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“You’ve been there?”

“No, but I took a correspondence course in their customs. Of course, there’s nothing like hands-on experience. What I learned is that, when this kind of ache comes up, there’s a particular spot that has to be massaged.”

“Smart natives.”

“Not there. Whatever are you thinking of?”

“I . . .”

“
Past
there.
Behind
it. Shall I explain what they discovered?”

“Absolutely. As long as you keep . . . I’ve got nothing else on my mind.”

“Behind your testicles.”

“Yes, I’m listening.”

“In the crutch of your legs, there’s a cord that leads from . . .”

“Yes, I feel it.”

“. . . your prostate to your testicles. And when I draw my index finger back and forth along that cord . . . So gently. With the flat of my finger. Are you sure I’m not boring you?”

“Definitely not.”

“Because if I
am
boring you . . .”

“No, please, keep . . .”

“When I trace my index finger along this cord, you’ll notice that it gets larger.”

“. . . Yes.”

“And that your testicles compact.”

“Yes.”

“And that the more I stroke this cord, your penis gets harder, your cord gets more swollen, your testicles get . . . What’s the matter? The cat got your tongue?” Tash asked.

“Something’s got something else of me. But the ache’s getting worse.”

“Then the treatment isn’t working. I’d better stop.”

“No. The treatment’s going to work. I’m sure of it.”

“I think it is, too. But I suddenly realized that I forgot the most important part. I have to position myself like this and lower myself down onto you like this and . . .”

“
Yes
.”

AFTERWARD, he lay spent, so relaxed that he didn’t move until a few minutes after Tash went into the shower. A high-pitched noise made him turn toward Tash’s purse. She had carried it up from the downstairs bedroom and left it on a chair outside the bathroom door. The cellular phone in the purse was making its unpleasant sound again.

“Hello?”

“Who’s
this
?” a husky voice asked. “
Coltrane
? What the—”

“Good morning, Walt.”

“What’s wrong with Tash’s phone? Last night, I tried for an hour to reach her. Now I’ve been trying for another hour. Nobody answers. She’s supposed to keep the phone with her wherever she goes.”

“And she has. I don’t understand why it didn’t . . .” Then Coltrane realized. “Until a while ago, her purse was in another part of the house. I guess we didn’t hear it.”

“House? She’s at
your
place? I thought you were taking her to a hotel.”

“Change of plan.”

“Put her on.”

“I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“She’s in the shower.”

Walt didn’t say anything for a moment. His voice was thicker when he spoke again. “You were right about microphones being in her house. I just got back to the station after the tech crew finished its search. There were bugs in every room. The SOB’s been listening to every word she said.”

“And everything you and the other men said when you were over there planning how to trap him.”

“We look like fools,” Walt said.

“Did you do what I suggested? Did you leave some of the microphones?”

“I don’t know what you think you’re—”

“Did you?”

“One. In the living room.”

“That’ll be enough.”

“But what’s this about?”

“I’ll explain when we get there. Two hours? The sheriff’s station?”

The bathroom door swung open. Tash came out with a towel wrapped around her, her wet hair combed close to her head, her features sculpted. She raised her eyebrows. “Is it Walt?”

Coltrane nodded.

Tash took the phone. “Good morning,” she said into it. Her voice was wonderful. She walked around Coltrane and pressed herself against his bare back. “No, it was a very quiet night. I went to bed early. I slept like the dead.”

THE DAY AFTER NEW YEAR’S, the Beverly Center was teeming with shoppers. The cavernous multistoried building reverberated with the rumbling echo of innumerable voices and footsteps. Coltrane was surprised. He had expected the place to be semideserted, everyone tired of shopping for Christmas, but maybe people were returning unwanted presents or looking for sales. Whatever the reason for their presence, they made it both easier and harder for him to accomplish his task: easier because he had expected to have trouble concealing himself while he took photographs of Tash’s progress through the mall, whereas the crowd gave him all the cover he needed; harder because the crowd also gave cover to his quarry, to anyone who followed Tash, showing undue interest in her and taking her picture.

