“I’m busted. Peter is a statesman and a snitch. But this can’t be what you were going to tell me.”
Sam paused and thought about how to approach it There was a tension in her body.
“To understand about our latest discovery you need to understand about my former love interest. And the death of my son.”
She had heard the tone of his voice change-her eyes showed it. She sat down. He joined her.
“It was an assignment. Suzanne King-you know enough about her, I assume?” She nodded. “Suzanne had a stalker. He was coming onto her property and taking pictures. Even intimate pictures. My son and I set a trap at her house to catch him…”
Twenty-seven
A droplet of sweat hit the yellow pad, slightly fuzzing the blue line on which it landed. Sunlight through ten- foot windows was broiling Sam alive, and the flak jacket under his shirt exacerbated the effect.
He pressed his eye to the camcorder that scanned the gardens, large veranda, and pool. The kidney-shaped Olympic-size swimming pool lay translucent blue-the South Seas hue created by tiny square ceramic tiles laid across its bottom.
Suzanne, who rarely consented to wear less than one-piece bathing attire in her movies, swam in a thong bikini, doing a slow crawl with perfect form, just as her father, now deceased, had taught her. The August sun beat on her tawny arms and glistened her splashes. Sam found her as beautiful as any woman ever created by God or gazed upon by man.
Sam’s son, Bud, moved along the terraced hillside among the rhododendrons, azaleas, dogwood, myrica, sunflowers, japonica, and lilacs, looking for the same thing that now eluded Sam.
Every inch of Sam remained totally alert. Three feet away was the door to the veranda, cracked open. He had been very clear with Suzanne that there was an element of danger. Personally he didn’t like using this seminude swim as bait. For some time he had felt that Suzanne’s stalker was mentally deteriorating. It was evident in the notes sent by this strange left-handed peekaboo artist. The laws of testosterone, buttressed by the shoe size of the print in the garden, dictated that it was a man fond of composing his notes with letters clipped from magazines.
The intimate and candid pictures the stalker had taken of Suzanne, and thereafter shared with her and others on the Internet, were at once compelling in their beauty and composition and at the same time chilling. It was inconceivable that someone could get so close so frequently and remain undetected. There was no technology to be found, no miniature cameras or telescopic lenses, on the premises. Sam had been careful to search.
Judging from the angle of the sun apparent in the photographs, the stalker made his daylight forays around 2:00 in the afternoon. One picture had been shot through the louvers ventilating the dressing room in the poolhouse complex-a striking nude. Sam had received a disturbed look from Suzanne when he jokingly complimented her. Sam was always serious, but seldom acted that way except at moments of peak vulnerability for his clients; when they wept he tended to ease up on the dry humor.
In searching for the stalker they had considered gardeners, housekeepers-anyone with regular access. They had all checked out negative.
At one end of the pool were small boulders and palms, at the other end marble statues of recent vintage amongst solid granite tables with blue and yellow parasols. To the far side of the pool, similar tables were placed under a massive pergola eighty feet long by fifteen wide and thick with vine-sprung leaves.
Hills the color of wheat were set off by an occasional dark-barked green-leafed oak-except in places like this estate, where gardeners used irrigation and soil amendments to defy the earth and climate. This ten-million-dollar home had been constructed on a natural bench carefully groomed with brick-fronted terraces in the Hollywood Hills.
Sam used his camera to scan the four-thousand-square-foot poolhouse annex, then swept up the hillside until he saw the boulders and palms on the far left. Monotonously he repeated the sweep, stopping every minute or so to look with his naked eye. It wasn’t enough to see the intruder; Sam had to capture his presence on film. That way the local police, who were at this point thoroughly buffaloed, could be convinced that they were looking for something more than one of Suzanne’s publicity stunts. Sam believed her. But even he was finding it taxing.
Normally he would farm out this sort of chase-’em-down job to someone like Shohei, or with a little more training from Shohei, perhaps his son, Bud. Usually his contracts were far more sophisticated than catching a clever stalker. But this fellow had so successfully eluded authorities and private detectives that Suzanne had finally persuaded Sam to solve her problem, paying his rather extraordinary fees.
More than anything else this stalker was patient, willing to wait weeks to get a single good photo. Last time, the final straw, he had photographed Suzanne painting her toenails in the bedroom. Carefully reviewing all the photos and the dates when they were apparently taken, Sam concluded that the man had a penchant for sneaking around the day before a full-moon night. Everything about this case was utterly bizarre. Sam knew they were dealing with a badly twisted mind, and it worried him.
He studied the buildings, the grounds, the pool, squinted, and did it again. Nothing.
The stalker seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing when to arrive. Suzanne, wanting to end it, thought the swim in the scanty suit, the day before a full moon, would make marvelous bait if the stalker had any means of observing it.
Sam had placed banks of infrared motion detectors and video cameras. Suzanne kept a dog, Grendel, making it seemingly impossible for a stranger to enter the grounds without triggering either a red blinking light on Sam’s control panel or a yapping dog alert.
But there was something Sam hadn’t figured out and he knew it. This guy had an edge that nobody understood.
Sam picked up the radio. “Bud, come back.” While he waited he made another sweep with the video.
Sam had hoped Bud would be drawn to a slightly more intellectual calling, but it was not to be. Bud liked the most literal side of fighting bad guys and there was no dissuading him. Close all their lives, Bud and Sam were inseparable. They both loved the daredevil stuff in their spare time and more often than not did it together.
Because he’d had longer to work at it, Sam was by most measures stronger than Bud, but at forty he was no longer faster. “Come back, Bud,” he spoke again into the microphone, slightly concerned. Nothing. Bud was normally back to him in three seconds. Maybe bad radio. Just then, Grendel the Doberman began an ugly bark in the dense garden behind the poolhouse.
“Bud, you out there? I need a comeback.”
A light turned red on Sam’s panel. Abruptly the dog went silent. Someone was in the garden. And the light indicated that someone was in the house. But that was impossible.
Suzanne swam, oblivious.
“Bud, you there?”
Damn.
Sam moved toward the door; time to get Suzanne out of the pool. Still nothing more from the dog. Before walking out the veranda door, he glanced back-no more lights were blinking on the control panel, so it was unlikely that whatever triggered the sensor was still in the house.
He slipped out the veranda door, holding the mike to the PA system.
“Suzanne,” he said.
She stopped swimming.
As if by magic, a man appeared, sitting on the roof of the poolhouse. He held a camera mounted on a crossbow. Sam swung the camcorder onto the pool-house roof and punched the police call button on the alarm pad. That done, he sprinted onto the veranda and down the six feet of steps.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” an amplified voice said.
Sam froze. The intruder was talking through the stereo system piped around the pool. If the gunman’s finger moved a fraction, Suzanne’s perfect body would be sliced with a four-bladed hunting bolt.
“Get out of the water, Suzanne,” the man said.
The intruder wore a mask, but at least two video cameras with separate feeds were capturing his image.
