A Perfect Life (14 page)

CHAPTER 21

Scott Thomas's digital watch read 12:00. Straight up midnight.

Four hours' drive south of Boston, Cannonball Walker's mind raced and occasionally jabbed at his conscience as he checked into the Madison Hotel on Central Park West. He checked a gold pocket watch and decided to call Scott when he got to the room, regardless of the time.

Ten hours' drive farther down the Atlantic coast, inside a glass-and-cedar beach house on Spinnaker Island, Charles Hunter stood in the door of his daughter's bedroom watching the child sleep. Twenty feet away, Kate Billings paused while unpacking her bags. She walked to the window, where she gazed at moonlit ocean and felt the same calm and fulfillment that Charles felt watching Sarah sleep safe in her bed.

Scott was alone now. He stood deep inside the shadow of an inset doorway, watching the second-floor apartment of Darryl Simmons. This part of Boston was old. It was a place where decades of stale odors mixed with the clean metallic scent of New England winter. He shifted his weight, tapping one foot against the other for warmth.

Occasionally, Click's dark silhouette would float across drawn curtains, and Scott would move farther back into the shadows to wait, to force himself to stay quiet. A couple of times, a group of teenage boys had wandered by, catching Scott's eye, puffing out their chests and talking trash—their slurred words hanging in the winter air inside visible puffs of fog. But anger and desperation so filled the young graduate student that the teenagers had sensed enough to leave him alone.

This was a bad neighborhood, bad as they get in modern America. Any man who stood alone in a darkened doorway had to be more predator than victim. And Scott felt predatory. He watched Click's form move across cheap, drawn curtains and visualized kicking the hacker's door down. He could almost feel the man's weight in his hands as he imagined slamming Simmons into the wall until he lost consciousness.

Scott shook his head. He tried not to think about hurting the man. He tried not to think about hurting anyone. But he felt empty without the fantasy. He felt warm in its presence.

The sound of a door opening cut into his thoughts, and he hastily stepped deeper into the inset doorway. Click, dressed in heavy topcoat and stocking cap, trotted across the asphalt and turned right in Scott's direction. Scott thought of stepping out. He thought of taking the guy down as he passed, of twisting arms until they snapped, of forcing Darryl Simmons to tell everything he knew.

But they were stupid thoughts.

What Scott needed was to get inside Darryl Simmons's life the way Simmons had gotten inside his. He needed to know motivations and means. He needed to know
why.
So he leaned his back against the door, propped one foot against the kickplate, and bowed his head to look at the ground. Simmons passed by without so much as a sidelong glance.

As the hacker's footfalls faded, Scott stepped into the street and followed.

Three blocks over, Simmons disappeared into an ancient parking garage and emerged minutes later driving the blue Lexus with chrome wheels—the same car the two burglars had driven a week earlier after breaking in to Scott's apartment on Welder Avenue.

Now Scott intended to return the favor.

He retraced his steps to the doorway across from Click's apartment window, where he waited ten more minutes. Watching. Listening for some sound that would warn him not to enter the dark apartment. At exactly 12:20
A
.
M
., he stepped out of the recessed doorway.

The apartment building was a dump. Gaps showed in the steps where bricks had been pried up and used as doorstops or makeshift weapons; spray-tagged plywood covered what had been a glass rectangle in the front door; the twin scents of smoke and grease reeked from a metal grate on the sidewalk.

Scott paused to glance up and down the deserted street. He reached inside his coat and rummaged inside a nylon bag hung from his shoulder, coming out with a thin-bladed chisel. Scott had never jimmied a door before. But, as it turned out, it was a surprisingly easy thing to do. Most crime is relatively unskilled—that's why people who fail at everything else are drawn to it. At least, most crimes are easy right up until the time you get caught; so he'd thought quite a bit about the best way to commit burglary. Lingering would look suspicious. Scott planned to move with purpose, to get in and out as quickly as possible.

He pushed into the foyer, where radiator heat burned and stung his cheeks. He smelled more grease, more smoke. A tangled hum of domestic noises—televisions and radios, clinking dishes and muffled voices—echoed in the dark stairwell.

