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  This book is for Spencer.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue

  Part One The Case of the Spanish Virgin

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Part Two Julie Angel

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part Three The Identity Man

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Part Four Hellfire

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author’s Note

  These days I always call it the Agency. WEISS INVESTIGATIONS, that was the name on the door. But my wife, my children, my friends have all heard these stories so often that the Agency is enough. They know what I’m talking about.

  They’ve been badgering me to write about the place for a long time. “When are you going to do something serious?” they say—something factual, they mean, instead of the fictional thrillers I’ve made my living with. But the more I struggled to find a way to tell about the Agency, Weiss and Bishop and the rest, the more I came to feel that the facts were actually a poor substitute for the truth of the matter. And now that the moment finally feels right for me to set all these events down on paper—these actual events that I saw or was told about and even participated in to some extent—I find myself essentially making them up, writing them as yet another novel, that is, complete with dialogue I couldn’t have heard and thoughts I couldn’t have known and even one or two incidents that only might have happened or might not have.

  The risk of doing it this way, of course, is that you won’t believe me, that you’ll think the whole business is so crowded with novelistic Danger! and Mystery! and Romance! that I must’ve made it all up. And that would be a shame because, for the most part, this is the way it happened. Not just the incidents and places. The internal stuff too, the personal stuff. People actually shared a lot of it with me. I think I must’ve been a good person to confide in at the time. I was young, after all, just out of school, an eager listener. I was an outsider in the place, an Easterner adrift on the West Coast, a struggling writer who’d taken the agency job only for the money and the experience; I had no permanent stake in anybody’s life. Plus I was, as I think I still am, slow to pass judgment on my fellow mortals. Unlike so many people who condemn and thunder among us nowadays, I never thought a man despicable because he harbored some bigotry or unkindness in him nor would I treat a woman with less respect because she acted unwisely or made herself miserable. If there’s anyone, man or woman, who has never done these things, I’ll let him or her look down on Weiss and Bishop and Kathleen and the others in this story. I hope the rest of you, small as your numbers may be, will sympathize with them for all their flaws and even come to like them more than a little as I did when I knew them back in the day.

  Prologue

  Killing the girl was worth forty-nine points. In a lot of ways, it was the easiest job the man called Ben Fry had ever had.

  The victim was no problem. It could’ve been anyone: a man, a child. A young woman alone just seemed right to him somehow. And it was simple to pick her out. He went down to the Pennywise Supermarket by the freeway. Haunted the aisles for a few minutes. Spotted her in the produce section finally. Young, attractive, small, shapely. Wearing a business suit, shopping for one. Exactly the kind of thing he had in mind. He followed her home from there.

  He watched her off and on for the next three days. Tailed her to the art gallery south of Market where she worked. Observed her through the large front window. She seemed to sit at a desk most of the day, at the back of the room but in plain view from the street. Sometimes another, older woman joined her in the place. Sometimes visitors would come in and she would show them around. Sometimes she went into a back room out of sight. But mostly she sat at the desk alone.

  When the gallery closed at six o’clock, she would set the security system, pull down the steel shutter and walk up to Market to catch a homebound trolley. She watched television at night, talked on the phone a lot curled up on the seat by her bay window. She didn’t seem to go out much.

  One afternoon while she was at work, the man called Ben Fry let himself into her apartment. He went through her clothes, her papers, her computer files and the rest. Her name, he found out, was Penny Morgan. She was twenty-three. Engaged to a young man named David Embry who was working on his MBA down at UCLA. Her mother and father lived with her younger sister in San Mateo. She wrote a lot of e-mails to them and to David and to a large circle of female friends. The man called Ben Fry found these e-mails to be very warm and affectionate. He formed an impression of Penny as an enthusiastic and cheerful person. In photographs around the apartment, he noticed she was always smiling or laughing, her eyes bright and glistening with pleasure.

  He figured he’d need another two or three more weeks before he was ready to kill her.

