him. Emily wanted to cry, but she fought it. “Can you tell me what it looked like, exactly?”
“The box?”
“Yes.”
“It was the size of regular paper. A ream. The bottom part was just plain white, but the top had a kind of maroon color, with gold letters that said something, some brand name of a stationery company.”
“Do you remember the company?”
“I’m sorry. It was just words, no picture or anything. That much I remember. It just didn’t seem to matter at the time.”
“Was there still stationery in it?”
“There was some. Whenever he added stuff, he took out enough stationery so the box would still close. By then maybe it was only onethird stationery.”
Emily recognized Phil’s way of thinking. He had brought his papers to the apartment of his current mistress. And then he hid the papers in a box of papers. That was Phil. “He hid it here so it would be safe. Did he say from whom?”
“No.”
“Did he say why he was taking it away?”
“I don’t know.”
Suddenly Emily knew. Just to be sure, she said, “April, did other people in the office know about you and Phil?”
“Ray Hall. I was sure he knew at the time, but he says now that he only suspected, but didn’t know.”
“Anybody else?”
“No. And Ray says nobody else knew. I would never tell anybody, and we weren’t that obvious about it. Phil wasn’t that trusting. He didn’t like people to know things like that about him. If he could have had an affair with me without my knowing, he would have. I mean, he was married, and…” She paused, not sure how to end the sentence.
“I know. Tell me something else. Did you ever hear of anyone else he’d had an affair with?”
“No. Phil told me there had never been any others. Ray told me there had been, but he didn’t say who. Nobody had ever said anything about it in front of me before.”
“Not even Ray?”
“Not until after Phil was dead. I don’t think anybody but Ray ever knew anything personal about Phil, and Ray was his friend. He would never gossip about him.”
Emily stood up abruptly. “I’ve got to go now.”
“What? Is something wrong?”
“I’ve just got to go,” she said. “Thanks for telling me the truth. It may be the thing that keeps me alive.”
28
Hobart watched Emily Kramer leave the apartment building. She looked as though she was in a hurry. He kept wondering why she would be out like this on the morning after the fires, going to see another woman. When she had left the house where she had spent the night in Van Nuys, he had expected her to be wearing the same pair of jeans and the same sweatshirt she had been wearing at the fire, but she had been dressed in black pants and a black jacket, with flat shoes. When he had seen her clothes, he had begun to scan the surrounding blocks for signs that an arson investigator had her under surveillance. If the cops had been watching, then the clothes would have been the clincher. A person who knows enough to pack up her best clothes the day before her house burns down is an arsonist.
Hobart was sitting in his third car now. He had given away Whitley’s car, rented a car and kept it until he had driven to the fire, and now he had rented another. This one was a small SUV, a Lexus that was difficult to pin down as to color. It was a metallic shade and sometimes it looked gray to him and sometimes tan, so it almost seemed to fade into the road. He had chosen it because the windows were tinted, making a person inside into a dim silhouette.
Hobart had spent most of the early morning completing his preparations for Emily Kramer. He knew he should simply have killed her. It would have been so easy. He could have sat in the warm, dark corner of her back yard on a lawn chair and put a .308 bullet right through her head. She would have fallen in a heap like a marionette with cut strings. It would have been loud, but sleeping neighbors who heard a single shot seldom got up to investigate. Instead they lay still, barely breathing, waiting to hear the next pop: “Was that a shot? Shhh. Listen.” And Hobart would have driven up to Theodore Forrest’s place, collected his second two hundred thousand, and gone about his business.
No. He would not have gone about his business. He was so tired that each time the work got harder for him. That was probably why he couldn’t resist killing Whitley. It was definitely what had made him decide he wanted the information about Theodore Forrest. When he added the money he could get from Forrest to the amount he had already managed to keep over the years, he would have enough.
Hobart supposed he had not lived as cheaply as some people, but he had saved. When a job was finished, he would put most of the money away. At first he’d had the misguided hope that Valerie would forgive him for going to jail. When that hope was revealed to be idiotic, he had still kept saving. Money became more symbolic than practical. He needed to pile it up to overcome the feeling of futility and emptiness he had felt since the day of his arrest. He tried to make himself feel as though he had succeeded and gotten the money, instead of prison.
Hobart watched Emily Kramer walk to her Volvo. She had parked it across the street from the apartment complex. At this time of day, that was a pretty smart thing to do. She had a very short walk to and from the apartment building, all in the open under the windows of a dozen tenants in the building, and in plain sight of two dozen in neighboring buildings. She had made it nearly impossible for him to approach her. She was thinking clearly now, as though she knew she was in danger.
She was smarter and more self-reliant than he had imagined, and the discovery made him more certain than before that she had been trying to deceive him about the evidence. She had set the fires to get rid of him, and that meant that she was now preparing a move against Theodore Forrest. She must have sent Ray Hall, the man she was staying with, up north to talk to Forrest in person while she scurried around here, probably hiding copies of the evidence, closing bank accounts, making travel arrangements.
She was dressed up today. Her dark hair looked as though she’d had it professionally styled, even though he knew that was not something she could have done without his knowing. He couldn’t help thinking of the way she had looked naked, and it was a distraction that made him wish he had never done that to her. He was reluctant to harm that beautiful body, and he couldn’t avoid feeling a sexual attraction to her that wasn’t quite affection, but was appreciation. He couldn’t let it make him hesitant. Today was the day when he would need to be hard on her. He had to persuade her to relinquish the evidence, withdraw, and leave Forrest to him.
He watched the Volvo pull away from the curb and move up the street. Hobart could tell from the way she accelerated that Emily was jumpy and anxious, but he was sure she had not spotted him yet. A few times he had noticed that people he had been hired to kill seemed to sense that he was around. It didn’t matter if they had no rational reason to know that someone wanted them gone. It didn’t matter if they had never seen Hobart before or had no suspicion that he was anyone to fear. He had even seen them get nervous and ignore him to look over their shoulders for someone else. They clearly felt something wasn’t right, but they didn’t know who or what was wrong. Sometimes they would change their plans: stay longer at a party or a bar because they didn’t want to leave the light and the company, or come out of a movie theater and go back to the box office to buy a ticket for another film that was playing on a different screen.
Hobart waited until she had turned the first corner before he started the engine of the SUV and pulled out to follow her. At the corner, he let a few cars go past before he turned. He tailed her at a distance for a few minutes. It was easy to tell that she was not aware he might be the one. She was not making quick moves to force him to do anything noticeable. He stayed far behind her and followed her onto the Ventura Freeway.
After a couple of miles, she passed the interchange with the San Diego Freeway, but she didn’t turn. It occurred to Hobart that she might be driving north past Ventura all the way to the Central Valley to meet Forrest. The thought put a little hitch in his breathing. She shouldn’t try to go up there alone.
