He changed direction yet again, hurrying back toward the shore. The man who had appeared from the side of the house had assumed that Coltrane would continue to rush inland. As a consequence, the man had left his strategic position and was racing inland, as well. Coltrane outmaneuvered him, continuing to charge along the shore.
“Damn it!” someone yelled.
Coltrane avoided a difficult shelf of rock and felt something twist in his stomach when he saw that the shore curved inward. To avoid the waves facing him, he would have to go inland again. His pursuers racing closer, he hurried around the half circle of the shore.
As one of the men darted at him from the side, Coltrane recalled how he had used his cameras to defend himself in Bosnia. He pulled the camera from around his neck, gripped its cord, and reached back to swing the camera toward the head of the attacking man.
“Hey!” The man lurched back.
Simultaneously, Coltrane lurched also, the backward motion of his arm causing him to lose his balance. His feet slipped out from under him. The next thing, all he saw was the sky as his body arched backward. The shock of cold water took the remainder of his breath away.
Not that it mattered. He couldn’t breathe anyhow. He was submerged in a hollow among the rocks, flailing to reach the surface. The current of a wave gripped him. Thrashing with cold-cramped arms, he heard a roaring in his ears. When he broke through the surface, the sun was almost blinding. Buffeted by another wave, he gasped and fought to inhale. Swallowing water, he coughed and tasted salt, then struggled against the weight of his water-filled shoes and soaked clothes and pawed toward a shelf of rock.
“Let him drown,” a man said.
Peering up through water-bleared eyes, he saw the men standing along the shore, just beyond the reach of the waves, their faces as craggy as the shelves of rock. They wore sneakers, jeans, and windbreakers, and looked like the only thing they had wanted for Christmas was a renewal of their exercise-club memberships.
“Yeah, let’s do the world a favor,” another said.
“Sure,” a third said. “He ran. He fell. We couldn’t get him out before he drowned.”
“But think about the lousy paperwork.”
Coltrane’s right hand gripped the shelf of rock. A wave thrust him toward it but as quickly tugged him away. His numbed hand lost its hold.
“The paperwork’s worth it,” the first man said. “Can you think of any better way to spend New Year’s than watch this prick drown?”
“Not me,” the fourth man said.
Aching from the cold, Coltrane got another grip on the rocks and strained to pull himself up. A wave knocked him against the shelf, making him groan. But despite the undertow, he mustered the strength to grip the shelf harder, pulling himself higher.
“Hold it.” The first man stepped forward and pressed the sole of his sneaker against the back of Coltrane’s right hand.
Coltrane winced.
“You didn’t ask, ‘May I?’” the man said.
“What do you think, Carl?” The second man turned toward someone approaching. “Do we let this jerk drown or pull his sorry ass out?”
Coltrane struggled as another wave splashed over him, his numbness worsening. He coughed and fought for air. Despite the bleariness in his salt-irritated eyes, he peered helplessly upward and managed to get a look at the person joining them, a man in sneakers, jeans, and a windbreaker similar to what the others wore, a man whose brown hair was trimmed to almost-military shortness and whose matching brown eyes had a no-nonsense steadiness, showing no reaction as he gazed down at Coltrane.
“Pull him out.”
“What kind a fun is that? At least let’s watch him splash around a little longer.”
“No, pull him out. This isn’t the guy we want.”
“How can you be sure.”
“I know him.”
“What?”
“He’s a photographer named Mitch Coltrane. He lives in Los Angeles, and believe me, he was otherwise occupied when all of this started. We’ve got the wrong man.”
The man who pressed his sneaker against Coltrane’s hand took a quick step backward.
Coltrane strained to get out of the water. The newcomer quickly grabbed him, raising him dripping from the waves.
“Are you all right?” the man who had saved him asked.
“Frozen.” Coltrane’s teeth chattered. “I didn’t know your first name was Carl.”
“That’s because I wanted you to think that my first name was Sergeant.”
“What are you doing here?”
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask you,” Nolan said. “And I can’t wait to hear your answer.”
5
Y OU CAN SEE WHERE WE WOULD HAVE GOTTEN THE WRONG IDEA .” The first man gestured apologetically.
A blanket wrapped around him, Coltrane didn’t respond, only kept shivering as he sat in a white wooden chair in an all-white living room. The back wall was composed entirely of glass, providing a panoramic view of the ocean. The late-afternoon sun blazed in but didn’t warm him.
“You were peeking in her windows,” the second man said.
“Give me a break. I was checking the house from the road, trying to see if it looked like anybody was at home.”
“And taking pictures of the place,” the third man said.
“I’m a professional photographer. That’s what I do, take pictures.”
“Including of a woman you claim you’ve never seen before, while you’re trespassing?” the fourth man asked.
“Yeah, how come you were sneaking up on the house?”
“Sneaking up?” Coltrane asked.
“I suppose you’re going to tell us you walked all the way here from L.A. Where’s your car?”
Anger raised Coltrane’s temperature as he told them where he had left his car.
“Okay, okay, that explains why you were on foot. But you weren’t just sight-seeing. You didn’t just happen to pick this house. What are you doing here?”
