Carver made his way to the guesthouse, walked to the back of the low building so he wouldn’t be seen from the main house, and began to try the doors and windows. The first few were tight and unmoving, as though they had been nailed shut. But when he reached the north side, he found a louvered window beside a sun window that jutted out from the kitchen. He touched a couple of the glass strips and found that he could rattle them. He slid his knife between one of the louvers and the aluminum frame that held it, bent it slightly, pulled out the rectangle of glass, and set it on the ground. He repeated the process with all of the louvers below it, then crawled in through the window onto the kitchen counter. He slid off the counter and went deeper into the guesthouse to be sure it was empty, then opened the kitchen door and brought his shotgun inside with him. A shotgun was reassuring. If he made a mistake, he could erase it.
In Woodland Hills, Lieutenant Nick Slosser turned the corner at his street and then turned again into his driveway. He stopped in front of the three-car garage. Mary’s Volvo and the Audi that Nick Junior and Sally shared were already parked there, so he pulled into the third space. He got out of the car, walked around to the trunk, and picked up his two cases. One was the locked aluminum briefcase that held his extra pistol and magazines and some police department paperwork he had brought home. The second was his suitcase, after three days mostly filled with dirty clothes.
He stepped to his front door, used his key to open it, and went inside. He smiled, happy to catch a glimpse of his wife just cleaning up in the kitchen. Tonight and for the next three nights, the wife he would come home to would be Mary.
Slosser set his two cases down just inside the dining room, walked into the kitchen, and looked at her. She looked up and came to kiss him. “Nick. Right on time. The kids had to eat early because they’re both going out. If you’re ready, I’ll heat ours up in the microwave.”
“Sounds fine to me.” He stood by while she put the first of the plates into the machine, closed the door and punched the buttons, then loaded the second plate with roast beef and spinach and potato. They took their plates into the dining room and sat next to each other on the long side of the table.
“Well?” she said. “You look pretty good. You having an okay week?”
“Not bad,” he answered. “I’m managing to keep busy and healthy. I got a thing this morning that looks kind of interesting. I missed you, of course.”
“There. That’s what I was waiting to hear” she said. “I’m doing pretty well too. I think I managed to sell the place on Long-ridge. Our counteroffer is in, and the buyer’s realtor didn’t flinch. It could go through tomorrow.”
“Wonderful. Congratulations, baby.”
“No congratulations yet. You’ll jinx it. Just so far, so good.”
“Right. How about the kids?”
“They’re on a roll too. Sally got a ninety-eight on a Chem test today, and the teacher read Nick’s essay on Thoreau out loud.”
“We should have them bronzed just as they are,” he said.
The Slossers were talkative, and it would have struck only the most observant of eavesdroppers that Nick Slosser never said anything specific about his work. Slosser believed in self-discipline the way some people believed in God or the scientific method. It was a way of seeing. The problem with all of the petty criminals he ran into was that they had no sense of how to govern themselves. They were thirty-five- or forty-year-old men who lived the lives of teenagers, following every impulse without any acknowledgment of responsibility to the greater society, to their families, or even to themselves.
Slosser’s own life had begun to thrive only after he’d learned the benefits of self-discipline. He had come home from the army and married Mary, the girlfriend he had met in college. They had bought this house in Woodland Hills that she had spotted as a bargain as soon as it had come on the market. They’d had Nick Junior and Sally within two and a half years, and Mary had kept working in real estate even after they’d come along. Nick had been so happy with his wife and family that he had married again right away.
He met Christa when he was at a police training conference in Phoenix. He was a young detective at the time, and he had found that the convention atmosphere that prevailed after hours didn’t make him happy. He didn’t drink. He was used to getting up early and lifting weights, and then going out for a run before the weather got too hot.
Christa happened to be staying at the same Phoenix hotel. She sold pharmaceuticals for a big drug company and had a route that took her from city to city over much of Arizona, New Mexico, a sliver of California, and Nevada, excluding Las Vegas. She was a lot like Mary, he thought. They didn’t look alike. Mary was short, with curly chestnut hair, big breasts, and wide hips. Christa was tall and thin with straight blond hair that she felt was her worst feature. She would say, “Give me a minute to brush my string,” or call it “this limp spaghetti.” But otherwise, Christa was a lot like Mary. He loved her almost immediately. In the first hours of joyful recognition, he had an impulse to call Mary at home and tell her, “I just met this great girl.” He didn’t do it, because he’d lost his heart, not his brain.
His infatuation caused anxiety. His train of thought on the first day went “What a terrific woman. If I tell her I’m married, she’ll lose all interest in me and go away.” So he didn’t tell her. That first night they met for a drink, and both ordered iced tea. Later they shared a large bottle of mineral water in his room. The second day of the conference, he skipped the meetings to go for a run among the desert rocks with her. During the walking breaks she told him all about herself—her family in Nantucket, her intense love of children. She said she wasn’t a frivolous person. If he wasn’t at least open to the idea of marriage and children, then they would have to end it after one night.
He was overjoyed. He loved marriage, and he knew he could be a good husband and father, because he already was a great husband and father. They never parted during the weeklong conference. She had to make a week of sales calls by phone while lying in his bed, and he pretended to be too sick to go to any seminars.
Then the week was up. Dating required planning and care. It had to occur without disrupting Christa’s regular round of sales visits. A young detective like Slosser had little control over his schedule. They managed to see one another, sometimes only for a daylight tryst in hotels along her route in Victorville, California, or Elko, Nevada. The following spring he took two weeks off, told Mary he had to give expert testimony in a trial in Massachusetts, and got married at Christa’s family’s church in Nantucket.
Christa’s family were exactly as he’d imagined them: tall, fair New Englanders with the same long, sinewy limbs Christa had, with high cheekbones, blue eyes, and faces reddened by the sun. They were great people.
Now, as he ate his dinner, he turned to glance at Mary Slosser. He had been married to her for twenty-two years. This house was the same one she’d picked out as a young realtor. Nick junior was now eighteen, and Sally sixteen. He and Christa Slosser had been married for nineteen years. Their children, Martha, Ross, and Catherine, were eighteen, sixteen, and fourteen. He lived with them in a house in Burbank. He slept three nights a week in each house and took a night shift on the seventh night.
His life required that he be a paragon of self-discipline and consistency. His families could count on him. He had not always been present for every piano recital or championship game, but few parents were, and he always made an effort to spend time with the child whose event he’d missed, and listen to the story or see the videotape or hear the piece replayed for him alone.
He even took both families on vacations. He had a police career punctuated by long, unexplained undercover missions, and while he was undercover he couldn’t be reached by phone. Now and then he would be sent on training assignments run by the FBI or the Department of Homeland Security. There were even a couple of Western Hemisphere Anti-Narcotics conferences at Cancun and Puerto Vallarta.
Slosser had been disciplined. He was always aware that he could be unmasked and destroyed if he got careless. Even a single word in the wrong place could do it. He allowed himself no vices or even luxuries, so he could support both households. He grossly understated his salary to both wives to make it easier, and he encouraged them to invest most of their own income, just in case he was caught and they had to live on their own after that. The system had worked because he had willed it to work. The well-being of the women he loved and his five perfect children depended on it.
The disaster that had been creeping toward him since the beginning was drawing very close now. He had begun trying to avoid it more than ten years ago, but he had been unable to do it. His two eldest children, Nick of the Woodland Hills family and Martha of the Burbank family, were high school seniors, and both had been accepted