One flight up, Scott paused outside a painted wooden door that bore the apartment number he'd gotten from Budzik. He stopped to listen. The background noises remained steady. The loudest sounds were Scott's own breathing, the beat of his own heart. He tapped lightly on the ancient door. No answer. The thin chisel slid easily between door frame and cheap molding. Scott felt for the dead bolt, got a corner of the chisel wedged into its side, and levered the bolt back into the lock. He held his breath and swung the door open.

The lights were off, but ambient light from the street showed a room about twice the size of his former living room on Welder Avenue. He could make out a couch, two chairs, a worktable, and four computers. This was Click's office, not his apartment.

Scott closed the door and pressed his back against paint-caked panels.

The street had been relatively bright. Inside now, he needed to adjust quickly to the dark. He stood very still and closed his eyes.
One step at a time.
It was his mantra for the evening. He'd planned out everything.
One step at a time
. A full minute passed, and he opened his eyes. Moving easily around and through tables and chairs, pasteboard boxes and thick cables, Scott made his way to the room's only window and parted cheap curtains. The street was empty.

He unbuttoned his coat and pulled out the nylon bag, swapping the chisel for a metal penlight. Sweeping the disk of light across the walls, he located two doors. One turned out to be a closet filled with electronic equipment; the other was a bathroom. Neither held any danger. Scott turned to grab a wooden chair and wedge it under the front door knob. He'd once seen a reformed professional burglar on
Oprah.
The trick, the guy had said, was to lock or barricade the bedroom or apartment door and have an alternate escape route available. Scott went in search of alternate escape routes.

The bathroom window would have let out onto an ancient, rusted fire escape if only it hadn't been painted shut. Scott clamped the penlight in his teeth and went to work with the chisel. Rivulets of sweat ran down the small of his back. His heartbeat sounded like boots marching through muck. It took four and half minutes, but the sash popped loose and moved up. Scott cussed into the rush of winter air that flooded the bathroom.

One more thing before he could work. He turned and ripped down a dark blue, mildewed shower curtain. Back out in the main room, he pulled duct tape from the nylon bag and sealed the shower curtain over the window that faced the street. Finally, he walked over and flipped on a desk lamp.

The front door was barricaded, an escape route was ready, and he could work in decent light without anyone seeing from the street. It had all taken just under ten minutes.

Oprah's professional burglar had sworn it had never taken him more than eight minutes from the time he entered a home until the time he walked out with every valuable in the place. But Scott wasn't here to steal cash or jewels. He wanted information, and that was going to take time.

The desk drawers held almost nothing—just pens, highlighters, and printer cartridges. A pyramid of pasteboard boxes occupied a back corner. The top box held two or three dozen PDAs—Palms, Visors, Blackberries, Pocket PCs, and Sony Clies. All used. Scott remembered reading that the information on stolen PDAs was generally more valuable to the crook than the device itself.

A thought glowed at the back of his mind.

A beat-up Palm Vx stood in a charger next to one of Click's computers. It was a slightly newer version of his own Palm V. He picked up Click's PDA and dropped it into the nylon bag. Then he went back to the pasteboard box and picked out a similar device. After unscrewing the top off of the stylus, he used the pin to press the reset button on the back of the Palm, dropped the device into Click's charger, and pressed the hotsync button to copy the backup files of the Palm's contents from the computer's hard drive to the virgin Palm.

The closet held stacks of equipment and brown boxes. In one, Scott found a treasure trove of cell phones. Budzik had called Click a phreak—a phone hacker. Scott chose a new Motorola flip phone in a case with its own charger. It worked. He dropped it into his bag.

Finally, Scott tried the computers. Here Click's professionalism showed. Scott couldn't get past a welcome screen without multiple passwords. He'd just powered on the last of four computers, vainly hoping that one was accessible, when a light knock came at the door.

“Click? Open the door, boy. I got somethin' for you.”

Seven hundred miles south along the Atlantic coastline, Kate Billings lay in bed staring at the ceiling of her new room. Unseasonably warm breezes wafted through open windows, ruffling linen curtains and caressing her arms and face. The soft rhythmic rush of the surf filled the room.

Kate had never lived in a place without traffic noises. She'd never even lived in a place where she could open ground-level windows at night without worrying. The young nurse sighed deeply and pushed back the covers so she could feel the breeze on her bare legs. She wondered if Charles Hunter was sleeping; she wondered if having a beautiful young woman in the house was keeping him awake at night.

