Forty Thieves (23 page)

Each night after midnight they opened the blackout curtains on the windows, went out, and sat on a pair of lawn chaises in the big yard behind their property to watch their house from a distance. Their gray Camry was parked on a street two blocks away, and the house was locked. Each of them held one of the silenced .45 pistols under a light jacket. The first couple of nights they had simply fallen asleep and awakened at dawn then gone to a hotel for the rest of their night’s sleep.

But the fifth night felt different almost immediately. Their house was near the end of a road, and there were only three houses past the corner, but twice during the late evening a car passed, moving very slowly as though the driver were
studying their house minutely. Then the street was quiet for a time.

Ed and Nicole watched for a couple of hours, and then fell asleep. But then the car came back, and Nicole awoke. She saw a dark SUV moving along the road toward their house. It was going so slowly that she couldn’t think of a practical reason to drive that way except to keep the engine noise to an absolute minimum.

The SUV stopped at the curb in front of their house, but nobody got out. Then a second SUV came along the same route and stopped behind the first. Nicole reached out and touched Ed. He leaned forward with the stillness of a big pointer hound, his eyes focused on the part of the road he could see between the houses.

The lights of the two vehicles went out. Doors opened and shut. In a moment, shadowy shapes were moving along both sides of their house. She could see there were guns. Their weapons were short and stubby like Uzis or Mac-10s. Their movements were reminiscent of a police raid, but the cars and the equipment didn’t look official. A couple of the men were silhouetted briefly in the light of a bulb over the Hoyts’ garage. After a minute the light went out as though the bulb had been unscrewed. Each man took a position under one of the house’s windows. A silent signal passed from man to man, beginning at the rear of the house at the kitchen door and moving to the front.

Nicole watched the kitchen window and saw a dim light at the end of the hall as the front door swung open, and then the shapes of men rushing inside—one, two, three, and then the front door closed and they were invisible. Ed placed his
silenced pistol on his lap but stayed where he was, so Nicole imitated him.

Inside the house, flashlights came on as the men moved through the living room. Two of the lights went out and then reappeared in the back bedroom, dancing along the walls and the ceiling, and then moved on. The men were clearing the rooms, making sure nobody was inside waiting to ambush them, or hiding in a closet. Nicole could follow their progress by watching the men stationed at the windows, because they stepped up to the glass with weapons raised as the penetration team reached their areas.

After a few minutes a wave went from man to man along the outside of the house, and they all moved off in single file the way they had come. The men piled into the second SUV, and it backed up, turned around, and moved slowly up the street away from the house.

But the three men searching the house stayed. Their flashlights came on and they moved from room to room, this time not looking for the Hoyts, but conducting a search of the contents of the house.

Nicole leaned so close to Ed that her lips brushed his ear. “I’d like to get out of this yard.”

He whispered back, “I’d like to get out of this state. But I’d better take a picture of that car’s plates so we can figure out who these guys are. Meet me at the car.”

Ed climbed over the fence to the next yard, and then moved forward to the road, staying as low as he could. He stopped and looked toward his house. The SUV was sitting driverless in front. The three men inside the house were still busy ransacking the place, but he knew that probably wouldn’t go on for long. He and Nicole had taken everything
out that was worth stealing, and anything that could be used to find out where they had gone.

Ed moved closer, trying to get a picture of the SUV on his phone, then looking at the image and seeing it was too dark to read the plate number. This part of the road had no streetlamps, the houses nearby were dark, and the moon seemed to be obscured by clouds. He moved onto the sidewalk and began to trot. As long as the men were busy they wouldn’t see him.

He kept glancing at the front door of his house to be sure the men weren’t coming out. Then he was close enough to read the plate number. He switched to the note function and a keyboard appeared, so he punched in the license number. He knew the plate might be stolen, so he stepped to the windshield of the SUV and used the faint glow of the phone’s screen to illuminate the vehicle identification plate and punched the long number into the phone’s memory.

The front door of the house swung open, and a man stood on the front steps, saw Ed, and raised his short-barreled machine pistol.

