A worried look passed over her face, but she looked unsure about what to say.
“Listen to me,” Quinn said. “If you tell me, I can help.”
“What can you do?” she asked, clearly wanting help, but unable to believe he could provide it.
“I can make sure he never bothers her again.”
“How?”
“Just trust me. I can.”
“Maybe you make it worse. Maybe he do what he say before and hurt her next time.”
Quinn tensed. “You need to tell me what he said. I will take care of this problem. I promise.”
She looked over at the kitchen entrance, then back at him. “She not want me to tell you.”
“Only because she’s scared.”
“Yes.”
“When I’m done, she’ll never have to be scared of him again.”
She hesitated for a moment. “You sure?”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
More silence, then, “Okay.”
Forty-five minutes after Natt finished telling the story, Quinn had climbed over the wall around Nick’s property and was standing in the front yard. He did a quick outside tour of the house, and came to the conclusion that whoever had designed it was an idiot. While it might have been aesthetically pleasing, and Nick had gone to the extra effort of having a security system installed, the building was just waiting to be broken into.
Before Quinn had returned to Beachwood Canyon, he’d made a stop at his house, and picked up a few items he knew would come in handy. Now, kneeling next to the side of the house, he pulled off his backpack and removed a small kit that contained — among other things — wires, a pair of cutters, and a bypass box. The last item was about the same size as a rubber eraser, and designed to melt into an unrecognizable plastic lump two hours after it was activated.
He stuck the items into the pockets of his black windbreaker. Then, with little effort, he used the poor layout of the house to climb onto the roof.
Less than ninety seconds later, he had disabled the phone service, and set up a loop that would make the security firm monitoring the house think that everything was fine. Now, if the alarm did go off, the only thing he’d have to worry about was Nick’s neighbors hearing it. But Quinn wasn’t planning on having it go off.
Back on the ground, he donned his backpack again and headed over to the sliding glass door that led from the house to the backyard. It would be the easiest way in. While he knew there would be an alarm contact along the jamb where the door met the frame, there was nothing monitoring the glass itself.
Using a suction holder in one hand and a glass cutter in the other, Quinn cut a large oval out of the door, set it carefully on the grass, and stepped inside.
There was an alarm panel a few feet to the left of the door. All the indicator lights were glowing green, and displayed on the tiny screen at the top were the words: HOUSE SECURE. He’d deal with the alarm later. His immediate goal was to discover Nick’s location.
He checked all the rooms on the first floor: kitchen, dining room, living room, two bathrooms, and a den. As expected, no one was in any of them. Upstairs he found four bedrooms, and a common bathroom. The asshole was in the master bedroom at the end of the hall, snoring away. Quinn was pleased to see he was alone.
Quinn spotted a cell phone on the nightstand next to the bed. He silently walked over, and put it in his pocket. Carefully, he then pulled out the nightstand drawer. Lying on the bottom was a little plastic box that looked kind of like a thin garage door opener. This was the alarm system panic button. Quinn slipped it in his pocket with the phone.
He thought it was probably a good bet the guy had a weapon stashed away somewhere close. His kind always did. It took Quinn less than a minute to find a Beretta in a box, under the nightstand on the opposite side of the bed. Instead of taking it, Quinn removed the bullets from the magazine and the chamber, made sure there were no other ones in the box, then put the pistol back.
Quietly, he moved back into the hallway, and began a more thorough search of the house. The downstairs den proved to be the jackpot.
Quinn had to admit that when he first saw the guy at the restaurant, and was told by Natt that Nick was a “bad man,” he’d assumed Nick lived in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere, probably in Hollywood, worked as a salesman at an electronics store or someplace similar, and spent his free time trolling the Internet or hassling women like Ice.
The first crack in that theory had been when Nick drove off in the Mercedes. The second had been the house itself. By then, Quinn’s theory had evolved into Nick having a trust fund and living off the money of others. It turned out he was both right and wrong.
Not a trust fund. A wife.
Dr. Carol Meyers. She was apparently some kind of vascular specialist. There were plenty of diplomas and certificates of honor and the like hanging on the den’s walls. There were also pictures. Quinn assumed the woman in each was Dr. Meyers. Nick was in many of them, too, smiling beside her. The others in the shots were probably dignitaries. There was even one or two Quinn recognized.
He sat down at the desk and woke up the computer, pleased to see there was no security screen he’d have to hack. He wasn’t the best computer wiz in the world, but simple civilian password protection? Easy.
He opened the calendar first and noted that Dr. Meyers seemed to be on the road a lot. Before he got too far, he found a pad of paper in a drawer, ripped off the top sheet, and started jotting down pertinent dates, account numbers, the doctor’s cell phone number and email address, and anything else he thought might be of use.
According to the calendar, Nick’s wife was nearing the end of a trip that had kept her away for two weeks. Which meant she’d been gone the night Ice found the doctor’s husband nude and in her small apartment kitchen, cooking her dinner. According to Natt, he didn’t touch Ice that night, telling her they still needed to get to know each other before they could be intimate. That was the word Natt used. She said she and Ice could only guess what it meant at first, and had to ask an American friend to confirm it. Since the night of Nick’s visit, Ice had stayed at Natt’s place, not once going back after she had left.
Quinn didn’t ask Natt why her friend hadn’t called the police. He knew Ice was in the country on a student visa and was taking language classes down on Wilshire Boulevard. But a student visa meant she wasn’t supposed to be working. She was probably worried that if she called the police, they would find out somehow, kick her out of the country, and do nothing about her stalker.
Whether that would have actually happened didn’t matter. It’s what Ice believed.
Quinn heard footsteps in the upstairs hallway. He reached into his backpack, pulled out a black stocking cap, and pulled it over his head until the built-in mask covered his face. This was his hometown, after all, no sense in taking any chances of being identified. He then continued looking through the computer.
In the Recently Viewed list of the machine’s photo software, he found several files that didn’t seem to link to anything on the hard drive. He leaned back and thought for a second, then gave the room another look. He identified eleven spots that would be decent-to-excellent hiding places. The five best he discounted as ones Nick would have never thought of, then began checking the other six.
He found the small, portable drive in the fourth spot, tucked inside a folding chess set sitting on top of a bookcase. As he inserted the drive into the computer, he could hear the careful steps upstairs retreating to the bedroom. It wouldn’t be long now, he knew.
The drive was password protected. Not a surprise. Fortunately, the software used was the weak, off-the- shelf variety. Something more robust might have been beyond Quinn’s abilities, but this he could hack into in his sleep.
The drive’s directory opened as the steps returned and headed slowly down the stairs. There were two dozen folders, but only one — marked “Old Reports”—contained actual files. Forty-three to be exact. Quinn opened them all together, then the muscles across his cheeks tensed, and his eyes narrowed.
Nick was the only one in the pictures. They appeared to be taken in bedrooms, no two the same. The bed, fully made, was always behind him, and he was always nude. None were taken in Nick and his wife’s house. From the way they were composed, Quinn guessed they were self-timed shots, taken before whoever lived in the home knew Nick was paying them a visit.