“I could have hit my head and been killed. You threatened to let me drown. I’m not answering any more questions until I find out who you are and what the hell’s going on.”
The group lapsed into an uncomfortable silence.
For the first time since entering the house, Nolan spoke. He had been standing in the background, shaking his head unhappily. “I think you already have a pretty good idea who the rest of these men are.”
“The same as you—police officers.”
“Not quite the same.” In deference to the all-white decor, Nolan and everyone else had taken off their shoes. His socks whispered on the thick wall-to-wall carpet. “Malibu doesn’t have a police department. Walt and Lyle here are with the local sheriff’s department. Pete and Sam are with the state police. The rest of these men are LAPD.”
“And how did you get involved?” Coltrane asked. “Since when do L.A. policemen work in Malibu?”
“They don’t,” Nolan said. “Unless it’s their day off and they’re here unofficially, doing somebody a favor.”
“Me,” the first man said. Nolan had introduced him as Walt. “I’m the one he was doing a favor.”
“It’s a stalker situation.” Nolan gestured wearily, having dealt with crimes of this sort too many times before. “The woman living here has been harassed for the past three weeks by someone who seems to know everything she does. Until a while ago, he phoned her constantly. Even though she changed her number five times and none of them was ever listed, he still managed to find out what the new ones were and keep calling her. Finally, she had the phone taken out of service.”
“That explains the computerized voice I heard when I tried to call yesterday.”
“So you did try to call,” the second man, Lyle, said. “I was going to ask you why you didn’t phone instead of paying an unexpected visit on New Year’s Day.”
“You still think I’m lying?”
“Just crossing the t’s.”
“Meanwhile
,” Nolan interrupted, “she started getting photographs.”
Coltrane straightened.
The men studied him—he had never been looked at so directly.
“Photographs.” Coltrane understood. “So when I showed up with a camera and started taking her picture, you assumed . . .”
“The photographs she receives—there are hundreds—have been taken wherever she goes,” Nolan said. “No matter what she does, somebody manages to shoot pictures of her.”
Coltrane felt a return of the bone-cold sensation of having been in the water, except that in this case he was frozen because he remembered how violated he had felt when he learned that Ilkovic had followed and photographed him.
“And that doesn’t include the bouquets of flowers that are delivered to her a half dozen times a day. Not always when she’s at home. She’s been getting them at restaurants, at her dentist’s, once even at her gynecologist’s. A note read, ‘Thinking of you,’” Nolan said. “Love letters on the windshield of her car. Special-delivery proposals of marriage.”
“So, naturally, she got worried enough to call the sheriff’s department,” Walt said. He had a brush cut, a squarish face, a sand-colored mustache, and a slight scar above his right eyebrow. “I’m the one who came out and interviewed her. We’re not a big department. We don’t have a lot of staff and resources, but that’s what we were going to need, I knew, because right away it was obvious that the complainant needed surveillance, and not just in Malibu. We might care about jurisdictions, but the guy we’re after is free to roam as he pleases. The complainant has business in Los Angeles. She goes there often. So I decided to call the LAPD Threat Management Unit and see if they had any advice.”
“Which is where I come in,” Nolan said. “Walt and I went to the Police Academy together. For a time, he was with the LAPD Robbery Division, but eventually he moved up here.”
“For the peace and quiet,” Walt said, as if peace and quiet were not what he had found.
“He asked for me,” Nolan said, “and we discussed the obvious problem, which is that, strictly speaking, this ardent admirer hadn’t broken the law.”
Coltrane cocked his head in confusion.
“The problem is that, in addition to a pattern of harassment, there has to be an element of threat,” Nolan said. “To you or me, it might be common sense that someone who pesters a woman night and day with professions of love is trying to intimidate her. But the district attorney’s office might not see it that way. They might worry that a jury will figure this guy is more a nuisance than a threat. I once had a case where a stalker sent chocolates to a woman all the time, boxes and boxes. Phoned her constantly. Wrote hundreds of letters. She felt threatened and wanted him stopped. A restraining order didn’t do any good. So I arrested him, and the case actually went to trial. But the jury couldn’t decide if he was guilty of anything. This happened around Valentine’s Day. One woman on the jury later said she thought sending all those chocolates was ‘quaint.’ Honest to God. Anyway, after the hung jury, the guy showed up at the woman’s house one night and shot her in the head. Said he got tired of waiting for her to marry him. Said if he couldn’t have her, nobody would. How’s that for true love?”
“But in this case, we got lucky,” Lyle said.
“If you want to call a threat lucky,” Walt added. “The ardent admirer sent our complainant a funeral wreath with a ribbon across it that read, ‘Till death do us part.’ That’s not the most explicit threat I ever heard of, but the ten-pound heart that came with the wreath certainly was. It turned out to be a bull’s. It had an arrow through it, and a note attached to the arrow. ‘Be mine. You’re wounding my heart. Don’t make me wound yours.’ Tender, don’t you think?”
“And enough to make a jury put him away,” Coltrane said.
“Maybe not for long. But hey, the complainant would breathe easier for a while at least. Hell, maybe this jerk would use the time to reconsider how he shows affection.”