He was on the third level of the massive shopping center, peering over a railing down toward the escalator that carried a steady stream of shoppers from the first level to the second and third. He was by no means the only one at the railing; otherwise, he would never have dared show himself. Across from him, several people drank coffee at a Starbucks concession. To his right, a group of teenagers leaned over, shouting down to friends. To his left, a middle-aged man leaned the other way, his back against the railing, sipping an Orange Julius while he waited for his wife to return from a dress shop that she had entered a few minutes after Coltrane got into position. Potted plants, pillars, and directional displays added further visual clutter, as did the continuous chaotic movement of shoppers just behind Coltrane. Anyone who suspected this might be a trap would take an awfully long while to spot Coltrane, and by then, Coltrane — or at least his camera — would have spotted
him
.

He glanced at his watch. Almost two o’clock. Any moment now, he thought, and lifted his camera from a shopping bag, adjusting its zoom lens. As if on cue, Tash stepped onto the escalator that led up from the first level to the second. Coltrane hadn’t expected to have any trouble seeing her. Her magnetic presence would have distinguished her in any crowd. Nonetheless, he was amazed by how immediately he noticed her. By contrast, the two men with her were relatively inconspicuous, one in front, the other in back: Walt’s partner, Lyle, and one of the state troopers whom Coltrane had met the previous afternoon. Both had the day off and had accepted the chance to earn more extra money as her bodyguards. They wore casual clothes and slightly oversized windbreakers that concealed the handguns they carried, their presence reassuring.

Coltrane returned his attention to Tash. Planning today’s strategy, the group had debated whether she should wear something attention-getting to make her easier for him to spot, but they had dismissed the idea as one that would be likely to make her stalker suspicious. Obviously, a woman afraid of being followed wouldn’t want to be conspicuous unless she was trying to bait a trap. Accordingly, they had agreed that she would wear something attractive without being ostentatious: camel slacks, a dark blue blazer, an ecru silk blouse, and modest silver earrings. But as Coltrane looked down at her from the railing of the third level, he now realized that it was impossible for her not to attract attention. Even from a distance, her beauty was manifest. With her hand on the railing of the escalator, her body turned sideways, she looked like a fashion model. As faces on the opposite, descending escalator pivoted in her direction, Coltrane started snapping pictures.

It wasn’t likely that anyone on the descending escalator would be the man he was hunting, but Coltrane didn’t want to take chances — there was no way of telling what he might inadvertently capture in the background. Three shots later, he raised his aim and got pictures of the crowd on both sides of where the escalator came up to the second level. Because he and Tash had verbally rehearsed her movements, Coltrane knew that she would turn toward the right. As a consequence, he moved simultaneously with her, but in the opposite direction, to the left, farther along the railing, able to snap several photographs of her shifting through the crowd below and across from him. A little farther along, he caught her entering a clothing boutique. Even with a zoom lens, it was hard to tell from this distance whether anyone gave her more than the usual admiring glances. No one seemed to be photographing her, but because he was looking mostly through the viewfinder, he couldn’t be sure. The magnified photographs would tell the story.

He changed position, heading to the right this time, to the store above the clothing store that she had entered. From that vantage point, he could look across the huge open space between levels. He could peer down toward the stores opposite the one that Tash had entered. He could see if anyone showed unusual interest in that store. Staying back from the railing so he wouldn’t be obvious, he made sure to change angles, getting as wide a variety of shots as possible.

Once more, he checked his watch. A half hour had passed. As he and Tash had planned, it was time for her to be coming out, so he shifted to the side opposite the door that she and her two bodyguards would be coming through. He caught photographs of the crowd on each side, of anyone who might be watching. Aware that she and her bodyguards would now head toward the down escalator, he reached a spot where he could take photographs of anyone watching from the first level as she and her escorts descended the escalator from the second level.

