Forty Thieves (22 page)

“What changed?”

“He did, and I did, but slowly. Things started going better for me at home. A year made my kids that much older, and keeping up with them wasn’t as grueling. My husband was working on a different show that was shot entirely on studio soundstages instead of two thousand miles away, and he spent more time with me. One morning I woke up and I didn’t want to go see James that day. Then I realized I didn’t want to go again, ever. I was ashamed, and I was afraid, and I knew I had to tell James it was over before I lost everything.”

“And that’s when you learned he had changed?”

“Yes. Or maybe what had changed wasn’t him. Maybe he was always the same, and this was just when I understood. I told him that I wasn’t happy with what I’d done to my life. I wouldn’t be seeing him anymore.”

“I take it he didn’t like that?” Sid said.

“No.”

“Did he get angry? Hurt?”

“No. He just refused to allow it to happen.”

“What do you mean?” asked Sid.

“I told him it was over, and he said that it wasn’t up to me. I was committed, had made my decision, and I belonged to him now. If I ended the relationship, he would make sure that my husband saw some videos he’d taken. All he had to do was send one to my husband’s e-mail address. He also said he’d send one to each of my husband’s co-workers, and
one to each of the friends I’d ever mentioned to him. He seemed to remember all of their names. Later I realized he must have gotten the names off my phone one day while I was at his house.”

“Was he bluffing?” asked Sid.

She took a deep breath and let it out. “I didn’t know anything about any videos, so I assumed he was. I had been seeing him on Thursday afternoons at four, and that Thursday, I didn’t show up. He called my cell phone, but when I saw his number on the screen, I didn’t answer. He called again five minutes later. Then I heard the little signal that I was getting an e-mail. I opened it, and there we were—James and me—on his bed, in a video. It wasn’t as though I were unrecognizable, some woman in a pornographic movie or something. You could see my face clearly, even on the tiny cell phone screen.”

“What did you do?” asked Ronnie.

“I erased the video from my phone and called him.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him he was disgusting and evil. I said I hated him, and hung up.”

“How did he react?”

“He called me back. What he said was that he still expected me that afternoon as always. Then he hung up.”

“What did you do?” asked Ronnie.

“I was shocked. I sat there paralyzed. I had only bad choices. He had already shown me everything that he could show me about my predicament. He had the graphic proof, and he had demonstrated that he had the capability and the malevolence to send the video everywhere—to ruin my life. So I went.”

Ronnie said, “Linda, did you have anything to do with Ballantine’s death?”

She shook her head. “No. I didn’t. I’m not the kind of person who can kill someone. I spent a lot of nights wishing that I were.”

“What did you do?”

“I cried. But I resigned myself to tolerating him for the time being, because I could think of nothing else to do. I went there every Thursday, and did whatever he wanted. Afterwards, I went home to my children and my husband. But for those hours, I was his property.”

“I’m sorry,” said Ronnie. “It must have been awful. Do you think it’s possible that someone else found out what was going on and decided to kill him? Did you tell anyone?”

She shook her head. “I went along with everything. Sometimes he would tell me that I would get over feeling bad about it. This was just the way the world worked, and I had to find out sometime. Everyone was trying to get an advantage over everyone else, to take what the other person had. When he got into that mood it was awful.”

Ronnie said, “If you didn’t tell anyone about it, do you think it’s possible that he did? That he might have tried to blackmail your husband or bragged to someone who decided on his own to put a stop to it?”

Linda shook her head again. “That’s not what happened.”

“Then how did it end?” asked Ronnie.

“One night, after I had put the kids to bed, I was waiting for my husband to come home. I was thinking about him, and how what I was doing to keep my secret was worth it. He came home, and sat down. He sat across from me and put his head in his hands. And he told me some news.”

“What news?”