In an instant Ed read the man’s reluctance to open up on the vehicle that was his way home, rested his silenced pistol on the hood just below the windshield, and shot him in the chest. He didn’t wait for the fall. Instead, he ducked and ran to take advantage of the two seconds of confusion in the minds of the other two men.

When Ed made it to the rear of the SUV he kept running past instead of stopping to fire on them.

The second man had already trained his silenced submachine gun on the spot where he expected Ed to be, a foot
behind the SUV, so when he fired, his bullet passed through the space Ed had just left.

Ed made it to the corner of his house near the driveway, but instead of sprinting past as the men now expected him to do, Ed stopped, dropped to his belly, brought his gun around the corner, and managed to shoot the second man as he jumped from the front steps to go after Ed. The bullet hit the man’s torso just below the sternum, so when his feet hit the ground his legs buckled and he sprawled on the front lawn.

The third man was a quick thinker who saw instantly that there was nothing he could gain by staying. He sprang from the top step and dashed for the SUV.

Ed fired, but he was distracted by the quick series of muzzle flashes from the other corner of his house. The man looked from Ed’s vantage as though he were running into the ground, his legs bending so they seemed shorter until his face hit the lawn. Nicole stepped out from the corner of the house and stopped to fire a round into the head of each of the three men, then approached Ed. “You okay?”

“So far,” he said. “You?”

“So far. We’d better get these guys off the lawn.”

They loaded the three bodies into the SUV, and then Nicole relocked the front door of the house and turned on the sprinkler system to cycle once and wash the blood into the lawn. Ed drove the SUV and dropped Nicole two blocks away at their gray Camry.

They drove a few miles to a neighborhood in Van Nuys where there were streets full of large old apartment buildings. Ed looked for one with big signs advertising vacancies, drove the SUV up the driveway to the parking area in the back, and found that four of the carports had no cars parked
in them at this hour of the night. Those must be for the tenants of the vacant apartments. He pulled the SUV into one of them, spent a minute taking the wallets and cell phones from the three bodies, and then walked out the driveway to the street, where Nicole waited in the Camry. Ed got into the passenger seat of the Camry, and let Nicole drive off.

Ed began to look through the wallets he had taken from the three dead men. “This one has a license from Kern County.”

“Has he got a name?” she asked.

“Volkonsky.”

“With an i?”

“No. A y.”

“A Russian,” she muttered. “What about the others?”

“Gregorin. Malikov. No Polacks. All Russians, I think. Now we don’t know if Boylan was working as a go-between for Russian gangsters, or if whoever he was working for just happened to know some Russians. Or if these guys were members of a gang.”

“Well they weren’t a bunch of wedding planners.”

“You know what I mean. Connected guys, not just guys with Russian names.”

“I don’t think it matters a whole lot who they were. The guy we have to worry about is the one who hired them. He probably thinks Boylan told us who he is, and he’s afraid of us. He’s got a lot of money and he can just keep hiring people until one of them kills us.”

Ed sat still for a few seconds, staring out the windshield. “You’re right. But we’ve got their cell phones. Those phones will show the numbers of the calls they got, where they’ve been, all kinds of things. The phones are our link to the guy who hired us all—Boylan, us, and these Russians.”

18

The Abels sat at the table in their hotel room with the curtain open, waiting for the coffee they’d made in the little machine the hotel supplied. The sky outside was still dark. In a half hour the upper floors of the building would be painted in the orange light of dawn while the lower floors would still be in shadow. There was a steamy, spluttering noise, and Ronnie got up, walked to the coffeemaker, and filled two cups.

She sipped her coffee, carried the cups back to the table, and sat down beside Sid. She kissed his cheek. “I guess we should start getting ready so we can go see what Ballantine’s next girlfriend can tell us. She’s got an appointment at nine, so she wants to see us before she has to leave.”

Sid looked down at the file on the table. “Emily Prosser.” He sipped his coffee and set it back down. He didn’t look happy to have it.

“Is something bothering you?” Ronnie asked.

“Not really,” said Sid. “I was just thinking.”

