of the brightness toward the dining room and the staircase. The color of the flames—bright yellow with blue fringes—told him it was gasoline. The front door swung open and he got a glimpse of a man wearing a blue windbreaker and jeans slipping outside.
Prescott sprinted around the corner of the house in time to see the man running hard toward the front gate. Prescott strained to gain on him, the balls of his feet digging hard into the grass and his strides lengthening. The man pushed on the gate, then realized it would not open, and reached up to pull himself to the top.
Prescott stopped twenty feet from him and aimed the gun. “Don’t leave just yet.”
When the man dropped to the driveway and turned to face him, the explanation settled on Prescott all at once. In the brightness of the fire, Prescott could see that the man’s face and hands were deeply scratched and skinned from going over the fence through the hedge of climbing roses. Trickles of blood ran down his cheeks to his chin, making streaks in the black carbon that had come from the mistake of lighting a big pool of gasoline in an enclosed space. His eyebrows and the hair above his forehead had been singed off by the first flash of ignition, but the eyes glowed with excitement, and the mouth was set in a delighted grin. On the heart of the windbreaker were the words MINNESOTA TWINS.
There followed a fraction of a second that Prescott used by cursing himself for letting this happen. He had been too willing to accept it when the police had insisted that the man who had gone after Stella Kaspersen was a solitary, introverted type who could not have had an accomplice. Prescott had not been sure. The murdered girls had merely been dumped in the woods after they were dead. The way they had first been overpowered and killed somewhere else argued for the idea that there was a somewhere else, and the police had not turned up a suitable spot that was owned or controlled by the man with the crowbar. The police had assured him it didn’t mean anything, because that part of Minnesota was full of sparsely populated places where a man could do virtually anything and not be heard or seen. Prescott had assumed they must know more about their territory than he did. Now, a month later, here the nonexistent accomplice was, burning Prescott’s house down around his ears.
When the fraction of a second had elapsed, the man’s right hand was slipping into the windbreaker’s pocket. Prescott had seen from the white-toothed grin in the middle of the black-singed face that this was going to happen, so while the man maneuvered the hidden pistol so he could fire it though the windbreaker’s pocket, Prescott took the time to place a shot through the bend of the
While he was bent over the body to check for any unwelcome signs of life, he happened to glance toward his house and see the center beam burn through to dump much of the tile roof into his living room and create a suitable flue for the forty-foot flames to billow upward into the night sky.
As he watched his beautiful, carefully planned house burn down, Prescott admitted to himself that he had become too notorious to live this way. It also occurred to him that in a large city, almost any good hotel had a bed as comfortable as he’d had, a chef who could cook better than he could, and a bathroom that was cleaned more often than he was willing to clean it. He rented a storage space for the possessions he felt he needed to own but didn’t want to carry from one hotel to another in a suitcase.
Without the burden of the big house, or the temptation to buy things to put in it, he spent a smaller portion of his income. He put his money into stocks and bonds that were in the physical custody of major brokerage firms, and they automatically fed his checking account every month. If anybody wanted him, they could dial his business telephone number or send a letter to his post office box.
Within a month after the fire, Prescott had effectively disappeared as a physical presence that could be limited at any given moment to a single set of coordinates on the earth.
9
Varney chose the North Hollywood branch library because it was miles from the big central one downtown. It was small enough so that he could see the entrances and most of the employees at a glance. Even if Prescott’s suggestion that he do some research was a trap—if Prescott had some insider’s way of getting the library’s computer-system controller to call the cops as soon as someone started running searches on his name—Varney was fairly confident that he would notice odd behavior in the librarians or patrons in time to get out.
The library was a low brick building at the edge of a huge, tree-shaded park that stretched for blocks in three directions. Near the building, right on the corner where Magnolia Boulevard met Tujunga, there was a life-sized too-bright golden statue of Amelia Earhart holding, oddly, the disconnected propeller of her airplane. On wooden benches near her and at various spots in the park, derelicts and homeless people congregated or slept where the shade would protect them from the ferocious sunshine for a time. It would be easy to slip into one of those groups and sit with that tired, bent-over posture, then make his way slowly to his rented car parked a hundred yards from the freeway entrance on Tujunga.
If that way was blocked, there was a big high school a few blocks down Magnolia. Varney was sure he could move through a big campus like that without being an obvious outsider. He had learned a long time ago that it was easy to take advantage of people’s reluctance to stop a stranger and ask rude questions. It took them a long time to convince themselves that somebody should, then that nobody else would, and then to check around them to be sure they would be safe if the answer turned out to be unpleasant. By then he could be around the next corner and out the door on the other side of the building. He considered for a moment. Yes, the high school would be best. After all the news about shootings in schools, no cop would see a high school as a place a man like Varney would try to hide: it was too foolish.
Varney parked and went into the library. There was a sign beside the computers explaining the rules for use. He had to go to the reference desk to give his name, and that would only get him a half hour of computer time. He sighed, then walked off between two shelves of books to pretend to browse while he studied the reference desk and thought about unseen risks. He could perceive none. There was nobody else using the computers at the moment: the kids were in school, and everyone else seemed to be looking at books. He walked up to the desk, showed a bored librarian his stolen California driver’s license, and wrote the owner’s name on a sheet of paper. Two minutes later, Varney was on the Internet, reading an article about Prescott.
He sat in the old, cool building, half aware of the chattering on the other end of the room near the circulation desk. He knew it would suddenly go quiet if he had a problem. He read the article again. He had chosen the
The title was “Five-Year Search Comes to an End.” It was about Prescott going after some guy named Spinoza who had been selling cocaine out of a house somewhere in L.A. County: Hawaiian Gardens? How the hell could they call a town that? The cops had raided the house, but the guy had already gotten out. He’d shot three little boys on the street nearby, because he knew three kids with holes in them would distract the cops. He had escaped and used his connections with his suppliers to hide in Mexico.
The reporter scored a lot of points against the L.A. police. Instead of getting the cooperation of the Mexican authorities, they had kept looking in Spinoza’s old L.A. haunts. Then the crush of an additional thousand murders a year moved the three little boys’ case into a kind of limbo: it was solved, just not closed. It was at that point that the neighborhood began collecting money and calling it the Three Boys Fund. By the fourth anniversary of the deaths, and with the help of large donations from a few rich businessmen, the neighborhood had collected enough money to hire their own hunter. They had asked around and kept hearing of Roy Prescott.
Varney looked up from the screen, his eyes moving across the circulation desk, a nearby window, and the doors while he thought. Prescott had already been well known five years ago. A bunch of poor, ignorant people in an apartment complex had heard of him from more than one source, and what they’d heard had convinced them to pay him to go after Spinoza.
He skipped down to the police spokesman’s statement: “We don’t approve of citizens seeking protection for their neighborhoods by giving money to men who may or may not be honest, or competent, and who, in any case, care nothing about the best interests of the community. In this instance, the issue was not even the safety of the neighborhood. It was revenge, pure and simple. As for Mr. Prescott, the district attorney’s office is studying his actions for possible prosecution, as, I believe, are officials in Matamoros, Mexico, and Browns-ville, Texas.”
Varney scrolled back up the column. Prescott had refused to answer any questions, but the story was clear.