“He had decided to end the marriage. He had found somebody else. She was a twenty-four-year-old PA on the show where he’d been working, and eventually he got around to admitting that he had been sleeping with her for a year. The times when he had not been able to come home, he’d been with her. I said, ‘It’s all right. We can get through this. I’ll forgive you, and we’ll start all over again.’ He said he couldn’t. He wanted a divorce, and he planned to file right away. He wouldn’t be a jerk about the property settlement in the divorce, because he wanted to take care of me. And if I wanted full custody of the kids, he would understand. Angela—that was her name—wanted to build her career, and having kids around wasn’t part of her plan. But the one thing that was off the table was staying with me.”

“Wow,” said Ronnie. “That’s tough.”

“Out of curiosity, I asked him if he remembered the time about a year before, when I was in New York for my aunt’s funeral, and my plane got delayed in Chicago. He didn’t remember.”

“Did that make him suspect something had gone on?”

“No. He was consumed by his own guilt. He thought I was asking whether my being away that night caused his cheating. After the divorce papers were filed, I told James Ballantine that the reason for the divorce was that I had finally told my husband the truth. I never heard from him after that.”

“Do you remember the date when this happened?” Sid asked.

“May fifteenth, two years ago.”

Ronnie said, “We really appreciate that you had the courage to tell us what happened. I wish you could have been spared all of that.”

Linda said, “I was sure the police would find whatever he had kept about me, and they’d come to ask me about him.”

“They didn’t know what you’ve just told us, or they would have,” Sid said. “A lot of people have been killed for a lot less than he did.”

“At the time, I did think about killing myself. Not him,” she said. “After that, when I wasn’t in his power anymore, I felt nothing. Whoever killed him, it was for some other reason. I agreed to talk to you because when he died, I heard and read all this stuff about what a great guy he was. I thought somebody would tell the truth, or find the videos, and the police would come. They never came.”

“There was no traceable connection between him and you,” said Ronnie. “Nobody the police talked to even knew you existed.”

“If it’s possible, I’d really like it if you could keep what I’ve told you quiet—that I was the one. I remarried about a year ago, and—”

“We’ll do everything we can to protect your privacy,” said Ronnie. She touched her arm gently, and gave a comforting smile. “Thank you again.”

A few minutes later, as they were walking to their car, Sid said, “You didn’t tell her where all the videos went.”

“Neither did you.”

“Not my job. I was letting you take the lead on the interviews with the women. They always seem to trust you.”

“They all see me and think they’re talking to their mother. They’re not.”

17

Nicole’s fear was like a whip. It woke her at dawn with an awareness of things she was going to have to force herself to accomplish, and the list seemed to have no end. She had already spent the past two days evicting herself from her house. Bugging out was incredibly hard work. First she had gathered items that were incriminating or might lead a pursuer to find her and Ed. Next she had gone through the whole house retrieving small but valuable possessions—money, her jewelry, a few garments that she knew made her look thinner or younger and that she could never hope to find in a store again.

In the first load she included a few well-disguised guns and the ammunition that went with them, thinking less of the cost of high-end firearms than of which ones were most likely to be useful in their current predicament, and which should be stored.

Nicole wanted to take the things out of the house that were dangerous to them, not empty it completely. She didn’t remove any big items like appliances or furniture, or cheap items like framed prints or bedclothes or pots and pans or
towels. She left enough of her clothes and Ed’s so a person who didn’t know them well would think the Hoyts had never left.

She was careful to remove every photograph. Most were pictures of her or of Ed, but she didn’t leave any of the others either. She didn’t want an enemy to have pictures of her friends and relatives, or of the places where she and Ed had been. In her time working with Ed they had been hired a number of times to hunt some person down and kill him. She had learned that people on the run tended to favor pleasant places they had visited on vacations or at school or in the military. Some of them were foolish enough to think they could seek shelter with their families, and some chasers were mean enough to start butchering the families to bring a fugitive out into the open. Photographs would show a hunter what she and Ed looked like, where they had been, what their relatives looked like, and maybe even where they lived. Sometimes she felt tempted to leave false leads for the pursuers, but she had learned that it was best to leave no information at all.