At the bottom, they moved out of his sight, heading along a corridor of stores toward an elevator that would take them to the parking garage. But by hurrying to the escalator and taking it three steps at a time down to the second level, Coltrane was able to get Tash in sight again and photograph the shoppers in the corridor below him. She entered the elevator. Its doors closed.

His camera clicked on the last exposure. As the rewind motor whirred, he lowered the camera. His back muscles slowly relaxed. But his tension was the result of exhilaration. Working a camera after so long had given him a rush, as had the clandestine nature of the photographs he was taking, the idea that he was trying to trap someone who wouldn’t know that he was being photographed. He wondered if that was the same kind of rush that the stalker got, the power of observing without being observed, of capturing someone’s soul without the target’s being aware that the theft had occurred. Suddenly chilled, he remembered the vulnerability and nakedness he had suffered when he found the photographs that Dragan Ilkovic had taken of him.

AS SOON AS THE CAMERA’S REWIND MOTOR FINISHED WHIRRING, he quickly removed the exposed film and put in a new roll. All the while, he calculated. He had to hurry to his car and get to Tash’s next destination, another clothing boutique, this one on the Third Street pedestrian shopping area in Santa Monica. After that, she would go to a similar store in Westwood and finally all the way down to yet another clothing boutique at the South Coast Plaza in Orange County. She owned all of them, he had learned. She also owned three more in San Diego and four in San Francisco.

“I have other investments, too,” she had said while they drove to the Malibu sheriff’s station that morning. “I try to stay out of their day-to-day affairs, but periodically I drop in just to let the managers know Big Sister is watching. In the case of the clothing boutiques, my interest is greater, so I pay visits more often. This afternoon and this evening would be a good time to make my rounds.”

“Do you ever phone your managers to alert them when you’re coming?”

“Always. Granted, it gives them a chance to hide anything that might be wrong, but it also makes me seem less adversarial than if I showed up unannounced, trying to catch them at something. I don’t want the managers to be afraid of me. I want them to work hard for me.”

“This morning, after you get back to your house, why don’t you use the phone to make appointments at the various stores for this afternoon? Add enough time between stops so I can get to each one ahead of you.”

“But what I say will be transmitted through the hidden microphone Walt left in the house. He’ll know my timetable.”

“Exactly,” Coltrane had said. “And we’ll know his.”

With the first phase completed, Coltrane got on the escalator down to the Beverly Center’s bottom level. The time was twenty-five to three. Depending on traffic, Tash needed only a half hour to get to the store in Santa Monica, but since the plan required him to arrive ahead of her, she had added another half hour to the timetable, making a 3:30 appointment with the manager. Tash’s stalker, who had presumably overheard the telephone conversation, wouldn’t expect her until then. Meanwhile, Coltrane would be able to arrive in time to start shooting various angles of the crowd. Of course, Tash’s stalker might decide not to show up at any of the—

A HAND SHOVED HIM FROM BEHIND, with such force that Coltrane lurched forward on the escalator and almost lost his balance. Startled, he grabbed the railing to keep from falling and spun toward the person who had shoved him. “Hey, watch where you’re—”

Twice as startled, he found himself face-to-face with Carl Nolan.

The sergeant and he were about the same height, six feet, but Nolan was on a step higher than Coltrane and seemed to tower, his weight lifter’s shoulders looking broader than usual.

Nolan jabbed him again, harder, jolting Coltrane’s right shoulder.

Almost falling, Coltrane gripped the railing harder. “What are you—”

“Keep your hands off her.”

People on the escalator couldn’t help noticing. As distracted as Coltrane was, he sensed their agitation.

“For God’s sake, have you lost your mind?”

Nolan jabbed him a third time. “Stay away from her.”

“If you don’t stop—”

“You’re missing the point.” Nolan gripped Coltrane’s right arm with a force that made Coltrane wince. “This is about
you
stopping.”

Coltrane suddenly felt off balance, the escalator no longer moving. With equal abruptness, he realized that he’d reached the bottom. The people who’d gotten off ahead of him scattered.