In searching for the stalker they had considered gardeners, housekeepers-anyone with regular access. They had all checked out negative.
At one end of the pool were small boulders and palms, at the other end marble statues of recent vintage amongst solid granite tables with blue and yellow parasols. To the far side of the pool, similar tables were placed under a massive pergola eighty feet long by fifteen wide and thick with vine-sprung leaves.
Hills the color of wheat were set off by an occasional dark-barked green-leafed oak-except in places like this estate, where gardeners used irrigation and soil amendments to defy the earth and climate. This ten-million-dollar home had been constructed on a natural bench carefully groomed with brick-fronted terraces in the Hollywood Hills.
Sam used his camera to scan the four-thousand-square-foot poolhouse annex, then swept up the hillside until he saw the boulders and palms on the far left. Monotonously he repeated the sweep, stopping every minute or so to look with his naked eye. It wasn’t enough to see the intruder; Sam had to capture his presence on film. That way the local police, who were at this point thoroughly buffaloed, could be convinced that they were looking for something more than one of Suzanne’s publicity stunts. Sam believed her. But even he was finding it taxing.
Normally he would farm out this sort of chase-’em-down job to someone like Shohei, or with a little more training from Shohei, perhaps his son, Bud. Usually his contracts were far more sophisticated than catching a clever stalker. But this fellow had so successfully eluded authorities and private detectives that Suzanne had finally persuaded Sam to solve her problem, paying his rather extraordinary fees.
More than anything else this stalker was patient, willing to wait weeks to get a single good photo. Last time, the final straw, he had photographed Suzanne painting her toenails in the bedroom. Carefully reviewing all the photos and the dates when they were apparently taken, Sam concluded that the man had a penchant for sneaking around the day before a full-moon night. Everything about this case was utterly bizarre. Sam knew they were dealing with a badly twisted mind, and it worried him.
He studied the buildings, the grounds, the pool, squinted, and did it again. Nothing.
The stalker seemed to have an uncanny way of knowing when to arrive. Suzanne, wanting to end it, thought the swim in the scanty suit, the day before a full moon, would make marvelous bait if the stalker had any means of observing it.
Sam had placed banks of infrared motion detectors and video cameras. Suzanne kept a dog, Grendel, making it seemingly impossible for a stranger to enter the grounds without triggering either a red blinking light on Sam’s control panel or a yapping dog alert.
But there was something Sam hadn’t figured out and he knew it. This guy had an edge that nobody understood.
Sam picked up the radio. “Bud, come back.” While he waited he made another sweep with the video.
Sam had hoped Bud would be drawn to a slightly more intellectual calling, but it was not to be. Bud liked the most literal side of fighting bad guys and there was no dissuading him. Close all their lives, Bud and Sam were inseparable. They both loved the daredevil stuff in their spare time and more often than not did it together.
Because he’d had longer to work at it, Sam was by most measures stronger than Bud, but at forty he was no longer faster. “Come back, Bud,” he spoke again into the microphone, slightly concerned. Nothing. Bud was normally back to him in three seconds. Maybe bad radio. Just then, Grendel the Doberman began an ugly bark in the dense garden behind the poolhouse.
“Bud, you out there? I need a comeback.”
A light turned red on Sam’s panel. Abruptly the dog went silent. Someone was in the garden. And the light indicated that someone was in the house. But that was impossible.
Suzanne swam, oblivious.
“Bud, you there?”
Damn.
Sam moved toward the door; time to get Suzanne out of the pool. Still nothing more from the dog. Before walking out the veranda door, he glanced back-no more lights were blinking on the control panel, so it was unlikely that whatever triggered the sensor was still in the house.
He slipped out the veranda door, holding the mike to the PA system.
“Suzanne,” he said.
She stopped swimming.
As if by magic, a man appeared, sitting on the roof of the poolhouse. He held a camera mounted on a crossbow. Sam swung the camcorder onto the pool-house roof and punched the police call button on the alarm pad. That done, he sprinted onto the veranda and down the six feet of steps.
“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” an amplified voice said.
Sam froze. The intruder was talking through the stereo system piped around the pool. If the gunman’s finger moved a fraction, Suzanne’s perfect body would be sliced with a four-bladed hunting bolt.
“Get out of the water, Suzanne,” the man said.
The intruder wore a mask, but at least two video cameras with separate feeds were capturing his image. They were also recording the voice unless he had somehow managed to disable the microphones.
Suzanne stopped at the edge of the pool, broadside to the intruder.
“Out now,” the man barked.
Suzanne didn’t move.
“Ten seconds and you’re a dead goddess. I suggest you move.”
Suzanne looked at Sam. He nodded. He needed time. Where was Bud?
“Take off the suit,” the man said. No doubt he was clicking pictures as he spoke. Suzanne didn’t move. “I said take it off.”
She looked at Sam. He nodded again, his eyes trying to pick out Bud. Suzanne’s shaking hands reached behind her to untie her top. As she moved her hands and turned to the side, Bud came flying over the peak of the poolhouse roof and sent his body like a missile at the back of the intruder. The man’s neck snapped with such a pop that Sam heard it from several yards away. The man rolled down the roof, hit the concrete, and moved in ugly spasms. Suzanne screamed and ran, trying for the short way around the pool to the house, thereby actually moving toward the poolhouse and the quivering body.
Sam drew his. 357 magnum and walked forward, his eyes never leaving the man on the ground. Suzanne began yelling crazy, hysterical screams all over again; a second man stood in the poolhouse door, just ten feet from her, with a pistol leveled at her chest.
“Nobody move,” the man said, “except you.” He spoke to Suzanne. “Come over here to Papa.” like the first man, he had a dark plastic mask hiding his face.
Suzanne just shook.
Grabbing her around the neck, the man dragged Suzanne back toward the poolhouse where Bud still stood on the roof, at least twenty feet away.
“Put down your guns and come down here or I blow her brains out.”
Sam’s mind was whirling. What stalker would risk this? And how could there be two men? Something was dead wrong. Whatever the case, if the guy was a sexual psychopath, Suzanne was likely dead if he got her alone-anywhere. If he was only pretending to be a sex nut, anything was possible.
Sam started walking, trying to will Bud to ignore the gunman and retreat over the roof to strike again.
Instead, Bud dropped from the poolhouse roof to the patio.
That was wrong, son.
“Stop there,” the stalker said to Bud.
Thirty feet from Sam the intruder had a chokehold on Suzanne and his gun to her head. He began walking Suzanne the last few feet to the poolhouse. Sam couldn’t let that happen. Bud was closer but could do nothing. For a second the intruder released Suzanne to open the poolhouse door. Suzanne started to bolt, but he grabbed her and pulled her back. Bud vaulted a patio table toward the pair, and the gunman fired, hitting Bud square in the chest. A second shot fired from the hip caught Bud in the head.