She left all of the things necessary to make the house look occupied. If it took a pursuer three days to be sure that the Hoyts were gone, then those were three whole days that Nicole and Ed could use. In three days, a person could go around the world and back. She even decided to sacrifice her Lladro figurines, because they were too pretty and expensive for anybody to believe she’d leave them. She moved them into the antique china cabinet that she and Ed had been using as a wine case, and stuck the wine bottles in a cheap wine rack she’d always refused to have in her way in the kitchen. The process gave her a chance to wipe the fingerprints off those smooth, perfect glass surfaces.

Nicole washed all the sheets, blankets, towels, and clothes that weren’t already clean, vacuumed all the floors, and had Ed replace the vacuum bags. She put them in trash bags along with all of the shredded receipts, bills, and other financial paper, and drove them to a dumpster behind a store five miles away. She collected the credit cards and licenses and other identification cards and replaced them with the cards in false names that she and Ed had kept for an occasion like this.

She put everything she and Ed wanted to keep in a storage space they rented in a storage facility on Vineland Avenue in North Hollywood. It was a single building with a high fence around it, and all the spaces were inside, so there was no likelihood of casual theft. The company was having a long-term rental sale, so she rented the space for three years in advance. She took the batteries out of their cell phones and left them in storage, and then bought new prepaid phones.

Nicole left a little of the money she had found in Boylan’s house in the rented storage space, and put the rest in their bugout kit. The bugout kit took quite a bit of planning, and that was where Ed concentrated his efforts now. The kit was in two medium-sized ballistic nylon travel duffels. Inside each duffel Ed placed a layer of stacked hundred-dollar bills in sealed plastic bags. Above that was a 9mm Heckler & Koch MP5 rifle configured for full automatic fire with a retractable stock and four loaded thirty-round magazines. In a pocket just under the zipper were a Sig Sauer P250 compact .45 semiauto pistol with a silencer and three full magazines. The rest of the duffel he filled in with clothes they would need.

Ed spent more time with their cars, particularly the gray Toyota Camry that Nicole called the invisible car. He changed the oil, filled the gas tank, adjusted the tire inflation, and loaded the bugout kits into the trunk. He had already decided that he would leave his big black pickup truck in the driveway if they ever had to disappear. That was a worthwhile sacrifice for several reasons. People would assume that he would never leave it, because anyone could look at that truck and know he loved it. The truck was clean, unscratched, and waxed by a detailer, and its deep, shiny finish was like a dare. The truck was capable of hauling heavy weights—its frame, engine, and wheels were big and strong—but it was not a work truck. Parking that truck in the driveway in front of the closed garage door was like placing a sign there that said the man who owned it was inside the house waiting for you to try something.

If Ed and Nicole had to go on the run, a vehicle like that would be far too memorable. And besides, leaving it would prevent Nicole from being tempted to bitch about the things she had to abandon.

When all of the cleaning and storage had been done, Ed and Nicole waited. Sooner or later somebody was going to find Vincent Boylan and his wife, and then the Hoyts would learn whether someone else—maybe the clients who’d dealt with Boylan—knew about them and wanted to kill them. Boylan had sworn he would never tell anyone, but that sort of assurance was worthless.

While Ed and Nicole waited, they continued their preparations. They plugged timers into most of the sockets in the house. The bedroom lamps came on at 6:39 a.m. and went
off at 7:27, and then came on again at 8:22 p.m. and off at 12:17. A radio in the kitchen came on at 7:20, off at 8:33, and came on again for a time after lunch. The big television set in the den went on at 8:00 in the evening and went off at 11:30. Ed had the air-conditioning thermostat set to seventy-two so it would run whenever an observer expected it to. When Nicole had finished washing virtually every piece of cloth in the house, Ed set the washer and the dryer on timers so they would run once in proper sequence on the day after the Hoyts left. Every room had its own schedule, so something that made light or noise would turn on as it would if the home were occupied.

At the end of the fifth day Ed and Nicole learned that someone had found Boylan and his wife. The Hoyts had assumed that they would first read about it online or in the local paper, or see a story about it on television. Instead they saw the reaction.