She glanced at the bedside clock: 1:33
A
.
M
. Kate smiled as she rolled out of bed.

It was time to go exploring.

CHAPTER 22

Kate Billings pulled on jeans, leaving her tee-shirt nightgown untucked and hanging to mid-thigh. Trotting across to her closet, she slipped her feet into untied cross-trainers, then thought better of it and tossed the shoes into the closet using her toes.

Out in the hallway, she brushed fingertips down the wall to guide her steps. Houses, she thought, have a different feel at night. Colors disappear into grays and blacks; windows throw pale planes of dissected moonlight onto floors and furniture; the black silhouettes of plants contrast sharply with the straight lines of walls and tables, seeming even more alive, more organic, than in full light.

She paused outside Sarah's bedroom, then pushed the door open. The little girl lay in a fetal position, her covers kicked to the foot of the bed. Kate moved silently across the floor, stopping next to the bed. Sarah's long hair had fallen across her face, and it occurred to Kate that the girl looked somehow generic—more an impersonal representation of childhood than an actual child. The thought sent a chill along Kate's spine, and she reached out with painted fingernails to brush the hair back.

Sarah stirred as her new nanny pulled the sheet and comforter up to her chin. Kate watched as the girl instinctually grasped the comforter in her fingers and straightened her legs to paw at the covers with curled toes. Kate paused a few seconds more, thinking about the events that had led her here.

Back in the hallway, Kate found her way to the great room and snuggled into an oversized leather chair. Charles Hunter's reading glasses were on the side table, perched atop a well-worn copy of a book titled
Rebecca
by a woman named Daphne something-or-other. She picked up her employer's glasses and tried them on. As she did, a soft breeze tickled her bare toes.

Kate moved carefully through the unfamiliar house, all the while following the feel and scent of fresh air. One of the beach-side french doors was ajar. She had already placed her hand on the knob to pull it shut when the sound of glass on glass drifted in from the patio.

Nerves tingled in the pit of Kate's stomach as she stepped through the door. The stone steps were cold against the soles of her feet.

“Kate?”

She jumped and spun to her left, where her eyes found a man's shape in one of the big wicker chairs facing the Atlantic. “Mr. Hunter?”

“Trouble sleeping?”

Kate walked toward the masculine silhouette. “New place, I guess.”

“Have a seat.” He motioned at a second chair. “Wish I had that excuse.”

She lowered herself into the chair as Hunter picked up a glass that smelled of whisky. He drank deeply. When he put the glass back down on the tabletop, Kate heard the same clinking that had drawn her out onto the patio. “It's nice here.”

He nodded, his eyes fixed on the ocean.

“I know this is a hard time for you and Sarah. Mrs. Hunter's death, especially the way it happened . . .”

Now Charles Hunter turned to face the new nanny. “I'd prefer not to discuss Patricia's death.” His voice was sharp.

Kate began, “I understand you'd—”

“No,” he interrupted. “You don't.”

Some time passed. Hunter drank more whisky, and Kate watched waves tug at the pebbled beach. Finally he said, “Sorry. Didn't mean to snap.” He paused. “The Boston police called tonight. There's been, ah . . . there's been an arrest warrant issued for that grad student who was taking care of Patricia. What was his name? Scott . . .”

“Thomas.”

“Right.” Charles Hunter picked up his glass, killed the contents, and repeated the word. “Right.”

Kate got up and left the famous architect alone. Back in her room, she placed a call to a Boston hotel where she was given a forwarding number in New York.

The phone rang a dozen times before a hoarse “hello” came over the line.

“Is this Canon Walker?”

“Who wants to know?”

“This is Kate Billings, Scott's friend.” There was no response. “Do you know how to get a message to Scott? It's important.” She told Canon about the arrest warrant. She begged him to get Scott out of Boston, to help him stay away from the police until he could prove his innocence.

Canon hardly spoke. When Kate said good-bye, the line simply went dead.

Kate punched the
END
button on her cell phone and walked to the open window. She breathed deeply of the scents of early spring, carried on heavy salt air. She had almost hoped it wouldn't come to this. Almost. She sighed and punched in the number of a cell phone in Boston.