“You’re not eager to interview another one, are you? I would have thought you’d be interested in hearing all these women tell you about their sex lives.”

“They all should have been interviewed a year ago, when their memories were fresh. If Kapp had asked Ballantine’s wife right away, she might have told him about them.”

“I met Kapp in the old days, when I worked North Hollywood. You ever run into him?”

“I don’t think so,” Sid said.

“It wouldn’t have done any good if he had interviewed those women. They never would have told him anything.”

“Really?”

She nodded. “He was okay, but he wasn’t a woman, and he didn’t have the right personality to make women open up. He was a tough, all-business cop, and no genius. They would have known at the start that they didn’t have to tell him anything personal, just wait him out. And he didn’t exude enough bogus sympathy to make them forget to protect themselves.”

“I’m glad I married you instead of him,” said Sid.

“I can believe it,” she said. “I look better than Kapp even now. And with me around, you don’t have to be sensitive, or even smart.”

As Ronnie stood in the shower she thought about Sid. In his career as a cop he had worked with all kinds of people in rough situations. Each time he’d moved on, just about everyone had been sorry to see him go. He was tough—a lot tougher than Kapp had been. But he had gone into police work believing that people were worth risking his life for. He had walked away from the department twelve years later with approximately the same belief, just a century older and with lower expectations.

Hers were probably even lower. Seeing the things people did to each other had been a shock to her. And Sid had missed out on Ronnie’s personal vulnerability on the police force, her sex. Every woman had to prove over and over again that while she couldn’t be as big or as strong as a male cop, she could be good at the job. She learned to be an expert at talking desperate people out of doing things that were sure to cause them pain and sorrow. She trained herself to be one of the best at using the tools—the laws, the gun, the handcuffs, the baton—to keep the peace. Later, when she was a detective, she acquired encyclopedic knowledge of techniques of detection and the psychology of suspects, witnesses, and victims.

She’d also made sure that no cop who worked with her had ever needed to wonder how she would behave in a fight. She had gone first through a lot more broken-in doors than she should have, just to keep that question from entering anybody’s mind. When she and Sid had both gotten about as good as they could get, built reputations as among the finest of the finest, they had given notice and then left.

They had wanted to work together, after years of seeing each other for only a couple of hours between the end of his shift and the beginning of hers. They had been happy enough since then, and they’d managed to raise two children to adulthood. The kids were hardly images of their parents, and not even people she and Sid agreed with very often, but they were okay. And she and Sid had solved a lot of cases, in spite of the fact that most of them had come to their attention after they were essentially over—already worked to their limits and abandoned for lack of progress.

The murder of James Ballantine was another one. The case had turned dangerous as soon as they started looking into it, but the danger had revealed nothing. Now, at last, Ronnie was beginning to see some progress. Ballantine had been a difficult victim at first—impeccable history, no vices, no vulnerabilities, no enemies, no friends. But now she and Sid had found an opening, a way in. The way in was the women.

Emily Prosser opened the door of her apartment as soon as Sid’s knuckle touched it. She was a tall, slim woman with pronounced Asian features and long, straight black hair. “Hi,” she said. “You must be Mr. and Mrs. Abel.”

“Yes,” Sid said. “And you’re Miss”—his eye caught the rings on her left hand—”Mrs. Prosser?”

“Mrs. Emily Lin Prosser,” she said. She raised her left hand so they could both see the rings, and smiled. “I guess you’re detectives, all right.”

“We’re just getting started this morning,” Ronnie said. “We’ll be quicker later in the day. Thanks very much for making time to meet with us.”

“Yes,” said Sid. “Thank you.”

“Come on in. There’s coffee. Want some?”

“That would be terrific,” said Ronnie. “Can I help serve it?”

“Follow me.”

Ronnie and Emily Prosser walked off into the kitchen, and while Sid stayed in the living room he used the time to look around. The room was dominated by high bookshelves that contained the sorts of books that weren’t decorations. There were oversize textbooks in various areas of science and engineering, a number of shelves full of books in various
languages, a few shelves holding great novels, mostly of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.