  So while Penny Morgan went to work at the art gallery, wrote e-mails to her friends, spoke to her fiancé for long, romantic hours over the phone, the man called Ben Fry prepared for her murder. He did t
his, as he always did, with elaborate caution. Flew to five different places under five different names. Gathered some of his materials in one location, some in another. He never used anything but pay phones. He rarely used computers. He rarely returned to the same source twice. He never left a trail.

  He practiced anonymity like a religion. No one alive knew the name he was born with. A plain man to look at, he seemed so average he was almost invisible. Thirty-five or so. Five-ten or five-eleven. Dull brown hair, dull brown eyes. Soft, uninteresting features. His body was stooped and pudgy. He didn’t look strong, but he had a broad, powerful chest and muscular arms and he was rattlesnake-quick when he wanted to be. He didn’t look intelligent either, but he was; he was very intelligent in a relentlessly analytical sort of way. He was always taking a situation apart, examining it piece by piece, calculating the odds of this or that, assessing the possibilities of this or that. He thought it kept him sane.

  When he’d gathered the materials he needed, he returned to the city. He had no home but he’d taken a shabby studio in the Mission district for the job. There, one Saturday night, he sat nude on the edge of his metal cot. There were several kidney-shaped stainless-steel tubs on a table beside him. There were needles and blades in the tubs, soaking in disinfectant. There was plastic sheeting on the floor and the furniture to prevent bloodstains.

  He pulled on a pair of surgical gloves. Removed a syringe from one of the tubs. It was already loaded with lidocaine. He slipped the hair-thin needle into a shaved patch on his inner thigh, the soft flesh just beneath his balls. He slowly drew the needle out as he pressed the syringe’s plunger so the anaesthetic would spread through all the layers of his skin. He repeated the process three more times. Then, when the area was numb, he reached into another of the kidney-shaped tubs. This time, he drew out a scalpel.

  The man called Ben Fry paused with the blade in his hand. He closed his eyes. He imagined a tower. He had learned to do this over the years. Whenever he was idle and his thoughts strayed beyond his work and his analytical planning and he suddenly found himself clutched by some emotion that unsettled him, he would imagine the tower and trudge up into it. He would stand at the top and look out over the parapet, out over the plains below. Down there was the red turmoil of life. Purple nakedness and silver tears, agonized cries and pitiless laughter. But in the tower he felt cool and blue and far away. In the tower, he became himself again.

  It was a good technique. It worked every time. Every time, that is, but once.

  He climbed into the tower now. He drew a breath. Opened his eyes. Then he pressed the scalpel into the numbed flesh of his thigh and sliced himself open. He let out a strangled grunt. The incision was barely an inch long but even with the lidocaine it was agony, his nerves burned white-hot. He pulled out the blade. The wound stayed clean for a moment, then it began drooling blood. The blood ran down the inside of his leg. Staring at it, breathing hard, the man called Ben Fry let the scalpel fall from his trembling fingers. It thudded and crackled softly on the plastic sheeting.

  A car horn sounded on the street outside. Night rain pattered at the windows. His chest heaving, the man called Ben Fry went on. From another of the steel tubs, he removed a capsule. It was about the size of the top joint of his thumb, made of some sort of soft, gel-like plastic, like the stuff they use for contact lenses. But this was hard and sharp around the edges, as if someone had forgotten to file away some excess material. One-half of the capsule contained something red, the other half something blue. He had had it made in one city, and purchased its contents in two others.

  Inserting the capsule into himself was even more painful than making the incision. At one point, as he worked it deep into the fatty tissue, the agony seemed to sweep down over his eyes like a curtain and he was almost blind with it, almost gone. He gave another strangled grunt. Imagined the tower, looked down at his scarlet suffering from the cool, blue tower far away.

  Finally, it was done. There was a wet, sucking noise as he drew his finger from the bloody hole in his leg. The capsule was in.

  He had to wait a few minutes for his hands to stop shaking before he could manage to sew himself shut. Then, when that was finished, he reached quickly—almost frantically—for another syringe, this one full of morphine.

  A short while later, he lay curled up on his side like a child, his two hands resting beneath his cheek. He slept a long time. All his dreams were nightmares.

