. There were two big couches on either side of a large, low, copper-clad table that sat on an Oriental rug. Strewn around the room on the floor were oversized pillows upholstered with materials that seemed too complex—snippets of tapestries, Oriental weavings in patterns that weren’t the same as the rug, and one that was iridescent like bird feathers. There were no windows in the room, and nothing hung on the walls. Walker looked more closely at the walls and saw that what had looked like panels of plasterboard covered with high-gloss paint was sheet metal: the room was insulated— against sound? Electronic signals leaking out? He noticed a bank of computer components that seemed to be connected in some tandem arrangement humming quietly, with red and green lights no bigger than beads glowing
