factories completely empty. Every time he had been there, he had found another civic advertising blitz announcing another local renaissance that he couldn’t quite locate. The last time he had been through, they had remodeled the airport. But it had the feel of public works in third-world countries that had been built out of civic ambition, and that he could imagine someday soon abandoned to the jungle.
If this killer lived in Buffalo, then the luck of the place must have gotten worse lately. Prescott knew the man had not been born there. His speech had no trace of the accent. Prescott supposed it wasn’t a bad place for a killer to live. Real estate was cheap. It was on the Canadian border, and not far from Ohio and Pennsylvania.
He took the telephone from the back of the seat in front of him and dialed the answering machine in his new office. He heard it rewind. There were two messages. He sat up straight, put his hand over his left ear to cut the noise, and listened, but this time it was not the voice of the killer.
“This is Daniel Millikan, and it’s four o’clock. I’ll be home in an hour, and I’ll be in all evening. If you don’t get me then, call me in the morning at the office.” Prescott listened to Millikan reciting the telephone numbers while he let the surprise wear off. He had not expected this. He hung up and dialed.
“Hello?”
“I got your message,” said Prescott. “What’s up?”
“The L.A.
“Yeah, but I know it. Most of the others don’t.”
“Why do you do this?”
“Answer unpromising phone messages?”
“No,” said Millikan. “You know what I’m talking about.”
“I know how to do seven or eight things,” said Prescott. “All the other ones cost money.”
“I want to call this whole thing off. It was a bad idea. I shouldn’t have told Cushner how to get to you.”
“It’s okay,” Prescott said. “You don’t have to do anything else. Your part is over.”
“He’s killed two people just to scare you, and two more to get to you. Putting yourself out as the next victim isn’t a good idea this time. You know what he is.”
“Yeah, I know what he is. He’s not going to get hungry—he’s done enough of these so he may not need money for years. He isn’t going to make a mistake out of desperation. The only ways are to wait for him to get hit by a truck, or get him to come after me.” Prescott paused. “And he could be active for a long time. He’s young. Late twenties.”
“How do you know that? Voices can be deceptive.”
“When he came to my office I saw him in the flesh. Thanks for your concern, but I’ve got to go now, Danny. I’m on my way to New York.” Prescott disconnected and returned the telephone to the back of the seat, then lay back and closed his eyes. His mind ranged nervously in one direction, then another, keeping him from sleep.
He found himself remembering his first lesson about killers. He had seen someone while she was alive, and then seen her again after she wasn’t. Prescott had been twenty-four years old. He had just gotten out of the service, and had known little more than that he was glad it was over. When he could find no job that paid well or seemed likely to lead anywhere, he had answered an ad in the paper placed by the Emil Vargas Detective Agency. Vargas was lazy, and he was cunning. In his later years, he would hire two or three young men like Prescott, who were strong and tireless and naive, and allow them to put in the two thousand hours of work required for a detective’s license in California. He would pay them minimum wage, and accept every case that was offered, without quibbling about the difficulty or danger. When one of the apprentices quit or put in his two thousand hours, another would take his place.
When Pauline Davis had called, Vargas had answered the telephone, written down the name and address, and handed the paper to Prescott because he happened to be in Vargas’s line of sight, and giving it to anyone else would have required him to turn his head.
Prescott met Pauline Davis at a small apartment building on Victory Boulevard. She was in her thirties but looked like an ugly teenager, almost skeletally thin, with bad skin and bad teeth that made Prescott suspect she was an addict. Her clothes were the short shorts and loose, translucent blouses that had not been in style during his lifetime except among street hookers. She said she owned the apartment building and needed a skip trace done. A man named Steven Waltek had rented an apartment. Through bluff and evasion, he had managed to avoid paying her for six months, then disappeared. He owed her six thousand dollars, and she wanted papers served on him. Prescott could still hear her voice, see her talking—always a little too fast, with nervous, birdlike movements. When she turned her head to look for the rental agreement, it was like a twitch.
