His car was an old Chevy he always had to feed with oil after a couple of hours of driving. As it climbed the steep inclines, it began to grind out a high, whining noise that made him hope that when it broke down he would still be able to disengage the transmission, push it around, and coast back down to the last of the little towns.
Waltek’s house was not even on the main road. It was up a side road so small that it turned into a mud track a quarter mile into the woods, and Prescott had to pull off into a level space in the forest and walk the rest of the way up. As he walked, the cold and damp and solitude began to affect his enthusiasm. He was arriving, unexpected, to dun some guy for six thousand bucks—some guy who worked in a job that probably didn’t pay a lot, and that required him to inhabit the border between courage and recklessness. It also occurred to Prescott that, while a lot of people way out here had guns where they could reach them, Prescott didn’t own one. As Prescott walked higher up the slowly vanishing path, he began to listen for any sound to reach him in the silence. He heard nothing, and that made him more uneasy. He came around a curve and saw the house. It was in a flat, rocky clearing, sheltered by tall trees on all sides. It was small, with siding composed of half logs nailed to boards so that it looked like a cabin. There was no car, and he could see no way for a car to get here, so he guessed that Waltek must park in a spot near where Prescott had left his car and walk the rest of the way. He knocked, but there was no answer. He supposed Waltek must have found a job, and maybe that meant he could pay. He decided that all he could do was wait.
He sat on the low front steps for a time, then gave in to his curios-ity and looked in the side window. The inside of the house consisted of one room at ground level and a loft. The part that he could see was cluttered. There were dishes overflowing from the sink onto the counter, clothes lying on the floor . . . he stopped. What he had thought was a pile of clothes now seemed to be something else.
Prescott moved to another window to look more closely. Then he kicked in the back door and entered. Lying on the floor was the body of Pauline Davis. He could see she had been beaten and probably, in the end, strangled. What had she been doing out here with Waltek? Then he saw the footlocker lying open near the door. There was nothing inside it, and when he bent to look, he saw stains that had to be blood. She had probably been killed in Los Angeles and brought here, so Waltek could bury her where he could keep people away from her grave.
Prescott backed out the door and headed down the path. He made it nearly to the car before he heard the footsteps. He could see Waltek now, just as he had seen Waltek when he’d emerged from the woods—as tall as Prescott, but very wide, with broad shoulders that made his neck seem short, and heavily muscled forearms developed by years of climbing and cutting. The eyes were the part that bothered Prescott all these years later. They were bright and intense, as the eyes of intelligent people often are, but they had a strange opaque quality, as though they were looking inward, the mind always contemplating its own concerns and needs.
Prescott smiled, held out his hand, and said, “Mr. Waltek? My name is Roy Prescott. Our agency—the Vargas Agency—has been retained by a woman named Pauline Davis. She claims that you owe her some money, and she would like to collect it.” It was a gamble, an attempt to convince Waltek, not of the fantastically unlikely story that he had other business here, or was a person who had just happened by, only that he had not looked in the window and seen the body of Pauline Davis. Waltek said, “I do owe her some money. I don’t have all of it right now, but I can give you some. Come up to the house with me.”
Prescott said, “Okay.” He felt something like amazement mixing in with his alarm: this man he had never seen before had decided to kill him, and it would happen in a moment. Prescott judged that Waltek was stronger, and he had no plan for saving himself, but there was no time to wait for things to get better. Prescott walked with Waltek for a few steps, until Waltek’s eyes drifted away from him for an instant. Prescott pushed off with both legs to give force to his jab, and struck with all his strength. The blow went wide and smacked into the side of Waltek’s head below the temple, making the head turn away with its force. Prescott was afraid to take the time to wind up again, so he instantly brought his right elbow back into Waltek’s face. Waltek staggered into it, and his knees wobbled. Then Prescott was on him, delivering punches as hard and quickly as he could until Waltek was down. Waltek rolled to the side and reached for something inside his coat, but Prescott pinned the arm there, picked up a rock with his free hand, and brought it down on Waltek’s head.
Waltek was unconscious. Prescott dragged him to the foot of a nearby tree, brought his arms around the trunk, took out the pair of cheap handcuffs that were the only implement of the trade that Vargas would allow his employees, and snapped them shut on Waltek’s wrists. He went to get his car, but found that Waltek had left a pickup on the road below his, so he could not get out. He had walked about a mile back to a store where there was a telephone.
Now and then Prescott thought about Pauline Davis. Waltek had killed her for practical reasons. He had wanted the six thousand dollars to add to the down payment for his house in the mountains. There had been something about her that made people know instantly that nobody cared about her. Prescott had seen it, and so, he knew, had Waltek. It made her weak, somebody he could kill.
Prescott detected a distracting something in the back of his mind, then remembered what it was. When he had dialed his office number, the machine had said two messages. Millikan had been the first, but he had not heard the second. He lifted the phone off the back of the seat in front of him, took out his credit card again, and dialed. He pressed the code to hear his messages.
“I’m leaving. I left you a couple of good-bye presents at the motel in Marina del Rey.” Prescott sat up, the sound of the voice making him wince. “They’re to remind you never to come after me again.”
That was it, Prescott thought. That was the price of failing.
11
Prescott traveled with a suitcase that had nothing inside it that he couldn’t replace within ten minutes in a department store. He bought dress shirts of 60 percent cotton and 40 percent polyester that said permanent press and meant it, some blue jeans, and some worsted trousers with a razor crease. The sport coats were always summer-weight and dark colored. They were the belongings of a man so ordinary as to seem barely differentiated from others, a fictional person that Prescott had invented to keep from being too easily noticed and remembered. He picked up his suitcase at the baggage claim at Kennedy Airport, then took a cab into Manhattan to begin his preparations.
He checked into a hotel on Park Avenue and began making his calls to art galleries. In the next twenty-four hours, he spoke with thirty-six men and women whose voices told him they were genuinely convinced that they were experts. On each call, he patiently explained what he wanted and listened carefully to the response. At the end of his thirty-six calls, he had heard one name twelve times and no other name more than three times. He made three calls to curators of contemporary collections at museums to see whether they had a different sense of things, but it became clear to him that the voices were essentially the same. The name Prescott heard so many times was Cara Lee Satterfield. He dialed her number, listened to her quick, businesslike hello. He introduced himself, told her that he wondered if she would be willing to speak with him about a commission for a special kind of piece—a picture of a man he would describe.