He turned his attention to Stillman, who was walking along beside him, studying each house they passed. When he spotted the right one ahead, Walker saw him slow down and study it as he came closer. Number 302 was a narrow Civil War–era brick rectangle with three stories that stood out a bit from the older ones near it. The house reminded Walker a little of a New York brownstone. He moved cautiously to a place near the front steps where he could see Mary’s hiding place, then crouched lower to lose himself among the shrubs along the front wall. Stillman nodded and moved silently along the side of the building.
Walker had seen Stillman work often enough that he could imagine exactly what he was doing: he would move along the side, stopping to examine each window, then continue to the back of the house, looking for a door lock he could pick or a window he could jimmy.
As time passed and Walker began to feel himself alone on the dark, silent street, his senses seemed to magnify each sight and amplify each sound. His eyes passed across the front door, where there was an old handle that had tarnished and darkened, and a shiny new brass key receptacle for a dead bolt. He wondered if Stillman had seen it and admitted defeat, or had simply not wanted to fiddle with a lock where he was visible from the street. He sighted along the foundation of the building looking for basement windows, but he saw none. He heard a noise. It was sharp and metallic, like the snapping of a latch. It took him a second to realize that it had come from above. He quickly moved around the corner of the house, pressed his belly against the smooth, old-fashioned bricks, leaned to bring one eye back to the corner, and craned his neck to look up.
This time there was a quiet scraping noise. A window was opening. Could Stillman have gotten up there so quickly? There was a long silence. Walker held his breath and stayed motionless. He saw a man’s head slowly emerge from the open window, facing down at the spot by the steps where he had been crouching. It wasn’t Stillman. Walker pulled back, then forced himself to look again. The head came out a bit farther, so the shoulders were visible. There was a movement, and the right arm swung down, holding a long, dark club-shaped object—a flashlight. The bright beam came on, made a few jerky movements on the shrubs by the steps, and Walker pulled his head back from the corner. He saw the beam go past the front of the building to his left, then retreat. Walker looked again in time to see the man withdrawing his torso into the house. As the arm bent to bring the flashlight inside, the hand turned it off, but not before Walker had seen the dark blue shirt and the glint of the badge. The window slid shut.
Walker whirled and hurried along the side of the building as quickly as he could. He stepped around the corner at the back of the house and saw Stillman kneeling at a kitchen door, his face close to the lock. When Walker took his second step, Stillman popped up and faced him.
“What’s up?” he whispered. “Did she signal?”
“I just saw a man in the second-floor window. He was a cop.”
“Damn,” whispered Stillman. “They’re staking this place out too.”
“Yeah,” Walker hissed. “But how? We didn’t know who the second man was. We never told them there was a second man.”
Even in the dim light, Walker could see Stillman’s eyes narrow. “Get Serena to her car. It’s time to get out.”
37
Walker made his way across the yard behind Gerald Bowles’s house, staying close to the rear wall so that a policeman at an upper window would have to lean out in order to see him.
He did not hear a window opening, so he moved to the next yard. It was a colonial house, but the back had been opened up a bit to accommodate a pair of French doors leading onto the patio. He could see into a dining room that had been decorated in an eighteenth-century style, with bright red walls and framed pictures in rows that went from just below the fourteen-foot ceiling nearly to knee level, a table with gracefully curved legs, and a huge sideboard. At the far end of the room he could see a narrow doorway that led down a corridor into the kitchen. There was a young woman in a green sweater, her shining blond hair pulled tight into a short ponytail. She turned to a counter, lowered her eyes, and poured two cans of cola into glasses. Walker slipped across the French doors and into the darkness beyond.
The next three houses had lighted windows too, but they were all smaller and higher, so he was able to crouch and move under them without slowing his pace. The fifth house was dark, so he turned and trotted down its driveway to Maple Street. He glanced back up toward Gerald Bowles’s house, but he could see no sign of the policemen inside, and the angle had become oblique enough so that the upper windows were less threatening. He hurried to a spot where the shadows on the pavement were deep, and rushed across to the other side.
He moved to the bush where he had last seen Mary, but she was not there. He whirled, staring frantically to all sides, then heard a low, breathy whistle, and followed it to the next house. She was up on the front porch, crouching behind the balustrade. He moved toward her, and she came down to meet him. He took her arm and hurried her toward the far side of the house, leaning close to whisper, “There are cops inside the house.”
She whispered back, “That’s a relief. I saw Stillman come out of a yard a block away and leave, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Walker kept scanning the street, now and then glancing back at the Bowles house to reassure himself that he was not taking Mary into a spot that was easily visible from the upper windows. When they had gone around the house to the back yard, he stopped and pointed. “The next street this way is Constitution. We’ve been up and down it a couple of times without seeing anybody.”
Mary moved across the next few back yards with him until they emerged beside one that faced Constitution Avenue. Walker stepped out onto the driveway and stood still for a moment, staring up the street toward the police station, then down toward the river. There seemed to be no cars out this late on the residential streets, and it had been at least two hours since he had seen his last pedestrian. He beckoned to Mary, then waited for her on the sidewalk.
When they had walked in silence for a block, he said quietly, “We don’t know what’s going on. We knew the police were putting a team at Scully’s house, but not this one.”
Mary looked at him in amazement. “You talked to the police, and then decided to pull a burglary?”
“It’s not what we had planned,” said Walker. “I guess that’s what’s been wrong since the beginning. We don’t have a strategy. We just react. Something bad happens, and we fall all over ourselves to get into the middle of it as fast as we can.”
He walked on a few paces. “We saw two men here, going into the coffee shop on Main. They were the same two who cornered us in an alley in Pasadena. We figured—or Stillman did—that they must be here for the same reason we were: to look for evidence that would connect them to Scully and the other dead man, who turned out to be Bowles. So we tried to get the police to arrest them. When the cops tried and the two men didn’t turn up right away, Stillman mentioned that they were here to break into Scully’s house. The police chief said he’d put cops there to catch them at it.”
“It seems as though you don’t have much to complain about,” she said. “They’re doing more than you asked them to.”
“That’s the problem,” Walker said. “We didn’t know about Bowles until you told us. How did they?”
They were coming up to Grant Street. Walker moved ahead, looked to the left, then the right, and froze. A man was turning off Main Street onto the sidewalk on Grant. As he moved away from the bright lights, he broke into a run. He was coming toward them.
Walker said quietly, “Try to look normal. If he’s okay, he’ll go past us on Grant. If he’s not, run for your car.”
He stepped off the curb to cross the street, his arm around Mary’s waist as though they were simply a couple out walking on a summer night, but Walker kept the man in the corner of his eye.
Mary said, “If I run, what are you going to do?”
Walker didn’t answer. He took a couple of deep breaths and looked at the next hundred feet of Constitution Avenue to pick the best spot to turn and fight, then looked back at Grant Street.
The man passed under the street lamp at the intersection, and Mary said, “Stillman.”
They stopped and Stillman trotted up to them, breathing heavily. “Glad I caught up with you,” he said. “The Explorer’s gone.”