Prescott had listened politely, written everything down, then gone directly to the county clerk’s office to see who really owned the apartment building. To his surprise, the tax rolls said Pauline Davis did.
He began to search for Waltek. He visited the landscaping company Waltek had listed on his rental application as his employer. The owner told Prescott that Waltek worked as a trimmer, climbing the big, old trees with a set of spikes on his work shoes and a leather strap, then using a light chain saw to lop off unwanted limbs. He said Waltek had collected his last check a month ago and expressed some vague intention to move inland.
It took Prescott a week of telephone calls to pick up a trace of Waltek. Prescott always made the calls as Vargas had taught him, claiming to be a former employer who owed Waltek some money, or a friend of a friend who had been told to give him a letter. He found a tree service in Riverside where Waltek had applied for a job. There had been no openings, but they had kept his application because he was experienced at a kind of work that not everyone could—or would—do. When Prescott arrived in Riverside, he found that Waltek’s address was not in Riverside. It was on a rural road somewhere in the San Bernardino Mountains. He drove for over an hour up narrow, winding roads, through tiny towns that seemed to exist for the benefit of people who came in other seasons—skiers in the winter, or campers in the summer—but never in the spring. The tall pine trees were shrouded in mist nearly to their tops, and on some of the low, shadowy rock slopes there were still half-melted streaks of dirty snow.
His car was an old Chevy he always had to feed with oil after a couple of hours of driving. As it climbed the steep inclines, it began to grind out a high, whining noise that made him hope that when it broke down he would still be able to disengage the transmission, push it around, and coast back down to the last of the little towns.
Waltek’s house was not even on the main road. It was up a side road so small that it turned into a mud track a quarter mile into the woods, and Prescott had to pull off into a level space in the forest and walk the rest of the way up. As he walked, the cold and damp and solitude began to affect his enthusiasm. He was arriving, unexpected, to dun some guy for six thousand bucks—some guy who worked in a job that probably didn’t pay a lot, and that required him to inhabit the border between courage and recklessness. It also occurred to Prescott that, while a lot of people way out here had guns where they could reach them, Prescott didn’t own one. As Prescott walked higher up the slowly vanishing path, he began to listen for any sound to reach him in the silence. He heard nothing, and that made him more uneasy. He came around a curve and saw the house. It was in a flat, rocky clearing, sheltered by tall trees on all sides. It was small, with siding composed of half logs nailed to boards so that it looked like a cabin. There was no car, and he could see no way for a car to get here, so he guessed that Waltek must park in a spot near where Prescott had left his car and walk the rest of the way. He knocked, but there was no answer. He supposed Waltek must have found a job, and maybe that meant he could pay. He decided that all he could do was wait.
He sat on the low front steps for a time, then gave in to his curios-ity and looked in the side window. The inside of the house consisted of one room at ground level and a loft. The part that he could see was cluttered. There were dishes overflowing from the sink onto the counter, clothes lying on the floor . . . he stopped. What he had thought was a pile of clothes now seemed to be something else.
Prescott moved to another window to look more closely. Then he kicked in the back door and entered. Lying on the floor was the body of Pauline Davis. He could see she had been beaten and probably, in the end, strangled. What had she been doing out here with Waltek? Then he saw the footlocker lying open near the door. There was nothing inside it, and when he bent to look, he saw stains that had to be blood. She had probably been killed in Los Angeles and brought here, so Waltek could bury her where he could keep people away from her grave.
Prescott backed out the door and headed down the path. He made it nearly to the car before he heard the footsteps. He could see Waltek now, just as he had seen Waltek when he’d emerged from the woods—as tall as Prescott, but very wide, with broad shoulders that made his neck seem short, and heavily muscled forearms developed by years of climbing and cutting. The eyes were the part that bothered Prescott all these years later. They were bright and intense, as the eyes of intelligent people often are, but they had a strange opaque quality, as