When a man's voice answered, she could hear music in the background. She didn't know it was Wagner. Click knew. He said, “Yeah?”

“It's Kate.”

Silence.

She went on. “There's a warrant out for Scott Thomas.”

“Good.”

Kate watched whitecaps roll across the black Atlantic. “I don't think so. He found the house, the porno . . .”

Click interrupted. “Took the hard disk from the computer, too. And somebody's been trackin' me through bulletin boards, trying to find me on the Net.”

She spun away from the window. “Shit!”

“Tell me about it.” His voice was calm. “Want me to kill him?”

Kate answered quickly, her voice clear. “Yes.”

“Sure?”

“Yes.”

“Cost you another five grand. Would be more, but I need the guy to go away, too. Figure killing him benefits you and benefits me. I could've emptied his bank account early on, and
you insisted . . .”

“If we'd taken everything, his checks would've started bouncing. He'd have known in no time that someone had access to his funds. And he may have called in the cops before we had time to convince him to try to handle things on his own.” She stopped to think. “You'll also remember that you wanted me to bang Scott and plant his semen at the scene.”

Click cussed. “Well, what's the hell's wrong with that? It's a lot less complicated than renting that house out in the country and filling it up with porno.”

“God.” Kate looked out at the waves. “The semen would've been dead by the time it got placed on the body. Remember, Patricia Hunter was in a hospital. We didn't have hours and hours before she was found. And, more important than that, every other cop show on television has someone getting framed with sperm.” She sighed. “No, Click. You're the computer jock. You know about computers. I'm a nurse. I know about biological evidence. That's why I'm doing the thinking. This is not a slash-and-burn operation.”

“Still,” he insisted, “I did what you wanted. Passed up thirty grand in Thomas's bank account. Could've emptied the whole thing. And now you gotta find more money to get the man dead. Shit. Like I said, killing Thomas benefits us both. But if I do all the work, I get paid for your benefit.” He paused. “Five grand.”

“You hear anybody arguing with you?” Her voice was hard. Sharp. “Just kill the bastard. And don't get cute and try to empty his accounts after he's dead. We've done pretty well. No need to give the cops something suspicious now.”

“Not a problem. Do whatever you gotta do to get the five grand together. I'll let you know where to send it.”

Kate walked across the room in bare feet and plopped onto the bed. Her eyes scanned the ceiling. She was thinking. “Let me know now. I'll wire the money tomorrow. This can't wait.”

“Always in a hurry. Always have been. Don't worry. I don't need the money in hand to do the job.” Click chuckled softly. “How long we known each other, Kate?”

“Since I was ten.”

“Think you know me pretty well?”

“I think so.”

He chuckled again. “What'll you think I'll do if I snuff this guy and you
don't
pay me?”

Kate's eyes stopped roaming. Her gaze came to rest on a water stain—an ugly discoloration in one corner of the otherwise perfect white ceiling. Something quivered in the pit of her stomach. “I'll pay you.”

“Yeah, Kate.” He paused. “I know you will.”

She let the threat pass. “One other thing. I just called that old guitar player Scott likes. He's in New York now at the Madison Hotel. I told him to tell Scott about the arrest warrant. Told him to get him out of Boston.”

“Why the hell—”

She cut him off impatiently. “
Again,
we don't need Scott talking to the cops. He's got more of this figured out than he knows.” Kate paused to take a deep breath. “Listen. This Cannonball Walker's a mean-ass old black guy who's got bad news written all over him. Probably been dodging cops since he was born. I used him for this once before. Don't worry. People like Walker don't go to the cops for help. They duck and dodge and slip out of town in the middle of the night. I'm telling you, the old man's going to keep Scott away from the cops, and that's going to give you the chance you need to finish him.”

Click laughed. “Katie? You are one devious fuckin' bitch.”

She ignored him. “Just make sure you get him. Everything else is working. All you have to do is make sure you stop Scott before he talks to anyone else.”

“He's good as gone. I guess that's it for business. Now, speaking of sperm. How 'bout telling me some of the kinky shit you're doing to help Charles Hunter through his grief? I bet you're wearing his old ass out.”

Kate punched the
END
button.