“You don’t have any idea who he is?”
“No, and neither does the complainant. The obvious temptation is to suspect he’s someone she knows. But that’s not always the way these things work. He might be someone she met five years ago and doesn’t remember. Maybe he’s a clerk at the bank she uses. Sometimes it takes only one look for a creep like this to get fixated on someone. We do know he orders the flowers by sending a letter of instructions along with cash to various flower shops. The wreath and the bull’s heart were delivered by a parcel service. The return address on the packages was bogus. While the phone was still working, the guy frequently left his voice on the complainant’s answering machine, but she doesn’t recognize it.”
“The best tactic we could think of,” Walt said, “was to try to entrap him.”
Lyle explained further. “Before the complainant had her phone disconnected, we told her to tell this guy when he called that it was time to put up or shut up, that she’d be waiting for him here this afternoon. She made certain he understood how angry she was with him and that she wanted to see him face-to-face to guarantee he got the point that she wanted nothing at all to do with him.”
“It was an ultimatum we hoped he couldn’t refuse,” Nolan said. “Especially because, when the phone was disconnected yesterday, the creep had no way to get in touch with her to try to renegotiate the terms of the meeting.”
“Then we sent for the cavalry,” Walt said. “Lyle and I are officially on duty. These other guys are friends helping out.”
“On New Year’s Day. I’m impressed,” Coltrane said. “Friends wouldn’t normally give up New Year’s Day to—”
“The complainant’s generous,” one of the other men said.
The rest of the group looked at the man as if he had said too much.
“There’s nothing wrong with it,” Walt said. “When we’re off duty, she hires us to be her protection. One or the other of us goes into L.A. with her.”
“Speaking of . . .” One of the state troopers glanced around nervously. “Where is Tash?”
The group tensed.
“Jesus.” Walt snapped to attention. “What happened to her? The last time I saw her, she was coming out of the water and we were chasing—”
6
I NEEDED TO GET INTO SOMETHING DRY ,” a voice said from above, on Coltrane’s right.
He turned toward a stairway, seeing a bare foot appear on the landing. The voice was full-throated, making Coltrane think of similar-voiced actresses in films from the thirties and forties. In his memory, they were always in a sparkling evening gown, standing next to a piano in a nightclub, exchanging repartee with a handsome hero in a white dinner jacket.
But the woman who descended the white carpeting on the stairway wasn’t wearing an evening gown. She wore a cotton sweatsuit, the raspberry color of which enhanced her tan face, dark eyes, and even darker hair. Although the exercise suit was oversized, a dramatic opposite to the tight wet suit she had worn a little while ago, her present outfit was nonetheless almost as revealing. The loose seat suggested the trim firmness of the hips it concealed. The similarly loose top moved up and down in the front and suggested that the woman had not put on a bra.
Everyone watched as she reached the bottom. Coltrane had the sense that the men liked to see her bare feet touch the plush carpeting, but his own attention was directed toward her face: the broad forehead, high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes, slender nose, curved lips, angular chin, and narrow jaw that were the elements of classical beauty and that Rebecca Chance had been blessed with. But a catalog of her features couldn’t communicate the animation of those features. Even in a sweatsuit, this woman had come down the stairs with the same fluid ease that Rebecca Chance had shown descending a staircase, wearing a sarong in Jamaica Wind. Her hair, still wet from having been in the ocean, was pushed back, clinging to her head, the way Rebecca Chance had pushed it back as she waded out of a river in The Trailblazer. That pose coming out of the river had been the same as the pose in Rando
lph Packard’s photographs of Rebecca Chance stepping out of the ocean, the same pose that this woman had assumed as she came out of the ocean onto the rocks not long ago.
Coltrane’s mind was aswirl.
“Hello.” She approached Coltrane, her gaze locked intimately on his as she held out her hand. “I’m Tash Adler, and I’m sorry about the misunderstanding.”
Coltrane felt a spark when their hands touched. Only static electricity from the carpet, he told himself. And yet . . .
“I hope you aren’t hurt.”
“No, I’m fine.” Coltrane suddenly felt foolish holding the blanket around him. “A little cold is all.” He eased the blanket off him. “Nothing serious.” He repressed another shiver, his wet clothes clinging to him. “Tash?”
“It’s short for Natasha. You should get into something dry before you catch pneumonia.” The concern in her voice made him feel that at that particular moment he was the most important person in the world to her. “But where am I going to find dry clothes for you? I don’t think you’ll fit into one of my bathrobes.”
The fact was, she was only about three inches shorter than Coltrane’s six-foot height, and he might indeed have fitted into one of her bathrobes.
“I know,” Tash said. “Why don’t you go into the bathroom down the hall, take off your wet clothes, and give them to me. I’ll put them in the dryer.”
“I . . .”
“It’ll take only fifteen minutes,” Tash said. “We’ll leave the door ajar so you can be part of the conversation and not feel you’re in limbo. I’ll make a pot of strong hot coffee for everybody and hand a cup in to you.”
Coltrane’s face felt warm, only partly because his cheeks were losing their numbness from the cold water. “Sure.”