  A week later, he took the stitches out. The scar was clean, the hair beginning to grow back over it. But even after another week, it was still too red and raw, too noticeable. So he waited. One week more, taking antibiotics against infection. March was over, April had begun, before he returned to Penny Morgan’s apartment.

  He went on a Monday evening. It was a little after 6:00 P.M. The girl, he knew, would be home around 6:30. Seated at the bay window, he would be able to see her coming, to make sure she was alone. Then he would stand by the kitchen so he would be hidden from her until she’d closed the front door. He was wearing a navy blue track suit, easy to move in. His gun sat comfortably under the waistband. He could draw it in one stride and in another he would be close enough to shoot Penny in the head. When she was down, he’d shoot her twice more just to be certain.

  He’d taken no caution in getting the gun. It was a street .38 someone had sold him out of the trunk of a car. There was no suppressor. It would be good and loud when he fired. A neighbor was sure to hear it. And in a respectable part of town like this, a neighbor was sure to call the police. That was the way the man called Ben Fry wanted it. No chase, no long, drawn-out investigation. They’d arrest him a block or two from the scene.

  While he waited for Penny to arrive, he rifled her apartment. Dumped the drawers, stripped the bed, pulled the books from the shelves. He found some gold jewelry, a pearl necklace; some cash, about forty bucks. He stuffed whatever he found in a plastic bag he’d brought along with him. Stuffed the bag in one of his pants pockets.

  Then it was time to go to the window. He sat there on the same window seat where Penny sometimes sat when she talked to her fiancé on the phone. He was hidden from the street by the sheer privacy curtains but he could see out through them. He studied the pedestrians passing on the sidewalk three stories below. She wasn’t there. It was still a little too early for her.

  He settled in with a waiting sigh. He watched the street. Once his glance drifted to the framed snapshots on the lampstand. Penny with David, his arm around her, she laughing. Penny’s kid sister with her golden retriever. The whole family, Mom and Dad, Penny, the sister, the golden, smiling in front of a lighted Christmas tree.

  The man called Ben Fry looked away, back down at the street again. Automatically, he began to think about the next phase of the operation, going over his plans, rechecking them. It soothed him.

  Then there she was. It was 6:27 and there was Penny Morgan walking up over the hill from the trolley stop. She was carrying the oversized purse she used as a briefcase. The white gauze of the curtain made her figure hazy to him but he could still follow her approach. He sat there and watched until she turned into the building. Then he got up off the window seat.

  He stood waiting in the kitchen doorway exactly as he’d planned.

  Penny Morgan paused in the vestibule to pick up her mail. She leafed through the envelopes as she climbed the stairs. She climbed slowly. She was tired and a little depressed. She was beginning to feel that working at an art gallery was not as glamorous as she’d hoped it would be.

  She sighed. The mail: all bills and flyers. She tucked them into her purse’s outer pocket. Worked her keys out of the same pocket as she reached the third-floor landing.

  She went down the hall to her door. She unlocked her three locks, the dead bolt, the inter-grip and the police bar. She decided she would call David before dinner. She promised herself she wouldn’t complain or anything. She just needed to hear his voice to cheer her up. She didn’t like these dull evenings at home. She wished h
e would hurry and finish his degree already so they could get married and start their life together.

  She pushed the door open. It was nearly Easter, she reminded herself. In another few weeks, David would be coming home for the holiday. They’d have almost a whole month together.

  She was beginning to smile a little as she stepped into the apartment.

  Part One

  The Case of the Spanish Virgin

  One

  It was one hundred and five degrees the day Jim Bishop roared into the north country. The sun burned merciless on the dead meridian. The mountains rose brown and barren on either side of the freeway. The heat pooled like water on the pavement up ahead.

  Bishop rolled the throttle of the Harley Road King. The big bike crested seventy-five, pulsing between his legs. It was a long-haul dresser, built for comfort, but Bishop was aching beneath his jeans. His gray T-shirt was black with sweat beneath his leather jacket. His hair was soaked beneath his helmet. His sunglasses were smeared—his windshield too—with what bikers call “protein spray”—splattered bugs.