Squeezing through the bathroom window like toothpaste from a tube, Scott hit the rusted fire escape on the point of his left shoulder, rolled forward to get onto his feet, and almost pitched feet-first over the railing.

Inside, the quiet knocking had amplified into a banging fist. The last words Scott heard before scrambling down the rickety escape ladder were “Click! Where you at, boy?”

A filth-filled alley fed onto the street that fronted the building—the empty pavement wet and black. Scott waited, flattened against old brick that infused the thick muscles along his spine with aching cold.

No friend of Click's was likely to call the cops. More likely that some dumbass with a Glock would come charging out of the building, firing rounds intended to put the idiot in solid with Click.

Scott needed to move. He'd parked in the right place—a space chosen so he wouldn't have to cross in front of the building if he had to leave from the rear.

The muddy boots of a racing pulse stomped louder in his ears. His breath came fast, as if he'd been running. But still he pushed slowly off the brick wall, and he walked. Hands in pockets. Shoulders hunched against the wind. He walked through the night to his car, climbed inside, and drove away.

Back in his motel room, Scott pulled off layers of clothes and stepped into a steaming shower. He faced the hot spray and let the warmth flow over a sea of knotted muscles that seemed to start in his temples and end in the balls of his feet. He didn't wash. He just stood there. When the hot water was gone, he stepped out.

Stretched out on clean sheets, he tried to get his mind around what was happening. Scott had spent most of his life orphaned, moving from one boarding school to the next with no sense of home or continuity. Yet, at that moment, he felt a crushing, almost physical weight of loneliness settle over him. He turned on his side and faced the bedside table. A soiled motel phone offered escape. But he had no one to call. It was past two in the morning. Even if Kate Billings or Canon Walker had been in town . . .

And he was asleep.

Charles Hunter sat immobile on the patio for an hour after Kate went inside. The last slivers of ice had melted inside his glass. He tossed whisky-flavored water out onto the stone patio and reached down to pick up a bottle of Macallan from beside his chair. After tugging at the cork, he poured half a tumbler of scotch and took in a mouthful of warm bliss.

Charles tried to set the crystal tumbler on the stones and misjudged the distance. He felt it shatter and raised his fingers in the moonlight. Black blood rolled down from his ring finger into his palm. Charles chuckled. He got up, staggered a bit as he wound through wicker patio furniture, and picked up a ceramic jar from the breakfast table.

He examined the jar containing Patricia Hunter's ashes as if he'd never seen it. “You get the bloody hand, Lady Macbeth.” He stood there and chuckled again at his joke. “It's time.”

The architect stumbled as he crossed the patio and stepped onto the beach. Hard, cold pebbles punched at bare feet as he hobbled to the surf. He paused at the high-tide mark. Cold waves lapped his toes, and Charles struggled to stop his upper body from swaying. A purple mist hovered over the dark Atlantic. Pink and orange halos surrounded the moon. He was an architect, an artist, and he believed that such things uniquely resonated within his mind or soul or, he thought, wherever it was that his talent, his view of the world, resided.

He turned to look off down the crooked line of beach—to examine how the purple mist turned the blue-black of India ink in the distance.

And he saw him.

As real as the funeral urn in his hands—as real as the sand and surf and fog—Charles Hunter saw his son, Trey, running along the shoreline. It was something his track-star son had done a thousand times, training for the four-forty, running in deep sand to build his calves and hone his balance. Then, just as suddenly as he'd appeared, Trey's beautiful form dissolved into the fog.

It wasn't real. Charles knew that. And it was because it wasn't real that the tears came.

With the jar held between forearm and ribs, he tugged hard at the lid of Patricia's funeral jar, twisting and yanking and cursing. It was dark; he was drunk; it wouldn't budge. He mumbled something that sounded like “Stubborn bitch.”

Standing alone on the dark shoreline, Charles Hunter smiled. He held the jar in both hands now, extending it out in front of his body. With a bounce, he stepped forward, tossed the heavy jar into the air, and punted it hard with his bare right foot. The jar exploded; a cloud of billowing gray ash floated out over the churning waters.

Inside her bedroom, Kate heard an anguished scream pierce the warm sounds of wind and surf. She sprinted down the hallway, though the great room, and out onto the patio. Her hands trembled.

Mumbling.